Transnationalisation, Public Communication and Active Citizenship. The Emergence of a Fragmented and Fluid European Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper is focused on the emergence of the European public sphere debate. This discussion has become more and more prominent between scholars of European Studies who have given it both normative and empirical attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, but in particular the increase in research about the legitimacy of European integration, which has been the subject of a wide debate since at least the beginning of the 1990s. Firstly, the article critically assesses the normative arguments that have supported the development of the European public sphere, by focusing on the social, political and cultural dimensions of European integration. After having assessed this debate and underlined current challenges emerged in light of recent events (such as the euro-crisis, the rise of euroscepticism and the rise in far right movements), the article then introduces the empirical research on the europeanisation of the public sphere, by looking at the development of an agenda that has more and more concentrated on the fragmentation and fluidity of such construct. This discussion is key to introduce the final part of the article, which focuses on the role of civil society in the broader European constituency and in the public sphere. The article highlights some of the ambiguities inherent to the current research agenda, by calling for a more comprehensive approach to study active citizenship in Europe that departs from a consideration of the NGOs activists as the main locus of analysis.

Selling TTIP: The European Commission’s information policy and the spectre of public opinion

“…To be sure, EU institutions have more recently created novel mechanisms to facilitate citizens’ political participation, most ambitiously through the ECI (Conrad and Oleart, 2020), while the Commission’s information policy has moved beyond traditional ‘one-way process of informing and justifying EU policy output’ (Van Brussel, 2014: 93). Confined to areas of ‘non-decision’ (Magnette, 2003), such efforts nonetheless maintain an ‘artificial top-down model of the public sphere’ whose ultimate aim is to depoliticise EU governance (Bee, 2014: 1021).…”