The debate about the legitimacy deficit of the European Union (EU) has so far devoted little attention to the role of political communication in legitimating governance. The resignation of the Commission has highlighted the consequences of communicative failure and points to the new role of the media in EU affairs. The article analyses and evaluates the Commission's media communication and places it in the context of the EU's broader institutional set-up and decision-making procedures. The article argues that the Commission's public communication suffers from the fragmentation of political authority, a pervading technocratic mindset and a lack of adequate staffing. More importantly, however, the Commission is located within a system of governance which depoliticizes conflict and obfuscates political accountability. This system has been used by Member States to circumvent public scrutiny and externalize public dissatisfaction to the Commission.
The article contributes to the debate about the emergence of a European strategic culture to underpin a European Security and Defence Policy. Noting both conceptual and empirical weaknesses in the literature, the article disaggregates the concept of strategic culture and focuses on four types of norms concerning the means and ends for the use of force. The study argues that national strategic cultures are less resistant to change than commonly thought and that they have been subject to three types of learning pressures since 1989: changing threat perceptions, institutional socialization, and mediatized crisis learning. The combined effect of these mechanisms would be a process of convergence with regard to strategic norms prevalent in current EU countries. If the outlined hypotheses can be substantiated by further research the implications for ESDP are positive, especially if the EU acts cautiously in those cases which involve norms that are not yet sufficiently shared across countries.
The article seeks to contribute to the debate about the Europeanization of publicized discourse as a key factor in the underpinning of legitimate and effective governance in Europe. It explores the degree to which two sets of European Union legal provisions for the co-ordination of national employment and fiscal policies have led to an adaptation of media discourses in selected Member States over time. Overall, the study finds only a modest degree of Europeanization with regard to media attention, representation of foreign voices and thematic convergence, but notes important differences between the two selected governing modes and to a lesser degree between the selected countries. It puts forward a number of hypotheses to explain why fiscal policy co-ordination led to more Europeanization of media discourse as compared to the softer governing mode in the area of employment policy.
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