ABSTRACT
This book has shown that it is against both present achievement and future uncertainty that we need to discuss the arguments about a European public sphere. Linguistic, political, economic and cultural diversity is the essential background to a discussion of the prospects of a European public sphere, not to speak of the continuing importance of diverse histories and how these continue to shape collective identities. Such deep diversity (Fossum 2003) is still profoundly linked to the continuing vitality of Europe’s dominant political framework: what we (not always felicitously) call the nation state. It is the nation state that has been the locus classicus of thinking about a public sphere – often conceived as a space of critical discourse about public matters. The actions of civil society, coupled with mediated communication, have commonly played a key role both in articulating and disseminating opinions and arguments. The European Union of course, is not a nation state, and the theoretical challenge has been – and continues to be – how to think about the public domain in relation to an entity that is in a process of continual transformation. Thinking of nations as publics bounded by a state has been the starting point for much theorisation (Splichal 1999: 16). And to the extent that the EU has some of the characteristics of a polity, it therefore becomes obvious – at least in part – to think about a public sphere in relation to its core institutions. In short, the model of the national public sphere exerts its influence on how we conceptualise a framework, which is actually quite different from, but at the same time linked to – and based upon – a union of European nation states. We have sought to address this ambiguity by working with three de facto polity models, each of which has a distinct vision of the public sphere. The first model is that of the nation state, which serves as a critical reference point for subsequent discussion. We have labelled the two other, respectively, the regulatory and federal models. In what follows, we highlight the main findings of this book in relation to the three main questions posed at the outset.
