ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns questions around the possible existence of something one might call a European civil society. It draws up a list of possible candidates, the number of contemporary or recently active intellectuals with a genuinely Europe-wide resonance revealed itself as rather small. Intellectuals might then be seen as the vanguard of a European public sphere or civil society a venir, rather as they were in Germany and elsewhere for the national societies of the nineteenth century. Morley and Robins note, for example, 'the retreat of many of the entrepreneurial enthusiasts of "European" satellite television, away from their original pan-European ambitions, towards a revised perspective which accepts the limitations and divisions of separate language/cultural markets in Europe'. Schlesinger sets the stakes fairly modestly as 'the minimal establishment of a European news agenda as a serious part of the news-consuming habits of significant European audiences who have begun to think of their citizenship as transcending the level of the nation-state'.
