Sophia Kaitatzi-Whitlock

THE MISSING EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE ABSENCE OF IMAGINED EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP

ABSTRACT In this article I correlate the lack of a common European public space for information and communication with the lack of a sense of a common EU citizenship and common European identity. The demonstrable deficit in communication is both vertical and horizontal. It alienates citizens from their elected representatives but also from crucial current public affairs. Citizens remain thus ignorant about power brokering in Brussels. It affects equally people from different coutries, individual citizens across the Union. I argue that both the growing ignorance of European citizens about Europolitics and their mounting disaffection with it derive from an entrenched political communication deficit. I hold that this malaise sustains the longlasting EU political crisis and its notorious democracy deficit. The study locates these crucial political and communicative problems, but when examining policy efforts to remedy them, similar policy gaps and non-policymaking are manifest. I analyse the media landscape, which with regards to contents of political news and current affairs, is nationally based, nationally oriented and controlled. This is then juxtaposed with the prevailing condition of huge voids and gaps in publicising, screening and in monitoring Europolitics. I then correlate the broadly documented ignorance of Europeans about their common political affairs with the absence of pan-European common public space. Similarly, the documented disaffection and abstention of citizens from political activity and Europolitics more specifically is accounted for by the absence of a common European political communication system. I further argue that, in the twenty first century, the medium of television, which in synergy with new media such as the Internet becomes interactive, is the best instrument to fill these gaps of the still missing common pan-European public space. The new media landscape offers the technical preconditions for the development of ‘communications rights’ strategy and, thus, for the development of a common televised public space that can approach the functions of a pan-European public sphere by allowing both active information functions, debate and dialogue between Europeans horizontally. Notwithstanding these new technological possibilities and in spite of the pressing needs for trans-national communication on Europolitics and between citizens, such potential is not exploited by European leaders. This results effectively in the abandoning of the crucial requirements for political communication to the ‘forces of fate’. It is empirically proven that nationally entrenched and commercial media have quite different objectives and priorities from those necessary for the function of a complete political communication. The former assume localist or nationalist perspectives whereas the most dominant of latter ones pursue globalist and exclusively profit seeking strategies. By definition, neither category can serve the objectives of European integration and or serve citizens’ needs from the European perspective. So, although communications’ rights can now be readily deployed, although pan-European television channels can contribute to a complete and responsible political information and communication, and although these are fundamental prerequisites for the development of a common European identity, a European solidarity and for the much sought after European integration process, these means are not taken advantage of. Hence, the point is that this problematic condition frustrates both EU citizens and the objective of European integration.

Greece, The Eurozone Crisis and the Media: The Solution is the Problem

Abstract By October 2009, Greece faced a sovereign debt crisis and a borrowing crisis and it was said to be putting the Eurozone at risk. After much delay, the EU Commission together with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF formed a hybrid tripartite entity, the so called “Troika,” to deal with the indebted country. This act raised the stakes since it converted the crisis to an issue of intense global media attention, influence and spin. The Greek people entered thus into the epicentre of a ferocious global publicness. This article analyses the Eurozone/Greek financial crisis, assessing critically the way that it was dealt with politically by national, European Union (EU) and Eurozone authorities. The author traces the modes that the eruption of the crisis was reported about, emphasising its crucial initial phase and exploring how crisis-management-policies were presented and discussed in transnational public spheres. She scrutinises the role of national and transnational media in framing this affair and key political communication manifestations or absence thereof. Moreover, the article examines the underlying material conditions and political economy motives of biased or “abnormal” reporting modalities. In terms of impacts, it elaborates on de-legitimation and polarisation of politics and in political communication of Greece as a consequence of “crisis management.” The article explores EU power relations and the tangle of socio-economic and political reactions/events that evolved from a controversial “crisis management” model and their impacts to date.

European HDTV Strategy: Muddling Through or Muddling Up?

Following a successful technology R&D programme, the European High Definition Television (HDTV) system was the only one available. Despite this, it will never reach the market. In June 1993 the great strategy of the EC to conquer the world with its own transmission system was officially abandoned. This article examines the strategy and the policy-making process that aspired to promote the European model of HDTV but failed. It argues that divergent and conflicting national and industrial interests, as well as divergent policy approaches, are in part to blame for this failure. Mismanagement of time in the policy process due to these conflicting approaches and interests was fatal as concurrently swift technological innovations led to the development of the competing digital HDTV model. It further argues that policy making was not flexible enough — and therefore not incremental — and that it ignored factors such as consumer demand. The HDTV strategy and policy goals were unrealistic and incongruent with available means as, for example, those who sought subsidies for the production of HD-MAC were concurrently developing the antagonistic digital model.

Review: Jannis Kallinikos, The Consequences of Information. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008. £55.00 (hbk), £19.95 (pbk). 205 pp

The primary focus of this book is on the impact of information on central instances of human organization. It advances a meticulous anatomy of certain modalities by which a pervasive dissolution is caused and highlights obtrusive, yet often imperceptible modi operandi of the digital code and computerized information in rendering reality and materiality digitized. Kallinikos views information not merely as a meaningful input, but as an underlying, drastically pervading element that permeates recognizable functions, institutions and organizational structures, that is: a habitat. In the guise of digital computation, information, the author claims, has evolved largely self-referentially. It is particularly true that through its telematic synthesis, information has acquired, first, a huge growth dynamic and, second, an exponential effect in promulgating further interoperability between systems. The combination of these features grant computational information veritable self-propelling traits and mechanisms. As daily activities, tasks and functions are becoming increasingly informatized, represented and objectified. We come to realize how full agentic responsibility, control or genuine creativity tend to diminish or to be lost. The author highlights in particular the multifaceted workings of computational, networkconfigured information that occur largely in non-observable, deep and complex processes, notably, such systemic and algorithmic processes and outcomes that primarily originate in the economic sphere. As a result of the all-encompassing digitizing trends, production institutions, entrepreneurial strategies and the prevalent capitalist productive relations undergo profound restructuring, dislocation/delocalization, flexibilization and global dispersion. In this light, the central thesis of the book is that dynamic, self-propelling, ‘runaway information processes’ cause far-reaching dissolutions of structures and realities that once were solid, tangible, hierarchical and bounded. The shock wave of such dynamic, yet also tacit, growth in combination with drastic, transactive new functions and opportunities, globally extending human action, spawns comprehensive ‘dissolving effects’. Dissolution hits the compact, en bloc character of tasks and operations, which subsequently generates disembeddedness. What accrues, instead, is a ‘new realm of resource mobility, transferability and combinability’ (p. 18), notably, also distributed modes of action, orchestrated through information. Given this profile, a key characteristic of this realm is its constant R E V I E W S

Review: Paolo Baldi and Uwe Hasebrink (eds), Broadcasters and Citizens: Trends in Media Accountability and Viewer Participation. Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2007. £29.95. 116 pp

vention of political activism through new communication technology need to be considered in the context of the material social and political world of inequality, injustice and corporate dominance. If it is true that an alternative politics can thrive online, then it is also true that it is segmented by interest and structured by inequality. The pre-eminent users of global communication networks remain the corporations and governments who seek to strengthen the dominant economic regime. The online world is firmly anchored in the offline world in terms of the social constraints all participants are subject to. For me, this comes too late in the book. I would have liked to have heard more about the relationship of tension between the New Left and the New Communalists; more about the context of institutional politics and its relationship to an increasingly global economic order – both factors that must also have played a part in forging the blueprint for how we conceive of the computer in our political worlds. But small criticisms aside, this is a well executed, thoroughly researched book – read it alongside The Millennium Whole Earth Catalogue and ponder the rebirth of the hippie.