Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A new perspective on the state
- The modern territorial state: limits to internationalization of the state's resources
- The rule of law: internationalization and privatization
- The democratic nation state: erosion, or transformation, of legitimacy
- 6 Is there a legitimation crisis of the nation state?
- 7 National and transnational public spheres: the case of the EU
- The intervention state: the shifting welfare component
- Index
7 - National and transnational public spheres: the case of the EU
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A new perspective on the state
- The modern territorial state: limits to internationalization of the state's resources
- The rule of law: internationalization and privatization
- The democratic nation state: erosion, or transformation, of legitimacy
- 6 Is there a legitimation crisis of the nation state?
- 7 National and transnational public spheres: the case of the EU
- The intervention state: the shifting welfare component
- Index
Summary
While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. Public information and debate are essential ingredients of democracy, and their confinement to the individual national public sphere threatens the democratic aspirations and legitimacy of transnational institutions. Therefore, it is often argued that the European Union can only achieve greater legitimacy if there is a Europeanization of national public spheres. Has public discourse in fact Europeanized in the last decades? Here we present results from a study of major national newspapers from five European countries. Europeanization is defined in three dimensions: Europeanization of contents, Europeanization of public identities, and Europeanization of communication flows. Our results show that national public spheres are, in fact, quite resilient and that change is slow or halting. We discuss several possible explanations for this resilience, and go on to question the assumption that the legitimacy of European institutions depends on Europeanization of public discourse.
The European Union (EU) is the most prominent, albeit in many respects unique, case of the development of a transnational or multilevel political system. Within the institutional framework of the EU, considerable political powers and competencies have been pooled at the transnational level. This has long been done by stealth, as it were, based on a considerable degree of elite consensus and the acquiescence of national voters and publics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Transformations of the State? , pp. 139 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 17
- Cited by