From October 2019 to May 2020, 150 French citizens have been involved in a participatory democracy experiment, defining measures to fight against climate change. But how, and through which legal process, can the citizens’ proposals be implemented?
How do you renounce unanimity to embrace the majority principle? How do you ward off the dissastisfaction of a minority defeated by vote? Those problems haunted the Middle Ages, the system of orders and ranks of which made room for the majority principle in many of its central institutions. For historian Olivier Christin, we need to reassess this era’s contribution to the origins of the kind of political decision-making that is associated with the democratic revolution.
At the Council of the European Union, decisions are usually made by consensus. Does this mean that all the countries are of one mind? In fact, disagreements are often concealed, since it is not in the interest of most countries to publicize the fact that they have been defeated. Stéphanie Novak describes the various practices that consensus entails and gives an account of the opacity presiding over the exercise of joint sovereignty.
