The participative aspect of democracy has proven to be one of the most important elements for ensuring a governance system close to the citizen. A maximum accessibility for citizens to the public decision-making process is a necessary condition for ensuring the civil society control over the act of governance.
It is a fact that democracy is ‘more real’ at the local level, that the local level offers the most suitable context for the functioning of the participatory democratic mechanisms. Local administration is the type of government that is closest to the beneficiary citizen, while being, at the same time, the most suitable framework for participatory democracy to manifest itself. The more the geographical level of the governmental organization structure enlarges, the more the distance from the citizen increases as well, while the possibility of citizens to influence the decision-making process decreases proportionally. This is a fact that we all can sense, either from intuition or from practical experience. It is much easier for us to contact the Mayor that the Prime Minister, and we have more chances to influence the decision-making process in the Local Council than the legislative process in the Parliament.
The citizen withholds the absolute control over his/her closeness to or remoteness from the various governing structures, depending on his/her contextual personal interests, on the political context or even on the particularities of his/her private life at a given moment. On the other hand, we all witness, usually biased, a parallel process of remoteness and alienation on the government from us. This process is achieved through the establishment of structures with governing attributions at the highest geographical level that are being transferred more and more regulatory rights from national authorities. We actually are witnesses to a process of centralization achieved through the transfer of executive powers – in the economic, financial-banking, justice, defence, environment, and health fields – from the national governments to several international structures. The process is slow and with steps small enough so as to contain its rejection by the public at large.
Civic organizations that fight for citizen and consumer rights all over the world increasingly condemn the negative effects of the globalization process. From the perspective of the evolution of democracy, the most important negative effect is the exclusion of the local decision-making process from a growing number of public policy fields, associated with their enclosure in the decisional sphere of international institutions where a withering number of citizens are able to monitor their representatives.
How will we be able to adapt to this situation after Romania’s integration into the European Union? The UN already covers, through its specialized structures, a large part of the fields and aspects of our private and public life. Organisms such as the ILO (International Labour Organization), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), UNEP (UN Environment Programme), World Bank Group, IMF (International Monetary Fund) and WHO (World Health Organization) influence our daily lives through their regulations with international applicability.
Without evaluating the opportunities these regulations attract and their quality, we must recognize a fact: our lives are influenced by public policies adopted at decisional levels to which we have limited access or no access at all! As a promoter of participatory democracy and of citizen involvement in the public decision making process, I am used to negatively evaluate those who, for various reasons, step aside and do not seriously undertake their role of partners for governors and do not participate, at all, in the politics of their polis. Nevertheless, I am afraid that, given the slipping of the governance process from my sphere of access, I will end up in a similar position with those who – in a very impolite manner – I used to finger-point at. I will thus become an audacious practitioner of participatory globalienation!
Cristian Bratu, Asociatia Pro Democratia, Timisoara
Translation: Laura Radulescu