1 Introduction
A spectre is haunting the European Union. Itâs the spectre of politicisation. After decades of âpermissive consensusâ, during which the European project has rarely been contested in the public sphere(s), the European Union (EU) has become a matter of contestation in mainstream public debates across European countries. During the recent 2019 EU elections, over half of the eligible voters turned out to vote, which constitutes the biggest turnout since the 1994 EU elections. Similarly, the COVIDâ19 crisis has exposed the increasing politicisation of the EU, as citizens and national governments demanded EU-level action. While it is still early to draw firm conclusions, it is safe to point out that during the last decade there has been a substantial increase in the politicisation of EU affairs at the national level in several countries, on issues such as trade, austerity, climate change, immigration or, recently, health care due to the COVIDâ19 pandemic crisis. The EU has never received as much attention from citizens and the national media as in the last years. There is indeed an academic agreement regarding the EUâs growing politicisation, departing from the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s (Barth & Bijsmans, 2018), and continuing with the debates surrounding the European Constitutional Treaty, the 2005 French and Dutch referendums (Taggart, 2006), the 2010 Eurozone crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis and the 2020 COVIDâ19 crisis. However, there is an academic disagreement on whether this increasing politicisation leads to the rise of nationalist rhetoric or prevents it. Hooghe and Marks (2009) famously argued that the politicisation of EU issues has led the EU from a âpermissive consensusâ to a âconstraining dissensusâ1 by increasing the political cost of EU decision-making, given that pro-European elites are facing an increasing Eurosceptic citizenry at the national level, due to the structural opposition of cosmopolitan and nationalist groups. However, this (pessimistic) interpretation of the growing politicisation of the EU at the national level is not the only one. Other authors argue that politicisation can, on the contrary, Europeanise the public spheres and normalise the EU as a polity (Risse, 2010). In line with this latter line of thought, this book will argue that politicisation empowers European integration, further intertwining national and European politics and connecting European citizens with EU institutions, thereby socialising citizens at the national level with the EU.
The political and historical context is deeply influential when reflecting upon the state of European democracy and conflictâs role in it. The global financial crisis triggered in 2008 was followed by the Eurozone crisis in 2010â2011, and together they had a considerable impact on the interest in EU politics by European citizens, and particularly those from the most affected countries, such as Greece, Italy or Spain. This was illustrated by the 2014 European elections, summarised by the BBC with the following headline: âEurosceptic âearthquakeâ rocks EU electionsâ (BBC, 2014). Similarly, Franklin and Nielsen (2016) edited an academic book entitled The Eurosceptic 2014 European Parliament Elections. In January 2015, the left-wing political party Syriza won the Greek general elections by campaigning against âAusterityâ, a victory that the progressive news outlet, The Guardian, summarised in the following way: âSyrizaâs historic win puts Greece on collision course with Europeâ (Traynor & Smith, 2015). In June 2016, British citizens voted against maintaining UKâs membership of the EU, mainly on the basis that they wanted to âtake back controlâ. In parallel, a number of right-wing political parties with tendency to question the EU project as a whole in different countries greatly increased their votes and gained (or maintained) positions in the government of several member states, such as Hungary, Poland or Italy. These political dynamics could be understood as a process by which âEuroscepticismâ travels âfrom the margins to the mainstreamâ (Brack & Startin, 2015), which implies that the European project is increasingly questioned in the public sphere, a phenomenon that might have a crucial influence on the future of European integration (De Vries, 2018). However, the increasing politicisation of EU affairs can also be seen as âresistancesâ (Crespy & Verschueren, 2009) to one or several aspects of European integration, rather than an illustration of âEuroscepticismâ.2
It is in this context of growing politicisation of the EU that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, a trade agreement between the United States (U.S.) and the EU, started. After Obamaâs announcement on 2013, February 12, about the TTIP negotiations, on 2013, June 14, the 28 EU member states officially gave the mandate to the European Commission to start negotiating a free-trade agreement with the U.S. on the EUâs behalf. Once the mandate was given, negotiators from both sides met regularly in successive rounds that alternated between the U.S. and Brussels. The first round took place in Washington D.C. in June 2013, while the final round (the 15th) took place in New York City in October 2016. Paradoxically, after years of contestation led by left-wing campaigners across Europe and the U.S., the victory of the right-wing U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, on November 11, 2016, effectively ended the TTIP project and the negotiations were put in the freezer.
The TTIP negotiations between the EU and the U.S. were initially received with great hope in June 2013 by mainstream political parties and specialised economic newspapers such as the Financial Times. TTIP, a trade agreement that largely followed the dominant neoliberal policy paradigm but with unprecedented ambitions (De Ville & Siles-BrĂŒgge, 2016), was presented as an opportunity to increase business competition and free trade, creating âjobs and growthâ across both the EU and the U.S. However, almost four years later, a technical and European issue like TTIP had become a politicised topic in several European public spheres. Despite the highly technical and complex nature of TTIP, mainstream debates included civil society actors speaking out against the negotiations, both at the national and EU levels. In addition, the European Commission opened participatory mechanisms to certain civil society actors, changed some of its proposals (such as the investorsâ protection mechanism or the negotiationsâ transparency) and adopted some of their ideas in the Commissionâs discourse.
The book departs from the European public sphere literature in interaction with the literature on politicisation of the EU, and attempts to empirically investigate how the debate around the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) took place in several European public spheres. The empirical data collected comes from quality news outlets, an established source of data when undertaking research that touches upon the European public sphere and its relevance for the legitimacy of the EU (Beetz, 2015; Hawkins, 2012). The media is also a consistent choice for empirical data when taking a public sphere perspective, where there is a direct link between the quality of discourse and the legitimacy of a polity. The public sphere is conceived as âan intermediary system of communication between formally organized and informal face-to-face deliberations in arenas at both the top and the bottom of the political systemâ (Habermas, 2006, p. 415). The driving concept across the book is the Europeanisation of public spheres, as a way to define the phenomenon by which the national public spheres increasingly converge in terms of its framing. The concept of Europeanisation has many faces (Olsen, 2002), and this book refers purely to one of them, the Europeanisation of public spheres.
While the institutional dynamics of the EU has received wide attention, the mediatised aspect of EU politics has received less (Michailidou & Trenz, 2013). The book analyses the mass media...