Mapping the European Public Sphere

Institutions, Media and Civil Society

Emanuela Bozzini, Cristiano Bee, Cristiano Bee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317100775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mapping the European Public Sphere combines theoretical and empirical perspectives to address three relevant issues that are marking the European communicative landscape: the role of media and journalism in shaping the European debate, the function of public communication in promoting institutional activities, and the implications of processes of inclusion to and exclusion from the public sphere. The volume offers a timely reflection on the communicative arenas that are structuring the discourse on Europe and its future and provides a map of existing communicative spaces to provide a better understanding of the development of a European Public Sphere and to identify critical issues. Situated in a timely debate and providing well-grounded empirical evidence, the book will be particularly valuable to social scientists researching European integration issues. At the same time, the book is relevant to those actors who are studied in the research, in particular European institutions, media groups and NGOs.

PART 1
Conceptualising the European Public Sphere

Chapter 1
The Europeanisation of Political Communication: Conceptual Clarifications and Empirical Measurements

Hans-Jörg Trenz

Introduction

The emergence of a pan-European public sphere as a correlate of democratic governance in the EU is held to be unlikely, if not impossible. This has shifted the research agenda to the Europeanisation of public and media communication. The ‘European public sphere light’ is observed by measuring different degrees of Europeanisation of existing national media spheres. In applied research however, the notion of Europeanisation remains often very fuzzy and contested. The new agenda of Europeanisation has so far been mainly used within a pragmatic research strategy and it still lacks theoretical grounding and methodological coherence. In this context this article raises the question of standards. Following a proposal made by Johan Olsen, a distinction is made between the what, how and why of Europeanisation. This involves first of all the need to set diagnostic standards for what is changing. Second, methodological standards must be set, which indicate how to measure the Europeanisation of public and media communication. Finally, public sphere research must critically address the question of evaluative standards to determine why Europeanisation takes place and when it can be considered to be a sufficient indicator for assessing a qualitatively different new public sphere.

The Emergence of a Transnational Public Sphere: Wishful Thinking and Empirical Evidence

The concept of the public sphere is generally developed by reference to language, territory and authority that restrict communication to distinctive spaces of meaning and intensified discursive interchange. Public sphere research is consequently biased in the way that it focuses primarily on the performance of the national public sphere. In both normative and empirical accounts, the nation state appears to be a kind of natural container of the public sphere. Nation-building and public sphere building are seen as co-evolutionary through the differentiation of a well functioning system of mass communication (Deutsch 1953, Gellner 1983, Anderson 1991).

European integration has put these assumptions about a symbiosis of the public sphere and the nation state to the test. From the beginning, the very idea of European integration has been driven by a new enthusiasm for the possibilities of trans-border communication and understanding. On this basis, the notion of the European Public Sphere (EPS) has been discussed as a legitimatory instance of the EU-institutional world and as a socialising instance of European citizens. At the same time, a functional relationship between political integration and social integration has been postulated acknowledging the existing public and communicative deficit of the EU, which needs to be overcome by innovative policy instruments and technical solutions (Trenz and Eder 2004).

The constitutive and distinctive features of the EPS have thus been elaborated ‘ex-negativo’. The EPS has not been introduced as a new conceptual tool to account for the transformation of existing communicative spaces, rather, its prominence is due to concern about the normative deficits of European integration. Both in EU-studies and from the perspective of institutional reformers, the EPS has been mainly addressed as something imperfect but desirable, as something that does not yet exist but that should be normatively constructed (Eriksen 2004, Peters 2004).

This grounding of public sphere research in moral philosophy and normative political theory has precluded the possibility of social scientific analysis (Delanty and Rumford 2005: 184). The EPS has become the object of institutional-constitutional design rather than its contingent effects on integration being recognised. Enhancing a EPS means acknowledging that the so-called gap between the EU and its citizens is grounded in a communication deficit and that the EU should therefore strive towards greater legitimacy in terms of public accountability, openness and participation – in other words, of democracy (CEC 2006c). EPS research has thus been carried out by a new enlightening movement that has promoted a normative debate about the reallocation of democracy.1 This also explains the personal commitment of the research community, which has been more interested in producing policy recommendations for public sphere building than developing analytical tools for understanding the possible transformation of existing public and media spheres.

Outside the field of European studies, academic research has so far not been much affected by this enthusiasm for the possibilities of trans-border communication and its new legitimatory potential. Within media studies and political sociology alike, the resilience of the national public sphere as the main locus of political communication and the political orientation of citizens is emphasised. According to Weischenberg (2000: 275) the construct of ‘world-society’ as a new reference point of media and communication studies has proven to be of little analytical value. The drawing of national geographic and economic borders between societies remains fundamental for categorising existing media communication. Comparative media surveys therefore always start with, and end up at, a typology of national media systems.

In some cases, the resilience of a national research focus might simply reflect established research routines. Most of social sciences’ analytical categories were developed within the nation state framework. As such they account for mainstream ‘methodological nationalism’ of the discipline, which considers nation states and nationally bounded societies as their basic units of analysis (Beck 2003, Zürn 2001). Non-reflected theoretical premises also structure empirical observations. This can be seen, for instance, in the choice of the units of measurement of public sphere and media research, which either look at the communicative performance of national governments or at the intermediary capacities of national media organisations or at the opinions and attitudes of national publics.

In most cases, however, the national research focus of media and communication studies is not simply the result of a theoretically blind research routine but actually the conclusion of an enhanced self-reflection within the discipline. Media analysis has provided rich evidence against the rather fashioned bashing of the social sciences’ methodological nationalism, which reconfirms the fragmentation of the public sphere along national lines and explains its resistance to transnationalisation. From a historical perspective, media perform as conservers of national culture, they are the school of the nation that forms the unitary national public. Schlesinger (2003) and Slaatta (2006) have pointed out the particular institutional connection between news media and politics as manifested in the conventions that generate the daily representation of national symbolic complexes. Following the main lines of historical sociology it is argued that ‘both linguistic and cultural boundaries, formatted through the historic structuring of social communication, over time have formed functional communicative spaces along the lines of national borders that work towards social cohesion and strengthening of collective identities’ (Slaatta 2006: 16).

Furthermore, the media’s inherent nationalism has been held responsible for the re-interpretation of issues of global or transnational concern within contextualised systems of meaning and particular cultures. Through the intervention of the media wider debates are broken down again into national debates. Political journalism develops within a particular political culture and reproduces its dominant values and interpretations. This nationalistic and ethnocentric bias is most pronounced in foreign news coverage, where journalists tend to defend national interests over normative ideals of a just world order (Hafez 2005). The nationalistic bias is manifested first in agenda-setting (heavy attention to those foreign events that are most closely tied to domestic politics and interests) and second in framing (for example in categorising foreign actors as friends and enemies of the nation) (Page and Shapiro 1987: 376).

In postulating the EPS as a necessary correlate of legitimate governance in the EU, normative political theory has to take into account these intrinsic constraints on the emergence of a transnational sphere of media communication. While it is true that mainstream public sphere research has mainly been conducted within the nation state framework, it must also be recognised that the methodological nationalism of the discipline is at least partially grounded in mainstream media nationalism. There are systematic reasons to assume that mainstream media has resisted and will continue to resist the transnationalisation of the public sphere. The way to go beyond methodological nationalism can therefore not simply consist in changing the normative preferences of public sphere research. Instead we have to search for a theoretically grounded and empirically sound way of thinking on how a transnational public sphere becomes possible.

Europeanisation of Public Communication: A New Research Agenda

Most authors have discarded the possibility of an encompassing EPS that is built using the template of the national public sphere (Gerhards 1993, 2000, Schlesinger 1994, 2003). Most importantly, the emergence of a pan-European media system is held to be unlikely, if not impossible. Due to the diversity of languages, media cultures and traditions European audiences remain nationally segmented. Political communication in Europe is still mainly channelled through national organisations, parties or elected representatives. This results in a differentiated practice of news production with regard to the EU. European actors and European issues appear, if at all, in domestic debates (Preston and Horgan 2006: 37).2

This has shifted the research agenda to the Europeanisation of public and media communication. The ‘EPS light’ is observed by measuring different degrees of Europeanisation in the existing national media spheres. In applied research however, the notion of Europeanisation remains often very fuzzy and contested. Recent research projects have developed quite different indicators, which are also used to measure different social artefacts.

It is at this point that the debate about the Europeanisation of the public sphere will be taken up in this article. The new agenda of Europeanisation has so far been mainly applied as a pragmatic research strategy. As such, it still lacks theoretical grounding and methodological coherence. In an attempt to tackle this, this article raises the question of standards. Following a proposal of Olsen (2001), a distinction is made between the what, how and why of Europeanisation. This regards first of all the necessity of setting diagnostic standards for designating the different phenomena of what is changing. Second, methodological standards, which indicate how to measure the Europeanisation of public and media communication, must be set. Finally, public sphere research must critically address the question of evaluative standards to determine why Europeanisation takes place and when it can be considered to be a sufficient indicator for assessing a qualitatively new public sphere.

The Scope of Europeanisation

The scope of Europeanisation can be approached by distinguishing its procedural (operational) and relational components (Eising 2003). With regard to the first component, Europeanisation implies a specific mode of social change. It stands for a transformative process that expands within a particular economic, political and societal space. In addition, Europeanisation also implies horizontal and/or vertical linkages between different institutional environments: a new centre-periphery relationship between the European Union and its subunits, the horizontal interrelation of different member states, the relationship between EU-governance and its societal environment.

The Europeanisation of public and media communication is mainly concerned with the transformation of national public spheres and their long term development. Forms of coupling take place either through intensified communication between different national public spheres (horizontal Europeanisation) or through the infiltration of European actors and issues into national public spheres (vertical Europeanisation) (Koopmans and Erbe 2004).

To speak of the national public sphere as the object of Europeanisation has not particularily clarified the subject however. Instead of providing an empirically substantiated model, the national public sphere itself is based on highly idealised assumptions that cannot be translated straightforwardly into research indicators (van de Steeg 2002). The public sphere is neither an organisational entity nor a particular institutional setting that can be analysed as a whole; it is made up of loose relations of communication that refer to variable carriers and reference groups.3 This also marks the major distinction between the notion of the public sphere and the notion of civil society. Whereas the latter has been conceived as a membership community that is build around solidarity, trust and unity, the former allows for contestation and open debates, which transcend contextualised identities.

The national public sphere is therefore a dummy alternative when it comes to determining the scope of transnational communication (Neidhardt 2006: 52). Just as there can be no unitary EPS, nor can there be any national public sphere as an entity that could be Europeanised in a more or less linear and unitarian way. Facing these conceptual problems, research has generally proceeded pragmatically in disaggregating the concept of the national public sphere.

The pragmatic solution followed in most analyses has been to focus on the Europeanisation of ‘national media systems’ as representing the national public sphere. The tricky question here is to determine the representativeness of particular media products, that is to identify those media which speak for the nation. In the past, national public spheres that were represented by relatively integrated media systems were mainly upheld by nationalised public broadcasting and television. They were symbolised by the fact that almost literally the whole nation still gathered around the eight o’clock news. Since the late seventies the internal segmentation of what has been labelled national media system has been proceeding very fast. The privatisation, regionalisation and commercialisation of news formats have fostered the multiplication of segmented spheres of communication that speak to different publics. Under such conditions, political communication is increasingly dispersed and faces difficulties in reaching larger mass audiences. There is thus the need to disaggregate the object of Europeanisation even further and to identify the relevant media segments that specialise in the distribution of European news.

The proposal is that Europeanisation research should focus on those particular news formats in which national political communication is also taking place. In all Member States the institutional arrangements and the organisational capacities for national news production are clustered around political journalism, which serves mainly public television, the radio and national newspapers (Cook 2005). This is the (increasingly?) restricted place in which information about national and international politics is selected and represented to larger mass audiences according to converging standards of news-making. It is here also that EU-politics can reasonably be expected to find resonance. The Europeanisation of political communication is thus heavily dependent on the allocation of knowledge and organisational capacities for national news-making.

EPS research has mainly followed this advice in determining the scope of the Europeanisation of news-making through quality journalism. The selective bias of research mainly follows the internal selective logics of the media system and its parallel differentiation of a highly professionalised sector of European news-making in the member states. This shall not exclude the parallel Europeanisation of regional news landscapes or the Europeanisation of the tabloids, but this will take place in different forms and with a less clear focus on the regular and balanced provision of information about the EU or other member states.4 Political news-making in general, and European political news-making in particular are floating islands in the sea of disparate communications that make up the modern public sphere.

The scope of the Europeanisation of the quality media is analysed in different dimensions. A first group of researchers concentrated on an analysis of the dynamics of European news-making, agenda-setting and diffusion. Following the classical model of the public sphere as a mediating arena between political contenders and their publics (Gerhards and Neidhardt 1991) the scope of Europeanisation is determined by analysing the inputs, throughputs and outputs of political communication on the EU:

1. The scope of political communication. The role of European actors and institutions as the ‘initiators’ of debates on Europe and their agenda-setting strategies is taken into account. This includes the analysis of media and communication policies of the EU (Mak 2001, Brüggemann 2005), the role of public intellectuals and media entrepreneurs (Lacroix 2005), the impact of protest movements (Imig and Tarrow 2001) or the contestation within political parties (van der Eijk and Franklin 2004)

2. The scope of mediation. This comprises information management through journalists as the mediators of Europeanisation in the Member States. Research has so far focused mainly on the organisational capacities of journalism and the media. Field studies were carried out to analyse the performance of EU-correspondents and the agenda-setting and control function of the Brussels ‘corps de presse’ (Meyer 2002, Siapera 2004, AIM research consortium 2007)

3. The scope of public reception and resonance. This includes research on the changing attitudes and preferences of the publics as the ‘receivers’ of political communication on the EU (Bruter 2004, Hooghe 2003). Attentive structures and the knowledge of European citizens are regularly surveyed through Eurobarometer, which has become the main source of information for both institutional actors and the European research community in their study of European publics.

A second group of researchers has mainly promoted content analysis of European news coverage. The public sphere is not seen as an arena of contention but as an arena for framing discourses and identities. Accordingly, research has focused on the contents of unfolding debates, on general issue structures and modes of interpretation:

1. Europeanisation of attentive structures. The scope of Europeanisation is measured here in the general level of media attention to political news from the EU or other member states. Accordingly, vertical Europeanisation refers to the general visibility of the EU measured in the extent to which European events, actors and issues are covered by national news media. Horizontal Europeanisation refers to the enhanced visibility of issues, actors...