ABSTRACT
It does not take much to show that the contemporary media landscapes in Eastern and Western Europe alike are not congruent with the physical geography of nation-states. The media systems of individual countries are typically segmented along cultural lines, and are often characterized by significant regional variation. In many cases, two or more distinct, sometimes territorially circumscribed and even linguistically diverse media systems coexist within the same state. Europe’s ‘stateless nations’ – the Catalans, the Welsh, the Scots – are tuned into a ‘dual’ communicative sphere, one limited to the nation itself, the other encompassing the whole state population (Schlesinger 2009). In countries such as Switzerland, Belgium or Bosnia and Herzegovina the internal segmentation is so pronounced that it seems difficult to see what, if anything, ties the different sub-state spheres of communication together (Bašić Hrvatin et al. 2008). Even in culturally most homogeneous states, the unity of communication, culture and polity is continuously disrupted by satellite television and the Internet, as well as by the flows of transnational migration and diasporic media (e.g. Kosnick 2007).
