THE MISSING EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE ABSENCE OF IMAGINED EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP
Authors: Kaitatzi-Whitlock Sophia 
Published: December 2007

In this article I correlate the lack of a common European public space for information and communication with the lack of a sense of a common EU citizenship and common European identity. The demonstrable deficit in communication is both vertical and horizontal. It alienates citizens from their elected representatives but also from crucial current public affairs. Citizens remain thus ignorant about power brokering in Brussels. It affects equally people from different coutries, individual citizens across the Union. I argue that both the growing ignorance of European citizens about Europolitics and their mounting disaffection with it derive from an entrenched political communication deficit. I hold that this malaise sustains the longlasting EU political crisis and its notorious democracy deficit. The study locates these crucial political and communicative problems, but when examining policy efforts to remedy them, similar policy gaps and non-policymaking are manifest. I analyse the media landscape, which with regards to contents of political news and current affairs, is nationally based, nationally oriented and controlled. This is then juxtaposed with the prevailing condition of huge voids and gaps in publicising, screening and in monitoring Europolitics. I then correlate the broadly documented ignorance of Europeans about their common political affairs with the absence of pan-European common public space. Similarly, the documented disaffection and abstention of citizens from political activity and Europolitics more specifically is accounted for by the absence of a common European political communication system. I further argue that, in the twenty first century, the medium of television, which in synergy with new media such as the Internet becomes interactive, is the best instrument to fill these gaps of the still missing common pan-European public space. The new media landscape offers the technical preconditions for the development of ‘communications rights’ strategy and, thus, for the development of a common televised public space that can approach the functions of a pan-European public sphere by allowing both active information functions, debate and dialogue between Europeans horizontally. Notwithstanding these new technological possibilities and in spite of the pressing needs for trans-national communication on Europolitics and between citizens, such potential is not exploited by European leaders. This results effectively in the abandoning of the crucial requirements for political communication to the ‘forces of fate’. It is empirically proven that nationally entrenched and commercial media have quite different objectives and priorities from those necessary for the function of a complete political communication. The former assume localist or nationalist perspectives whereas the most dominant of latter ones pursue globalist and exclusively profit seeking strategies. By definition, neither category can serve the objectives of European integration and or serve citizens’ needs from the European perspective. So, although communications’ rights can now be readily deployed, although pan-European television channels can contribute to a complete and responsible political information and communication, and although these are fundamental prerequisites for the development of a common European identity, a European solidarity and for the much sought after European integration process, these means are not taken advantage of. Hence, the point is that this problematic condition frustrates both EU citizens and the objective of European integration.