(which, if implemented could greatly contribute to upgrading Greece's position within the European Union)
DEMOS
The "think tank" Demos has acquired influence since the election of the British Labour Government in 1997. One of its scholars, Mark Leonard (now Director of the Foreign Policy Centre) visited Athens last year to deliver a lecture at the Britain in Greece festival.
SORTITION
Last May Demos published a report called "The Athenian Option", Radical Reform for the House of Lords, which proposed the introduction of sortition or the drawing of lots, as practised in the ancient Athenian assembly, as a means of deciding who should sit in a reformed House of Lords in Britain.
This started some of us wondering why, if sortition can be proposed as a means of deciding who should sit in the second chamber of the British parliament, it should not also be proposed as a means of deciding who should sit in a second chamber of the European Parliament.
EUROPARLIAMENT SECOND CHAMBER
The idea of establishing a second chamber of the European Parliament has not previously been raised. With the common currency being established in some EU countries and serious discussion starting on the goal of political unification, perhaps now is the time to raise it. Many express concern at a so-called "democratic deficit" in the EU. The problem has obviously been considered serious enough for Jacques Delors now to be talking of the presidency of the European Commission needing to acquire a democratic mandate. Euroscepticism remains extremely strong because of a number of concerns: a) national sovereignty, b) the orientation of EU foreign policy, c) the desirability and economic consequences of the common currency. There are many who claim that the problems of monetary unification and the democratic deficit could between them lead to the failure of the whole European project.
EUROSCEPTICISM
Euroscepticism is not associated with "right wing" or "left wing" politics. Most British Tories are Eurosceptics through opposition to the Euro and a desire to keep the pound. Greeks are often Eurosceptics through dislike of European policies towards Turkey and in the Balkans generally. Lack of democracy in the European Union is something that should concern all citizens, irrespective of party allegiance.
THE POWER OF THE ATHENIAN MODEL
Demos's choice of the ancient Athenian model as part of a proposal for reforming the British House of Lords shows the potential power of Hellenism if people in Greece can come forward with a bold idea that can also provide answers for some of the questions being asked by Eurosceptics.
PROPOSAL: 50/50 PARTICIPATION
The proposal is for a start to be made now, here in Athens, to build political support for a second chamber of the European Parliament. In Greece participants in the sortition procedure could be fifty percent nominated by the conservative New Democracy and its associated organisations and fifty percent nominated by others whom we will call "direct democrats". New Democracy is of course in a position to mobilise far more people than the ecological-alternative milieu from which the present proposal comes. However, in return for agreement that our second chamber be manned by sortition, not by election, and that the numbers of people mobilised by New Democracy be restricted to matching the numbers that can be mobilised by the direct democrats, it may well be possible to persuade many other supporters of direct democracy to consent to half of the candidates for sortition (at least in Greece) being drawn from the camp of New Democracy.
TRANSCENDING PARTY POLITICS
The proposed second chamber of the European Parliament would - like the British House of Lords - seek to transcend party politics. "Direct democrats" would unilaterally commit ourselves not to function on the basis of party discipline. (We would not, for example, reserve the right of expulsion without consultation with our political opponents.)
REMOVING THE MIDDLEMEN (THE MEDIA)
The second chamber would also symbolise an attempt to remove the "middlemen" - the mass media - from the political game, or at least to create an enclave free from media domination of politics. Surely the total commercialisation of political debate is undesirable for anyone, whatever his viewpoint, who is interested in public policy-making. If this is so and if media-driven ideological (and image) competition and the "left" vs "right" numbers game can be taken out of the equation, it is conceivable that sincere differences in political viewpoint will be able to be argued out rationally and a second chamber of the European Parliament constructed which will embody this expectation and hopefully practice. The positive record of Britain's House of Lords, where until now the competitive pressures of mass politics have been kept to a minimum, shows what is achievable.
ATHENS AS THE SITE OF THE SECOND CHAMBER
For historical reasons, Athens is obviously well placed to be the starting point for an initiative to create a second chamber of the European parliament, and to be the site of the chamber itself.
HELLENISM AND EUROSCEPTICISM
An alliance between Greeks and Eurosceptics elsewhere in Europe could also do much to counter the perceived prejudice of the official European Union against Greek national interests. If the alliance were based on an institutional counterproposal, programmatic disagreements about e.g. the common currency could be of secondary importance, to be argued out democratically within the new institutions we would be creating.
NATURAL PARTNERS
The direct democrat component in our coalition would be natural partners for rank and file Eurosceptic groupings like those around the magazine "These Tides" and the Coalition for a Different Europe. New Democracy would be similarly well-placed for dialogue with Britain's Eurosceptic Tories, Northern Ireland Unionists, the Bruges group, etc.
THE PRECEDENT OF THE TZANNETAKIS GOVERNMENT
In some ways the coalition proposed here was foreshadowed in the 1989 Tzannetakis coalition government of New Democracy and the Synaspismos (at that time including the Greek Communist Party). Of course the Tzannetakis government contained no explicit pan-European dimension, nor did it entail a proposal for alternative institutions. Quite possibly the reason for that government's arguable failure to achieve anything significant was that the unconventional political alliance on which it was based did not draw into question the existing institutional framework and so was at the mercy of conventional party mentalities.