ABSTRACT
The question of what characterises the European public sphere, and even whether one actually exists in the first place, has been a topic of flourishing academic debate for many years. Concomitant with the rise of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, the focus has shifted to exploring how social media can be used to encourage a European public sphere that is fully transnational in nature. Our chapter contributes to this literature by focusing on the transnationalisation of the public sphere in the context of European integration under conditions of crisis. Using a topic modelling approach, we map the topics of the German and Greek Twitter-spheres surrounding the refugee crisis of 2015–2016 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020–2021, exploiting the multilingual nature of Twitter discourses in the two countries to investigate the transnationalisation and Europeanisation of discourses both in domestic-language and English-language tweets in the two countries. We thus bring new empirical analysis to the timely issue of whether the EU’s near-permanent state of crisis both in the past and in the current decade has given rise to a dedifferentiated public sphere, whereby Europeans use social media to debate the same topics while applying the same frames of reference, or whether social media instead continue to serve as an amplifier of national discourses and debates.
