An Overview of Research on the European Public Sphere

Zeszyty Prasoznawcze, 2018

The European public sphere appears only incidentally and temporarily and even then, European issues are presented through the prism of national benefits or loss. All of this is not conducive to the creation of a European identity, nor the legitimization of EU. Should the media and the journalists be blamed for this state of affairs? How do they perceive their role in the process of European integration? Where, in their opinion, are the causes, which render the creation of a European public sphere impossible? This article will present the results of individual depth interviews (IDI) conducted with German press journalists (16).

German Law Journal

Democratically legitimized European integration calls for developments in culture and society—which arise naturally in the scope of on-going political, economic and institutional European Union (EU) integration—to be publically debated so they may be politically processed. The space where this happens is the public sphere, or, in the context of the EU, the European public sphere. The latter complements national public spheres. Successful integration among EU Member States is made possible by adhering to a common set of values at the same time as respecting the national identities of the Member States and fostering cultural diversity. By way of Union citizenship rights, individuals are able to make use of and actively promote the Europeanization of societies and cultures. Yet citizens are affected by Europeanization to differing degrees, with only a minority of citizens actively partaking in transnational exchange. In order to account for European integration democratically, the EU t...

Abstract The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place.

2004

The development of post-national democracy in Europe depends on the development of an overarching communicative space that functions as a public sphere, viz., a common room created by speakers who are discussing common affairs in front of an audience. This is a place where opinions ideally are formed and changed according to a communicative mode or interaction. The point of departure is Habermas' seminal work on the public sphere from 1962. The author examines the aptness of his recent reformulation of the concept (1992/1996), which is found to be too 'thin'. Further, he distinguishes between a general public sphere, segmented publics and strong publics and clarifies their potential conduciveness to democratic government. General publics are inclusive and open communicative spaces rooted in civil society in the periphery of the political system. Such a sphere is found wanting at the supranational level in Europe. Rather what is discovered are transnational, segmented publics evolving around policy networks constituted by the common interest in certain issues, problems and solutions. The EU also has many strong publics, viz. legally institutionalized discourses specialized on collective will-formation close to the center of the political system.

2009

This article argues that most research conducted on the topic of the European public sphere (EPS) has been heavily influenced by a definition of the public sphere that has been historically promoted by the European Union institutions themselves. Communication and, later on, public opinion have been considered by EU pioneers as ways to overcome the limited competences of the European institutions. By doing so, they heavily influenced later theories of the European public sphere by promoting a conception of the latter based on two major assumptions: the EPS relies on the availability of information about the EU in national media and all EU citizens are members of the EPS. This article proposes alternative research paths about the EPS. The EPS should probably not be thought of in terms of the national media of the member states, nor should it be conceived as including all EU citizens. Rather, the EPS appears as sectoral, heavily selective and including actors from various professional and policies areas that have, in common, a strong interest in EU matters.

Based on the theoretical and empirical knowledge about the European public sphere, we discuss the theoretical problems by reviewing different theoretical models, their normative implications and the consequences for empirical studies, who are characterized by an empirical heterogeneity. In the second part we focus on the problems of theory, especially on the question of avoiding to simply extend our notions of national democracy to the European level and the alienability of theories to the European Union. We discuss the three categories of actors of the public sphere and draw conclusions for further research. We give reasons for a re-definition of the relevant fields of discourse and a re-definition of media functions in a European context.

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2004

In this paper we address the alleged communication or public sphere deficit of the EU. We develop a systematic approach to the Europeanization of public spheres, which distinguishes three forms of Europeanized political communication: supranational, vertical and horizontal. We propose that the spatial reach and boundaries of public communication can be determined by investigating communicative flows and assessing the relative density of public communication within and between different geopolitical spaces. We apply this model to data on political claim making in seven issue fields in German print media in the year 2000. We find that the degree and forms of Europeanization of political communication vary considerably among policy fields. These differences are strongly linked to the extent and type (supranational or intergovernmental) of competencies of the EU in these fields. Contrary to the hypothesis of a public sphere deficit, the German mass media seem to quite accurately reflect the Europeanization of policy making, at least in those policy fields where a clear-cut transfer of competencies to the supranational EU level has taken place.

The discussion about the public sphere only began to have significant relevance within the setting of the European Union in the middle of the 1990s when a growing degree of attention was directed towards European integration and the role of national and transnational media in providing thrust for it. Since then, the notion of the public sphere has been seen as a central feature of European democracies, shaping the coherence of political systems and decision-making processes. There has also been a tendency in the literature to perceive the European public sphere (EPS) as having positive effects on the EU by endowing it with legitimacy and providing a space where its institutions and leaders can be made more transparent and accountable. What is disputed throughout this scholarship is the possibility of creating an overarching European public sphere that would act as a transnational discursive space uniting various communication fluxes and actors from all strata of society. However, the answers provided by scholars for this puzzle are at most ambiguous or undecided and seem to be torn between viewing the EPS as aspiration, myth or reality.Bee, C. and Bozzini, E. (eds) (2010) Mapping the European Public Sphere: Institutions, Media and Civil Society. Farnham: Ashgate.Fossum, J. E. and Schlesinger, P. (eds) (2007) The European Union and the Public Sphere: A Communicative Space in the Making? Abingdon: Routledge.Koopmans, R. and Statham, P. (eds) (2010) The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Risse, T. (2010) A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

2001

2007

The public sphere is a central feature of modern society. So much so that, even where it is in fact suppressed or manipulated, it has to be faked. (Taylor 1995: 260)