Bernhard Peters

Transnationalization of public spheres

List of Figures - List of Tables - Preface& Acknowledgements - List of Authors The Transnationalization of Public Spheres: Theoretic Considerations Analysing Europeanization: The Research Framework Segmented Europeanization Differential Europeanization: Explaining Vertical and Horizontal Europeanization in the Quality Press Towards a Pan-European Public Spheres? A typology of Transnational Media in Europe M.Brugggemann& H.Schulz-Forberg Together We Fight? Europes Debate over the Legitimacy of Military Interventions United in Protest? The European Struggle over Genetically Modified Food S.Schneider Conclusion Appendix 1: Additional Tables for Chapter 4 Appendix 2: Methodological Appendix Notes - References - Index

Segmented Europeanization: Exploring the Legitimacy of the European Union from a Public Discourse Perspective

The article presents the results of a longitudinal newspaper analysis on the Europeanization of public discourses in five EU countries. It shows that European governance is increasingly subject to public scrutiny, but neither has a common discourse in Europe developed nor has the communication lag of the EU disappeared. Therefore the EU remains largely dependent on domestic processes of legitimation.

7 National and transnational public spheres: the case of the EU

While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. Public information and debate are essential ingredients of democracy, and their confinement to the individual national public sphere threatens the democratic aspirations and legitimacy of transnational institutions. Therefore, it is often argued that the European Union can only achieve greater legitimacy if there is a Europeanization of national public spheres. Has public discourse in fact Europeanized in the last decades? Here we present results from a study of major national newspapers from five European countries. Europeanization is defined in three dimensions: Europeanization of contents, Europeanization of public identities, and Europeanization of communication flows. Our results show that national public spheres are, in fact, quite resilient and that change is slow or halting. We discuss several possible explanations for this resilience, and go on to question the assumption that the legitimacy of European institutions depends on Europeanization of public discourse.

A new look at ‘National Identity’ How should we think about ‘collective’ or ‘national identities’? Are there two types of national identities? Does Germany have an ethnic identity, and is it different?

There is a notorious typology of ‘conceptions of nationhood’, which opposes ‘ethnocultural’ conceptions to political or ‘civic’ conceptions of nationhood. Analytically, the typology is unsatisfactory, as are its normative and explanatory applications. A more multidimensional analysis of elements of national identity is proposed, which clarifies some possible meanings of ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ in this context. These considerations are then applied to the case of German national identity.

Segmentierte Europäisierung: Trends und Muster der Transnationalisierung von Öffentlichkeiten in Europa

Bisher beschrankt sich die Debatte urn eine „Europaische Mediendffentlichkeit“ vor allem auf mogliche Voraussetzungen und Bedingungen, die fur ihre Konstitution notwendig seien, wahrend empirisch gestutzte Analysen zu ihrem aktuellen Entwicklungsstand weitgehend fehlen oder bestenfalls als Momentaufhahmen eines langerfristigen Prozesses interpretiert werden konnen.1 So bleibt trotz erster Forschungsbemuhungen die zentrale Frage unbeantwortet, inwieweit und mit welcher Qualitat sich ein Wandel nationaler Medienoffentlichkeiten in Europa bereits vollzogen hat: Hat medienvermittelte Kommunikation uber die Europaische Union die Stufe routinemasiger ausenpolitischer Berichterstattung und Debatte schon langst uberfliigelt, wie (2000, 307) behaupten? Oder ist (2000, 295) zuzustimmen, der in einer Studie festgestellt hat, dass der Europaisierungsgrad zumindest der deutschen Medienoffentlichkeit dem gestiegenen politischen Einfluss der EU nach wie vor erheblich hinterherhinkt?

Together We Fight? Europe’s Debate over the Legitimacy of Military Interventions

This chapter explores the Europeanization of public spheres in a highly contested area of European integration: the use of military force. It probes into the emergence of a common European security discourse as a‘hard case’ of Europeanization and analyses the ways in which speakers in the media have legitimized the use of force, changed domestic norms regarding the deployment of troops, and shifted national security identities in the wake of a new international‘humanitarianism’ and interventionism.

The Transnationalization of Public Spheres: Theoretical Considerations

The transnationalization of public spheres can best be understood within the context of more encompassing transformations of the state. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s the nation-states of the OECD world — among them, of course, the growing number of member states of the European Union — have been in a process of continuous transformation (Zurn and Leibfried 2005; Hurrelmann et al. 2007). It is unclear as of now whether this incremental change will develop into a new, relatively stable constellation of statehood in the twenty-first century, or whether change will be perpetual. What we do know at present, however, is that there are two main directions of transformation: internationalization and privatization. The four most basic normative goods that the OECD state has provided for so long — monopoly of force and taxation (resources), rule of law, democratic legitimacy and welfare — are today partly co-produced by international bodies and private agencies, or both. Of course, transformation in these four realms is uneven. While on the whole internationalization is more pronounced in the resources and legal dimensions, privatization is somewhat stronger, though not universal, in welfare production.

Analysing Europeanization: the Research Framework

In the previous chapter we developed a complex and multifarious model of the transnationalization of public spheres from both an empirical and a normative viewpoint. But how can such an ambitious model be translated into empirical research? The following chapter answers this question by describing and explaining the research design we employed to measure the transnationalization of public spheres. The first part of the chapter shows how the overall design of our research scheme addressed the three main conceptual challenges inherent in our model. This research scheme consisted of two separate but closely related empirical studies — a major cross-issue, quantitative content analysis of media debates, and two issue-specific qualitative and quantitative case-studies — which will be described in detail in the second part of the chapter.

Differential Europeanization: Explaining Vertical and Horizontal Europeanization in the Quality Press

In the preceding chapter we concluded from the results of our quantitative long-term cross-sectional content analysis that the Europeanization of public spheres has hitherto remained limited to a single dimension: the monitoring of EU governance. A truly integrated European public sphere in which public debate actually transcends national borders has not yet developed. However, while the overall result is similar for all newspapers, a detailed analysis reveals a surprisingly wide range of patterns of Europeanization, as the level of Europeanization reached in each dimension can differ from paper to paper, some scoring relatively low on all dimensions, others achieving high levels on some dimensions, but falling behind on others. In this chapter, we shall first develop a theoretical model for explaining these different patterns of Europeanization of newspaper content. We shall then proceed to test this model on the data of our cross-sectional content analysis. Besides offering an analytical framework suited to identifying different ways of talking about Europe, that is, different patterns of Europeanization, we also venture a tentative explanation of how these different paths emerge and why they do not converge over time.