ABSTRACT
The European public sphere has been soft with very few exceptions, throughout history for two main reasons. European power centre has never existed; there has thus never been an official representation of a European government that would be staged as an actor within the European public. Therefore the European public never had the possibility to address and influence a European power centre. Today it is possible to discern five general characteristics of the soft European public sphere: it is issue-related, composite, multilingual, unstructured and elite-dominated. The fact that the European public sphere is multilingual has an interesting effect on a recent phenomenon of a counter-public sphere, the European Social Forum (ESF). The ESF meets in order to address European issues and is characterized by the participation of a truly pan European group of activists fighting for a more social and cosmopolitan Europe.
