Suchergebnisse

Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, this book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.

The current crisis of the project of European integration places pressure on and raises expectations concerning the interdisciplinary European Studies community. Looking back at the history of political ideas that informed the project of European integration, the article critically discusses how a new (or renewed) narrative for Europe can be constructed from below and not imposed from above. It seeks new integration dynamics in the ways in which popular discontent finds expression in contemporary Europe, in which citizens experience European integration as crisis and trauma, and in which citizens themselves envision the major challenges ahead. In collecting the voice of popular discontent, we find that citizens' dissatisfaction and frustration with European integration are related to deficits in the democratic process and efficiency of governance, increased inequalities at a global scale and challenges to truth and rationality. Visions of 'alternative Europe' do in this sense embrace the old Enlightenment promise and do not fundamentally reject it.

This article addresses the question whether the potential of mass media as a motor of social integration, order and unity can be transposed from the national to the transnational and European level of society. The issue is how the media (new and old) can re-establish the link between social order and democratic legitimacy that characterized the national public sphere. To approach this question of the relationship between the media, a new transnational (European) society and democracy the article delivers a general account of how media (old and new) interact with the project of European integration. Can we speak in any meaningful way of the mass media as a facilitator of European integration? Or are the mass media the major obstacle to the political efforts to further integrate Europe. The notion of an EU mediatized democracy is introduced to understand this interplay between EU institutions and various attentive publics in the contestation of EU legitimacy. ; El presente artículo trata la cuestión de si el potencial vertebrador de los medios de comunicación de masas como motor de la integración social, el orden y la unidad pueden ser trasladados del nivel nacional de la sociedad al trasnacional y europeo. Se trata de cómo los medios (nuevos y viejos) pueden re-establecer el nexo entre orden social y legitimidad democrática que caracteriza la esfera pública nacional. Para aproximarnos a la relación entre los medios, una nueva sociedad y una democracia trasnacional (europea) el artículo ofrece una panorámica general de cómo los medios (tradicionales y nuevos) interfieren en el proyecto de integración europea. ¿Podemos hablar con sentido de los medios como facilitadores de la integración europea?¿O son los medios un gran obstáculo para los esfuerzos políticos de integrar Europa? La noción de una democracia europea mediatizada se introduce para entender las interacciones entre las instituciones de la Unión Europea y los diversos públicos que contestan la legitimidad de la UE.

Institutional designs of governance in the European Union frequently underlie a dichotomy between participation as the realm of civil society and representation as the realm of national governments and parliaments. The aim of this paper is to consider organised civil society not as distinct from but as part of the multi-level representative field that is emerging in the EU. This is done by distinguishing two distinct mechanisms of political representation in aggregating individual preferences or in integrating the political community of the EU. In order to spell out this latter integrative function of political representation as a creative practice, the notion of representative claims-making will be introduced. The practice of representative claims-making can then be analysed, first of all, as a way of distributing the social capital of the actors and institutions that populate the European field of civil society activism. Secondly, the practice of representative claims-making can be analysed as a way of building new forms of cultural and symbolic capital of civil society that are needed to occupy the new transnational positions that are made available by European integration.