Social Movements in the European Public Sphere

Reykjavík.
The second panel at ECPR 2011 is on civil society, identity and the public sphere in the EU, and begins with a paper by Helene Pristed Nielsen, whose focus is on European social movements. Her argument is that further inclusion of social movements in public sphere deliberation represents both a potential and a pitfall for the future of EU democracy.

Social movements are defined here as communities of interest: a distinctive form of contentious politics that make specific claims which if realised may clash with other communities’ views. The European public sphere is regarded as an open field of communicative exchanges, which may be in the process of emerging, though this, too is contentious.

An EU public sphere which would exclude specific civil society actors would cease to be a public sphere in any sense of the term, so social movement inclusion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of such a public sphere; some social movements may even seek to undermine democracy, of course, leading to the rise of an ‘uncivil society’. The Eurosphere research project has done some work towards examining this European public sphere, examining political parties, social movements, media, think tanks, and other groups across 16 participating countries.

Helene now focusses on the presence of democracy as a core value amongst organisations: in Denmark, for example, all groups except for the Danish Association accept the need for inclusivity and open dialogue in society. The research found the question of uncivil society to be an important one: anti-diversity groups themselves report significant support for their views (and this is observed by pro-diversity groups, too); at the same time, anti-racist groups also report that there is a common European communication space for social movement organisations (though they don’t speak about it in terms of an organised European public sphere).

It’s interesting in this context that social movements are expected to be all-inclusive to a much lesser extent than political parties, which are meant to represent society as a whole; social movements are permitted to pick much more partisan stances. This should not be seen as an argument in favour of excluding such movements from policy-making processes, however.