ABSTRACT
Neither e-democracy nor EU-democracy exists. Both are projects that have been imagined and advocated by theorists and practitioners, but have not been realised — yet. Moreover, their relationship to each other is ambiguous. To the extent that experiments in politicking are currently being made in Europe with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for voting in elections, expressing opinion, sharing information, recruiting members, organising protests, campaigning by candidates, soliciting funds and just plain ‘interacting’ among citizens, they have been confined largely to the local level. Extending them systematically to national democracies already seems risky, perhaps premature and definitely over-ambitious. The supra- or cross-national level, i.e. Europe as a whole with its diversity of languages, cultures, institutions and legal systems, must appear to most citizens as ‘virtually’ impossible to reach. 1 The European Union, par contre, has just undergone a unique experiment with its ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’. The resulting draft constitution is utterly conventional in its approach to the mechanisms for governing a continental-sized democracy. There is no explicit mention of ICT and no obvious place for its utilisation. If the draft document were to be ratified as is by the Intergovernmental Commission, it would surely not advance the cause of e-democracy.
