The Meaning of Crises in European Public Space(s)

Hamburg.
We’re now in the final plenary session at ECREA 2010, which starts with a keynote by Ruth Wodak. Her interest is in a multi-level, qualitative, and longitudinal analysis of the European public sphere (EPS), which necessitates a multidisciplinary approach. She begins by taking us back to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which started the process of European unification – at a virtually all-male, all-elderly meeting of (western) European heads of state.

Compare this, for example, with the original Website of the European Union, as a very different public space – constructed at some great effort, but highly bureaucratic, and ultimately shut down for being ineffective in engaging with citizens – or with the at once transnational and local public spheres which formed for example around the mass demonstrations across Europe at the start of the Iraq war.

So, there are many genres of public spaces and public spheres in Europe, which can be approached from perspectives including the Europeanisation of the national, the formation of structures of resonance across Europe, the transnationalisation of (national) public spheres, the Europe of multiple publics and multiple public spheres, or the Europe of multiple vertical and horizontal flows of communication.

Who are the actors in public spheres, then? They include the state (the level of control and the execution of administration), politics (an intermediary level between the state and the people, with competition for hegemony and control of the state), civil society (closer to the interest of the people, but still intermediary), uncivil society (a fake civil society that is not guided by the principles of common good and social solidarity), and the social level itself (citizens or ‘the people’).

Taking further the topic of inclusion and exclusion, it is also worth considering the vectors of the European public sphere: along concentric circles of the Schengen and Euro zones (Europe as ‘fortress’), the overall original EU, the first wave of new EU members in 2004, further new member states, and the non-EU countries in Europe.

There are multiple tensions and contradictions between these different public spaces and public spheres – elites vs. grassroots, EU vs other Europe, majorities vs. minorities, etc. These tensions are enacted in different ways – by negotiation and deliberation, by agonistic struggles, or by parallel societies which do not interact at all.

Social, political, and economic crises are the main points of reference for these different modes of negotiation or struggle, since crises are those points in history where otherwise taken-for-granted issues are thematised and problematised. The European public sphere(s) are therefore variously crisis-dependent, globalised or standardised, glocalised, virtual, multi-generic and multi-modal, fragmented and/or nationalistic, and inclusive or exclusive.

The Emediate research project has examined media discourses during key points of crisis in post-war European history. How does the notion of Europe change between 1953 and 2006; what do crises imply for the construction of European identities? What are the debates around these crises, and how was Europe thematised in these cases? This was approached through interdisciplinary research, examining crises as points of transformation and change (a transition from one state to another, at least in some aspects), and investigating the horizon of expectations during such moments.

The project worked mainly with press reports, and interviewed some of the journalists involved; it also examined the contexts of media production, and focussed especially also on transnational reporting. Crises included Hungary 1956, the Berlin Wall 1961, France and Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland 1981, Germany 1989, the Iraq war 2003, and the Mohammed cartoons 2006.

Researchers examined discourses (patterns and commonalities of knowledge and structures), texts (specific and unique realisations of discourses), and genres (used by communities of practice with specific functions). Texts create sense when their manifest and latent meanings are read in connection with knowledge of the world (context models, shared knowledge, collective memories, resonance).

In discussing the Iraq war, for example, it is possible to identify specific patterns of argumentation that draw on ‘commonsense’ topoi (e.g. of the inherent value and positive consequences of European unity, and the threat of dependence on the US for military defence). Indeed, the Iraq war was expected to be a tipping point for breaking national traditions and moving towards a unified Europe – but this didn’t happen, given the differences of opinion between various European leaders; in fact, there were multiple juxtapositions pitting individual EU countries against one another. In this context, there was no European public sphere in the media, no common deliberation of these crises, and rather a tendency of glocalisation – with multiple tensions and differences across spaces and genres.

Crisis events thus appear to have ceased to be elements or effects of longer historical processes, and seem to have become snapshots (expressed through iconic images); this takes place mainly according to the media-logic of newsworthiness, brevity, and other news values. There are now no correlations between crises and the reconceptualisation of Europe or its related concepts; what crisis means now is ambiguous – some crises are imposed and inflamed by the media, without significant take-up by the public, or alternatively there is a constant crisis in the media, and ‘crisis’ thus becomes a meaningless concept: an empty signifier.