The new crisis of regime in France is offering a unique opportunity to take advantage of the latest progress of knowledge to bring the country up to the standards of democracy. The mere statement of the principles of democracy, now clearly explained in the preamble of a constitution, is sufficient to establish the role of the state and the motor of the political life. A new essential element will complete the whole, an Upper House in the full sense of the word, necessary to make sure that public actions will comply with the fundamental principles and that the constitutional provisions can be completed if need be and permanently updated.
Unlike elected officials, selected by the parties for their opinions and party allegiances, the members of the Upper House will be veritable Elders, alien to partisan debates. They will be chosen by juries of citizens for their sense of the common good as vouchsafed by their previous career and for their potential of expertise in the realm of moral and political sciences. They will have the upper hand on the third part of the constitutional triptych, the live and flexible part of the fundamental law, including all the organic laws, such as the rules of procedure of the National Assembly, the method of appointment of judges, the control of the independent higher authorities or the detail of the rules of the game applicable to the various political actors.
The Upper House will vote by qualified majority once enlightened in its mission by experts in a very special field: democracy problems. Only the Upper House will be in a capacity to enrich and marginally amend the constitution. It will no longer be possible to surreptitiously introduce alien elements, partisan claims or topical stereotypes borne by cunning minorities flooding the media and the social networks. It will also have at its disposal a right of veto over laws deemed to be inacceptable.
The citizens being thus protected from the ever-possible whims of a unique chamber, under the pressure of events heavily loaded with emotion, a second chamber will no longer be needed. The Upper House will at the same time watch over a better division of tasks in the public chain of decision-making, for the farther one gets from the local level, the more the quality of the governance depends on it. Public decision-makers will be reinforced in their prerogative: their capacity of judgment. They will, however, rely upstream on a new link in the chain: the democracy engineers, apt to identify the range of possible solutions, with their costs and advantages, to the various problems raised. Information professionals will have access to the same sources to enlighten the citizens. The civil servants, as to them, will focus on the implementation of the public choices.
There is no doubt that the Elders will also be capable of choosing the person with all the required qualities to become head of state. It will be their task to implement civics on a wide scale, so that the citizens, with their natural enlightenment thus reinforced, will be better equipped to resist the flood of abstract ideas and more liable to gather around common values. The society will function better when the citizens are better informed of its methods of functioning.
The Elders will also be entrusted with the nation’s “political budget”, so that MPs can no longer be accused of making free with the budget of the state. The political sphere will open itself wider to the civil society. The citizens themselves will control the parties and the centres of political reflection — too few of which yet exist — through fiscally deductible donations in return for first-hand information on the projects.
Since the Senate will have lost its raison d’être, reforming the territorial organization will become possible and the number of administrative layers might be reduced from nine to three. The present C.E.S.E. (Conseil économique, social et environnemental), an organ that might have its right place in a corporatist state, will liberate its premises in order to enable the democracy engineers, consulted prior to any legislative work, to proceed to vast consultations. The lobbies, among which workers’ unions will henceforth figure, will no longer be able to draw their fundings from the public Treasury.
Considerable sums will be saved by reducing the perimeter of the state, for the use of public force will henceforth have to be better justified. Beyond the role attributed to the Upper House as guardian of the law, a unique supreme jurisdiction relying on the preamble of the constitution will exert an ex-post control over public acts, given that the fundamental principles can be invoked from the very first level of jurisdiction upwards. We shall attend the awakening of a regenerated France, in which the powers that be will more explicitly found their action on the law of democracy.
G.L.