ABSTRACT
The decline of the ‘permissive consensus’ over European integration and its democratic consequences are central themes of this book. The European Union’s failed attempt at ‘constitutionalisation’, in 2005, brought issues about its perceived or real ‘crisis of legitimacy’ to a head. Rejections of the Constitutional Treaty (CT) in referenda by citizens of two founder members, France and the Netherlands, marked a watershed, indicating that integration could no longer advance without popular consent. It dealt a possibly fatal blow to an idea that was already in decline: that political elites could simply proceed by ‘building Europe in the absence of Europeans’, as Jean Monnet succinctly put it (Tsoukalis 2003). It also exposed as overly optimistic the assumption, promoted by early scholars of integration, especially Ernst Haas (1961), that political engagement would automatically follow from Europe’s supranational institutional developments. Haas visualised a ‘process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new political centre’ (ibid.: 196). Such functionalism has been criticised and mostly rejected in the academy for several decades but retains a pervasive influence in the Commission’s thinking. Even after the constitutional crisis, Brussels officials sometimes give the impression that they use Eurobarometer opinion data to determine whether European peoples’ consciousness has sufficiently ‘evolved’ to be ready for EU citizenship in its full sense. Instead, it is perhaps time to consider the public sphere, where politics is mediated to citizens, and the dilemmas posed by European integration. This chapter therefore addresses the emergent ‘Europeanised’ political communication in national public spheres.
