The Communicative Construction of Europe

Cultures of Political Discourse, Public Sphere, and the Euro Crisis

Andreas Hepp, Monika Elsler, Swantje Lingenberg, Anne Mollen, Johanna Möller, Anke Offerhaus, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137453136
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on a 12-year long project, this book demonstrates the contested character of the communicative construction of Europe. It does so by combining an investigation of journalistic practices with content analysis of print media, an examination of citizens' online interactions and audience studies with European citizens.

1

Introduction

The euro crisis, as it is widely known, has been an important focus for media coverage both within Europe and beyond. Since 2009 we have been confronted with an ongoing discourse dramatising the crisis surrounding the euro in Europe and the EU. In 2003 The Sun was already writing about the ‘EU in crisis’ (12 December 2003) – a discourse that intensified when the financial crisis erupted. On 13 December 2008, for example, the German Bild talked of a ‘crisis domino-effect’, reflecting ongoing problems with the eurozone currency and financial politics in general. In Poland, one could read on 13 December 2008 that the member states of the EU should ‘jointly struggle with the crisis’ (Dziennik Zachodni). And in France, Ouest France called upon ‘the state to rescue the crisis’ (25 March 2008), while Le Monde anticipated that ‘in Southern Europe, the crisis further weakens confidence in the state’ (7 May 2013). More recently, on 4 November 2014 the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza agreed with politicians that ‘the euro crisis has not been solved’, asking what could be done. The German Spiegel Online calculated on 6 January 2015 that the euro crisis had ‘destroyed 3.8 million jobs’. All in all, this throws up more questions than answers. Is the EU really under so much pressure? Do we risk the derailment of European integration? And is a process of re-nationalising Europe taking place, with the state acting the part of a trouble shooter? How can we interpret the various forms of Euroscepticism?

Questions like these are also the subject of intellectual debate – and some of Europe’s best-known public intellectuals became involved. For example, Anthony Giddens (2012) argued in the Guardian that ‘stabilising the euro should be a bridge to longer-term change’ of Europe and the EU. In his book Turbulent and Mighty Continent (2014) Giddens imagines a different kind of Europe. He argues that the EU is a ‘community of fate’ (2014: 18), in which the dominance of (German) austerity policy is problematic. Instead of being a centralised top-down polity, the EU should become more devolved, with the initiative being taken at the bottom: ‘Citizens must at this point become more deeply involved in the process of European reform – the bottom-up element must be strong and persuasive, not confined to occasional consultations or even elections.’ (2014: 46) In parallel, and also as a reaction to the euro crisis and the related politics of the German government, in 2014 Ulrich Beck published German Europe. Here he criticises the increasingly dominant position of Germany in the EU and the related ‘national view’ upon Europe. For him, this perspective weakens the originally transnational and partly cosmopolitan orientation of the European project. Spurred on by his conviction, Beck became politically active in building an initiative for a ‘bottom-up Europe’ – together with other politicians and intellectuals, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Delors, and Richard Sennett (cf. Delors et al. 2012). Jürgen Habermas (2012) also published various interviews and articles about the present situation of the EU, many of which were translated into English and as a consequence became part of the wider European debate. His book On the European Constitution (Habermas 2011) adds two academic essays to some of these newspaper articles, outlining the possibility of a post- or supranational Europe in a worldwide society. Besides calling for a deepening of European integration, these intellectual statements coincide with two arguments: first, that Europe and the EU should be considered a transnational rather than a national project and, second, that the euro crisis should stimulate a rethinking of Europe from a citizens’ perspective.

Our research questions

This is the debate in which we want to position our book. We want to temper the emotionalism surrounding this debate by grounding it in empirical analysis drawn from a 12-year comparative research project that was conducted from 2003 to 2014. The overall project, ‘The Transnationalization of Public Spheres in the EU’, was part of the Collaborative Research Centre 597 ‘Transformations of the State’ at the University of Bremen. Being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), we had the opportunity to investigate the media coverage of Europe from 1982 to 2013 in the quality, tabloid, and regional press, studying the practices of journalists producing this media coverage as well as the online activities of citizens and their media appropriation. This allowed us to present the European public realm as a communicative space. About half way through the project, what is now called the euro crisis blew up. It became an important reference point for our research. We had four principle research questions: First, is there such a thing as a European public sphere and, if so, what is its character? Second, how can we explain the character of such a European public sphere through the production practices of journalists? Third, how do citizens relate to the European public sphere and react to its character? Finally, did the subsequently revealed patterns undergo change in the context of the euro crisis?

In pursuit of answers to these principal questions, we conducted our research in and across six countries: Austria (AT), Denmark (DK), France (F), Germany (GER), United Kingdom (UK) and Poland (PL). We wanted to include the economically strongest founding member states of the EU including two EU-positive members (France and Germany) and one EU-sceptical member (UK), two smaller member states of which one is pro-EU (Austria) and the other EU-sceptical (Denmark), and one of the eastern latecomers to the EU (Poland). Our argument for selecting this sample was to focus our research on a varied selection of the countries that build the economic core of Europe and are main actors in constructing Europe as a society and the EU as its political institution. From today’s perspective one might argue that at least one Southern European state is missing, partly because of differences in media systems (Hallin/Mancini 2004: 89–142; Hepp 2015: 51–59) and partly because of the deeper impact of the euro crisis on Southern European states, resulting in a different kind of media coverage and public discourse (Breeze 2014; Kaitatzi-Whitlock 2014). Such a criticism would have been justified if the aim of our study had been to draw comparisons of the Europeanisation of national public spheres in Europe with reference to their differences of media systems or if our research had been occupied with comparing the different consequences of the euro crisis on national public spheres. However, our interest is another one, namely, to investigate the communicative construction of Europe during the course of the euro crisis. Having such a research objective, it is much more appropriate to focus on those countries which are the dominant actors within this process of construction. And the Southern European states are present in our data at least indirectly as a topic of media coverage and online discourse, and thus also reflected in citizens’ media appropriation.

Methodologically, we worked according to what we call a ‘transcultural perspective’ (Hepp 2009; Hepp/Couldry 2009). By this we understand an approach that does not take the ‘nation state’ and its ‘national culture’ as the unquestioned unit of comparison, structuring all the data from the very beginning in ‘national containers’ – something that has been widely criticised (cf. Beck 2000; Wimmer/Glick Schiller 2002). Instead, we analysed the data set in total, looking for transcultural patterns of similarity and difference across all the researched countries, including national differences where they are significant. At the level of newspaper coverage, our data in all six states is based on a quantitative content analysis of the media coverage during two artificial weeks of the years 1982, 1989, 1996, 2003, 2008, and 2013, including quality, tabloid, and regional newspapers. At the level of journalists, in the autumn of 2008 we conducted 216 interviews with EU and foreign news editors, chief editors, and foreign correspondents of 23 quality, tabloid, and regional papers. We also undertook participatory observations in two newsrooms per country and documented this in research diaries. This data was analysed according to the standards of grounded theory research (Glaser/Strauss 1967).

The same analytical approach was applied to our data gathered at the level of audiences: We carried out 182 in-depth interviews, qualitative network maps (interviewees’ drawings of their communicative networks), and media diaries (interviewees’ documentations of their media use over a period of one week). This fieldwork was undertaken from September to December 2011, a period when discourses surrounding the euro crisis initially peaked associated with a possible withdrawal of Greece from the Eurozone.

Finally, we completed a WebCrawler analysis of hyperlink networks for each of our research countries as well as on a transnational European level, and conducted an interaction analysis of 125 comment threads from 28 online comment forums, encompassing European as well as national forums. These comment forums were selected from blogs, mainstream news media, and the Facebook pages of political news media. The comments for the analysis were then sampled from these forums during a week of the so-called European Crisis Summit – the summit of the European Council – in June 2012.

All in all, these data offer a deep insight into what we have chosen to call the ‘communicative construction of Europe’. The European public sphere is first of all a communicative space in which the joint transnational construction of Europe takes place. Of course, there are also further issues related to the social construction of Europe, for example, institution-building as it takes place in Brussels or policies like the Erasmus programme which motivate and facilitate European mobility. These are means of social construction familiar from the advent of the nation state (cf. Anderson 1983). However, the joint communicative construction is as important as are these other means, because it is through communication that we build our understanding of what the ‘European society’ (Vobruba 2012) is or might be. As this European society is still emerging, and as its communicative construction is an ongoing process, all research faces the problem of determining what already can be identified as European, and what cannot. In the ensuing process, we must reconstruct this specific European character through careful empirical analysis (cf. Neverla/Schoon 2008: 20). Our analysis will show that the euro crisis cannot be seen as causing a collapse of this communicative construction. Nonetheless, it might be a ‘tipping point’ (Eder 2014: 221), or at least a point of increased ‘politicisation’ (Risse 2015b: 12). Maybe Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are right: The euro crisis has unleashed a clear desire for a ‘Europe from below’ (Beck 2014: 7), in which citizens’ uncertainty, anxiety, and indignation should become a prime point of reference for politics.

Some basic concepts

For our analysis we need to clarify some interrelated but nevertheless distinct concepts. First, there is the difference between Europe and the European Union (or EU). When we use the term ‘Europe’, it refers to Europe as a society that is still in emergence, and that has borders less clear than those of the EU. Here we are rather at the beginning than at the end of a long-term process of social construction (cf. Vobruba 2012). Europe as a society is more than institutionalised politics. It has very much to do with everyday social relations, with partly conflicting understandings of what Europe is (or might be), and with varying attitudes towards it. In a certain sense Europe as a society is the everyday dimension of this unfinished project. In contrast, we reserve the term ‘European Union’ or ‘EU’ for the evolving political institutions of a European society. In this sense, the term is more specific and focused, not covering all aspects of the (communicative) construction of Europe, but only those related to political institutions. As Peter Golding (2008: 25f.) points out, this terminological distinction ‘between the EU and Europe as objects of perception and aspiration’ is of great help for any empirical analysis.

For both Europe and the EU, the European public sphere is a fundamental communicative space. The next chapter discusses in detail our understanding of the public sphere. However, at this point we need to provide at least a rough outline. In our view, a public sphere is best understood as a ‘thickened space of political communication’ (Hepp et al. 2012: 25). As communicative spaces, public spheres are not exclusive phenomena in the sense that involvement in one precludes involvement in another. Rather, various public spheres ‘overlap and interconnect’ (Risse 2015b: 9) – and they are partly articulated through each other. The latter is especially the case for the European public sphere, which is a thickened communicative space articulated mainly through certain patterns of transnationalisation within local, regional, issue-related, and especially national public spheres (Koopmans/Statham 2010b; Wessler et al. 2008). Based on our previous distinction between Europe (the European society) and the EU (its political institutions) we can say that the European public sphere is the space in which a dual communicative construction takes place: On the one hand, it is the space in which the European society is communicatively constructed in its political dimension; on the other hand, it is the space in which the communicative construction of the legitimacy of EU politics takes place.

By means of such a definition of the public sphere we indicate that not every form of public communication – understood as generally accessible mediated communication – should be considered as constitutive for a public sphere. In parallel to recent reflections by others (cf. Lunt/Livingstone 2013), we argue that public communication becomes constitutive for a public sphere when it is related to common issues and related decision-making – in the case of the European public sphere, the common issues of an emerging European society. Hence, from the perspective of audience and user studies, the issue of to what extent everyday people have a ‘public connection’ (Couldry et al. 2007b: 5) to the European public sphere becomes an important question – how far they are involved in common European issues, and how controversial those issues might be. Only through an involvement with these issues do the various ‘media audiences’ in different European states become a European ‘citizen audience’ (Lingenberg 2010b: 45), and thus part of the European public sphere.

If we follow the present public discussion, one of the most-used words in relation to Europe is ‘crisis’. Again, some analytical precision is necessary here if we are to avoid misinterpretation. In general, discourse about crises seems to be a constitutive moment of Europe and the European public sphere (cf. Triandafyllidou et al. 2009). This is not a new phenomenon, but an ongoing European narrative. To recall other recent crises: At the beginning of the 1990s there was a crisis of European foreign and security policy during the so-called Balkan conflict. In general, the eastern enlargement of the EU was understood as a process of ongoing smaller crises. And there was a crisis when the constitution for a pan-European institution was rejected in 2005 through referenda in France and the Netherlands. When in the following sections we talk in general about crises as one moment of the communicative construction of Europe, we point to the various crisis events which were and are a reference point of communicative construction within the EU. In a narrower sense, we use the term ‘euro crisis’. By this, we understand the crisis we have witnessed since 2008 in the eurozone, an outcome of the financial crisis of 2007 caused by the breakdown of the US housing market and the consequent collapse of Lehmann Brothers. The euro crisis is not one single crisis but a multilevel phenomenon, including at least a banking crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, and a market crisis (Vobruba 2014b). That’s why the euro crisis has no single meaning; it is – as our analyses will show – a signifier for various financial and economy-related phenomena, and open to different interpretations. As a signifier, the euro crisis is an important point of reference for the present communicative construction of Europe, and of the EU within the European public sphere.

An overview

Based on these fundamental analytical considerations, we develop the argument of this book in eight chapters. Chapter 2 outlines what we call a communicative constructivist perspective on Europe and the EU. Such a perspective does not mean that we want to reduce Europe and the EU to a semiotic phenomenon. European integration is a complex, multilevel social, cultural, economic, and political process that has to be theorised as such. Instead, the idea of communicative constructivism argues that the everyday meaning of such processes of integration become...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Approaching the Communicative Construction of Europe: Cultures of Political Discourse, European Public Sphere and the Euro Crisis
• 3 Journalistic Practices: National and European Cultures of Political Discourse
• 4 Representing Europe in the Press: The Multi-segmented European Public Sphere
• 5 Citizens’ Online Engagement: The Euro Crisis in Online Forums
• 6 Appropriating Europe: Communication Repertoires, Citizens’ European Public Connections and the Euro Crisis
• 7 Challenging Europe: Understanding and Solving the Euro Crisis
• 8 Conclusion: The Contested Communicative Construction of Europe
• Appendix: On Methodology
• References
• Index