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The Internet has brought about opportunities for citizens to get involved in democracy and policymaking. Is there real appetite for e-democracy and online participation, or is it outweighed by reluctance or apathy, Jan Malinowski asks.

Jan Malinowski is the head of the information society department at the Council of Europe. This opinion represents the authors personal views on the subject.

Participation in decision-shaping and making in respect of the Internet has been at the heart of Internet governance debates. It come back on stage in the wake of Edward Snowdens revelations about mass surveillance and, more recently, following the decision a few weeks ago of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to initiate a handover process in respect of the oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the multi-stakeholder community.

There is now unprecedented activity around Internet governance: NetMundial (in Sao Paulo this week), Freedom Online Coalition (FOC, Tallinn next week), High-Level Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms sponsored by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (HLP, Dubai in May), Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG, Chaired by Carl Bildt), European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG, Berlin in June), Internet Governance Forum (IGF, Istanbul in September), and much more.

Thousands of keen participants in these events hope to influence the future of decision making in respect of the Internet. They include representatives of civil society, business, governments and international organisations. This interest is understandable given the Internets public service value and the importance it has in peoples everyday lives. Governance on the Internet is as important as governance of the Internet.

There are many examples of opportunities for participation brought about by the Internet: Arab springs and Internet-enabled expression of dissent; increased transparency and accountability in public and private sectors; crowd-inspired and crowd-sourced activities; collaborative creation and new commons.

However, there are many unanswered questions and doubts about a global village, new orders and whether we are on a path to improved democracy and participation. Global could be the result of aggregating distinct constituencies and bringing participation to people. There is growing appetite for transparency and accountability at both local and global levels, Internet governance being just one among many areas of legitimate interest.

Fundamental to this discussion are threats and obstacles. Is there real appetite for democracy and participation, or is it outweighed by reluctance or apathy? Are human rights eroded by a shift away from governments, which nevertheless remain responsible for human rights under international law? Are all players prepared to undergo public scrutiny? Some support tools, platforms and applications designed to bring to account other governments and administrations, but themselves resist scrutiny.

What about the new power brokers? The fourth estatethe mediais a known good-evil, but there may be a fifth estate in the form of the new technology superpowers and big data controllers. Increased power comes with greater responsibility. Will big data, dragnet, predictive analysis be tamed for democracy or will decision makers play into the hands of new (or old) despots?

There is a need to learn from the past in order to overcome current turbulence. The raison dtre of human rights, and of the emergence of democracy, was to challenge absolute power by asserting individual rights. The goal was to gain the right to participate in public affairs and matters of general interest. There are also lessons to draw from man-made crises and catastrophes stemming from poor governance or bad management, and from failed uprisings and transitions that regressed to illiberal regimes.

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Imagine that the collapse of Soviet communism more than two decades ago had taken a different form than it did. It might have done so, if the dramatic and fast-moving events of 1991 and key people who participated in them had taken a few different turns.

Today we associate the collapse with the dissolution of the USSR and its replacement by 15 independent republics. But the break-up of that union did not need to be part of the failure and demise of the Leninist method of organizing politics, economics and society that we came to know as Soviet communism.

It is true that separatist sentiment had become by early 1991 a significant part of the growing political crisis in the Soviet Union, with the Baltic republics and Georgia making declarations of independence. Even then, however, the break-up of the union was by no means certain. The center was using military force to try to bring the Lithuanians back in line and Mikhail Gorbachev was supporting the adoption of a new charter, to replace one from 1922, aimed at mollifying sentiment in the non-Russian republics while preserving some sort of union.

The career track of Boris Yeltsin had as much as anything else to do with the political shape events in the Soviet Union would take later in 1991. Yeltsin had risen to senior posts in the union power structure before having a falling out with Gorbachev and others in the Soviet regime. He happened to make his political comeback in the government of the Russian republic, and was elected president of that republic in mid-1991.

Thus Yeltsin was in that position when he climbed atop a tank to face down the Soviet hardliners who attempted a coup in August while Gorbachev was vacationing at his dacha in Crimea. This meant that once the coup was defeated and Gorbachevs power waned as Yeltsins waxed, power went from the union government to the Russian republic. Yeltsin scooped up union ministries and made them Russian ones, and when Gorbachev resigned as the last Soviet president later in the year there was barely a shell of a union government left.

It is plausible to imagine a different scenario in which the government structures that emerged from the wreckage of the USSR would have looked substantially different. Suppose Yeltsin had taken his defiant, tank-climbing action not as president of the Russian republic but as a reformist party chief of the Moscow region a job he had once held, along with sitting on the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Perhaps this would have meant significant power remaining at the level of a reconstituted union.

Such speculation does not say anything about the relative likelihood of the scenario being posited, although the scenario can be the basis for a useful thought experiment if it is at least plausible. Nationalist sentiment in the constituent republics would always have been a significant factor to be reckoned with.

Probably what is most implausible about any continued post-Soviet union would be inclusion of the Baltic republics. They alone among the republics of the USSR had a history as independent states as recently as 1940. The United States and the West never recognized their annexation by Moscow, and the Baltics westward orientation has always been strong.

The relevant thought experiment worth doing is to ask: if some sort of union (even without the Baltic states) had endured, how would we in the United States have assessed the events back in the 1990s, and how would we see our interests in that part of the world today?

There still would have been sufficient basis on which to say that the Cold War was over and that our side had won it. Moscow had already lost its Eastern European empire, and the Warsaw Pact was gone. Although there would not have been as distinctive a dissolution of the USSR as in fact happened with the creation of 14 independent states plus the successor state of Russia, the collapse of Soviet communism and the Leninist system would still have been readily apparent.

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