Bringing Permeability Back In. Transnational Communication in the Debate on the Constitutional Treaty in Two Swedish Quality Newspapers

Abstract

Bringing Permeability Back In. Transnational Communication in the Debate on the Constitutional Treaty in Two Swedish Quality Newspapers. The academic discourse on the need for a shared political public sphere at the level of the European Union has in recent years produced the conventional wisdom that an emerging transnational community of communication is already observable in the mass media. However, the empirical indicators on which this notion rests tend to accommodate parallel national public spheres rather than a genuine transnational communicative space. Arguing that the mutual permeability of national public spheres is a key precondition for the emergence of spaces for transnational opinion formation, this article analyzes to which extent the debate on the Constitutional Treaty in two Swedish quality newspapers has been characterized by transnational communication. While showing certain embryonic elements, the debate analyzed still falls short of fulfilling the normative requirements for a European public sphere understood as a genuine communicative community.