State of Europe 2019: Vision Innovation for Europe

Ambassador-at-Large Iztok Mirošič attended the annual roundtable of the Friends of Europe think tank Vision Innovation for Europe held in Brussels. In the main panel, addressing the democratic participation of citizens in EU affairs, he discussed the pitfalls of the transformation of representative democracy into direct “online” voting, which might also be a topic of the convention on democratic changes in the EU in the coming years as conceived by the new European Commission. In the discussion on European foreign policy, Ambassador-at-Large Mirošič stressed the need to support democratic legitimacy when transitioning from consensus voting to qualified majority voting, and the need for enlargement to the Western Balkans. With relation to climate change, he noted that the costs of social and energy transformation and of environmental protection must not become a new class issue.