Navigating between Policy and Populace: Estonia, Its Accession Referendum and the EU Convention

The Convention on the Future of Europe represented an unprecedented test of the EU’s capacity for deliberation and political consensus formation. In the candidate countries of the time, this challenge was even greater given the coterminous tasks of completing accession and facing a popular referendum. In Estonia’s case, we argue that the promise of the Convention’s deliberative process was largely lost, since not only was there a gulf between state administration and civil society, but also within the state to the extent that most policy was formed by a narrow set of civil servants working in the Eurointegration Office.