I’m just thinking
that it’s not in the magazines
but in those files
Briefcases
and dressing boxes
they carry
all our misery

– Sgt. Pepper, “29 wierszy doraźnych” [29 ad hoc poems], author’s own edition, Warsaw 1982

Reading this short blank verse in the spring of the year of martial law’s introduction in Poland, I had in front of my eyes the morose apparatchiks with pouty faces sat down at plenary and executive sessions, whose photographs were published with anointment by the People’s Tribune on the occasion of successive Party congresses, and I thought it hardly surprising that it was in Poland under communist rule that turpism arose.

I felt a sincere dislike for these yaps. Their faces were perfectly suited to personify the essence of the system in which we were all immersed without any hope. In my situation at the time and at my age at the time, such a feeling was completely understandable, but this personification was obviously a dead end.

I had good teachers, of course. Tyrmand, for example, wrote in his “Dziennik” [“Diary 1954”] about Ochab [Edward Ochab, 1906-1989, a communist activist from a peasant family, before World War II a member of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), in the People’s Republic of Poland, among others, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and chairman of the State Council – ed.] that his physique betrayed “connections with the pork trade”, and about literary activists he wrote that they were people “with the appearances of roadside stones”. Very apt.

But Sgt. Pepper also accurately noted that it’s not the faces that matter. The contents of files and briefcases – this is what mattered. Documents, plans, intentions, papers. Words. Even if they were spoken by nice and polite people.

Let’s sit cross-legged together

Let’s take a look at this nice photo. Ursula von der Leyen is sitting cross-legged in a circle with young people, who are probably discussing some important matter with her. They talk of the Union, of Europe, the future of mankind or the planet. It is inconceivable that the President of the European Commission could talk about something trivial, is it not?

All those seated have masks on their faces, so facial expressions are not visible, but can be perfectly imagined. On the faces of those young people, there is certainly an expression of excitement resulting from the sense of agency that comes from their alignment with a representative of authority. They are sitting together! On the same carpet!

Von der Leyen’s face is probably calm and balanced, although underneath the mask she can afford a slight dismissive smile. She doesn’t adopt it, however, because she doesn’t want to lose control for a moment. After all, she is sitting with them together! On the same carpet! And this always gives rise to situations that require caution and distance.

The photo can be seen thanks to the press service of the European Union, and was probably circulated in the single-hearted belief that it was necessary to provide the citizens of the Union, especially the youth, with a sense of complicity in the political life of this great imperial organism. Or was the intention not so single-hearted after all?

The President of the European Union is not a beauty, but the aesthetics of her character are light years away from communist apparatchiks. About Eva Kaili, her colleague temporarily in a place that prevents her from sitting together in the circle of the young people of the Union [Kaili came from the left-wing PASOK party, she was Greek vice-president of the European Parliament in 2022, until she was arrested and accused of corruption – ed.], one can already freely say that she is a beautiful woman. Aesthetics, then, are beside the point.

What is in their files and briefcases? What will they want to tell us when they want to sit down with us, cross-legged, in a circle? In other words: what is the future of our world’s democracy as the modern apparatchiks see it?

Of course, Ursula von der Leyen, as I mentioned above, has to keep control, obviously, so she cannot speak too openly, but some light is shed here by documents from European think tanks. Especially the most important ones, which have former and current top-level politicians on their advisory boards and funded by governments and EU directorates.

And it is best when they join forces with others. Then their recommendations take on a kind of new lustre, a new power of persuasion. It is also interesting to note that the recommendations may relate to seemingly distant matters, but they contain fragments reflecting some of the designed universe. A world contained within a dewdrop.

People without mouths don’t scream

This is according to a report published late last autumn entitled “Fair Energy for All - How do we get there?”, which was produced through the efforts of a number of leading European think tanks, led by the renowned European Policy Center. The former head of the European Commission Herman van Rompuy is on the board of the latter, which in itself should indicate the seriousness of this undertaking.

The report is exciting if only because it reveals the true aims of transport and the future of the car market. It seems to everyone that the European Union is aiming for electromobility, i.e. that all combustion cars should be converted to electric ones. The report, however, leaves no doubt about this: “It isn’t a solution for all of us to have an electric car because we just can’t make that many.”

This quote, put in the box, comes from one of the “vulnerable” citizens involved in the research that led to the report (the authors recommend using this word in place of the supposedly “stigmatising” term “poor”).

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  The real goal, then, is not to swap one private car for another, greener one, but simply to abolish private car ownership altogether: “Switching to electric cars is not enough,” – write the authors of the report – “there needs to be a clear message that people will have to forgo personal cars and cycle, walk, carpool, take public transport etc.”

Of course, such a change won’t happen easily, administratively it can’t be enforced, although that would probably be best, so a cultural change will have to take place. Let people just not want to own a car and that’s it. It can be done!

How? For a start, there is a proposal to ban car advertising. No more invoking a sense of freedom with impunity and hypocritically showing how much electric car buyers care for the planet! No more images of families shamelessly packing their belongings for an entire holiday into spacious interiors, along with muzzleless dogs. Children sprawled brazenly and screaming in the back seats.

To grasp this idea, one need only glance at the graphics showing people of the future populating the iconosphere of similar reports. These figures don’t have eyes, and they usually don’t have mouths either. So they certainly aren’t screaming.

Nor will it be without sacrifices on the part of the top management. Ursula von der Leyen and Eva Kaili (the latter as soon as she leaves prison) will have to set an example together with Franz Timmermans and Charles Michel. Indeed, the second point on cultural change stipulates that “political leaders should use bikes or buses where possible, to set an example”. Fortunately, the sentence contains the interjection “where possible”, so there is some room for compromise and the prospect of an amicable settlement.

The third point is absent, so the cultural change will have to be resisted for the time being with a ban on advertising and the occasional sight of authority on a bicycle. Whether this will be enough is to be doubted, but one has to start somewhere…

Random democracy

But what does this have to do with the democracy mentioned in the title? Against all appearances, a lot. The report contains a small but weighty passage on how to “engage European citizens” in the process of change (let us note in passing that the existence of “European citizens” is considered by the authors to be so obvious as to require no explanation).

Of course, citizens are organised on an ethnic basis before they become European, so the key here, however, is the emergence of “national citizens’ assemblies” comprising “randomly selected citizens” whose activities will “strengthen policy ambitions and trust and increase public acceptance of major change.”.

“Randomly selected assemblies” are thus supposed to work downwards, transmitting guidelines, but – as it turns out in a moment – also upwards, obliging the authorities to implement them. For the next point reads as follows: “Citizen assemblies’ findings should be binding on governments”.

Admittedly, in a moment the document reassuringly states that not every proposal has to be implemented straight away, but there is a worrying tension as to what proposals will or will not be implemented and who will decide. A fascinating problem, isn’t it?

We already know that “random assemblies” will act as transmission belts moving up and down, providing governments with decisions and the governed with messages about what to accept. Will they also make those decisions? One is free to doubt. Randomly selected citizens will derive undoubted satisfaction from having sat in the same circle as the greats of this world.

However, they may not be drawn next time after all. That is only natural. And their place will be taken by other democratically-drawn citizens, who will once again have the honour of sitting on the same carpet, cross-legged, as their predecessors. And so we will move forward together.

Complementing the idea of “random democracy” is the idea that “citizens of the European Union” should lead their deliberations on key legislative solutions at community level. This is all, of course, to ensure that “vulnerable citizens” have a voice on issues that concern them. These debates would span local, national and supranational levels. “Random democratic assemblies” would be organised at all these levels, presumably with a draw algorithm to encourage greater representation of the “vulnerable”, which, of course, is not in the document, but, firstly, dictum sapienti sat, and, secondly, this representation must be achieved somehow, and, of course, algorithms are a perfect tool for this.

The authors of this apparently innocuous-looking report on a certain life necessity, which seems to be the energy transition – and which they have larded with good-sounding adjectives, of which the word “fair” is not declined in all cases simply because there are none in the English language – have, in the course of their deliberations, presented a particular way of understanding democracy. A way whose occurrence will be worth observing in official documents and statements. And this seems to be the most important thing in the report (although private car owners may have a different opinion on this).

The future of Europe?

Let us not think, of course, that this way of functioning democracy, which I have taken the liberty of calling “random democracy”, was invented by the authors of this very report. Of course not! They merely decided to apply (one is tempted to write – implement...) this idea to a specific case.

The idea itself was floated and tested on the occasion of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which ended last year. Everyone has probably forgotten about it by now, but wrongly so. Indeed, its legacy is revealed in documents such as the Energy Transition Report described above.

The conference lasted a year, ended last summer and was media-killed first by the pandemic and then by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, but had it not been for these events, which the authors of the Conference concept could not have foreseen, we would now be at a very different point in the development of “random democracy”.

An essential element of the Conference was the setting up of four panels, each consisting of 200 randomly selected citizens from all 27 European Union countries, but in such a way that a third were 16-25 year olds and that their gender, material status, places of residence, education and other characteristics best reflected the diversity of the Union as a whole. A sophisticated algorithm must have been in charge of this…

These people then met in real and virtual ways, discussing the issues gathered in four thematic groups, all overseen by representatives of the three European institutions: Parliament, the Commission and the current presidency, in this case the French one, because President Emmanuel Macron was very keen to succeed. The most prominent figure in this group was Guy Verhofstadt, and he was probably the one who ultimately decided the direction in which the ideas discussed by the citizens seated in Turkey should move.

Manipulating the results of civic deliberations was extremely easy in this arrangement and did not require excessive interference. After all, the debating groups consisted of people who did not know each other, who were not connected in any way by ideological ties that would allow them to build a common front around any ideas, and who, in addition, spoke many languages and were working under time pressure, which was exacerbated by the fact that most of these people were normally working professionally.

Therefore, it was not difficult to reach a “citizens’ agreement” on, for example, broadening the scope of issues that would be subject to a majority vote within the Union, increasing the scope of the conditionality mechanism for bailouts, establishing the institution of a binding EU-wide referendum, or returning to the idea of an EU constitution.

Overall, the spirit of the single European state hovered over the conclusions of the Conference. The fact that Guy Verhofstadt and other politicians managing the Conference are in favour of such changes is pure coincidence, and in no way influenced the results of the randomly selected citizens. To doubt this would be an insult to democracy, which has risen to a higher level thanks to the Conference.

And then there is this: the citizens have proposed that such randomly drawn citizens’ bodies should be set up on a permanent basis and that their conclusions should be binding on the EU institutions. As it turns out, the authors of the report on a fair energy transition did not invent anything, but rather diligently studied the documents. And that they found these ideas particularly useful? Well. I am not surprised. And you?

– Robert Bogdański

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

  – Translated by jz