The European Public Sphere:
the Reality and Imagination of an Institution of Appeal

Conference in the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas,
Leipzig, Germany,
from the 9^th to the 11^th of December 1999

Organizer:
Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas e.V. (GWZO),
Luppenstraße 1 b, D-04177 Leipzig, Germany

Dr. Martin Schulze Wessel, GWZO, schulzew@rz.uni-leipzig.de

Dr. Jörg Requate, Universität Bielefeld, Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaften und Philosphie, Bereich Neuere Geschichte, Universitätsstraße 1, D-33615 Bielefeld, jrequate@geschichte.uni-bielefeld.de

Coll for papers

The question of a European public sphere has arisen with increasing regularity in recent years in the debates over the process of European integration. In this respect historians, sociologists and political scientists have repeatedly emphasized the central importance of such a public sphere in the democratisation of Europe. At the same time most observers are in aggreement that the prospects for the creation or the expansion of a European public sphere can hardly be jugded optimisticly. Despite the well advanced political and economic integration of the E.U. the medium systems and the attention of news conveyers and receivers are still nationally orientated; even where European topics are on the agenda. The latest European election has once more offered impressive proof of this.

Something corresponding to the national public spheres of the member states of the E.U. obviously does not exist at the European level. Whether national public spheres can be regarded as a pattern for a future European public sphere and whether the already existing forms of the European public sphere can be measured against them is very doubtful. This does not mean that the question as to the existence and the character of European communication and public sphere structures is already obsolete. The creation of a European public sphere can be understood as a concentration of individual expert public spheres. In this respect the development of a European public sphere is closely correlated to the process of political and economic integration; it appears as an accompanying phenomenon to the growing together of the E.U.

The planned meeting, however has a different focal point. The European public sphere cannot only be understood as the product of elite communication, but also as an assumed authority which can be appealed to. In this sense the question to be asked concerns the meaning of European communication between the centre and the periphery and between powerful and relatively powerless groups. The creation of national public spheres in the 18th and 19th centuries was determined by the concentration on particular topics, which had their place in the newly created public spheres. The national public spheres produces their integrating achievements not least by exclusion. Topics which here were condemed to marginal importance could only, if they were to be successful, be deliberated on in other areas, whether local or regional. Also" the European public sphere" could be such an area. The precondition for the success of such an appeal to an assumed European public sphere was that particular groups in particular situations could activate an idea of European unity - however diffuse this may have been. Here the European public sphere remains a virtual reality, an institution of appeal, whose reality depends on the fact that it was called on.

Several examples should make clear, which questions can be associated with this conception of a European public sphere.

• The Enlightenment was based not least on the idea of the priciple of unity of a European wide "républic des lettres", founded on the conception of a field of communication in which an obligatory code - this for the enlightener was the language of reason - was spoken. However, it must be maintained that the project of the Enlightenment was bound up with very different (proto)national connotations. Here it is not a question of an exposure of European labeled "in reality", but national projects. What is decisive is much more which communicative circumstances and from which motives a European public sphere is addressed, whether it proves itself to be suitable for this and how it is influenced by the media of this public sphere.
• In a particular way the questions arised with respect to epochs in which contemporaries can hardly avoid the impression of the uniformity or uniform direction of the historical process in Europe, for example, in the European revolutions and upheavals of 1848, 1917-1918, 1968 and 1989. However different the national projects in the revolution of 1848 were, and however limited and inexact was the knowledge of the events in the countries of their European neighbours, the idea that the leaders of the national projects could appeal, in a European revolution, to a European public sphere influenced their language and thereby also their projects.
• But also within the above mentioned upheavals of the European Enlightenment and European revolutions, in which to some extent Europe had a common language, the European public sphere is to be understood as an institution of appeal. It is about all those social groups which are cut off from regional or national public spheres that address their projects to a European public sphere and thereby bring forth and keep alive the consciousness of its existence. This is the case with various groups for social emancipation, for example, of workers, of women or of Jews. In a particular way this is also valid for movements of national emancipation in the empires of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Perhaps here is the clearest expression of what is to be understood by the term institution of appeal. When, for example, Polish intellectuals tried to draw attention to their national project in pre1848 western Europe, their appeal to the European public sphere reflected the fact that either a national public sphere did not exist or it was not accessible to this particular group. This kind of appeal could only have been successful if it were formulated in a language which was appropriate for those Europeans to whom it was addressed. An empathic acknowledgement of their own Europeaness and an emphaticly atlested belief in the institution of appeal of the European public sphere could hardly have been ubsent here.

From the historical point of view we can in summary understand the European public sphere also as an imagined institution of relatively powerless groups, who had no national public spheres of their own. The creation of a European public sphere was a project which was connected with the individual projects of these movements of national emancipation. While an investigation of the concentration of structures of communication draws attention to states, which are regarded as European core states and which took part in the process of the integration of the E.U. from the very beginning, the suggested questions should complement this by concentrating on the movements of social emancipation and the national movements at the European peripherie.

Those interested are asked to send an abstract of a paper, which should be about 60 lines,
by the end of August at the latest.

Quelle = Email <H-Soz-u-Kult>

From: "Dr. Ewa Tomicka-Krumrey" <tomicka@rz.uni-leipzig.de>
Subject: CFP: Europaeische Oeffentlichkeit / Leipzig: 12/99
Date: 21.7.1999

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