Television and the European Public Sphere

Abstract

■ The European Union would like European citizens to be more involved in its political processes and to cast off its `democratic deficit`. A functioning European public sphere has been seen as both a solution and an instrument for producing a European identity that might motivate more participation. The main question discussed in this article is what the medium of television can contribute and already has contributed to the construction and existence of a European public sphere. On the way to a (preliminary) conclusion, the article suggests definitions and understandings of the key terms involved and sketches an overview of transnational television in Europe. It then suggests that while the EU may challenge the nationalist idea that a polity must also be a `complete' cultural community, and some seem to think a polity can do without any cultural community to speak of, one should rather think of the EU as a political project that gradually, over time, will add a `European' layer to the identities of Europeans — not least due to the sort of everyday cultural community that television has contributed to since the early 1950s. ■

Three Models of the European Public Sphere

“…Yet, in European political communication research, the existence of different normative public sphere theories, especially in empirical studies, has mainly been neglected. Instead, the majority of studies are implicitly or explicitly based on Habermas' conception of the deliberative public sphere (Brüggemann and Kleinen-von Konigslöw 2009;Brüggemann and Schulz-Forberg 2009;Eriksen 2005;Gripsrud 2007;Hepp et al 2012;Kleinen-von Königslöw 2012;Koopmans 2007;Peters 2005;Peters et al 2005;Schlesinger 1999;Splichal 2006;Van de Steeg 2002;Trenz 2004;Wessler et al 2008).…”

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

“…The same kind of complaint can be levied at work which more explicitly addresses who constitutes the ‘public’, and/or how identities are forged through different kinds of participation in the public sphere. Consider, for example, contemporary work which critically interrogates the emergence of a transnational Islamic public (Salvatore ), and which explores how Muslim identities are formed within a highly differentiated Islamic public sphere – signified politically by US policy‐makers as the ‘Arab street’ (Eickelman and Salvatore ); or work which persuasively demonstrates how stand‐up comedy is being used as a tool of political irony to question Chinese identity‐construction amidst cynical and ambivalent Hong Kong audiences;(Tsang and Wong ); or Gripsrud's () recent discussion of the potential for transnational television programming to create a distinctly European public sphere which nurtures a European identity and a cultural community which transcends national borders. In each case, despite references to emergence, contingencies and complexity, these accounts still tend to privilege the notion of a public sphere as a composition, an aggregation and/or an admixture of who and what it involves at any given time and place.…”

Mass Media, Journalism, Society, and Culture

“…The public sphere has always been tied to the mass media, and in many parts of the world, it is the mass media that have greatly contributed to the formation of national identity and inclinations to participate in political processes within nation states. A proper European public sphere asks for similar conditions at national level, such as a common language, infrastructure, and media system (Gripsrud 2007 ).…”