Two meetings were needed to reach agreement on a text on the referendum. The only concession we had to make was that in those countries whose constitutions currently do not allow referendums at least consultative referendums should be held. Our original aim was to encourage these countries (such as Germany) to change their constitutions to allow binding referendums. But with regard to the second text we were unable to reach a consensus. Some favoured creating high thresholds for citizens' initiatives, others didn't want to interfere with the European Commission's exclusive right of legislative initiative and we suggested only covering the basic principles and instruments of direct democracy, in order to avoid complicated debates on procedures and numbers. At the end of that meeting (on 27 February), only 5 minutes were left to discuss these differences - impossible to reach a consensus. It was not clear either who should be responsible for coordinating the whole process and especially for collecting signatures in the Convention. We discussed these problems and decided to coordinate the process ourselves in close cooperation with Jürgen Meyer and Alain Lamassoure. We started collecting signatures among the Convention members that day. It was very unusual for members of NGOs to collect the signatures of elected representatives, but no-one questioned our right to do so and we felt obliged to fight for our ideas and for the agreed text. We left Brussels on Friday, 28th February, with 8 signatories for the referendum proposal.

But how to proceed with the citizens´ legislation? After nearly one month of discussions with individual Convention members, we decided to seek support for a text that introduced the instruments of the citizens´ initiative, citizens´ referendum and an obligatory referendum only in the case of constitutional or treaty amendments, without specifying the procedure, the majority requirements or the number of signatures that had to be collected. When we started to push for our second text we had already collected 33 signatures for the referendum - most of them at the Convention meeting on March 17-18 which six of us attended, and some by the federalist intergroup in the Convention.

Between the meetings we distributed our text to a lot of Convention members by e-mail and fax and phoned them over and over and over again… It was a very hard and sometimes frustrating job because it was much easier to contact the politicians directly in Brussels, but on the other hand it was not possible to contact them all directly. On 31st March Alain Lamassoure sent the referendum text - signed by 37 members, alternates and observers - as a contribution to the Convention secretariat. At that time we had only 3 signatories for the second text.

Step four: What kind of "democratic life in the European Union"?

(to page 4 of 6)