A European Public Sphere and the Issue of Permeability. 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 such an emerging transnational community of communication is already observable in the mass media. However, the empirical indicators on which this notion is based tend to accommodate parallel national public spheres rather than a genuine transnational communicative space. Arguing that permeability of national public spheres to contributions by non-national speakers is a key precondition for the emergence of spaces for transnational processes of opinion formation, this paper analyzes to which extent the debate on the Constitutional Treaty in two Swedish quality newspapers allows us to identify an emerging European community of communication. While showing certain embryonic transnational elements, the debate analyzed is still far from fulfilling the normative requirements for a European public sphere understood as a genuine communicative community.