European Public Sphere(s): Uniting and Dividing

The project Uniting and Dividing European Public Spheres is working parallel in five sub-projects, all deriving from the main research question and sharing the presumptions as presented in the research plan. The sub-projects will hold common seminars regularly. The themes of the sub-projects and their responsible researchers are introduced here.

1) The concept of the European Public Sphere from the comparative historical-sociological perspective (Dr. Hannu Nieminen).

Following Habermas’s theoretical framework, the European way of organising the relations between the individual and society has a long history. The classical European heritage includes the idea of the public sphere as the arena for equal participation and critical deliberation, open to all sovereign members of the society. Thus understood, the European understanding of the relations between the individual and the society seems to differ principally from several other ways of conceiving those relations, at least to the degree that we know e.g. Asian, African, native American and other cultures.

In this sub-project an attempt will be made to study and compare different ways to define the individual--society relations. How are the elements of public life defined and controlled which in the European thought are approached with the notion of the public sphere? How are such issues of inclusion and exclusion regulated in non-European cultures which in Europe are regulated through the mechanisms and procedures of the public sphere?

In this project, the cultural-institutional and sociological comparisons will be intertwined. Firstly, the different institutional arrangements will be elaborated through which the individual and the social interact with each other in different cultures. Secondly, the role of the intermediaries will be scrutinised. Intermediaries are those who mediate between individual and social levels, such as priests in pre-modern societies and public intellectuals in modern societies.

In this sub-project, two levels of analysis will be applied. On the basis of earlier research, a general theoretical-comparative framework will be constructed on both global and European levels. On empirical level, several case studies will be conducted, both in Europe (such as Finland, Britain, Germany, France, Spain) and in other part of the world (for example in India, Tanzania/Namibia, Brazil, USA).

As a result, we will have better understanding of the idea of the European Public Sphere and of its global context. The sub-project will greatly advance the critical applicability of the notion of public sphere, both in singular and in plural, both in European and in international research.

2) The national, regional and global challenges to the construction of the European Public Sphere (Dr. Anu Kantola, Dr. Inka Salovaara-Moring).

This sub-theme will be approached by Dr. Anu Kantola in her research project Public Sphere and Politics at the Age of Globalization, for which she has received a separate funding from the Academy of Finland (Research Doctorship for 2004-2006). She is interested in the development of political public sphere as national political public spheres face the challenges of internationalisation, i.e. globalisation as well as the Europeanisation of politics. The project aims thus to analyse the role of public sphere in contemporary politics and understand how internationalisation of politics if changing the practises and role of the national public sphere. The basic questions are: i) What is the role of public sphere in the contemporary politics? ii) What are the forces that aim to restrict or narrow down the role of public sphere in contemporary politics? iii) How could the role of public sphere be enhanced and developed?

The research question has risen as a result of a previous research on the Finnish political elites and the political governance of the economic crisis of the 1990s. The research gave a rather bleak picture on politics and democracy. The basic constituents of democracy, i.e. politics, public life, elections and citizens were viewed in a rather negative terms by the political elite.

Behind these observations seemed to be above all the structural changes linked to economic globalisation. It seems like the institutions and processes of democracy are currently under negotiation in all European countries. At the same time also the scope and role of public sphere in democracies is under negotiation. Thus it is important to do research on the evolving role and relevance of public sphere in contemporary democracies.

Dr. Inko Salovaara-Moring will work on her post-doctoral research project Geographies of Power, Politics and Memory: A Spatio-Cultural Approach to a European Public Sphere. Her point of departure is the enlargement of the EU, which brought together very diverse nation-states with major divergences between economic, political, and cultural development. Geopolitically this created a situation that affected the positioning (in terms of the search for one’s “place” in this new constellation) both in old and new member-states. Depending on whether it is seen from the cores or the peripheries Europe, cultural change in today’s reflexive negotiation of identities and borders of Europe has surely a different pace and logic. Cultural change may dissolve both institutions and modes of thinking as well as build on them. Particularly in new member-states, one may expect a high degree of tension between tendencies towards disintegrating and re-forming of power-blocks on the one hand and preserving and building on them on the other. In this context, cultural change may be seen as a ‘forgetting process’, which in a subtle way relates to the Habermasian ‘learning’ processes for a common public formation of opinions.

Furthermore, the “cores” and “peripheries” of Europe do not follow a conventional uni- or even bi-central pattern. Capital cities more often identify with EU whereas peripheral areas also in the biggest EU-states are found to identify themselves as culturally peripheral with respect to the Union. The dynamics of the ongoing process of defining oneself in this context raises highly interesting questions relating to different cultural geography and identity politics between ‘new’ and ‘old’ Europe. The aim of Dr. Salovaara-Moring’s project is to understand and compare democratic processes and dynamics of European public sphere in regard to spatiality and cultural change within different parts of the EU.

The overall aim of this sub-project is to draw conclusions of the role and relevance of the public sphere in the contemporary Finnish and European politics. The project tries also to find out how the public life could be enhanced in relation to political process. By tracking the problems of public processes the study tries to give also some recommendations on how the processes of public action could be enhanced and developed as a part of working democracy.

3) The role of the media in constructing the European Public Sphere (Dr. Tuomo Mörä, MSocSci Kari Karppinen, MA Hanna Raijas ).

This sub-theme will be approached by three researchers:

The topic of MSocSci Kari Karppinen’s doctoral thesis is The normative grounds of European media policy, in which he focuses on the ideological and normative roots of European media policies, especially concerning media pluralism, public service media, and related choices in structural regulation of the media. Normative theories of the public sphere and democracy are used as a framework for studying the conceptual foundations used to legitimize media policies.

By analyzing the conceptual structure, and therefore choices, implicit in European policy debates (both academic and political), he aims at clarifying the wider normative and theoretical context of current challenges in media policy. Recent media policy developments in the European Union are analyzed through documentary analysis, with a view to exposing key conflicts and their roots. Analysis of the current policy context enables an assessment of normative media theories, their continued relevance, and the necessary revisions. Finally, the study aims to develop elements for a theoretical approach useful in both interpreting policy challenges and offering a basis for alternative perspectives.

The second perspective to this sub-theme is by Hanna Raijas, whose doctoral thesis deals with the digital television and its developments in Europe, influencing European broadcasting policy and regulation. The time frame for her research is from the late 1990s until the expected analogue switch off around 2007--2010. To examine the process and changes different theoretical frameworks are adopted. The policy networks approach can explain day to day policy-making and the roles of different actors with diverse interests. In broadcasting policy cultural and economic factors are often likely to contradict one another. New institutionalism and its ‘institutions matter’ view helps to understand the constraints affecting regulation and to answer the question: who holds power to decide the future of broadcasting? The structural power theory offers some insight into the question, why economic actors seem to have a dominant position (or are clearly more powerful than cultural actors) in broadcasting policy-making. Governments and businesses need each other. The recent developments have created an area of convergence where sectors of media, telecommunications and information technology are overlapping. The Ph.D. thesis will look at regulation of broadcasting and audiovisual sector at the EU level, use some decisions already made as examples and assess to what extent these policies have been successful in achieving their aims and where the possible failures and weaknesses of the EU’s audiovisual policy are.

As a case study, comparing Britain and Finland brings into the picture the national level of audiovisual policy-making. The development of digital technology and its usage is at different stages in these two countries, Britain having introduced digital television in the late 1990s and Finland following a few years behind. Hence, some of the differences in the broadcasting sectors in Britain and Finland can be explained by institutional factors and different choices in the past. A crucial question in the digital era is the survival of public service broadcasters and the pluralism of the audiovisual media. This is at the core of the economics versus cultural factors debate. Although different in many ways, the two share a strong public service broadcasting tradition. This adds another level into the study, namely the contrast between similar and yet different countries.

The third perspective to the role of the media in the European Public Sphere is offered by Dr. Tuomo Mörä, whose topic is Journalists and the European Public Sphere. Studies of public sphere are typically normative macro level analyses of society in which present problems of citizen participation are compared with ideal situation (in the past). He takes a different angle and analyses the public sphere from grass-root level, bottom-up, approaching it by studying one key group of modern, mediated public sphere, journalists. His interest is to find out how journalists conceive the “public sphere” and journalism’s role in constructing it. In other words, what are journalists’ predispositions about democracy, citizenship, society and journalisms’ role as part of those. His special focus group will be journalists working in and reporting from the core of “Europe”, i.e. institutions and centres of European Union (Brussels, Strassburg; EC meetings, etc.)

This approach is relevant from three distinct angels. First of all, as members of society and prevailing culture journalists reflect the values and predispositions of their environment. Actually they have to do it in order to stay in business. Studying one group of people is here a method to approach a larger societal value system and ideas of how things should be.

Second, journalists are a key group in mediating, reproducing and reshaping the value system. They construct the picture of phenomena that citizens have no direct acces. The more distant the subject matter is, the more important role the journalists play. In spite of the new technological possibilities like the internet, journalism and journalists are still, and even ever more, the major players in this field.

And finally, beginning of the century faces two major changes: both the political and journalistic cultures are in transition. Political and economical decision making has been moving from national level to European and global level. On the other hand, the competition of public’s time and attention has set enormous pressures on journalism on both commercial and public service sectors.

4) The role of the internet and virtual communities in the development of the European Public Sphere (Professor Sinikka Sassi, MA Juha Sjöblom).

This sub-theme will be covered by two researchers. In the background of the research is the emergence of computer networks, the internet in particular, which have changed the concept and formation of communities. Although there is no physical presence or space in digital world, virtual communities act as if they were in an actual physical space. Virtual communities can be defined as symbolic communities because they are created by symbolic exchange and computer-mediated communication. In virtual environments like newsgroups community formation and construction of space is dependent on, and reproduced by, social interaction. Therefore it is important to understand the collective symbolic processes through which the virtual communities build their subcultures, hierarchies and systems of social control. The aim of the study is, first, to examine the social uses of new media environments and, second, to understand the role of the technologically mediated conversations as part of public debate.

In her project professor Sinikka Sassi will concentrate on the theme Locality and digital public sphere, in which she studies the theories of democracy and public sphere form the broader context of the above study. When new digital forms of democracy and especially those of citizen participation are concerned, not only the formal procedures but also the underlying structures of communities and the actual codes of communication are essential. In order to be able to develop situated and meaningful democratic practices it is necessary to know how people communicate and organize themselves in the virtual space. Without actual social ties and intercourse no viable local democracy can exist.

As a research material interviews and reports produced by local projects plus research reports done during two university courses are utilized. Existing forms of online democracy and communities will be compared in Finland and some other European countries (among them Sweden and Norway). In Finland a couple of social experiments such as Nettila and Nettimaunula are examined in order to find out the changes the digital medium can create. The preliminary findings of these experiments reveal that the new means of public conversation and participation are not exploited to the extent expected by the project designers. The dilemma is that in urban or semi-urban environment the forms of social life are dispersed and should be reinforced in order to form a necessary basis for political activities but at the same time exactly this seems remote from the current daily life.

Another perspective within this sub-theme will be MA Juha Sjöblom’s doctoral dissertation on Representation of Self and Space in Virtual Communities. Development of technological mediation has introduced some distinctive features to human communication which are still poorly understood. This study is especially interested in the ways members of virtual communities represent both themselves and virtual spaces, and in the ways these representations evidently vary between different European cultures and regions. The communities, which are often multicultural by nature, collectively create and maintain their norms, hierarchies and social order. Also individuals represent textually their bodies or virtual identities: gender, race, age and social status. The essential feature of the computer-mediated communication is that the cues of physical body, personality and social status are sparse, that is, online conversations lack the transparency of communication. This fact clearly forms a big challenge to internet literacy, that is, the capacity to make sense of the messages. Thus it is important to examine how people use symbolic acts as means of self-presentation, expression, formation of virtual identities and maintenance of interpersonal communication. Conversations in virtual communities can have an effect on public opinion and therefore the specific means of opinion formation and online persuasion are important issues. The aim of the study is to understand the characteristic conventions of the internet communication both crossing the cultural and linguistic barriers and differentiating between European cultures. Lively debate in virtual communities can act as a basis to public opinion and will formation.

5) European minorities and the prospects of constructing the European Public Sphere (Professor Tom Moring, Professor Charles Husband, MA Yonca Ermutlu, MPolSci Camilla Haavisto).

This sub-project is carried out by two senior researchers, Professors Tom Moring and Charles Husband, and two doctoral students, supported by an international network of experts. The project Public sphere and sphericules: ethnic and linguistic minorities in an integrating (?) Europe, explores the interface between the political economy of minority and majority media, as they emerge according to language and ethnicity divides. One point of departure will be based on normative instruments for policy formation in the field of media and minoritised groups (UN, UNESCO, OSCE, and Council of Europe etc). Another point of departure will be actual policies (EU policies, and policies in specific states). The research questions are designed to address different aspects of European public life from the point of view of the proliferation of spericules fragmenting the public sphere.

This comparative project seeks to interrelate four aspects relating to minoritised communities within a fragmented public sphere: 1) strategies for cohesion (how minorities communicate within themselves) 2) strategies for presence in the society at large (how do minorities get their voice heard), 3) societal practices of addressing minority communities, and 4) societal practices of acceptance of minority presence.

The particular states to be studied are Finland, the UK, Estonia and Turkey. The choice of states is based on the historical development of national and immigrant minorities and their rights within the states themselves as well as the position of the relevant state with respect to European integration. The selcteed states represent a broad diversity with respect to key variables in our analysis.

The theme of the doctoral research of MA Yonca Ermutlu Participation of ethnic minorities in public sphere. She aims to explore the participation of ethnic minorities in public sphere in Finland, Turkey and United Kingdom from the agency point of view. The main research questions are: how and where and in which language do the ethnic minority members get the information related to their lives; how do the ethnic minority members make themselves heard; how do the ethnic minority members interact with the main public sphere; how do they participate in discussions of common concern; and what are the principles of being a citizen in a multi-ethnic and democratic society? Theoretically, this study focuses on the principles of becoming a citizen in a multi-ethnic society especially concentrating on the principle of “right to express opinion” as a central theme, and thus exploring the possibilities towards a multi-ethnic public sphere.

The theme of the doctoral research of MA Camilla Haavisto is The construction of otherness in the public sphere. She analyses the appearance and the construction of otherness, mainly ethnic otherness, in the public sphere. This is done by studying presentations of otherness in popular media, which is mainly managed by majority representatives. The main question is how the construction process of different mediated group identities works. To answer this, one has to understand, develop and successfully combine theories of both mass communication and identity construction. But also, for a deep and true understanding, one has to consider practical issues, like the everyday routines of journalistic work. On the bases of a wide empirical material concerning different types of presentations of ethnic minority representatives, the thesis will enlighten the issue of the representation of non-majority representatives in one corner of the public sphere; the popular media.