Popping the Bubble: Undemocratic, or Just Inarticulate?
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
-Haruki Murakami
Nearly every government, from tiny Tuvalu, all the way up to India, has a public sphere. That is, a community of some kind, “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state”, which is what a public sphere is according to Jürgen Habermas, who coined the term. Tuvalu (the state) has a public sphere, which is Tuvalu (the people); India has India, and so on. Yet the EU, self-appointed torch-bearer of democracy, arguably has no public sphere. Now, there are plenty of public spheres within Europe: for example, the Assemblée Nationale certainly finds out when the people it represents (the French) don’t agree with it. Yet very few European citizens seem to know much about the EU, let alone whether they agree with its actions.
The European Commission is probably the most studied and most important of the EU’s seven decision-making institutions. It functions as an executive branch, with 27 commissioners – one appointed by each state, but all sworn to act in the general interest of the Union. Its European perspective effectively condemns it to a lack of public sphere because too few Europeans share that perspective to create a real public sphere. Even if they did, there isn’t much media coverage of the EU, so the problem persists. As a result, the Commission (which, let us remember, is an executive body) comes across as technocratic and bureaucratic. But is the Commission as removed as it may at first appear?
Two interesting studies by Iskander De Bruyker and Jan Beyers examined the relationship between the European Commission and the press. The first found that, if it’s an issue talked about enough in the media, the Commission will generally listen more to public sentiment. This is in the context of lobbyists deliberately seeking public attention in a strategy known as “outside lobbying”. As they put it: “EU policymaking cannot be reduced to a purely technocratic endeavour; however, EU policymakers display some sensitivity to popular demands and lobbying strategies articulated in the media.”
The second study however, found that few legislative proposals (in the Commission) gather much media attention. Those proposals that do get attention are the ones with lots of highly visible lobbying, where ‘various conflicting interests get mobilised’ – which could quite likely mean the cases where “outside lobbying” is most used. Such cases tend to be very partisan and ideological and these are the ones to get public attention.
This shows that what little public sphere does exist is highly artificial, and press coverage reflects the concerns of lobbyists more than those of the people (though lobbyists only use outside lobbying when they know that they have some degree of support). There’s one big problem in that analysis though, namely: which press are we talking about? Both those studies were looking at the same set of media outlets: European Voice (now Politico), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Agence Europe, Le Monde, and the Financial Times. These outlets are very far from representative of what everyday Europeans actually read, but this is what seems to influence the EU most (back when these studies were conducted, at least).
The idea that Europeans and Eurocrats don’t read the same papers is supported by surveys of what’s read by various EU decision-makers, including MEPs. They reveal that of the news sources rated as “most influential”, only one is a national media outlet: the BBC (which needless to say is hardly what’s most read by most MEPs’ constituents). National media outlets as a whole are rated as being fairly influential, but still place last on the list of “other forms of influence”. The disconnect between the EU and Europe is shown another way by an unrelated study that found that domestic scrutiny could lead to MEPs voting with their national party instead of their EP block, which they generally wouldn’t do in the absence of such domestic scrutiny.
How can a public sphere exist when the leaders don’t read the press that forms and reflects public opinion and the very same press rarely bothers reporting on said leaders? This mutual “indifference” is unhealthy for EU politics. Whether through reading habits, or voting habits, the ‘Eurobubble’ is very much a real thing. This might lend a bit more independence to the EU, for better or worse; but it is at the expense of the democratic legitimacy enjoyed by national institutions. To pop that bubble, and create a more democratic EU, the popular press needs to have consistent coverage of EU affairs from a European perspective rather than from a domestic standpoint.
Why isn’t this already the case? At present there is a vicious circle whereby the public doesn’t know much about the EU: no-one explains it to them so they don’t understand it, therefore they don’t get involved and don’t exercise their democratic power, then they get annoyed with an ‘undemocratic’ EU when national politicians and media blame their problems on it, which they can get away with because nobody knows much about the EU.
But the EU would be a lot easier to understand if it made sense; leading to this a second (related) catch-22: people don’t really know or care about the EU so people don’t bother reporting on it and since nobody cares the EU doesn’t try to be understandable. This cycle keeps Europeans away from the EU, perpetuating many of its problems, including keeping the Brussels bubble strong.
So one could be tempted to say that obviously the problem is the lazy national media, – if they just covered Europe there would be no problem, right? Well, according to the Media Coverage of European Affairs report published by the European Commission, covering EU Affairs requires very experienced reporters with a good grasp of the topic at hand and a good network, and that without good salaries, they often turn to PR or consultancy. When faced with the European Commission’s press releases the reason for this becomes obvious: it is actually incomprehensible.
Commission press releases have been found to be only slightly more comprehensible than political science abstracts, and use even fewer familiar words: meaning that it is quite possible for an experienced political reporter who can read political science abstracts to still have trouble understanding Commission press releases, especially if they’re not used to EU jargon. Additionally some of them aren’t even translated, making it very difficult for people who don’t speak English well.
So let’s say that since there has been little coverage of a European-level initiative that you’re interested in, you decided to check social media to hear directly from the source: no luck. Another study found that Tweets by EU institutions and personal accounts were also pretty bad, stating that: “Message comprehensibility for the average citizen is hampered by a comparatively high syntactical complexity, unfamiliar vocabulary, and a rather nominal style that may obfuscate political agency in the textual content that supranational actors post on Twitter” (if you had trouble understanding that, try to imagine it but with fewer familiar words!). At least Twitter (now X) has a translation button though!
It seems like the press, the European Union, and yourself, are in quite a pickle here: there’s a limit to how much the EU can do to simplify what it says given the diplomatic compromises it rests on, and we can’t expect everyone to be able to understand their gibberish. So what can be done? Well maybe nothing needs to be done at all: the EC’s study found that there’s a positive trend in the number of Europeans who consider themselves well-informed about EU affairs, and found an increasing ‘Europeanisation’ of the news. The cycle could slowly be breaking simply because Europeans realise how relevant the EU is to their daily lives.
Nobody seems to be entirely sure why that is, but it could quite simply be because people are more aware of the EU now. That could be because of any number of things: the internet giving the EU direct access to citizens and vice versa, a more European-feeling generation growing up, changing geopolitical realities highlighting the EU’s role in safeguarding Europe, and Brexit, to list a few possible reasons. No doubt they all played a role in making people aware of the EU, but until citizens of the EU adopt a European perspective (at least partially), and the EU embraces the necessity of public relations, both sides will continue to be frustrated.
Obviously there is still a very long way to go, but with Europeans becoming more aware of the EU, the EU will inevitably become more aware of them, and the Eurobubble will pop.
