Stefanie Pukallus

The European Community's Public Communication Policy 1951–1967

From its inception the European Community had a civil aim: the need to stimulate a European civil consciousness. Viewed as a pre-condition for the popular acceptance of increased European integration this provided the rationale for the Community’s public communication policy 1951-1967. The Community pursued this civil aim through two distinct public communication approaches: popularist 1951-1962 and opinion leader led 1963-1967. We conclude that the way the Community undertook its public communication policy cannot be understood without considering the Community’s civil aim. This leads us to question some of the common views held on the significance of European public communication policy 1951-1967.

The politics of impunity: A study of journalists’ experiential accounts of impunity in Bulgaria, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Mexico and Pakistan:

Definitions of impunity regarding crimes against journalists have thus far been too narrow. Therefore, we propose a new approach to understanding impunity as also being grounded in journalists’ liv...

‘A People’s Europe’ (1973–1992)

With the end of the Yom Kippur War and the European Community’s first common statement on a matter of foreign policy in 1973, the European Community became confident enough to move towards a political democratic union. Soon the second representation of European citizenship, ‘A People’s Europe’, emerged. It was a form of political-federal European citizenship which ascribed special political rights such as voting rights to the European citizen. It was also during this time that the European Community turned to the use of political-federal symbols similar to those of a nation-state that marked the European ‘homeland’ and introduced specifically European cultural events.

Europe of Rights (2010–2014)

With the Lisbon Treaty, the fifth representation of European citizenship, ‘Europe of Rights’, emerged, where European citizenship was understood as defined by civil-legal rights. Accordingly, European citizens were represented in the form of citizen-consumers who gained their rights from the Single Market and who should be able to easily enjoy these rights. The European Commission’s objective was therefore to remove all obstacles (which included a citizen’s lack of knowledge about these rights) that European citizens encounter when trying to exercise their rights across European borders. Once citizens’ rights were rendered understandable and easily enjoyable, European citizens would develop, so the European Commission hoped, a solidarity with and loyalty to the EU and fellow European citizens.

Europe of Agorai (2005–2009)

The fourth representation of European citizenship emerged in the context of the Constitutional Treaty and the appointment of Margot Wallstrom as Commissioner for Communication Strategy who began to create a ‘Europe of Agorai’ for European civil-spatial citizens. What this meant was that the European citizen was understood as an intelligent and rational deliberator who is interested in and knowledgeable about European policies and who could (at least in theory) act as a policy-advisor to the European Commission. The European Commission believed that debate and dialogue facilitated by newly built virtual and physical European agorai would give European citizens the real possibility to debate European topics, to voice their own opinions and to gain ‘ownership’ of the European project.

Homo Oeconomicus (1951–1972)

The first representation of European citizenship emerged in the context of the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community. Homo Oeconomicus, as a form of economic-social European citizenship, portrays a male qualified coal and steel worker (from 1957 a worker per se) of French, German, Dutch, Luxembourgian, Italian or Belgium nationality. The European Commission imagined that such a worker would happily use his newly acquired right to free movement in order to find work in another member state and ascribed social rights and benefits to the worker and his family. With the renewed impetus for greater European political integration in the late 1960s this representation began to become obsolete and was soon replaced by the representation ‘A People’s Europe’.

A Civil Europe

Since 1951 the European Commission (and before that the High Authority) had a continuous civil aim: the stimulation of a European civil consciousness amongst a European public. One of the ways in which it attempted to achieve this was through the public communication of European citizenship, the meaning of which changed depending on the social, political, economic, historical and institutional contexts of European integration. The different meanings of European citizenship are best understood as five representations which the European Commission communicated between 1951 and 2014: Homo Oeconomicus (1951–1972), A People’s Europe (1973–1992), Europe of Transparency (1993–2004), Europe of Agorai (2005–2009) and Europe of Rights (2010–2014). When combined they form an uninterrupted European civil narrative.

‘Europe of Transparency’ (1993–2004)

Following the difficult ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the European Commission believed European citizens were suspicious of the secretive bureaucracy of the European institutions and desired more institutional transparency, easy access to official documents and opportunities to enter into debate and dialogue with the European institutions. In response, the European Commission started to publicly communicate a form of political-dialogical European citizenship in a ‘Europe of Transparency’. Here, European citizens were to be well-informed rational discussants deeply concerned with all forms and sorts of policy matters, and they debated increasingly using both physical and virtual spaces on different levels, namely on Community, national, regional and local levels.