“The project will go on for five years: the first year will be a kick off year, where we will work on homogenizing theoretical and methodological issues. Later we will go on with the data collection – and during the three coming years the activity will peak. Finally, the last year will be spent on gathering trains of thought,” Yngve Lithman explains.
Professor of sociology at the University of Bergen, Lithman is director of Eurosphere, and he doesn’t make a secret of the high ambitions and the challenges of the project. Representatives from the 17 partner institutions spent large parts of the kick off conference to word these challenges.
The overall objective of EUROSPHERE is first of all to develop innovative perspectives on the European Public Sphere and secondly to identify the factors which facilitate or hinder the articulation of a European Public Sphere.
Need new tools
“Note that we are talking about innovative perspectives – which imply something new. We will develop a new diversity approach to the public sphere,” Hakan Sicakkan, researcher at Unifob Global explained in his presentation of the project. He is the deputy director and scientific coordinator of Eurosphere.
Sicakkan also underlined the importance of developing new research tools to obtain these goals.
“If you look at today’s reality through old glasses, it is not easy to see what’s new,” he explained.
What is a common-european agenda?
During the project, the researchers will investigate the meaning of central social sectors in the European public sphere:
* Political parties
* Think tanks
* Social movements
* Mass media
The four partners responsible for these research areas shortly presented each of these categories and sketched some of the challenges they offered.
“If political parties are to play a role in the European public sphere, they have to be concerned about common European issues. But in order to do this, we first of all need to clarify what these issues are,” said Professor Andras Bozoki from the Central European University in Budapest. He was of the opinion that the study of political parties in relation to a European public sphere was difficult; since most parties are strongly attached to the nation state they are operating within.
“And international federations of parties are hardly ever more than aggregates of national divisions, who only contribute to strengthen these divisions,” he claims.
Indefinable think thanks
Another group which increasingly operates at an international level is think tanks and Professor Veronique Dimier from the Université Libre Bruxelles, also claimed that many of them exclusively worked towards the EU system.
“There are two essential problems with the study of think tanks: First of all, there is little done on this subject – mainly because a single and universal definition of the concept doesn’t exist. And secondly, think tanks are often made up of political scientists – and when political scientists study their own, problems tend to arise,” Dimier said.
Professor Ahmet Öncü from Sabanci University, Istanbul, had also experienced problems with definitions – but of a different type:
“When everyone is enlightened, life’s tough!”
In contrast to think tanks, “social movements” is an overloaded concept. We have many competing and partly contradictory definitions to choose between – and none of them are universally accepted. He used a Turkish word saying to illustrate the dilemma:
“Translated it means something like this: “when everyone is enlightened, life’s tough!”. In these types of settings, everyone will bring in their own definitions of what constitutes “social movements” and what qualities they posit,” he claimed.
Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen from the University of Cardiff had a different set of challenges, partly overlapping with Bozoki’s. This is because most media enterprises operate within nation-states – a fact which is proved by the medias coverage of international – even European events.
Problematic concepts
“At the same time most media actors are positive to the European idea and to European integration and not afraid to raise questions attached to this – they do so often to a greater extent than the general public,” she claimed.
Earlier on the day, several of the partners met in a roundtable discussion. Here, other challenges the researchers will meet in the coming years were drawn highlighted.
The topic of the debate is “diversity and visions of a European public sphere”. Already here we have three problematic concepts, “Diversity”, “European” and “Public sphere”, the moderator Giuseppe Sciortino said half-joking.
“I prefer “arena” instead of “sphere” when speaking about the public. “Sphere” is too harmonic; we should not withhold the fact that democratic discourses often imply conflict. This is also the way it should be,” said Veit Bader from the University of Amsterdam. Another aspect we must not ignore, he claimed, is the complexity of this question – and he warned against oversimplifications before an overview of this complexity is obtained.
“Listen to the sceptics”
“I understand the dream of establishing a vital, European public sphere where diversity can flourish, without the limitations of nation building projects,” said professor Rainer Bauböck from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. At the same time he claimed that sceptics insist that limitations of the nation building project are completely necessary to create this kind of public space.
“The question is whether this is possible at a European level,” Bauböck said, which sounded like the same sceptics’ aversion towards “Eurospeak” – the somewhat odd, elitistic technocrat-language EU bureaucrats and researchers had in common.
To the sceptics, a European public space is not only difficult to achieve, it is also dangerous. It could in fact create an illusion of a public sphere – which in reality is unavailable for most democratic governments and citizens in general. – I don’t say that I share this scepticism, but only that it is important to keep it in mind on the road that is ahead of us, Bauböck underlined.
“Of course, we can solve these problems. Fortunately we’ve got five years to do it,” Yngve Lithman finished off.
