Europe democracies’ staunch belief in a pluralistic democracy is evident in other ways. I recall interviewing the deputy mayor of Bonn, Germany, who told me about a remarkable institution known as Children’s Parliaments. Several hundred cities in Germany allow schoolchildren to elect representatives four times a year. The Children’s Parliaments convene and debate issues and actually are permitted to propose legislation to the local city council.
This was astonishing to me, because I remember when the city of Los Angeles was establishing neighborhood councils, but the powers-that-be did not want to allow even the adults to propose legislation to their city council. It occurred to me that this was emblematic of a key difference between Europe and the United States in the practice of democracy and pluralism. In the US, two hundred years after the founders created a political system with certain undemocratic tendencies, we still really don’t trust “we, the people” that much. Yet in Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Scotland, Italy, Estonia, Ireland, Spain and other European democracies, children are involved in policy making, including in some cases to propose legislation to their city councils. I was fascinated by this.
I asked the deputy mayor, who was a leader in the local Green Party, “What do the children propose, do they propose silly things like chewing gum in schools or three sodas a day?”
“Oh no,” she said. “They take it very seriously. They have proposed things like more garbage cans in the schoolyards and the transit stations, since children were throwing their wrappers and litter around. Once small pebbles were placed in the schoolyard in the play area. ‘You try kneeling on that, it hurts,’ said the children, so they proposed sand. They proposed moving the buttons down on the trains, which many schoolchildren use to get to school, so that small children could reach them. Very practical things. Ones that the adults would never think of. And sometimes impractical things like ‘save the rain forest,’ and of course the conservatives said, ‘See, the children don’t understand anything.’ But if you think about it, there are things you can do on the local level with the rain forest, having sister city partnerships with cities there. So it’s a question of how to deal with it.”
“So does that mean when these Children’s Parliaments meet, you know that afterward you are going to receive a stack of legislation sitting on your desk?” I asked her.
The deputy mayor nodded and groaned. “Yes, absolutely. We receive many proposals, and they are very detailed. It can be a lot of work, because they do take it seriously. And if they take it seriously, then so must we, or the children will become even more tired of politicians, having had the experience of not being taken seriously.”