Transnationalization of the Public Sphere and the Fate of the Public 9781612890364, 9781612890371, 2011034764

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Transnationalization of the Public Sphere and the Fate of the Public

About Euricom The European Institute for Communication and Culture (Euricom) is a non-profit organization devoted to research and publication in the general areas of mass communication, media studies, and cultural studies. In keeping with its unique position bridging the two parts of the formerly divided Europe, Euricom is concerned with the relationship of the mass media and democracy. For more than a decade Euricom has organized annual scholarly colloquia dedicated to this theme. Contributions to the colloquia have been published in theme issues of the journal Javnost-The Public and in scholarly monographs. Euricom publishes the quarterly interdisciplinary journal Javnost-The Public. Based in the social Sciences, Javnost-The Public addresses problems of the public sphere on an international level and stimulates development of theory and research in the field. For further information on Euricom and Javnost-The Public, see: http://www.euricom.si/.

About Euricom Monographs Euricom Monographs is an initiative of Euricom and considers book-length manuscripts on aspects of democratic theory grounded in empirical investigations of recent communicative innovations. Although the primary objective of Euricom Monographs is to contribute to intellectual understanding of transformations in the democratic process, some titles are oriented towards improving political practice, policy and action. Topics of interest to Euricom Monographs include: • • • • • •

Internet-based discussions and political discourse Politics and political action online Tele-democracy initiatives and e-voting Implications of the digital divide for public discourse Online media as arenas for public information and debate Community networks and community development.

Previously published titles in the series include Ethnic Minorities, Electronic Media and the Public Sphere: A Comparative Approach Donald Browne Community Radio in Ireland: Participation and Multiflows of Communication Rosemary Day Making our Media: Global Initiatives Toward a Global Public Sphere Volume 1: Creating New Communication Spaces Clemencia Rodriguez, Dorothy Kidd, and Laura Stein (eds.) Volume 2: National and Global Movements for Democratic Communication Laura Stein, Dororthy Kidd, and Clemencia Rodriguez (eds.) Forthcoming titles in the series Euricom Monographs include: Voice and Equality: The State of Electronic Democracy in Britain Wainer Lusoli For further details, see: http://oase.uci.kun.nl/~jankow/Euricom_Monographs/index.htm. Queries about Euricom Monographs may be addressed to: Nicholas W. Jankowski, editor Euricom Monographs, Department of Communication, Raboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected].

Transnationalization of the Public Sphere and the Fate of the Public

Slavko Splichal University of Ljubljana

HAMPTON PRESS, INC. NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Copyright © 2012 by Hampton Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Splichal, Slavko Transnationalization of the public sphere and the fate of the public / Slavko Splichal. -- 1st ed. p. cm. -- (Euricom monographs) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-1-61289-036-4 (hardbound) -- ISBN 978-1-61289-037-1 (paperbound) 1. Publicity. 2. Social media. 3. Civil society. 4. Transnationalism. 5. International organization. I. Title. HM1226.S66 2011 303.4--dc23 2011034764

Hampton Press, Inc. 307 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10001

Contents

Preface

vii

I THE EMERGENCE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SOCIAL THEORY 1

The Universe of Publicness The Rise and Decline of Publicness Conceptual Burgeoning … … And Revisionist Attempts Notes

3 6 11 14 20

2

Visibility, Publicity, and Privacy Publicity Versus Privacy Public and Private Censorship The Publicness of Silence “New Publicity”—The End of Publicness? Notes

23 24 33 39 41 45

3

Reflexive Publicness: Rationality and Surveillance Rationality and Surveillance in the Classical Public Opinion Tradition Public Discourse: Cooperation Versus Antagonism Note

47 48

Civil Society, the Public, and the Public Sphere Normativity and Social Criticism in Conceptualizing the Public (Sphere) Civil Society and the Public Sphere Mass Media, the Public, and the Public Sphere The Rise of the Internet and Its Consequences for the Public Sphere

65 68

4

55 64

76 90 106 v

vi

Contents University—A Blind Spot in Theories of the Public (Sphere) Did Public Opinion Polling Kill the Public? Notes

117 127 138

II TOWARD A COSMOPOLITAN PUBLIC SPHERE 5

6

Global Governance and Transnationalization of Public Spheres Challenges of Transnationalization and Transformations of the Public Sphere The Public and Public Sphere in the Age of Global Governance Notes

169 189

Europeanization: Redeeming Publicness in the Era of Globalization Decentralization Versus Hybridization of the Public Sphere Strength and Inclusiveness of the Public Sphere A European Public Sphere—Can We See It? Rebirth of the Public? Notes

193 196 205 211 222 226

References Author Index Subject Index

145 145

231 245 249

Preface

The original plan for this book was drawn up in the spring semester of 2006, when I was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, under the auspices of the Scholars Program in Culture directed by Barbie Zelizer. For a variety of reasons, I had to postpone this project until 2008 when I committed fully to it, owing much to the generous invitation by Jostein Gripsrud of the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at University of Bergen to participate in the symposium on Television and the Digital Public Sphere in Paris organized in collaboration with Institut Français de Presse at the Université de Pantheon-Assas (Paris II). The ultimate incentive to finish the manuscript arrived from the University of Bergen again, this time in the form of Hakan G. Sicakkan’s invitation to give a keynote speech at the international EUROSPHERE conference on “The Publics of Europe & the European Public Sphere” in Brussels in November 2010. This book is built on my articles already published or in press, but it is more than just a collection; so much more that I may dare to say that this volume amounts to an entirely new entity. It does not consist only of parts of essays already published (and listed below) because large sections of the chapters in both parts of the book are entirely new. The previously published articles are not simply included in the present volume as they were published but are substantially revised, rewritten, and integrated to fit in with my original plan of the book—to discuss the issues at the center of the contemporary debates on the consequences of the globalization of governance and the (new) media for civil society and the public sphere. I wanted to integrate the normative-theoretical discussion of the key concepts—publicness, the public, and the public sphere—in a historicalpolitical perspective with a critical analysis of the current processes in the realm of publicness. There is a range of questions appertaining to the historicity of these general theoretical concepts. Conceptualizations of publicity, publicness, the public, public opinion, and the public sphere reflect both their specific historvii

viii

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ical roots and specific social (political, economic, cultural) realities in which they were constantly being reconsidered and reconceptualized; theory should accommodate both. I am particularly interested in the changes of the conceptual delineation of, and relationship between, the two key concepts, the public and the public sphere, and their interdependence with wider theoretical and practicalpolitical implications of the “revolutionary” social phenomena, which emerged from the beginning of the 20th century, such as public opinion polling, to the late 20th-century development of globalization and governance and reinvention of civil society. Specifically, I also address the question of whether the internationalization of public debates lead to, or it has already brought about a political public sphere that transcends nation states. “The public sphere” became a popular catchword in the social sciences in the last three decades. A plethora of articles and books appeared using the concept in a more or less “innovative” way—often without a firm theoretical and historical grounding, as is usually the case with trendy catchwords. The sudden ubiquity of the concept in a variety of disciplines indicated a strong need to fill an empty conceptual space, sometimes without sufficient historical and theoretical reflexivity. As a citizen of Slovenia with a nation of no more than 2 million population, which managed to develop and protect its own Slovene language during the last 500 years despite the fact that it never enjoyed political autonomy until recently when it even succeeded to establish—paradoxically, in the era of globalization— its own nation state, I always had scruples about the scientific misrepresentation or neglect of streams of thought, which—for a variety of reasons—did not fit in with the dominant paradigm or did not have enough power to shift it. Of course, it is not just a new idea or concept or a new invention in general that suffices to shift a paradigm; it has to be “invented” at the right time in the right place, in an appropriate social (and linguistic) frame. The idea of public/ness is rarely attributed to the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who should be given even some credit for later works of Robert E. Park and other members of the Chicago circle (notably John Dewey), and Ferdinand Tönnies in Germany, who either further developed Tarde’s ideas or were stimulated by them to develop their own streams of thought. These authors are the founders of the theoretical concept of “the public,” which is often—but unjustifiably—forgotten in the contemporary debates on the public sphere mainly because their works remain “hidden” to those who do not master French and German (to read, e.g., Tarde and Tönnies, which I had a privilege to study) but also for more “theoretical” reasons (which may help to explain the reluctance to bring Dewey back into the public sphere debates). One of the main issues I am focused on is why the concept of “the public sphere” became ubiquitously so important while the formerly fundamental concept of “the public” is almost rooted out. This is an important issue because it is my fundamental postulation that “there can be no public sphere without a public,” as suggested even by Habermas (1997: 364) in the English translation of his

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ix

Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms). It is my firm scientific credo that (unconscious) attempts at erasing “the public” from the map of publicness inevitably lead to blunting the intellectual power of critical theory; thus, much of my work presented in this book is aimed at “rehabilitating” the notion of “the public” in critical theory, as well as its French and German (alongside with British-American) godfathers. From Bentham to Dewey, “the public” was considered essential for political democracy. In Bentham’s (1830/1983: 36) view, the public or, as he named it, the Public Opinion Tribunal consisted of all “auditories” at public meetings and assemblies dealing with political questions, including “any dramatic entertainment, at which objects of a political or moral nature are brought upon the stage” and “all persons taking, for the subject of their speeches, writings, or reflections, any act or discourse of any public functionary, or body of public functionaries belonging to this state” As Tarde (1901: 20) emphasized, despite differences and multiplicity of coexisting publics intertwined in a society, they appear to form together a single public by their partial agreement on some important issues—a political public that “absorbs, like a river, its tributaries, all other publics, literary, philosophical, scientific.” My own concerns with the “universe of publicness,” as I define it, follow this stream of thought by relating it to the res publica and conceiving it as consisting of normative principles and discursively formed occurrences of publicness crystallized through democratic political (and communication) culture and related to political actors and actions. Universe of publicness comprises a set of normative concepts and institutional forms, which should foster an engaged citizenry and self-governance. The volume starts with conceptual clarifications; it deals with (normativepolitical) concepts as tools to conceptualize social reality and illuminate it and theoretical and practical reasons for the conceptual changes in “the universe of publicness” (chapter 1). With relatively recent phenomena of globalization and the Internet, the old-time complexity of publicness and the entire “universe of publicness” increased beyond conventional borders of the nation states and traditional media. The issue of visibility and publicness, which is discussed in the chapter 2 on “Visibility, Publicity, and Privacy,” is not as simple as it perhaps used to be centuries ago when publicness seemed to be a universal remedy against any misuse of power, as Bentham (justly perhaps in his own time) believed in his aspirations for publication of parliamentary debates. A similar development also affected another historical cornerstone of publicness, Kant’s “public use of reason.” The contemporary complexity of the relationship between discursive visibility and publicness, rationality and surveillance (chapter 3), far exceeds Kant’s idea that was modeled on scholarly discourse “extended” to the society at large—perhaps similarly to the contemporary idea of “public sociology” or “public social sciences” in general. In addition to university, several more recent technologically driven public phenomena, such as mass media, polling, and the Internet, are discussed in chapter 4 as examples of the escalating complexity of the relationships among civil society, the public, and the public

x

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sphere. We have to be particularly aware of these changes and challenges for critical theory they carry when approaching the “transnationalization” of the contemporary manifestations of publicness, which often come closer to multinational than transnational phenomena. Although internationalization leads to multinational relationships between nation states and their “representatives,” such as governments, transnationalization refers to denationalized, global relationships between governmental and nongovernmental, individual and collective (local, regional, national, multinational, transnational) actors whose decisive feature is that of not belonging to a specific nation state (e.g., in terms of advancing “national interests”). These challenges are discussed in more detail in chapters 5 and 6 with specific reference to the processes of “Europeanization,” which may denote both trasnationalization as well as multinationalization (internationalization) of public phenomena. I have tried to bring to attention those emblematic—largely global—processes of the present that seriously influence public phenomena and the nature of publicness itself. In the forefront of my interest are the possibilities of the development of transnational publics and public spheres under global governance and some issues and illusions of empirical research in the field. In an attempt to identify key dimensions of the idea of transnationalization of the public sphere in order to reveal its complexity, and conceptual difficulties and contradictions involved, my main interest is in conceptual modifications, innovations, and aberrations, or, more generally, attempts at deconstructing and reconstructing the concepts of publicness and the public sphere in the transnational social and political contexts. In practical-empirical terms, transnationalization of the public sphere is exemplified with the processes in Europe or, more specifically, the European Union (EU) as it has emerged after its widening to the CentralEastern European (formerly communist) countries in the beginning of the 21st century. This is not to suggest, however, that “Europeanization”—a concept widely used among European and U.S. scholars—is either a valid theoretical concept sui generis or a valid operational proxy for transnationalization. Many people deserve credit for their generous support throughout the process of planning and completing this volume. I wish to thank many colleagues from whom I have benefited in so many ways over the years on different, more or less formal occasions. I am particularly grateful to Peter Dahlgren, Jostein Gripsrud, Hanno Hardt, Bob Ivie, Nick Jankowski, Greg Lowe, and Barbie Zelizer for their comments and many great opportunities of individual and collective “reasoned debates,” which also inspired my thoughts on university as a neglected element in theorizations of the public sphere. This book would probably never appear without the research grant I received from the Research Agency of the Republic of Slovenia. My gratitude also goes to the publishers, editors, and anonymous reviewers of my previously English-language published essays on the issues discussed in the present volume:

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Splichal, S. (2006). In search of a strong European public sphere: Some critical observations on conceptualizations of publicness and the (European) public sphere. Media, Culture & Society, 28(5), 695–714. Splichal, S. (2006). Manufacturing the (in)visible: Power to communicate, power to silence. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3(2), 95–115. Splichal, S. (2006). Public media in service of civil society and democracy. In Christian S. Nissen (Ed.), Making a difference: Public service broadcasting in the European media landscape (pp. 17–34). Eastleigh: John Libbey. Splichal, S. (2007). Does history matter? Grasping the idea of public service media at its roots. In Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Jo Bardoel (Eds.), From public service broadcasting to public service media (pp. 237–256). Göteborg: Nordicom. Splichal, S. (2009). “New” media, “old” theories: Does the (national) public melt into the air of global governance? European Journal of Communication, 24(4), 391–405. Splichal, S. (2010). Eclipse of the public: From the public to (transnational) public sphere: Conceptual shifts in the twentieth century. In Jostein Gripsrued and Hallvard Moe (Eds.), The digital public sphere: Challenges for media policy (pp. 23–38). Göteborg: Nordicom. Splichal, S. (2010). From Bryce’s “government by public opinion” to global governance—without public opinion. In Tobias Eberwein and Daniel Müller (Eds.), Journalismus und Öffentlichkeit: eine Profession und ihr gesellschaftlicher Auftrag: Festschrift für Horst Pöttker (pp. 57–71). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Splichal, S. (2010). Democracy, publicness, and global governance. In George Cheney, Steve May, and Debashish Munshi (Eds.), Handbook of communication ethics (ICA Handbook Series) (pp. 387–400). Abingdon: Routledge. Splichal, S. (in press). University in the age of a transnational public sphere. In Barbie Zelizer (Ed.), Making the university matter. New York: Routledge.

I

THE EMERGENCE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN SOCIAL THEORY

1

1

The Universe of Publicness

In retrospective, it seems somehow logical that concerns for visibility and publicity—or rather publicness—came to the forefront of scholarly interests in the period of Enlightenment. The light of knowledge and education hauled people out of the dark world of human ignorance, but the light of eye-opening was no less needed: thrown on the secret world of absolute ruling made its latent corrupt nature visible. However, a whole century had to pass by before the late 19th-century Bentham’s and Kant’s ideas of publicness acquired a complete domicile in social sciences. The Enlightenment brought about radical changes in European societies whose social and political histories after ancient Greece were not particularly remarkable compared with the histories of some other cultures and regions of the world. What is known as a dark age between the 7th and 11th centuries in Western history was the Golden Age elsewhere. For example, the Umayyad and Abbasid regimes between the mid-600s and mid-800s mark the most prosperous and productive periods in the entire Islamic history of the Middle East, with codification of the Arabic language, architectural monuments, and development of sciences (mathematics, physics, astronomy, and medicine), philosophy, and literature. The Sung period (960–1279) in China was characterized not only by its fast technological advancement (e.g., the development of gunpowder and shipbuilding) over other civilizations but also in philosophy and arts. With the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe and its spread to North America, the primacy of cultural, scientific, economic, and political progress1 has returned to Western civilization. An important product of the intellectual movement of Enlightenment was “a second stage in the history of democracy”—the institutionalization of representative democracy (Keane, 2009: 161). With representa3

4

Chapter 1

tive democracy, publicness was raised to a fundamental ethical and legal principle and turned into a political phenomenon par excellence. The generic concept of publicness historically refers to the constitution of a specific mental “site” for communicative/discursive engagement and contest, a special—democratic— relationship among citizens within this site, and a specific form of communication through which such a relationship can be established. The concept of publicness refers to all formations and processes of being/making public—the universe of publicness—and thus comprises a whole host of different, often contradictory meanings. Just a hasty look at history is needed to realize that the concepts of publicness, publicity, the public, public sphere, and public opinion belong to the realm of most controversial, ambiguous, opaque, and disputed concepts that the social sciences have developed in the last two centuries. It would be difficult to argue that it was merely by chance that these concepts have been persistently used since the 18th century despite the social, historical, and disciplinary variability and inconsistency of their definitions and (popular) meanings. Even more so, because they were not used only as tools to conceptualize and explain important social phenomena and their changes but also as ideological tools and means, for example, to legitimize political decisions as “responsive to public opinion” or “critical for the (national) public.” Attempts to draw a theoretical conclusion based on empirical observations of communication “facts” mostly depend on a theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere. Differences in conceptualization of the public sphere refer to its ontological status (i.e., how—if at all—does the public sphere exist; what are its social-institutional fundamentals and functions), its epistemological status (the validity of assumptions on which functions of the public sphere are defined or imposed by observers/researchers), and methodological implications (the key questions here being how the public sphere is conceivable as an object of empirical research, and, if so, in what way the concept should be operationalized). Specifically, the differences may be outlined by demonstrating how the concept of the public sphere is related to other “public phenomena” (such as the public and public opinion) and linked to notions of democracy (the underlying political system) and the media. The intellectual diversity in conceptualizations of the public sphere is related to specific social-theoretical traditions that grasp the essence of the phenomenon. Explanations of conceptual differences include but are not limited to the division between normative theories and sociological analysis of what is defined as the principal phenomenon under study. The general idea of “the public sphere” is usually attributed to Habermas and his early work on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1995), where he elaborated the idea of the (liberal) bourgeois public (sphere). Although the close relationship between the development of the public and the rise of the bourgeois class that succeeded to enthrone itself as “civil society” was thoroughly discussed earlier, notably by Tönnies (1922), Habermas is rightly deemed the founder of the theory of the lib-

The Universe of Publicness

5

eral (bourgeois) public sphere. Not only has the late English translation (1989) of his book originally published in 1962 brought the concept of the public sphere into the forefront of (critical) social theory worldwide; it is also “responsible” for alternative conceptualizations of the public sphere, which arouse from the critiques of Habermas’ “praise” of the early bourgeois form of the public sphere.2 Habermas actively participated in the discussions that followed, together with other prominent scholars such as Bohman (1996, 1999), Rawls (1987, 1997), Hauser (1999), Dryzek (2000), and others, contributing substantially to the conceptualization of “the dialogical public sphere.” A clear departure from the dialogical public sphere advocated by the Habermasian stream of thought is represented by conceptualizations of the “proletarian public sphere” (Negt & Kluge, 1972), “the counter-public sphere” (Fraser, 1992; Warner, 2002), and “agonistic public sphere” (Mouffe, 1999). While these two broad streams focused on the issues of (non)universality of the discursive publicness, the third stream was particularly concerned with “the mediated public sphere” brought about by the “new publicity” that television created (Zolo, 1992; Thompson, 1993; Mayhew, 1997). This partly technology-driven line of thought has been lately enhanced with the idea of an “online public sphere” that (supposedly) the Internet has generated. Marx Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht (2002) categorized models of the public sphere in terms of four traditions of democratic theory, which resulted in (a) Representative Liberal model, (b) Participatory Liberal model, (c) Discursive model, and (d) Constructionist model. The four models differ in the answers they provide to the following questions: (a) Who participates (b) in what sort of process, (c) how ideas should be presented, and (d) what should be the outcome of relation between discourse and decision making. The critiques of Habermas’ theorization of the public sphere that propose alternative conceptualizations at least partly overlap with the classification of the public sphere concepts based on a broader frame of democratic theories. Most clearly, there is an overlap between the idea of “the counterpublic sphere” and the “constructionist model” and between the “dialogical public sphere” and the “discursive model.” It is this latter cross-section of paradigms by which my own view of the conceptual territory is deeply informed, as is obvious in the subsequent chapters. The interest in the phenomena of publicness that I simply call “the universe of publicness” (e.g., the public, public sphere, public opinion, public service, etc.) is largely rooted in democratic (political) theory, but other important areas and lines of thought highlight the processes constitutive of the public sphere and its “relatives.” In addition to democratic theories, several approaches could be listed, which have been developed in communication and media studies, such as the political communication tradition (closely related to democratic political theories), the political economy (of the media), and cultural studies, and I could also add others, such as feminist theories. In the first place, however, I should refer to the founders of the modern concept of publicness, Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, who have “encumbered” the intellectual history of publicness

6

Chapter 1

since its very beginning with antithetical conceptualizations of “the principle of publicness.” The present-day popularity of the ideas of publicness, particularly those associated with the concepts of publicity and public spheres, shows that they are no less relevant in the contemporary period of globalization than they were in the earlier periods of conceptualizations of the public (e.g., by Tarde, Park, Tönnies, Dewey, Habermas) and the public sphere (Habermas). In particular, Kant’s age-old prophetic conceptualization of the third—global—dimension of the (principle of) publicness as the condition for “perpetual peace among states,” which could only materialize in the form of universal or global “federation, which should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace” (Kant, 1795/1983) has been only lately proven as even more relevant for a normative-critical conceptualization of publicness than the first two—its personal enlightenment and judicial-moral dimensions.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF PUBLICNESS The principle of publicness was conceived of as a critical impulse against injustice based on the secrecy of state actions and as an enlightening momentum, substantiating the “region of human liberty” and making private citizens equal in the public use of reason. In contrast to earlier and vague conceptualizations of “public opinion,” the concept of critique was central to the idea of publicness at that period as it was to the ideas of Enlightenment in general. Bentham (1791/1994) favored a free press as an instrument for public control of government in the interest of the general happiness—in contrast to what the dominant function of the press has been at that time. Kant (1784) advocated free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of autonomous rationality of human beings—in contrast to the existing censorship in the public domain of the time. In contrast to the “public,” “private,” for Kant, did not refer to the domestic sphere but rather to situations in which individuals “have to obey” as loyal subjects (i.e., are subject to the authority of an institution [e.g., the state or church], which they are not allowed to challenge). To use one’s own reason in public is therefore a relief from the duty to obey orders in job-related “privacy,” as Kant understood it. Early normative theories considered publicness one of the fundamental principles of democratic governance and emphasized the principal role of the public as the fourth power or watchdog maintaining surveillance over the government. In early debates, the idea of publicness pointed toward freedom of the press as a natural extension of personal freedom of thought and expression. However, soon after the press had been liberated from administrative censorship, it became an instrument of power based on the private property right. Moreover, privatization of the press largely removed the ground for a public discussion

The Universe of Publicness

7

about what had been appropriated in that process. With the discrimination in favor of the power/control function of the press embodied in the corporate “freedom of the press,” the struggle for press freedom digressed from the Kantian quest for the public use of reason and his idea of publicness as a personal right fundamental to democratic citizenship. Namely, if the people rather than different estates—as in the early days after the birth of first democratic institutions— legitimize all branches of power, the control dimension of publicness embodied in the corporate freedom of the press should be effectively supplemented by actions toward equalizing citizens in the public use of reason. Such actions would lead to a personal right to communicate rather than to a corporate right to press freedom. Yet a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press generally failed to achieve both Benthamian and Kantian normative goals. The 17th-century liberal-rationalist ideas on freedom of expression and publication have generated two different intellectual currents of conceptualizing “publicness” in the centuries to follow. The first conceptualization, which was originally formulated by Immanuel Kant, derives from the transformation of the natural personal right of free expression into a civil right to communicate, as a realization of the generic human freedom, embedded in the press as the common means of individuals to communicate their spiritual existence and participate in a collective (and particularly political) life. Jeremy Bentham is the founder of the second conceptualization that rests on functions performed by the public and its immediate instrument, the press, to ensure the surveillance of the “public opinion tribunal” over those in (political) power. The former stream is focused on the generic human ability and need, and thus the natural right of human beings, to communicate; it included political philosophers as different as Rousseau, Kant, Marx, and J. S. Mill, among others. Much before the public and the public sphere became commonly used terms, Kant defined their core principle—publicness—as a “transcendental concept of public justice” based on citizens’ fundamental dignity and moral sovereignty. He conceived of publicness as a moral principle and legal norm, as an “instrument” to achieve both individuals’ independent reasoning and legal order in the social realm, arguing that “all actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public” (Kant, 1795/1983: 135). Kant conceptualized the idea of publicness as fundamental for both individual citizen rights and legitimate government. If a goal can only be achieved with the help of publicity, it means that there is no distrust in the underlying political maxims that are congruent with the goals and rights of all. Kant also considered publicness fundamental for individual liberation from human immaturity, which could only be achieved if individuals think with their own mind and in public, together with their fellow citizens (Kant, 1784: 1). Only a free public use of one’s reason can stimulate personal enlightenment otherwise hindered by the limitations of the private uses of reason. Any regulation of relationships in a (political) community would contradict the public interest and citizens’ freedom, if citizens are kept alienated and isolated from public communica-

8

Chapter 1

tions that would enable them to discuss matters of common concern in public, or if they are ordered to obey rather than being convinced with arguments in the public realm. They should only obey those laws that all concerned would equally accept based on a public use of their reason. The second stream of thought is closely related with utilitarianism. Whereas Kant favored free public discussion as the condition of public justice and citizen autonomous rationality, his contemporary Bentham promoted publicness and a free press as instruments to establish public surveillance over government in the interest of the maximization of citizen happiness. In defending representative democracy as the only form of government that would (pre)serve the public interest and not misuse the entrusted power, Bentham warned against the permanent danger that self-interests of governors may be in conflict with the interests of the community that they were supposed to take care of. Bentham’s solution was in securing that all transactions in the political assembly would be subject to the surveillance by the “public opinion tribunal.” He saw publicness—“the fittest law for securing the public confidence” and a necessary precondition “for putting the tribunal of the public in a condition for forming an enlightened judgment”—as the principal means to secure public control over those in power (Bentham, 1791/1994: 590). To achieve such a condition, the press should report regularly on government activities and proceedings of the legislature in an accessible form to the readers and present critical opinions of the public. The Benthamite stream of thought that conceived of publicity primarily as a means of democratic surveillance over political authorities prevailed in the 19th century and has been effectively institutionalized in the press as the “fourth power” or “watchdog.” This conceptualization of freedom of the press served as a powerful means—although not always in the hands of the public—of limiting the governmental abuse of power. The significance of publicity and the press for democratic developments was clearly acknowledged by François Guizot, who attributed the advantages of the representative political system of England over any other form of government almost exclusively to its openness to the public. He praised its potential of assisting citizens to “seek after reason, justice, and truth” and delegitimizing absolute power “(1) by discussion, which compels existing powers to seek after truth in common; (2) by publicity, which places these powers when occupied in this search, under the eyes of the citizens; and (3) by the liberty of the press, which stimulates the citizens themselves to seek after truth, and to tell it to power” (Guizot, 1851: 264). Since its very first foundations laid by Bentham and Kant, publicness always referred to a number of very different, often even opposing objects of study. The ticklishness of publicness was scrupulously documented rather early, and soon after the public/ness became part of social-theoretical vocabulary. For example, the commissar of an administrative district under the revolutionary regime of 1789 in France reported to the minister in Paris that “public spirit” existed in his district if the minister understood by public spirit subjections to the law; however, if

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he attributed a broader meaning to it, that would also imply a “general élan,” a certain “love to the fatherland,” then the commissar could hardly report that such things existed (Ozouf, 1989: 592). Bentham and other English-writing authors of the 19th century were interested in “publicity,” “the public,” and “public opinion.” Neologistic terms public sphere and publicness appeared only later in the 20th century when the public and publicity were radically “reconceptualized” in the daily practice of professionals dealing with publicity. In the 20th century, the critical dimension of publicity was waning fast. Once a noble profession and vocation of editors and journalists, as modeled by Bentham, publicity was transformed into a weapon in the hands of “the publicity man” whose primary task was to be “censor and propagandist, responsible only to his employers, and to the whole truth responsible only as it accords with the employers’ conception of his own interests” (Lippmann, 1922/1998: 345). Together with publicity, the public came into “eclipse,” as Dewey (1927/1991) wrote. After the invention of polling, public opinion was often understood as being embodied, once and forever, in public opinion polls as “an implicit verbal response or ‘answer’ that an individual gives in response to a particular stimulus situation in which some general ‘question’ is raised” (see Jowett and O’Donnell, 1992: 33). The decline of publicity as a critical scrutiny is clearly reflected in the fact that the very term publicity, which used to refer to reasoned debates, has been occupied by the newly emerging professions of advertising, market research, and public relations. “The terms ‘publicity’ and ‘advertising’ were used interchangeably as synonyms for dissemination of information to the public, and both terms were used to describe activities that would now be called public relations” (Raucher, cited in Mayhew, 1997: 202). The rising ambiguity of the concept is evident in the 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, where publicity was still defined both “as an instrument for public control of governmental and industrial activities and as a technique for directing the interest or good will of the public toward some individual or organization” (Gruening, 1963: 698). In either case, publicity was not considered any more a “business” of citizens in democratic societies but only of the press and, in the first place, public relations counsels. We can also notice that the term public in the prior definitions is not used to refer to any specific collectivity of citizens as discussed in the normativecritical paradigm but simply to indicate the persuasiveness of publicity. In the early 20th century, the variance between different conceptualizations of publicness and public opinion became so confusing that American political scientists despaired of the haziness of the concept, suggested dropping the term public opinion altogether (Binkley, 1928: 389). The intricacy of the situation was later well illustrated by Childs (1965), who discovered more than 50 different definitions of the concept public opinion, which led him and many other scholars afterward—who were favorably but critically disposed to empirical research of public opinion, as, for instance, V. O. Key (1961/1967), Benjamin Ginsberg (1986), James Beniger (1987), and John Zaller (1992)—to conclude that only the

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substitution of the term public opinion with mass opinion in empirical research would solve the problem. The issue of what exactly constitutes the object of “scientific” empirical public opinion research led Theodore M. Newcomb (1950: 176) to suggest that the term “group attitudes” would be most appropriate to identify it, which suggested that the critical or reflexive nature of (public) opinion should be eliminated in order to achieve a sufficient level of “scientific” rigor. However, even if we strongly believe that nomen est omen, we should admit that a mere substitution of the term does not solve any substantial problem. Even less a solution could be the recognition that—as Pierre Bourdieu (1972/1979) suggested in early 1970s—“public opinion doesn’t exist.” Yet others proposed a minimalistic operational definition of public opinion, basically saying that public opinion is what is measured in public opinion polls, hoping that the empirical turn would “solve” all theoretical controversies and render a scientific aura to the concept. Similar “solutions” to the flood of definitions can be found in more recent times in relation to the concepts of civil society, public sphere, and other public phenomena in the universe of publicness. The shortsightedness of these “solutions” aiming at the depoliticization of the concept becomes evident when situated in a historical context. The emergence of the public sphere in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a prerequisite necessary for the emergence of the public in the sense of a “public opinion tribunal.” In the 20th-century positivist and operational approaches, however, public opinion is commonly “emancipated” from its specific historical foundations (autonomous civil society) and the public sphere. Sociopolitical conditions of private individuals creating public opinion became definitely irrelevant in “public opinion polling.” Along with the reconceptualizations of public opinion, a decline of “the public” occurred, either by its hazy dissolution into the public sphere or by a “transformation” into “the New Public,” which “has matured […] when advertising […] has appropriated a variety of modes of social sciences not only to construct successful sales messages but to justify its own project as well” (Mayhew, 1997: 195). In the empirical perspective, most of the controversies seemed to be resolved as soon as quantitative statistical methods were introduced to “measure” opinions. In the 20th century, the issues of public opinion were mostly discussed without any reference to the classical debates on (the principle of) publicness but often in connection with communication psychology and propaganda, which was conceived of as a technique “to editorialize or to select the content of channels of communication for the purpose of influencing attitudes on controversial issues” (Lasswell, 1950: 284), thus sharing its essential characteristic of “controversial issues” with the concept of public opinion. While having reduced public opinion to “the uniformities observed in opinions,” Herbert Hyman (1957: 59) believed that “we stand close to a sound theory of opinion formation, and only because of the riches and variety of empirical research.” By the end of the 19th century, Osborne and Rose (1999) went even further by suggesting that there is no public opinion beyond polling and that technical procedures designed to capture public

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opinion actually create it—all the rest is believed to be just keeping appearances of something that is not related to public opinion. A deep abyss has risen between the normative-political conceptualization of publicness and its practical implementations spurred by the dominant political and economic forces. Whereas the concept of public opinion was historically rooted—as its most important materialization—in the principle of publicness, the newly discovered phenomenon of public opinion as uniformities empirically observed in individuals’ opinion largely ignored its normative-critical intellectual origin. I return to this important issue later in more detail.

CONCEPTUAL BURGEONING … The concept of publicness is in its strict sense a product of the Enlightenment. Since its first appearances in the 18th century, it had a clear critical-political sting; it was directed against the social and political structures of the traditional, premodern, or prebourgeois society, and hereditary authoritarian powers. In centuries to follow, the general idea of publicness has been developed from its rudimentary conceptualizations to ever more detailed and specific concepts so that it now includes nine principal “conceptual incarnations” of the universe of publicness. (1) Publicness denotes the condition or status of being public—a specific nature of a particular activity, object, or space (the characteristic or state of publicness; e.g., public speech, public rally, public utilities, public service, public school, etc.). It is public what is (generally, to all) visible and/or accessible, in contrast to what is private, hidden, or secret. In this sense, the adjective public refers to what can be seen by or is accessible to everyone or at least to many, what is happening within the sight of the citizens, spectators (readers, listeners, viewers), whereas the private (and secret) is hidden and confidential and is carried out within a narrow circle of individuals (e.g., within a family, but also in the institutions of power, as in the case of state secrets). As Hannah Arendt (1958/1989: 50) put it, the term public primarily means that “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.” However, it would be a mistake to reduce the condition of publicness to that of visibility. In the normative sense, publicness is more than just (any) visibility; it implies a specific communication structure that enables citizens to act communicatively “in public.” The sheer visibility reminds us of commodities in the market place, which are seen by and accessible to buyers, but only in circulation, whereas the spheres of production or consumption are largely privatized and hidden. Even Habermas’ representative publicness in the sense of public representation of power in front of politically and economically repressed subjects refers to the making of the (feudal) power visible, thus making the monopolized power a “matter of general interest,” but that kind of “publicness” is a negation rather than an affirmation of the genuine idea of publicness.

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In more general terms, although it is quite commonly accepted that what is “public” is opposed to privacy and secrecy, and closely related to visibility, there is much more controversy about the positive definition of publicness—what exactly does and did “being public” denote and imply? (2) Publicity is the activity of making someone or something communicatively visible, an object of perception, attention, and interest, with some expectation of response or (possibly favorable) attitude toward it: “an elementary and pervasive form of social action that is found in every culture” (Bohman, 1999: 184). “Making visible” is thus not only the condition of making “it” accessible but also instrumental to a wide range of different forms and degrees of purposive influence on behavior—from open threatening with negative, or providing major positive, social sanctions to insignificant, probabilistic practices that may influence only a very narrow segment of the targeted “addressees.” Of different conceptualizations and/or kinds of publicity, critical (reflexive) publicity is of the kind inherently associated with the principle of publicness. (3) In a specific sense, Public/ness associated with the state, defined in opposition to the market and civil society, and institutionalized in the form of state institutions and state funded “public” institutions (e.g., those providing “public services,” developing and implementing “public policy,” and constituting “public sector”). (4) A/the public is considered a communicatively/discursively acting social category or collectivity, or a more specifically defined social group (das Publikum; e.g., in the works of Gabriel Tarde, Ferdinand Tönnies, John Dewey, and Jürgen Habermas) consisting of formally equal citizens deliberating in public, not in private or in secret; a discursively emerging, relatively stable, and recognizable (visible or imaginable) social actor or agent, appearing and acting particularly in relation to some important and controversial social-political issues—conceptually often in contrast to the crowd or the mass and opposed to the decision-making authorities (e.g., the state); also an “imagined” or “virtual” community (“une foule virtuelle” for Tarde). Since the very beginning, the public was not considered an immediately present public (aggregate) consisting of interacting or copresent individuals (as in the crowd) but rather a social category differentiated in terms of interests and forms of participation in many fora and (sub)groups that are interlinked through the mass media as “organs” of public opinion generated by the public. It is not only the actual participation in public deliberation that constitutes the collective body of a public; what is also needed is a collective imagination of belonging to a public discussing common themes and problems (Peters, 2007: 284). Newspapers (and later other media) were thus seen as constitutive of the public by both generating and reflecting its differentiation. (5) The public/ness also appears as the focus (object) of democratic deliberation and decision making: “Controversial social issues,” which are supposed to be discussed in public and/or by the public, refer to matters of general or, specifically, national (state) importance or interest, which, of course, has nothing to do with general accessibility but rather with common or general interests, with the public good, primarily—according to Rawls (1997: 766)—related to “constitutional essentials

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and matters of basic justice.” Thus, to make something public is more than just making it publicly visible; visibility is of course a necessary but not sufficient condition of publicness. (6) The abstract-normative concept of publicness (Öffentlichkeit in the broad sense) referring to discursive visibility represents the foundations and the core of the entire “universe of publicness” normatively “enacted” in an ethical principle or universally acknowledged norm. It tends to develop into a universal human right of the public use of reason and personal right to communicate, which includes two complementary rights—to speak and to be heard. The English term publicity was once used in the same sense (e.g., by Bentham and Kant) to refer to (the need of) publication of reasoned debates under the auspices of the “public opinion tribunal,” but it was later overshadowed by the concept of manipulative publicity, which brought the concept close to public relations and advertising. Thus, I prefer to use the term publicness to the once preferred term publicity for the abstract concept of Öffentlichkeit. (7) Public sphere as a specific sphere, domain, or imagined space (l’espace publique in French) of communicatively mediated social life, a discursively constructed opinion market or social space between the state and civil (initially bourgeois) society, represents the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse. Public realm (der öffentliche Raum, der Raum der Öffentlichkeit, die Sphäre des Öffentlichen) is “the public world, in contrast to the private,” which is common to all of us but “is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement,” and has long-term interests of its own (Arendt, 1958/1989: 52–54).3 It is taken for granted that no specific social norms (e.g., privacy, ownership) and regulatory rules (e.g., formal membership) limit citizens’ access to the public sphere, and no specific knowledge and competences are needed to make them able to participate in it. A public sphere could either be (a) the sphere of publicness or public space (i.e., communication spaces created and maintained by the media, which involve relations of power and dominance) (“public space”), or (2) the sphere of the public(s) consisting of free and equal citizens participating in public reasoning. In either case, the principle of publicness represents the very heart of the concept of the public sphere. In empirical terms, the public sphere is often conceived of as a kind of “compromise” of these two “ideal types.” (8) Public opinion denotes either (a) the prevailing sentiments or attitudes of the majority in a society on significant issues at a given time (relates to 7.1 above), or (b) in a more strict sense, a rational discursive process among members of the public addressing legitimization claims to the authorities (relates to 7.2 above). In normative theories, public opinion is considered as directly resulting from either the public sphere (expressed in public) or the public as a social category (expressed by the public in public). (9) Public culture or, rather, the culture of publicness represents, on the one hand, one of the three constitutive dimensions of the discursive public sphere: a specific democratic political (communication) culture next to advanced public communication channels (technological infrastructure) and political institutions constitu-

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tionally designed and implemented in the political system to secure and protect citizen rights, which might include a wide variety of practices from performances and demonstrations to writing, in which participation is open to those who have mastered some basic conventions (Bohman, 1999: 185). On the other hand, however, it is the broadest, generic concept denoting “a complex form of social will” in the Gesellschaft-type of social structure, “which essentially refers to the ethical (and in relation to it, aesthetic) side of co-habitation, that is, to ‘the spirit,’ ” as Tönnies (1922: 228) would say; a certain repertoire of values and symbols acknowledged as relevant for public discourse, thus making a collective identity—an imagined communion, to use Benedict Anderson’s term—possible.

… AND REVISIONIST ATTEMPTS Emphasizing the importance of the Enlightenment for the conceptualization of publicness does not imply that publicness is, by its very definition, “limited” to an individual’s public use of reason as his legal-political right and ethical duty set in the forefront by Kant. Nor does it impose a “simplistic and authoritarian alternative” that you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad). (Foucault, 1978/1984: 43; italics added)

As Foucault insists, a critical analysis should not be “oriented retrospectively toward the ‘essential kernel of rationality’ that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event” but rather toward “the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects” (Foucault, 1978/1984: 43). I do not think the two propositions are indeed mutually exclusive. If we are interested in publicness and public sphere either normatively or analytically, we cannot conceptualize them irrespectively of the context(s) in which they were/are historically embedded. As Foucault also suggests, “We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment.” Although this historical vestige of the Enlightenment is fundamental to understand the idea of publicness, it does not necessary fully determine its contemporary meaning, and it is so for a very simple reason—because of fundamental changes in its historical context. One can hardly disagree with Foucault suggesting that “many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not

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make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet” (Foucault, 1978/1984: 49). Indeed, the idea of publicness that should, as Kant expected, liberate humankind from immaturity is far from having achieved that goal, and we can even doubt together with Foucault if “we will ever reach mature adulthood.” However, without a clear historical understanding of the concept of “publicness” and its original embeddedness in the Enlightenment, we would reduce it to a kind of whirligig that may display a different figure each time when whirled. This is a serious danger to which the concepts of publicness and the public (sphere) are exposed particularly by the debates strongly dividing between “modernist” and “postmodernist” traditions and rejecting the former as unrealistic, utopian, or obsolete. I wholly agree with Garnham’s (2007: 207) comment on this divide that such a binary approach is far from being illuminating. The standards by which the developments of publicness are judged should not be the utopian standards of any type of “perfect democracy,” as it had often happened in its early days. A critical analysis should strive to explain how the historical processes of alienation and subordination penetrate communication processes in different spheres of human life (e.g., education, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, journalism, mass communication, or computer-mediated communication), how they are being reproduced, and how those processes could be overturned to liberate the channels of communication and opinion formation. Such analysis unavoidably proceeds from certain normative assumptions. The normative dimension implies a critical look at the intellectual and material history of publicness. This is particularly important because the present fascination with the new information and communication technologies (ICT) may easily veil their deep embeddedness in the social structure and their ambivalent potential in relation to social visibility and publicity. It is important to realize that citizens will remain deprived of opportunities to make democratic decisions without an enhanced capacity to gain access to information and communication media. Yet the capacity to acquire needed information is largely a question of human capabilities, economic conditions, and social values embedded in regulations and laws beyond technology. The capacity of citizens to communicate with each other is largely a question of appropriate media but also of education and development of virtual or physical public spaces. The technical capacity of ICT has not totally transformed and devalued the importance of our generic ability and need to communicate, central to which is the capacity to communicate face to face. It seems that those who call for alternative media today often fail to rediscover the potential of what we already have, in principle, available to us as “simple” human beings. An emphasis on the normative dimension in conceptualizing the public sphere whose organizing principle is that of publicness also helps us to avoid an operational (or empiricist) reduction of the concept to the existing social conditions. Yet the prevention of normative blindness may also easily lead to normative sterility. A normative approach is productive inasmuch as it links normative

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presuppositions and empirical social conditions in a historical perspective, thus linking the present with the past and the future. The results of a historical inquiry have to be tested—in terms of theory and practice—against the existing reality from the point of view of its hypothetical future development and alternatives in the past. This may help us see what could have happened and what can happen due to specific circumstances. As Kant (1781: 125) suggests in his defense of the Platonian Republic, we should carefully follow up on the ideas of the past and “employ new efforts to place [them] in clearer light, rather than carelessly fling [them] aside as useles.” Mills’ operational model of the public opposing the mass is an example of the attempts to narrow the gap between normative-critical and empirical positivist approaches by specifying the empirical conditions that should take place to facilitate deliberative legitimization processes in complex societies by mediated political communication in the public sphere. It turns out that new communication technologies can only help to “solve” problems related to two—out of the four—of Mills’ criteria of the possible transformation from the mass society to “the democratic society of publics.” They make possible that “(1) virtually as many people express opinion as receive them,” and that (2) “Public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately […] to answer back any opinion expressed in public.” Immediately perhaps, but not also effectively (who will visit your reply or comment on a website?), which was the second part of Mills’ claim. However, new technologies have no significant impact on two subsequent dimensions, differentiating between the mass and the public, namely, (3) whether an opinion formed in discussion could be materialized in an effective action, even against authorities, or the realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities; and (4) whether the public is autonomous in its operations from authoritative institutions or whether they penetrate the formation of opinion (Mills, 1956/2000: 303–304). Habermas’ quest to derive operational criteria for the communication model of deliberative politics from critical theory represents a similar attempt with less demanding criteria. The two specific conditions he defines are that (a) “a selfregulating media system gains independence from its social environments,” and (b) “anonymous audiences grant feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society” (Habermas, 2006: 412). Analysts of the transnational public sphere are eager to claim that contemporary modes of communication are radically new, unprecedented in older modes of communication. However, a closer analysis shows that—even if the claim is accurate—their impact on the constitution of the public (sphere) relative to external social, political, and economic factors is almost insignificant. The distinctive feature of the public media that they can transform particularistic interests into a common interest by confronting the rulers and the ruled, or mediating between them, is missing on the Internet not because of its technological character but because of its social use(s).

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Although it is difficult to imagine how the nature of publicness could have been changed radically without new modes of communication, the main cause of its transformation does not lie in technological innovations but rather in (the dominant) social relations. Karl Bücher (1893/1901: 242) realized long ago in his discussion of the industrialization of the press that “the active, leading elements […] are outside of the press rather than in the press”; its quality thus depends on “the very complicated conditions of competition in the publication market.” The most important and contestable “external element” that determined the radical transformation of the press in the 19th century was, in Bücher’s view, the economic interest in profit making that transformed newspapers from cultural to commercial organizations. He emphasized the great complexity of the newspaper as a primarily cultural phenomenon that emerged out of political interests in national unification, economic interests in information from remote places, and demands for new social and economic relations (Splichal, 2007). What Bücher used to call “a fundamental transformation of the essence of the newspaper” (i.e., its commoditization) was a manifestation of the radical change in the nature of publicity in the second half of the 19th century. Theorizing and investigating the constantly changing social conditions, which substantially affect communication among human beings, is the primary task and mission of critical communication theory and research. This does not imply that such studies should produce claims related to ideal communication acts—supposedly good in themselves although opposed to reality—but related to what it is already time for due to the existing practical conditions, to paraphrase Horkheimer’s famous idea. Such attempts may be seen as “nonproductive”— because they do not advance the existence of the past in the present or the present in the future—yet they are productive in a more fundamental sense; they “construe” facts that materially do not yet exist but have ample potential for existing, and they confront barriers that do not allow for their practical realization. In that sense, communication, like any other social research, always implies (maybe just tacitly assumes) normative and regulative components that link theory, research, and social action. The empirical conditions specified by Mills, Habermas, and many others should remind us that attempts to regulate and institutionalize human communication (to either liberate or censor it) are at least as old as those trying to understand and theorize its human nature and its inherent laws. Such a crucial regulatory question, which critical communication research should concentrate on today, is that of unraveling communication (in)equalities among individuals and social groups and impediments to the civil right to communicate. However, regardless of how we assess the relationship between regulation and research and the nature of that relationship in different societies, cultures, and historical periods, we must realize that communication research has never been “regulation-free.” The results of social research may always invite, or be used for, “therapy” by social action. Whether “administrative research,” as a prototype of linking specific problems and tools identified with interpretations of

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findings that support (explicitly or implicitly) the status quo of society, critical theory and research, or any other theory—they are all motivated to create specific relations between theory and social practice and, specifically, influence regulatory capacities and institutional designs. And vice versa: Regulatory and institutional designs always imply or proceed from more abstract ideas or theories rather than from sheer empirical investigations and analyses. The identification of ideal communication procedures and social conditions for them to materialize in the empirical world is not utopianism. I am suspicious of the so-called “end of utopia” because the end of utopia as a great achievement of (Western) civilization is predicated on the misidentification of utopia with totalitarianism. It is often (wrongly) believed that utopias (similarly to ideologies) are necessarily a first step to totalitarianism because the use of force and violence would be justified to achieve utopia. As Marcuse (1967: 11) suggested in his discussion of the end of utopia, the projects of (radical) social transformation that are not viable because of the absence of subjective and objective factors at present should not even be designated as “utopian” but rather as “provisionally unfeasible” projects. Strictly speaking, utopian projects are only those that contradict “certain scientifically established laws, biological laws, physical laws; for example, such projects as the age-old idea of eternal youth or the idea of a return to an alleged golden age”—but even for some of them, their “ahistoricity” has a historical limit. In this sense, the ideas of publicness and (national and transnational) public sphere may be “provisionally unfeasible” but far from being “utopian.” A similar argument may be found in Dewey’s discussion of the hindrances to the formation of “the public.” Dewey (1927/1991) argued in The Public and Its Problems against the accusation that democracy and majority rule lead—by definition—to mediocrity. In contrast, Dewey (1927/1991: 209) maintains that there is no way to identify the genuine intellectual potential of the general population and its capacity to act as “the public” as long as citizens have limited access to education and until “secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity.” In other words, a valid conclusion cannot be made based on existing conditions; the public could be perfectly competent provided that “the problem of the public”—“the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion”—is solved. What seems to be a complete utopia to Lippmann (1922/1998) at that time was clearly a “provisionally unfeasible” project to Dewey. The very counterfactuality of critical publicity and the (rational-discursive) public sphere tested against the existing practice is thus potentially liberating. As Habermas (1992: 455) suggests, the question of “whether, and to what extent, a public sphere dominated by mass media provides a realistic chance for the members of civil society, in their competition with the political and economic invaders’ media power, to bring about changes in the spectrum of values, topics, and reasons [...] to open it up in an innovative way, and to screen it critically” is a question that “cannot be answered without considerable empirical research.”4 In contrast, the revision of key normative concepts of publicness in order to make

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them better fit in with the changing empirical realities would inflict a huge loss to the mobilizing power of critical theory. Technology played a crucial role in the decline of “public phenomena,” but it was not the decisive force. This clearly shows the case of the press. The public has been constituted with the newspaper as the “hub” or “central node”—if we use the terminology of the Internet era—that mentally connected physically detached individuals. Improvements in printing technology made an enormous increase in the speed and scale of printing possible, yet they were “just” necessary but neither sufficient nor decisive conditions for the transformation of the press from a medium of personal freedom of public expression to an instrument of a corporate (press) freedom. The decisive role in that transformation was “delegated” to the dominant form of capitalist production that Bücher conceived of rather early in the 19th century. In the most recent and perhaps most revolutionary technological revolution, the computer-mediated communication enabled physically separated individuals to interact over great distances directly—not only through the hubs—on a massive scale. What the final social outcome of this revolutionary technological change will be is not clear yet. Nevertheless, if we look at the changes in the universe of publicness brought about by the deployment of earlier comtech achievements, some warnings are certainly in place. As Table 1.1 shows, technological “interventions” in the public sphere since the rise of the mass press come rather close to what Raymond Williams (1976: 10) once critically wrote about the social uses of communication technology, namely, that throughout history, new means of communication “have been not only used, but also abused, for political control (as in propaganda) or for commercial profit (as in advertising).” We can see, for example, that some of the most recent “interventions”—polling, Internet, and cell phones—radically changed the conceptualization of the relationship between the individual and the collective body of publicness—the public—by moving it either toward a simple statistical aggregation of individuals (in polls) or an aggregate networking of individuals (in the Internet). In the subsequent chapters, transformations of the original conceptualizations of principal dimensions of publicness in some of the dominant streams of thought in the field outlined in the beginning of this chapter are discussed in view of the changing social, political, economic, and technological conditions that could have influenced these reconceptualizations. As I argue, these practical and conceptual changes somehow coalesce when it comes to the contemporary processes of transnationalization of the public (sphere), which suggests that all these changes are related to the growing complexity of the universe of publicness. I start with the changing nature of “visibility” generated by publicity and its relation to the public and the private, and then I continue with the historical and conceptual changes its main generator—public discourse—has undergone in the period from the print to the Internet era. The issues of the social nature of visibility and discursive publicity are central to the discussion of “correlation” between the public and the public sphere, and such specific distinct but cognate phenomena of publicness as the old and new media, university, and public opinion.

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Table 1.1. Revision of Key Dimensions of Reflexive Publicness in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries and Its Technological Roots PUBLICNESS Original normative concepts

Technological & scientific in(ter)ventions

PUBLICITY Revised concepts

Freedom of expression (public use of reason)

Press

Freedom of the press

Discursive reflexivity

Broadcasting

Mediated visibility Persuasiveness

Surveillance over power Press, TV, Internet, mobile phones

Surveillance over citizens

Opinion of the public

Polling

Public opinion polls (implosion of the public)

The public

Television Internet

Audience-as-public Social network (links)

Public sphere

Television Computer, Internet, cell phones

Mediated public sphere Network of networks (infrastructure) Communicative space (explosion of public spheres)

The public exercises surveillance over national government

Internet Globalization

The public is a shareholder in global governance

NOTES 1. The term progress is used to denote the processes of social changes that occur not just at the level of political and social orientation but—as the consequence of purposive, concentrated efforts—in fundamental elements of the power structure, particularly in the development of a political public sphere and political pluralism (see Habermas, 1990). 2. In fact, the concept “public sphere” was first presented to the English-speaking scholars with the translation of Habermas’ short encyclopedia article from the Fischer Lexikon Staat und Politik (Fraenkel & Bracher, 1964), which was published in the New German Critique in 1974 and later reprinted in Communication and Class Struggle (Vol. 1) in 1979. 3. Whereas the English term the public sphere refers—or at least alludes—to a natural space at a certain point in time, the original Öffentlichkeit transcends “our life-span into past and future alike.” When entering the public realm, individuals want “something of their own or something they have in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives” (Arendt, 1958/1989: 55).

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4. Fishkin’s experiments with deliberative polls justify this kind of “utopianism.” They are an example of empirical research, which Halloran (1981) named “policy-oriented research” in contrast to “policy research.” The latter is essentially administrative because it “seeks to bring about the efficient execution of policy and thereby make the existing system more efficient.” Policy-oriented research, in contrast, is normativecritical: It starts by questioning what is tacitly assumed in administrative research—the legitimacy and sufficiency of the existing order—and goes on to identify, normatively and empirically, alternatives with regard to both means and ends.

2

Visibility, Publicity, and Privacy

Visibility may be considered an utterly benign and wholesome communicative phenomenon and quality of democratic relationships as long as we do not realize that it not only refers to transparency and candor but also to tyranny and suppression of privacy. In this chapter, I address contradictory qualities of visibility generated by publicity, which may result in either publicness or censorship. This issue is particularly important in order to “calm down” the unconditional enthusiasm for new communicative opportunities brought about by the Internet and mobile telephony, but it also concerns the more general question of the genuine—controversial—fundamental nature of visibility. In fact, an unconditional trust in the righteousness of visibility is not a new development. Kant and Bentham disagreed on many dimensions of publicness, yet they clearly agreed on the unquestionably beneficial function of public visibility; they both stressed that if an action is public, it means that there is no distrust in the underlying intentions. In his conceptualization of publicity, Bentham (1791/1994) emphasized the aspects of general visibility and accessibility as not only necessary for an effective surveillance over power elites and remedy for misrule but also as the means to achieve people’s pleasure. He believed that the principle of universal visibility cannot do any harm to anyone and attributed all objections and prejudices against publicity to immoral motives (Bentham, 1791/1994: 582). In his attempt to prove the illegitimacy of rebellion, Kant (1795/1983: 135) argued that a revolution is illegitimate because “its maxim, if openly acknowledged, would make its own purpose impossible,” which is why it is always kept secret. Generally, according to Kant, publicness always indicates that the under23

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lying political maxims of an action are congruent with the goals and rights of all, thus making actions both moral and legal. Kant and Bentham were not able to see—due to the early stage of the development of mass media quite understandably at the time—that publicity in the broadest sense (as “making something visible to all”) can also have disciplinary and hegemonic aims and consequences as other forms of visibility do. This “blindness” is particularly remarkable in Bentham’s writings becausee his early research interest was precisely in establishing an “irresistible control” over a large number of people to be kept in view by a limited number of “head keepers or inspectors”—a plan that is inseparably connected with “one of the most puzzling of political questions—quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”1 (Bentham, 1791/1995: 45–46). In his “penitentiary inspection house,” Bentham meticulously designed an institutional and architectural structure based on the principle of permanent visibility, which would enable the invisible (those in power) to control those who were made visible against their will by force. When he later designed a democratic structure of surveillance (in which the public opinion tribunal replaced the inspector of the penitentiary inspection house), he seemed to forget his own caveat that guardians should not be left devoid of guardianship over them. Bentham not only failed to see the controversial nature of visibility determined by the specific social context (e.g., penitentiary vs. parliamentary visibility); he also missed to identify the press as not only the most important organ of the public but also as a possible—and very efficacious—means to manipulate the public. His omitting of the possibility that a newspaper as an organ of the tribunal of public opinion might be abused in the same way as political power could be most likely attributed to the nature of the press of the time. It was indeed difficult to imagine that the press which (still) strived to get rid of the yoke of censorship may itself become a powerful instrument of a ruthless publicity and political and commercial manipulation that emerged in the late 19th century. Yet this was exactly what happened after the press has overthrown the rule of censorship. It became evident that publicity not only legitimizes human actions but also limits personal and organizational—physical, intellectual, and informational—privacy. Publicity not only makes things “democratically” visible to everyone and thus suppresses censorship; it can also impose visibility on an individual’s actions and thus intrudes his or her privacy. The issue of privacy became particularly contentious with the advance of communication technologies. Changes in communication technology and its social uses shape, often in controversial ways, the diffusion of power and power relationships in society.

PUBLICITY VERSUS PRIVACY Toward the end of the 19th century, almost regular abuses of the principle of publicness materialized in the press freedom against personal rights of privacy,

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on the one hand, and the growing awareness that the government is a powerful (potential) privacy invader, on the other, called for the protection of personal (right of) privacy. As Warren and Brandeis wrote (1890: 196), “The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency.” Brandeis later recognized that the press was not the most dangerous violator of citizen privacy: Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government […] to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. […] The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire tapping. […] Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions. (Brandeis, 1928: 473)

“Making visible” thus became a kind of powerful disciplinary strategy based on the principle of rationalization of persuasion and developed to the level of perfection in propaganda, advertising, and, more recently, public relations. Disciplinary visibility of “others” is not only the main threat to their privacy, as censorship (which by definition is disciplinary) is to publicness; it is also the pernicious danger to publicness.2 Consumerism “discovered” its own “principle of publicness” in promotional visibility: In advertising, attention of audiences should be attracted at any price. Developments in communication technology and its social uses made individual behavior surveyable and visible to those in power. Of course, communication can still be used as a means of execution of control over power, but—in the opposite direction—it also makes power3 immediately sensible, experiential to the general populace; it makes actors and their actions visible in public, which helps make the execution of power more effective. As we all know, making/keeping things invisible or “private” is individuals’ most common practice. Even in our everyday, not entirely private4 interpersonal communication, in which we are accountable to a rather limited extent, we carefully and sometimes unconsciously select what we want to conceal and what— and how—we will reveal. All we communicate to another individual by means of words or perhaps in another fashion—even the most subjective, impulsive, intimate matters—is a selection from the psychological-real whole whose absolutely exact report (absolutely exact in terms of content and sequence) would drive everybody into the insane asylum. (Simmel, 1908/1950: 311–312)

We are rarely concerned about what people may say about us in their privacy and our absence because we also say things “in confidence” that we would not

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say in public or to someone’s face. This reticence is a kind of politeness we practice every day. In Sigmund Freud’s metaphor comparing dream distortion and political censorship, the politeness of a dream interpreter talking to his patients also applies to “the political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell to those in power.” To avoid censorship, the author is compelled “to express himself in allusions instead of by direct assertions; or he must conceal his objectionable statement in an apparently innocent disguise” (Freud, 1900/1938: 223). Machiavelli (1513/1992: 48) went even further, suggesting to his Prince not to hesitate to play the hypocrite if needed to keep himself in popular favor: “It is good to appear merciful, truthful, humane, sincere, and religious; it is good to be so in reality. But you must keep your mind so disposed that, in case of need, you can turn to exact contrary.” Not everyone would agree with Machiavelli. Whether the quandary of making things visible or making/keeping them invisible is merely a matter of politeness or, perhaps, of deception and even tyranny may turn out to be a far more complex issue than Machiavelli thought. Concealment and secrecy may be effectively used to deceive publics, thus generating a system of censorship, particularly in a world of oligopolized mass media. Only in such conditions, a preference for privacy and secrecy could be legitimately considered a sign of guilt, as, for example, by Bentham (1791/1994: 582): “Why should we hide ourselves if we do not dread being seen? [...] Suspicion [...] thinks it sees a crime where it beholds an affectation of secrecy; and it is rarely deceived.” However, not everyone would agree with Bentham’s general negation of the “right of hiding” either. If one is tempted to consent to Bentham’s mischievous concept of hiding, however, he or she should at least consider such instances of hiding as a “public sphere” still existing largely behind closed doors of salons or coffee houses where private people came together to be in hiding from the absolutist regime and thus made secrecy a condition of the publicness of reason, or Freud’s analysis of censorship in dreams as a “guardian of our psychic life,” which both indicate that the hidden does not necessarily prove corruption. Of course, in the “invisible” private sphere, mutual trust, dependency, and benevolence in family and among friends do not always dominate; private relations may also be heavily authoritarian, violent, and even brutal. With the new media (the Internet), the private and the public tend to overlap much more than before. Semi-closed social networks on the web, which include tens, hundreds, and maybe even thousands of “friends,” are difficult to classify exclusively in either category. On the one hand, the number of members of such groups greatly exceeds the size formerly considered characteristic of private groups; on the other hand, the content of communication usually comes closer to what friends would discuss among themselves rather than what is considered to be worthy of public attention. Yet it contrast to Brandeis’ concerns about the violation of privacy, the expansion of social networks in the Internet in the last decade and the increasing exposure of privacy is an outcome of personal promotional publicity rather than external disciplinary publicity, although individuals (particularly the

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young) may not be conscious of all risks and potential (negative) consequences involved in such a semi-public communication. Nevertheless, a genuine publicity when individuals as “public persons” appear in a (virtual) open space to (re)present their power or to participate in public discourse always involves risks for participants. As Hegel suggested (1820/2001: 252), “What a man fancies when he is at home with his wife and friends is one thing, and quite another thing what occurs in a great gathering where one clever stroke annihilates the preceding.” A person participating in a public discourse is deprived of the absolute control over the selection of issues to be discussed in public, limits of the discussion, and even her own participation in the discussion. Public appearance (e.g., in the mass media) implies more or less formalized accountability for what has been said, and implementation of personal accountability may take rather annoying forms of public exposure that those acting in public would rather avoid. Still, publicness may not only stimulate the debate in which “one clever stroke annihilates the preceding” but also hamper the quality of deliberation. Although publicness forces the actors to provide the most substantial arguments (“appeal to reason” according to Lippmann) that would make their judgments reasonable or objectively certain, as Kant would say, it may also force them to provide the most persuasive arguments for the audience to promote their opinions (“appeal to the public” for Lippmann). This latter tendency transformed publicity from a public use of reason (providing primarily substantial arguments) into deliberate communicative attempts to attract public attention and manage the public’s perception of a subject by providing manipulative arguments. Would in such cases a “limited publicness” controlled by some monopolized power—a form of censorship—do any better than manipulative publicity? Using the case of the early stages of European integration when democracy was exclusively a national domain and its transnational extension could have degenerated into a nationalist and populist discourse, deBeus (2006: 75) has no doubts that limited access and publicity are neither sins nor breaches of norms but indispensable means for integration in the best interests of ordinary Europeans. The time will not be ripe for politicization of European institutions and policies till integration has become irreversible and the sense of interdependence and community has become quasi-natural.

Obviously, the consequences of public deliberation are not always exclusively beneficial; and public visibility always entails some hazards. Bentham (1830/1983) once compared the risk of being exposed to public defamation taken by civil functionaries in democratic societies with that of military functionaries in war: The latter are paid for being shot at, and the former are paid for being criticized and even unjustly defamed. Even in totalitarian systems, some forms of public representation of power may have negative consequences for power

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actors. Thus, Machiavelli (1513/1992) suggested that although there is nothing wrong if a prince presents himself in a way that would make him feared (it may be even preferable because making people fear him is under his own control, in contrast to love that is not achievable by external force), he should prudently use his power to avoid and conceal anything that makes him hated. Nevertheless, the private and public spheres are inherently connected. As Tarde (1898/2000: 60) suggested, a discussion “between two men who have solved the question differently” is always based on “the menial discussion between contradictory ideas within the same mind”: Similarly, if verbal, written, or printed discussions between groups of men […] take the place of verbal discussion between two men, it is because the more limited discussion has been brought to an end by some relative and temporary agreement, or some sort of unanimity.

It is the borderline between the private and public where the individual selection of what to make visible/public and what to keep invisible/private takes place. This selection is determined in two ways: (a) it may be primarily internally (by our inner motives) or primarily externally (by group or social expectations) determined; and (b) in either case, it may be either instrumentally or discursively motivated, leading toward hegemonic or discursive visibility (see Figure 2.1). It relates not only to what we communicate but also to how we communicate— which specific code of communication we choose. For example, linguistic or ethnic minorities are often forced to use majority language in public. Attempts at strategic control through “making visible” are complemented by resistance to disclosure and efforts to keep things hidden. The ambivalent potential of communication—to reveal and to conceal—makes communication contingent on external factors and circumstances within which it occurs. According to Nagel (1998: 14), “What is allowed to become public and what is kept private in any given transaction will depend on what needs to be taken into collective consideration for the purposes of transaction and what would on the contrary disrupt it if introduced into the public space.” 5 Which of the two moments of the ambivalent potential will prevail in communication primarily depends on its social use(r)s rather than the “inner” developments of communication forms and technologies. A trade-off between “making visible” and “making/keeping invisible” is made relative to specific goals and circumstances in the strategic process of strengthening power. Visibility is not exclusively instrumental and oriented to an external—either intentional or imposed—goal. At least in a normative perspective, visibility may also be purely discursive or associative, thus stimulating freedom of thought and expression as a personal right and social need. For Kant (1781), visibility qua publicity was a normative criterion and practical assurance of universal justice; reason accords “sincere respect [...] only to that which has stood the test of a free and

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public examination.” As Bentham believed, visibility in the sphere of politics should help achieve people’s pleasure and happiness. Both Kant and Bentham believed that authoritarian rulers could do anything they want only as long as their actions are not disclosed to the public. In fact, even today it is commonly believed that, to the detriment of democratic polity, more is concealed than revealed in politics and by politicians. Nevertheless, this does not imply that anything that is not publicly visible is immoral or unlawful. In terms of action orientation, instrumental visibility not only contradicts discursive visibility but is also ambivalent in itself. On the one hand, instrumental visibility manifests and amplifies power and domination that may also be executed secretly. “The making visible of actions and events […] is also an explicit strategy of individuals who know that mediated visibility can be a weapon in the struggles they wage in their day-to-day lives” (Thompson, 2005: 31). On the other hand, because visibility is also a condition of the execution of control and limitation of power, it makes the execution of power more vulnerable and thus brings about attempts by agents of power to control and narrow their visibility and to introduce censorship. In all manifestations of power, censorship occurs to some degree. That was why Bentham, for example, fought for visibility of all actions of the parliament (which the members of the parliament might want to conceal) and considered visibility necessary for the functioning of newspapers as the most important and “the only constantly acting visible organs” of public opinion. In a way, Bentham’s and Kant’s claim for visibility of the institutionalized (political) power in order to limit its arcana confronts with the evidence that any execution of power is inseparable from the pretension “to make something invisible visible through the public presence” (Habermas, 1962/1995: 35). We may speak of “the invisible hand of the marketplace” that harmonizes self-interest with the general welfare but not of “the invisible hand of politics” in the sense that political actors are invisible to the general population ruled by their power. The body politic always needs a form of commonly visible representation, and the essential questions are: Who is in control of “politics” of visibility? Who decides on what has to be seen and what has to be put out of public sight? The aim of political communication is primarily to make others accept expressed views rather than to express oneself. Machiavelli (1513/1992: 63) advised his prince never to forget to give to his subjects “the impression of being a great man” and to seek popularity and reputation among them, “yet avoiding any compromise to his dignity, for that must be preserved at all costs.” The only goal of his public appearance should be to persuade his subjects of his devotion to the public good, and no means should be disregarded in the attempts to achieve this goal. There always exists a compromise between showing and hiding and a culturally, morally, and politically defined boundary between visible and invisible, between external and internal, between public and private, between disclosure and discretion or reticence.6 It may be a personal or collective compromise. In

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the medieval Europe, for example, the king, or the feudal lord, was the only “public person” worthy of visibility (J. Peters, 2001: 86). The natural body of the king was the only form of public representation of the body politic, and it was represented before the people present in the ceremonies and festivities organized to celebrate the king and the court. With the gradual expansion of suffrage and general political democratization, both representation and visibility have been substantially changed: The former princely “representative publicity” was replaced by discursive forms of publicness and a more “realistic” (in contrast to the former purely symbolic) representation of the people—by the people—for the people in the political process. Not only restriction of visibility by censorship but also the imposition of visibility is repressive in the sense that the execution of power provokes fear of power, thus deterring individuals from any action against authorities. Individuals can be made to fear not only by a Machiavellian visible omnipresence of the rulers (in contrast to Bentham’s apparent invisible omnipresence of the inspector in the panopticon) but also by a panopticon gaze to which common citizens are exposed either publicly (e.g., in the media) or secretly (e.g., as in espionage). According to Foucault (1977/1995: 201), generating permanent visibility of individuals and preventing them from hiding ensure the automatic functioning of power in society. Visibility, as it is generated, for example, in contemporary systems of video surveillance and electronic remote sensing, may develop into tyranny over private citizens and their normatively assured privacy. In such cases, visibility enforcement by surveillance goes beyond the execution of power and deteriorates into the misuse of power (the very concept of the misuse of power presupposes the normative concept of visibility). The historical irony of surveillance by either restriction of visibility (as in censorship) or generating visibility by power (panopticon gaze) is that it is at the same time often a sign of significant changes in power to come: Surveillance is generated by power actors to prevent their loss of power for the benefit of potentially more powerful competitors who are likely to prevail, and, therefore, as an absolutist policy it is ultimately subversive and self-destructive.7 As Castells (2007: 248) argues, “in all known societies, counter-power exists under different forms and with variable intensity, as one of the few natural laws of society, verified throughout history, asserts that wherever is domination, there is resistance to domination, be it political, cultural, economic, psychological, or otherwise.” Surveillance is always confronted with resistance and attempts to trick the custodians or censors, regardless of whom the controller and the controlled may be and what amount of power either of them may have. The main goal of surveillance is to dissuade the people from any action (or even thought of it) that would oppose the established norms of the dominant order. Bentham’s philosophical interest in such profoundly different forms of institutionalized surveillance as penitentiaries and parliaments exemplifies the point. In Panopticon, he designed a system of control over a relatively large number of distrustful individuals “meant to be kept under inspection”—applicable to institutions such as prisons, factories,

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hospitals, and schools—that would avert all persons from the mere thought of evasion of responsibility or escape, which they would otherwise certainly try to carry out. Similarly, he argued in his pleading for public control over parliament: Such is the nature of man when clothed with power—in that part of the field of government which is here in question, whatever mischief has not yet been actually done by him to-day, he is sure to be meditating to-day, and unless restrained by the fear of what the public may think and do, it may actually be done by him to-morrow. (Bentham, 1820)

Censorship helps to organize and protect the discourse of power, and resistance tends to undermine and disrupt it by producing “discourse dislocations” (i.e., those sites and moments where and when strategic organization of resistance to dominant discourses can take place, which is essential for a democratic society) (Laclau, 1990: 43–44). Such “points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape,” according to Foucault (1982: 794), are even constitutive of any power relation. Whereas censorship is aimed at making the physically visible socially invisible, the manufacturing of visibility is aimed at making the physically invisible or less visible (or even nonexistent) socially (more) visible. They are both engaged in the execution of power. We can identify two main kinds of strategic manufacturing of visibility (instrumental visibility): promotional, actively promoted visibility displays or rather propagates distinction—specificity, difference, uniqueness— and thus power of the visible, whereas disciplinary visibility in surveillance is aimed at suppression of diversity, forced compliance, and conformity, which ultimately makes the visible invisible (see Figure 2.1). Promotional visibility is representative by its very nature; it is a sort of spectacle. It keeps up appearances—promoting what one should esteem rather than reflecting what one would like to see (e.g., in an artistic expression) or what one should think and believe it exists rather than reporting what actually exists (e.g., in news reporting). Disciplinary visibility is restrictive: It restricts individual autonomy in defining the borderline between the visible and concealed and strips away the appearances one wants to keep up either privately or publicly. It is impossible to eliminate secrecy from social relations and evade censorship in communication—not only because they are deep-rooted and extensively diffused in all societies but also because they are constitutive of social behavior. Censorship is a guardianship located at every border between the visible and the concealed. In censorship, forces of making visible confront the resistance to disclosure and efforts to keep things hidden. Censorship operates in two distinct spheres and thus has a double nature. In the private sphere, it is inward directed; it controls and restricts the emergence of thoughts and information into circumstances different from those in which they originated and thus safeguards the creators and their secrecies (against the psychic energy of the unconscious). In non-

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Fig. 2.1. Divergent qualities of visibility resulting in censorship and publicness

private and particularly mass-mediated communication, not to say in the public sphere, censorship—directly or indirectly carried out by the state authorities, private corporations, powerful individuals, and civic associations—is outward directed and represses “epistemological criminals” who may challenge the premises of the existing order and threaten the ruling power in society at large or parts of it. “Their power (or potential power) derives from their capacity to spoil the terms of the bargain which has made a viable version of social reality possible” (Jansen, 1988:184). Censorship thus protects the foundations (not necessarily democratic, however) of society, and that may be (in some way always is) at the expense of individuals’ freedoms and rights.

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Both promotional and disciplinary forms of manufacturing visibility may be considered constitutive of publicness as long as they are not oligo- or monopolized. However, when either of them is monopolized, the principle of publicness is severely threatened. If only a few have the power to decide what can or has to be seen or heard, any form of visibility acts as a pressure toward conformity, a hidden censorship. Whether monopoly is secured by the majority or by some powerful minorities—monopolized visibility always manufactures silence, or even a silent consent among the rest, as the critics of the “tyranny of majority” and “collective mediocrity” (e.g., Tocqueville, Mill, and Bryce) argued. In the most radical (although also prejudiced) social-psychological version of this paradigm, Tom Harrisson (1940: 370) formulated the iron law of public consent: “At all ordinary times and places, there is a tendency for most ordinary people to follow what they believe to be the majority, to voice in public mainly those sentiments and opinions which are generally acceptable and respectable.” This was later named “the spiral of silence” by Noelle-Neumann (1974). Indeed, the very act of communication may also be the cause of silence, as effectual as censorship in the narrow sense.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CENSORSHIP The difference between promotional and disciplinary visibility, between propaganda and surveillance, and between representative publicness and censorship could only have been established when the means of communication were alienated from communicating individuals—a process that coincided with the establishment of class society. Biological organs of verbal communication (organs of speech, sight, and hearing) were complemented and extended with external corporeal (technological) means that one can freely dispose of to communicate more effectively—but one can also be deprived of them. Those who are effectively in possession of such means can also define the borderline between the visible and invisible in specific situations because they have control over their constitutive conditions. Censorship has long been regarded primarily as an (exclusively) authoritative interference with communication aimed at the suspension of communication—essentially a remnant of unenlightened, authoritarian, premodern, preliberal ages or “an act of external interference with the internally generated communicative, expressive, artistic, or informational preferences of some agent” (Schauer, 1998: 150). Today, it is not limited anymore to state interference with visibility or publicity but includes diverse actors exercising surveillance activities of imposing or suppressing visibility that may oppress or marginalize others and limit their access to the communication means (see Figure 2.2). Censorship may be conceived as a gate-keeping formation located on any between-system boundary, for example, between “the inner self” and “the social self,” between “the private” and “the public,” between “the hidden” and “the visi-

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Fig.2.2. Visibility and surveillance under conditions of structural censorship

ble,” between the personal and mass-mediated communication, or, as it were, on the physical border between two countries. Such an analogy with Freud’s psychotherapeutic conceptualization of censorship is perfectly justified because, as Freud argues, the inner nature of “the true psychic reality” is just as much (un)known as the reality of the “external world,” and they are both—either “by the data of consciousness” or “by the reports of our sense-organs”—only imperfectly communicated or made visible to us. Censorship results as a compromise of the struggle between the two opposing forces—showing and hiding—which tend to outwit each other. Nevertheless, a deep ideological cleavage between mental and material censorship identified already by Marx still prevails. “When government capitulates to private groups and commits speech-stifling acts, the acts are described as ‘censorship.’ When private entities commit the same acts, they are described as exercises in ‘property rights,’ ‘editorial control,’ or simply ‘business policies’ ” (Soley, 2002: ix). I do not intend to minimize the repressive power of “classical” political or state censorship, yet contemporary censorship is far more complex and goes beyond state censorship; it is manifested in a variety of subtle ways in which different institutions enforce or legitimate rules of public discourse, although they disavow their censorial nature.

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The customary view of censorship that dominated until not long ago was narrow and dogmatic because it limited it to direct interference with communication resulting in “noncommunication” (i.e., preventing something from being viewed or heard) but neglected structurally set boundaries and distortions in communication as irrelevant for the conceptualization of censorship. One reason for such a narrow conceptualization of censorship may be found in its etymology, which does not seem to include structural restraints to communication. In Latin, censeo (inf. censere, part. fut. censurus, -a, -um) stands for giving one’s opinion or judgment; assess. In Ancient Rome, censor was one of two powerful magistrates (highest public officials next to consuls) who supervised public morals and conducted the census to count and classify citizens. To count citizens, they had to define criteria for citizenship that included moral standards. It was censors’ immediate duty to censure immoral behavior, which may have had annoying political consequences for the person in question who could have been deprived of citizenship. The privileged position of censors to judge on matters of public morals reflected the general belief that censorship was no less a value and no less needed than freedom of speech—an attitude that actually prevailed even during the Enlightenment. Censorial work was not considered oppressive at that time; quite the contrary, censors were the most honorable public officers. We can find eulogies on censorship, such as that by Plato in The Republic, on the ground of the prevention of storytellers and poets like Homer and Hesiod from making “an erroneous representation [...] of the nature of gods and heroes” that young people would not be capable of understanding: Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded. (Plato, 360 BCE/1901)

Indeed, Plato was the great founder of the aristocratic idea of censorship that was resonating for more than 2,000 years. Yet Plato refused the responsibility of the authorities for the production of the “correct representations,” suggesting that the task of the “founders of a State” is to lay down the principles according to which poets should cast their tales; to make the tales is the duty of storytellers. The concept of censorship constructed in the Enlightenment retained parts of its ancient pedagogical connotation. “Everyone knows the wonderful effects of the censorship among the Romans,” Montesquieu (1752) still believed. Rousseau was no less in favor of it: “As the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the declaration of the public judgment.” Plato remained the great paragon: “Plato banished Homer from his republic and we will tolerate Molière

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in ours?” (Rousseau, 1758/1960, 1762: 116). Both Rousseau and Montesquieu saw the main beneficial role of censorship in fighting against the corruption of manners and believed that: Censors are necessary [...] in a republic, where the principle of government is virtue. We must not imagine that criminal actions only are destructive of virtue; it is destroyed also by omissions, by neglects, by a certain coolness in the love of our country, by bad examples, and by the seeds of corruption: whatever does not openly violate but elude the laws, does not subvert but weaken them, ought to fall under the inquiry and correction of the censors. (Montesquieu, 1752: book V, 19)

The Enlightenment was loud in praising Greek and Roman humanism and aristocratic republicanism but closed its eyes to the intolerance of adversary ideas. In contrast to a widespread libertarian picture of intellectual life in ancient Greece and Rome, a closer historical look reveals that suppression and prohibition of speech and writing condemned as subversive of the common good was actually a regular practice. “Athenian censorship was so extensive that a hierarchy of sanctions ranging from prohibition of public speech (banning) through denial of civil rights, exile, imprisonment, and execution was routinely invoked to suppress dangerous ideas” (Jansen, 1988: 36). Among famous victims of censorship, we find Socrates who paid with his life for “corrupting the young” and Aristotle and Euripides who fled from Athens to evade charges of impiety and died in exile. Despite the advocacy of “enlightening” forms of censorship, the Enlightenment’s liberal views on censorship substantially deviated from its former meaning in confronting the royal and ecclesiastic suppression of civil liberties and religious intolerance. The Enlightenment brought about such writers as John Locke and Voltaire, who fought for the personal right to free expression as a natural right and saw criticism as a tool of “moral censorship,” or Kant and Bentham, who significantly contributed to one of its greatest achievements—the substitution of the rule of reason for the rules of repressive censorial power. Yet the enthusiastic idealism of the Enlightenment’s writers was essentially an aristocratic doctrine—full of admiration for ancient aristocratic ideals but not at all a universal affirmation of human rights. The great harbingers of the Enlightenment did not even see any contradiction between the principle of freedom of expression and authoritative suppression of opinions contrary to—according to Locke (1689)—“those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society.” In the last instance, their defense in favor of free publication rested on moral and intellectual superiority of the elite organized in a kind of Court of Honor as conceived by Rousseau (1758/1960) in his Letter to d’Alembert. They might have fought for freedom of intellectuals to express their ideas, but at the same time they also advocated more subtle forms of non-state censorship that would set norms of public discourse and, again, differentiate between the authorized and unauthorized writings and writers.

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The most sacrosanct institutions of knowledge, academies of science, were not immune to imposing censorship, as in the famous case of the French Academy of Science vs. Mesmer in 1784 (Bensaude-Vincent, 2000: 24–25). Academies and similar institutions considered themselves the instantiation of reason, and therefore “anything or anyone unwilling to be subjected to their critical gaze [...] was automatically suspect” (Dean, 2001b: 635). Their censorship had primarily a legitimating effect: They conferred legitimacy only to those authors who deferred to internal hierarchies and demonstrated respect. Censors compared themselves with the academy—not enforcing superior authority of the crown against the writers or repressing authors’ liberty but reproducing “the basis for legitimacy in public speech, by enabling aspiring gens de lettres [...] to conform their personal comportment and speech to the deferential norms they would be expected to observe when entering literary institutions” (Brown, 2003: 238, 259). Similarly to Plato, not only censors but also some writers of that period saw censors acting in the interest of the community. Ironically, many writings of the most prominent writers of the Enlightenment advocating some “enlightening” form of censorship—such as Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Rousseau—were banned due to the state censorship laws, and the authors were forced to go into exile or to write anonymously. At the same time, in the period of the Enlightenment, the door was opened to new forms of less visible structural censorship that still exists in all societies even if they offer constitutional guarantees of personal freedom of expression and press freedom. Changes in censorship were closely related to the changes in conceptualizations and popular understandings of publicity. The Enlightenment conceptualized “publicity”—most visibly institutionalized in the press—as an instrument of reason and public control over government. However, no other resources than personal intellectual capacities were stipulated as conditions for a free use of reason, and no reasons were seen that the press, like any other power, could be used as an instrument of misrule. Until the mid-19th century, newspapers were still largely believed to have merely “ephemeral existence” unable “to continually satisfy enduring needs, unlike that of the written instruction through the book,” and the financial or business side of publication seemed irrelevant (Knies, 1857/1996: 4). As newspapers were supplied to an ever-larger readership, their influence was less and less based on the personal point of view presented in the newspapers or respect for the authors. Rather, the development of the press from an intimate “companion” to an industrial corporation took place since the mid-1800s. The metaphors of the press as “the fourth power” and “the free marketplace of ideas” that took root in that period obscured the facts that neither the “fourth power” was ever an autonomous power separated from other powers nor in “the free marketplace of ideas” everyone had an equal opportunity to make her voice heard. The commercial development of mass media has radically transformed (the meaning of) publicity. Dewey was among the first who noticed significant changes in the meaning of the concept. In contrast to Bentham’s and Kant’s ideas

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of publicity that prevailed in the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Dewey’s time, publicity was not related anymore to the core of intellectual freedom. Rather it denoted “advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the ‘featuring’ of passing incidents in a way which violates all the moving logic of continuity” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 168). As Tönnies (1923) suggested, although the power of publicity had initially grown in the press as an instrument of the liberal enlightenment, it was soon corrupted by private interests and capital.8 The powers of capital are intent not only to bring about a favorable opinion concerning their products, and unfavorable one concerning those of their competitors, but also to promote a generalized public opinion which is designed to serve their business interests, for instance, regarding a policy of protective tariffs or of free trade, favoring a political movement or party, supporting or opposing an existing government. (Tönnies, 1923: 88)

This brings us to the second reason for a rather narrow conceptualization of censorship as a direct authoritative interference with communication: to keep hidden the power that appropriated the media after they have been released from the state control—the power of capital. The first and perhaps still most comprehensive critique of commercial censorship was published by Karl Marx in the mid1800s (see Jansen, 1988: 93; Splichal, 2002: 124–128). The “structural censorship” now prevailing does not imply any direct “authoritative intervention” but rather a personal fear of being disapproved, criticized, ridiculed, belittled, discriminated, or simply unnoticed when speaking in public. The idea of silence caused by “fear of isolation” (Noelle-Neumann) is an adoption of Festinger’s (1957/1962: 31) model of cognitive dissonance, which predicts “a priori self-protective behavior,” that is, that a fear of dissonance leads to a reluctance to take action or commit oneself in order to avoid possible unpleasant consequences in the future. This “self-protective” communication is commonly named “self-censorship,” but the concept of self-censorship is misleading inasmuch as it suggests that one is censoring his or her own (communicative) action as if (a) it were an act of solitary personal decision rather than a socially constructed (actually imposed) act, and (b) other forms of censorship would involve no personal decisions on the part of the censored. The concept of self-censorship is even deceiving because it suggests that speakers willingly refrain from their opinion or action or moderate it while in fact they stand in fear of external censorship or negative sanctions. Even if the fear of sanctions were the main mechanism regulating individual opinion expression, it cannot be an idiosyncratic trait of the individual without being at the same time also characteristic of the social structure and social will (e.g., the definition of “normality” and “tolerable”). Every single act of (non-)communication, including the so-called self-censorship, is a social act if communication is con-

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ceived of as a sociocultural process—conditioned by social “externalities” such as specificities of languages, traditions, experiences, and interests—and not as “an operation as simple as the transportation of a commodity like bricks” (Park, 1939/1966: 171–172).

THE PUBLICNESS OF SILENCE Although authoritative censorial intervention in communication is aimed at silencing (a part of) interlocutors, not every silence (absence of linguistic signals) is a sign or consequence of censorship. The relation between censorship and silence is similar to that between the hidden and the visible, where not all of what is hidden may be taken as a sign of the absence of justice, although it results from inner censorial acts (i.e., hiding). Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. […] Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. (Foucault, 1976/1990: 100–101)

Generally, silence has an interactive character when participants perceive or expect communication process to take place, and it is interpreted by them as an act of communication (Jaworski, 1993: 34). In this sense, silence and speech are two extremes on the communication continuum. The master’s silence may show his disapproval of his subordinates. Such is the case when a teacher in the classroom becomes silent to restore order in it. An interesting case of communicative silence is hesitation when a person is to utter another person’s name (as if one would forgot it), which is according to Freud (1901/1938: 80) a clear sign of disparagement. Students’ silence, in contrast, may indicate their unwillingness to submit to the teacher’s authority, as in the case when no student wants to answer the teacher’s question in the class. Similar would be the case of the defendant standing mute of malice in court. Both the dominating and oppositional silences in these cases represent active interventions into communication to negotiate power, rather than consequences of censorship. The most powerful silence is that of “the mass public” with its latent, potentially visible opinions. Not all opinions have to be made visible in order to have influence. “While specific opinions may have no impact without publicity, the power of the mass public always exists as a latent force […] It is always there and capable of being mobilized to confront political leaders” (Lang & Lang, 1983: 19).

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The ambivalent nature of silence that is reflected in different dimensions (e.g., the controlling vs. submissive silence, submissive vs. resisting silence, active vs. passive silence) makes the relationship between silence and censorship tricky. Not every silence results from oppressive acts! Silence is a sign of censorship only as the absence or breakdown of communication, but as a nonverbal communication behavior it may also indicate deep affection or admiration (“making words superfluous”) or a powerful resistance (e.g., the “cultural silence” of writers and artists in some European countries who did not want to participate in the public cultural life under the Nazi-fascist occupation during the Second World War). Silence may be even threatening: “One fears that if a man is silent he will retain his aversion to an object; but reasoning upon it furnishes a safety-valve and brings satisfaction, while the object, in the mean time, pursues its way unmolested” (Hegel, 1820/2001: 253–254). Even if silence results from a censorial intervention, it carries communication by reporting what is forbidden to communicate in public; on this basis, it may also breed social (communicative) action (e.g., “alternative” or “underground” media). Like Freud’s “pathological enfeeblement of censorship,” it may help the oppressed groups to gain access to the public sphere and the media. “The stricter the domination of the censorship, the more thorough becomes the disguise, and, often enough, the more ingenious the means employed to put the reader on the track of the actual meaning” (Freud, 1900/1938: 223). However, the absence of silence is not a positive proof of free communication. Communication freedom is limited not only by attempts to obstruct communication but also by those who have ability to manipulate social relations for their own advantage. [...] They have an uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual tendencies even remotely threaten to encroach upon their control. They have developed an extraordinary facility in enlisting upon their side the inertia, prejudices and emotional partisanship of the masses by use of a technique which impedes free inquiry and expression. (Dewey, 1927/1991: 169)

Elimination of formal or legal limitations to communication does not yet provide freedom of communication; it is only its necessary condition. Removal of such limitations may create a wrong impression that intellectual freedom exists while in fact it does not, which generates “complacency in virtual enslavement.” People exercise incomplete control over persuasive communication they encounter, and they are often unaware of its implications. However, as Dewey suggested, awareness of external oppression may awaken intellectual energy that could break censorship. In terms of Roman Jakobson’s classic definitions of six linguistic functions of verbal communication, silence represents a specific form of universal speech. It obviously has a phatic function of maintaining the communication process or inter-

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rupting it without transmitting one single bit of information concerning the object. It can have an emotive function expressing a communicator’s attitude toward the object of communication (and it is usually accompanied by other nonverbal behavior expressing the same function). If the communicator’s silence indicates an aim to elicit a certain reaction from the recipients or mobilize them, it has a conative or injunctive function. Although silence is not commonly regarded as a medium of artistic expression, it certainly may be an object of aesthetic satisfaction, and thus it has a poetic or aesthetic function. Jaworski (1993: 164) compares (linguistic and visual) silence as an artistic activity with the interpersonal silence in the conversation between two interlocutors. However, because silence hardly has any referential function (it is not a conventionally defined sign of anything), it always calls for a context that helps define its “correct” meaning—the presence of the metalinguistic function performed, for example, by another form of nonverbal communication, while at the same time, silence may function metalinguistically, too, for example, when indicating the need for an explanation of what has been just said. Only when silence implies the absence, interruption, or even suspension of communication that was assumed to have taken place is it a symptom of a censorial intervention. Silence is a sign of censorship when it is imputed to a dominated group, which is not able or allowed to break the silence by its own choice. Yet even in this case, when censorship and free expression can be considered formal opposites (i.e., communication vs. noncommunication), they complement each other on a more abstract level. Gouldner (1976: 107, 126) argues that news not only “reports” but also “censors and occludes aspects of life; its silences generate a kind of ‘underprivileged’ social reality, a social reality implicitly said (by the silence) to be unworthy of attention.” Reporting in the media not only attracts and frames attention of audiences but also averts their attention from certain issues. Making things visible (as in news reporting) may imply censorship just as well as silence. In this sense, as Gouldner (1976) suggests, censorship has a similar meaning as a country’s border: It not only limits, but also constitutes “the self and its rationality,” just as a country’s border not only indicates the limit of the sovereign power, but is also constitutive for the exercising of power because power can only exist in a collectivity that legitimates it (in contrast, for example, to violence and force). What is not said contributes to the meaning of what is said—in this way, the said and the unsaid are reflexively determined.

“NEW PUBLICITY”—THE END OF PUBLICNESS? The more a system of communication is diversified and complex, the more censorial forces themselves become diversified and complex. As long as the publication of books and newspapers was essentially based on personal craft and property, censorship was institutionally personalized, too. Similarly, in ancient Rome, censors were appointed by the rulers to assess publications and ban “immoral”

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writings. From ancient Greece until the end of the Middle Ages, the roles of the censor and the censored were clearly defined and divided. The growth of communication networks gave rise to more sophisticated, quiet, indirect, informal, hidden but in a way also more effective, all-embracing, and multifaceted forms of censorship. As the Enlightenment spoiled the former relationship between the censor and the censored, the post-Enlightenment period spoiled the relationship between publicity and the public. The marketplace became the most powerful censorial institution deciding what should be made available and what not. At the same time, “new publicity” based on instrumental visibility became a powerful instrument of making certain that sufficient attention is devoted to what corporate decision makers identify as profitable. What are the strategies to confront the hidden forces of censorship? In practical terms, censorship is determined either primarily internally (by individual inner motives) or primarily externally (by group or social expectations from and pressures on individuals). On analogy, individual strategies of avoiding the barriers set by censorship can be aimed at either (a) reducing one’s needs and desires attainable through public actions, or (b) increasing one’s power relative to others. Theoretically, two opposing conclusions can be made in view of the conditions of structural censorship: (a) that “the public” in the strict sense does not and cannot exist because of the persistent presence of censorship, and (b) that actions directed to change these conditions can bring us ever closer to “the counter-factual ideal of the public.”9 Dean (2001b: 645) argues that current “Habermasohistic” democratic political theory must fail for it is focused on: revealing, outing, and uncovering what has been concealed or withheld from the public [...]: because the public can never live up [to] its promise (a failure marked by the secret), a dynamic of suspicion and surveillance (now materialized in technoculture) is installed as the next best thing.

The obsession with a permanent revelation of the hidden must fall short of the goal because we can never know whether the entire secret has been revealed. Yet why would this imply that “the public sphere cannot acknowledge [...] that the secret marks the constitutive limit of the public”? (2001: 645, 648). Why should the concept of the public (sphere) be only legitimate on condition that it could in due course materialize in practice? As I argued earlier following Gouldner, the hidden is co-determinative of the visible. In this sense, it not only limits but also constitutes publicness. Censorship cannot be abolished in social communication but only interpreted and controlled (and thus delegitimized and limited to some degree). However, censorship and forces of hiding do not undermine the very notions of publicness and the public (sphere) because they do not rest exclusively on the idea of disciplinary visibility (i.e., uncovering the hidden and making visible what is defended

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against the public[ity] by some private or hidden forces). The dynamics of suspicion and surveillance (hegemonic visibility) interacts with the dynamics of discursive visibility in rational, deliberative, or agonistic discourse. For Kant, a “public use of reason” also denoted provision of reasons for one’s judgment. Individual judgments have to be publicly presented and discussed to become more rational or objectively certain and eventually agreed on. In fact, no opinion is merely an arbitrary fiction, and it must always be presented and taken up with some knowledge. Although opinions should have no place in the sphere of science and morals where knowledge should dominate, according to Kant, the entire development of scientific knowledge is nothing but enduring refutation of erroneous hypotheses and partial explanations. Thus, if the “obsession” with a permanent revelation of the hidden delegitimized the noble idea of the public (sphere), the “obsession” with errors and inaccuracies would delegitimize science. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the prevailing concept of “publicity” has largely lost its critical spirit that it had in the age of the Enlightenment and now prevalently denotes the promotion of commodities and interests through advertising and public relations, which has nothing in common with the Benthamian surveillance of power and the Kantian public use of reason. The postEnlightenment reconceptualization of publicity is clearly reflected in the fact that the word publicity, which referred to “the state of being public or open to the knowledge of a community” in Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 and 1913, has been overshadowed by “the activity of making certain that someone or something attracts a lot of interest or attention from many people, or the attention received as a result of this activity” in Cambridge Advanced Lerner’s Dictionary and conceived of as “one of the variables that comprise the promotional mix” in Wikipedia, along with “other components of promotions [which] are advertising, sales promotion, and personal selling. [...] Publicity is closely related to public relations.” Although formerly censorship has been in a clear opposition to publicity and publicity has been actually “invented” with a view to abolish state censorship and make state secrets visible to the public, the definition of publicity in “Newspeak” equates it to what I defined as instrumental or hegemonic visibility, which by definition includes censorship. In manufacturing visibility, secrecy may be effectively used to deceive publics. There is little chance to revive the “old” notion of publicity in the everyday jargon. There is no doubt that the “new publicity” (or “the new visibility” as termed by Thompson) brought about by the new forms of mass-mediated communication became “a principal means by which social and political struggles are articulated and carried out” (Thompson, 2005: 49). Yet this is not to say that this transformation of publicity/visibility is a good one. One could propose to restore the Enlightenment meaning of censorship to legitimize the moral critique of the “new publicity,” following Marx’s (1842/1974: 55) idea that “true censorship, rooted in the very essence of freedom of the press, is criticism.” Unfortunately, such an attempt at the restoration of the original meaning of publicity would not be viable for practical reasons because “the lay public” may then equate the cri-

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tique of commercialization of the media with censorship. This is actually already happening: The critique requesting restrictions on commercial communication is rebutted by media corporations on the ground that this would be nothing but bringing in censorship. What we should do is readdress the conception of “authoritative intervention” in the definition of censorship—so that it would refer not only to the direct (politically and ideologically motivated) restraints of communication acts but also to a variety of unfavorable structural circumstances that may avert individuals and groups from speaking, make them imitate or heed opinions of others, and say things other than they may say under more favorable conditions. New and complex forms of (structural) censorship cannot undermine the importance of public reasoning as a personal need, duty, and right and as a societal need and obligation. It is usually taken for granted that freedom of thought and opinion is not an intrinsically collective exercise of freedom, and thus it does not legitimately invite public regulation. Such a belief is essentially delusive. As Kant (1786: 325) put it, “How much, and how correctly, would we think if we did not think, at the same time, in community with others?” thus emphasizing the collective nature of the personal right to use one’s reason in public. Social experience, or “putting ourselves in the position of everyone else,” in Kant’s words, plays a fundamental role in constructing personal autonomy and the public. Censorship can make the process of constructing social experience more difficult, but it certainly cannot prevent it. Censorial forces can only be limited if social communication becomes truly socialized. The critique of censorship should be complemented by the critique of “new publicity.” The task of critical theory is not merely to identify and explain the working of censorship and new publicity based on hegemonic visibility, but to formulate a critique of censorship that may help overcome the inhibition and expansion of censorship leading to undesired consequences for the individual and society. In his defense of the concept of the constitution, Kant (1781: 114) concluded that although a perfect state may never exist, the idea is not on that account the less just, which holds up this maximum as the archetype or standard of a constitution, in order to bring legislative government always nearer and nearer to the greatest possible perfection.

In a similar way, Habermas (1992: 440) conceptualized the unity of public opinion as a counterfactual entity in democratic theory that should enable the distinction between “genuine processes of public communication and those that have been subverted by power.” As both Kant and Habermas and many others claim, neither a perfect state nor a perfect public can exist, and yet critically theorizing them may bring us closer to such a counterfactual ideal.

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NOTES 1. “Who will guard the guards themselves,” a phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal leaving in the late first and early second century AD. 2. Although disciplinary visibility represents the major threat to genuine publicness, secret forms of privacy invasion infringe the personal right to privacy even more dangerously. Contemporary monitoring technologies can secretly record all computer and Internet activity of any group of users. For example, they enable a complete Internet access control and web filtering, provide information on users’ web browsing and downloading activities, instant messaging, and e-mail activities. 3. The concept of power, although widely used in social sciences, has no common definition. Castells’ (1996: 15) essentially Weberian definition that I adopt here states: “Power is that relationship between human subjects which, on the basis of production and experience, imposes the will of some subjects upon others by the potential or actual use of violence, physical or symbolic.” As Buckley (1967: 186) states, “the mechanisms involved may range from naked force, through manipulation of symbols, information, and other environmental condition, to the dispensing of conditional rewards.” In fact, this is also the concept of power used by Foucault (1982: 788), who considers power “a way in which certain actions modify others.” 4. It is difficult to denote any form of communication as strictly private in the sense that the results of interpersonal transactions are controlled entirely by the people involved and no (indirect) consequences would appear to the people not directly involved. 5. “Private” is for Nagel (1998: 14) what people keep for themselves, “the inner self”; and “public” is what I present to others, “the external self.” 6. This boundary is, however, permeable: The way I would like to be perceived socially—my “social self”—also influences, to some degree, my inner, private self and vice versa. The two selves never coincide, but they certainly correlate. The correlation may be either positive (the two selves being consonant) or negative (denoting dissonance), which depends on the kind of internal censorship that takes place in the construction of one’s “social self.” As Mead (1934/1962: 69) suggested, “We are, especially through the use of the vocal gestures, continually arousing in ourselves the responses which we call out in other persons, so that we are taking the attitudes of the other persons into our own conduct” (see also Nagel, 1998: 7). 7. As Foucault suggests (1982: 794), “every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal.” 8. Tönnies (1923: 98) also quoted the American sociologist Edward A. Ross, who maintained that “the clandestine prostitution of the newspaper to the business interests has never been so general.” 9. I assume that there is no need for a theoretical critique of the “trivial” form of censorship as a direct authoritative intervention, although this assumption might appear unjustified in the face of recent developments in many countries.

3

Reflexive Publicness: Rationality and Surveillance

At least one thing should be clear after the discussion of the contradictory nature of visibility—namely, that not just any kind of visibility is compatible with the idea of reflexive publicness. Although this “negative definition” of publicness brings us closer to its “positive definition,” it does not yet provide one. The reason is simple and, for the social sciences, notorious: It does not provide one but many different and even divergent definitions derived from different normativetheoretical assumptions and based on different aspects of empirical evidence. The disagreements are not new; they can be traced back at least to the dispute on the nature of “the public” and its intellectual capacities between Dewey and Lippmann in the 1920s, of which I wrote in my book on public opinion (Splichal, 1999), or—in a broader sense—even to the earliest conceptualization of publicness. They mainly refer to the (a) nature, composition, and (minimum) size of the public; (b) conditions needed to make public opinion effective; (c) subject matter to which the public relates, and its importance (e.g., in terms of consequences); and (d) kind of discourse required for and/or created by the public use of reason. The differences related to the nature and (non)inclusiveness of discourse in the formation of public opinion generated two profound abysses: first—in the 1920s and 1930s already—between the “substantive theories” of opinion of the public emphasizing the constitutive role of the public in the formation of public opinion through a discursive process named “secondary reciprocity” by Park and “adjective theories” conceptualizing public opinion as a simple aggregate of solitary individual opinions; and second—since 1970s—between the theories focused on the nature of discourse and discursive rules in the public sphere (e.g., rational vs. agonistic, which is discussed in the second part of this chapter) and 47

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more radical theories (e.g., C.W. Mills, N. Fraser) emphasizing the importance of the efficacy of public opinion and its institutional infrastructure from the oldtime coffee houses to modern media. The issue of efficacy of public opinion is also highly controversial in itself: Whereas early normative theories of public opinion were clear about the need of public opinion to control political authorities, later conceptualizations defined its control in much broader terms of “social control.” It is this point I discuss first.

RATIONALITY AND SURVEILLANCE IN THE CLASSICAL PUBLIC OPINION TRADITION Public opinion represents the form of materialization of publicness that attracted—particularly in the 20th century—more scholarly attention than any other phenomenon of publicness. Most of that attention was devoted to public opinion research and polling. The dominant streams of thought have been established with widely recognized representatives. On the one hand, particularly, although not exclusively, the early normative-political public opinion theories proceeded from the notion of “the public” as a particular social category resulting from a rational-critical discourse. The public was seen as the most important constitutive momentum of public opinion, which therefore should always be understood as the “opinion of the public.” With Rousseau and particularly Bentham, the concept of “the public” as a sort of popular tribunal expressing opinions and representing the general will gained prominence in political-philosophical discourses. The concept of the public was also essential for theorizations of public opinion in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which public opinion was considered a process by which individuals incorporated into the public expressed approval or disapproval of any authoritative actions or abstentions from them. Public opinion research represents an often-disputed field of study in which, as Mills (1959/2000: 52) put it, “the thinness of the results is matched only by the elaboration of the methods and the care employed,” and abstracted empiricism is concentrated on the kind of behavior readily amenable to statistical investigations. By ignoring social relations among individuals and groups, this kind of research tends to reduce social sciences to “nothing more than ‘aggregate psychology’ ” (Coleman, 1964: 88–89). The development of polling made things worse, although Philip Converse (1987: S13) believed that “the firm establishment of a public opinion polling industry […] homogenized the definition and stabilized it for foreseeable future.” The facts rather proved the contrary: Despite considerable money and attention devoted to public opinion polling, there are “few theoretical perspectives to guide research on the role of public sentiment in the political process. Perhaps this lack is not so surprising, given that even consistent definitions of the concept ‘public opinion’ are missing” (Glynn and McLeod, 1984: 43).

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In the early 1920s, Walter Lippmann (1922/1998: 253) was disappointed to find no coherent literature on public opinion, and he complained that “the existence of the force called Public Opinion is in the main taken for granted” despite the common belief that public opinion was “the prime mover in democracies.” He was not the first to complain about the state of the art in the field. Contradictions in conceptualizations and identity of public opinion appeared already since the late 18th century. Systematic efforts to (re)consolidate the concept of public opinion and (re)discover its discrete empirical referents only appear in the sociological thought of the 20th century, but the results of these efforts were again controversial. To some degree at least, Lippmann was mistaken. Notable publications on publicity, public opinion, and the public sphere appeared at least since the 18th century. Seminal works were published before the 20th century by Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Albert Venn Dicey, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave LeBon, to name just the most inspiring authors, followed in the beginning of the 20th century by the Chicago School sociologists in the United States and Wilhelm Bauer and Ferdinand Tönnies in Germany (Splichal, 1999). The highest quality attributed to public opinion by this pleiad of thinkers was, to paraphrase Kurt Lang (2003: 21), that “public opinion develops out of discourse on all levels—from the streets to the highest councils of government. It contributes to the enlightenment through which people gradually discover what is truly in their common interest” (italics added). In contrast, the second stream separated the concept of public opinion from that of the public and “liberated” it of rationality. Early normative-political theories of public opinion may be defined as substantive, in contrast to what Francis G. Wilson (1962) later named adjective theories. In adjective theories, the term public is used as an adjective denoting the specific quality of an (individual or collective) opinion. In contrast, the substantive conceptualization of public opinion as “opinion of the public” stresses a firm, authoritative singleness of “the public” as a (universal) collective subject expressing the public opinion—as opposed to the irrational, emotional, and even violent behavior of its antonyms—the crowd and the mass. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1980/1993: 227) proclaimed the “rational” conceptualization of public opinion attributed, in particular, to Jürgen Habermas, “elitist” because it “privileged”—in contrast to her spiral of silence theory—those in power and intellectuals capable of taking part in rational discourse against common citizens who are largely not able to participate in this process. She suggested that theories of public opinion assuming that opinion formation is a “rational process” are not able to explain “the pressure that public opinion must exert if it is to have any influence on the government and the citizens,” whereas “[i]f public opinion is viewed as social control, its power is easy to explain.” NoelleNeumann was not clear in her critique if she had in mind “instrumental rationality” or “communicative rationality”—a distinction clearly defined by Habermas—in the formation of public opinion or perhaps even both. When briefly referring to Robert E. Park, a representative of the “rationalistic”

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approach, Noelle-Neumann cited “an American monograph,” claiming that the work on the dissertation on public opinion left Park exhausted and disappointed. She warned: “Even today, a similar fate probably awaits authors who try to equate public opinion and rationality” (Noelle-Neumann, 1980/1993: 223). The obvious moral of Park’s story should be, “Don’t waste your time with rational public opinion!” (Noelle-Neumann, 1980/1993: 223). Could the conceptualization of public opinion as social control indeed compensate for the conceptual and explanatory deficiencies of “rational public opinion”? Because there may be no doubt that both hegemonic and discursive visibility, surveillance, as well as rational discourse are parts of public opinion processes—both concepts imply a specific form of control and a specific form of rationality (either prevalently “formal-procedural” or “substantive” in the Weberian dichotomy)—the question of rationality in the definition of public opinion is primarily a matter of normative concern. According to Weber, rationalization is a macrohistorical process that no society can evade. Thus, “derationalization” of public opinion suggested by Noelle-Neumann would represent a historical regression, whereas in fact, as Weber would argue, public opinion process is increasingly characterized by instrumental rationalization. Noelle-Neumann’s conclusion is contradictory because “it is one thing to recognize that rational ideals have not been attained. […] It is quite another to place the irrational aspects of behavior at the center of politics and to behave as if the truth or falsity of principles is irrelevant” (Wilson, 1962: 147). The problem is in a way analogous to the relationship between the principles of publicness and justice, which Kant exemplified with dueling. If public opinion enforced a person on whom an insult was inflicted to obtain satisfaction by a duel rather than in a court of justice (i.e., “rationally”) and one of the dueling parties is killed, this cannot be called murder because the duel took place publicly and with the consent of both parties. However, dueling clearly contradicts the categorical imperative of penal justice, that the killing of any person contrary to the law must be punished with death, and the transcendental formula of public justice (Kant, 1795/1983: 135). Kant’s conclusion was that such an empirical “regulation” of obtaining satisfaction in dueling was still barbarous and incomplete, and it should have been changed according to the two normative principles of publicness and justice that thus should remain in force. The contradiction between the normative and experiential meanings of the public and public opinion was also the core of Park’s “disappointment”: What is usually called a public is a kind of group which stands for the most part at the same stage of awareness-development as the crowd. Thus, socalled public opinion is generally nothing more than a naive collective impulse which can be manipulated by catchwords. Modern journalism, which is supposed to instruct and direct public opinion by reporting and discussing events, usually turns out to be simply a mechanism for controlling collective attention. (Park, 1904/1972: 57)

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This is not to say, however, that the normative concepts should be discarded altogether. The difference between the two conceptualizations of public opinion is not one between rationality and controllability (influence), but rather in the origin and aim of control. It is essentially a consequence of two different approaches to public opinion: The “instrumental” approach is focused on the forces in the modern world that shape and restrain opinions and actions of individuals, whereas the “substantive” conceptualization is focused on the ways and forms of action that individuals are using to get control over their environment. The former concentrates on different forms of group control over its members to reduce divergences among them, whereas the latter stresses originality, the recognition of individuality, and social change. The latter approach is particularly characteristic of Tönnies’ theorization of public opinion and symbolic interactionism of Mead and Dewey, on which the co-orientational approach to public opinion is based. Social Control By definition, any institutionalized human activity implies social control (Berger & Luckmann, 1969: 59). It may include the entire range from a monopoly (absolute control by a single agent) to the weakest and most probabilistic forms (i.e., any kind of purposive influence on behavior, however insignificant), but it can never exclude rationality. Institutionalized forms of communications effectively performed the function of social control since the early postal networks in ancient Persian, Roman, and Chinese empires. As any other form of social will, such as law and religion, public opinion includes, according to Tönnies (1922), an important dimension of social control. Common will gives to all forms of collective opinions an obligatory character— they only may differ in the degree to which they are actually binding on the whole community or society (e.g., forms of organic will more than forms of reflective will). Sumner (1997: 5) identifies two general problems in the concept of “social control” as developed since the early 1900s, which may be thus considered responsible for major differences in its conceptualizations: (a) the nature of control (e.g., integrative vs. conflict-generating forces; local vs. global control), and (b) the nature of the social (e.g., consensual and collaborative vs. hegemonic control; progressive vs. conservative, intrinsic vs. extrinsic control). The social character of “control” was put on the political agenda by people in territories where the means of production, the means of “legitimate” violence, and the means of mass communication were in the hands of elites and specialists […] whose power derived in one way or another from the violent suppression of alternative claims on those resources. (Sumner, 1997: 8)

The two concepts of social control—consensual-integrative versus hegemonic— were clearly distinguished already by Bentham. On the one hand, he was concerned with the government’s permanent search for opportunities to promote sin-

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ister, partial interests. He was the first to elaborate the idea of control by public opinion as the central part of his defense of representative democracy, which he considered the only system that may truly serve the public interest and prevent the misuse of power. According to Bentham, the publicness of all actions and discussions in political assembly should enable an efficient control by the “Public Opinion Tribunal” over the elected representatives to prevent them from the misrule, together with four other political reforms required: regular meetings of parliaments, virtually universal suffrage, equal suffrage, and secrecy of suffrage. On the other hand, in the design of his famed Panopticon, Bentham focused on how to bring large numbers of people under permanent hidden surveillance by the few, which makes the inmates of Panopticon only suspect, but be assured, that whatever they do is known, even though that should not be the case. The Panopticon surveillance is oppressive in the sense that it enables an individual or a group to control others and force them to act against their will. Surveillance by publicity, however, does not need to assure anyone of surveillance because it is clearly visible, and those who are exposed to public surveillance take an active part in publicity. The parliamentary control is also a medium through which knowledge-based mastery, emancipation, and freedom can be achieved. Generally, Bentham’s principle of publicity is an exemplification of the idea of benign control as canonized in English utilitarianism with the formula “inquiry, legislation, execution, inspection and report.” Bentham’s conceptualization of the relationship between publicity and surveillance reveals that the nature and forms of social rationality and surveillance are historically and culturally specific. By the end of the 19th century, a metamorphosis of Bentham’s idea of public opinion began. Although it became widespread even among some critical theorists (e.g., in the Chicago School), the notion of publicity was radically reconceptualized by emphasizing its dimension of hegemonic control, which developed into the dominant operational understanding of public opinion in the 20th century. Whereas Bentham primarily saw the function of publicity in enabling the public opinion tribunal to (rationally) sanction political representatives who would fail to promote the public interest, the new version of the rule of publicity developed in sociology, and social psychology has been redirected to focus on “how public opinion bears on a man as member of society, rather than as its agent or spokesman” (Ross, 1901/1969: 97n). The new conceptualization did not stress the impelling power of public opinion to control the rulers but rather its power to discipline the people—preventing them from dissenting behavior while excluding them from an active participation in forming public opinion. The normative idea of bringing the government under control of the public through publicity was abandoned altogether. Publicity was seen primarily as a disciplinary instrument coercing general population to conform beyond any class division. The “organ of the public”—the press—once designed, theoretically at least, to control the mightiest has been conceptually and practically transformed into an instrument of producing conformity through socialization.

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We are come to a time when ordinary men are scarcely aware of the coercion of public opinion, so used are they to follow it. They cannot dream of aught but acquiescence in an unmistakable edict of the mass. It is not so much the dread of what an angry public may do that disarms the modern American, as it is sheer inability to stand unmoved in the rush of totally hostile comment, to endure a life perpetually at variance with the conscience and feeling of those about him. (Ross, 1901/1969: 105)

Ross’ idea that social control should limit deviant behavior and ensure social order is a replica of Locke’s (1690: book 2, chapter 28, § 12) persuasive discussion of “the punishments due from the laws of the commonwealth” and much closer to the kind of the order Bentham (1787/1995) designed in his “inspection house”— aimed at bringing large numbers of people under permanent surveillance and making them a permanent object but never the subject of control—rather than to his design of democratic control over the parliament. This was seen, however, by some authors as the major contribution to the development of a valid public opinion theory. Noelle-Neumann (1991: 257), for example, insisted that “we will make no progress toward a theory of public opinion if we do not adopt a completely different concept of public opinion [from those relating it to the processes of government].” Her suggestion (1980/1993: 229) that the main characteristic of public opinion is that everybody is pressured toward social conformity by public opinion utterly dilutes the concept of public opinion because, as V. O. Key (1961/1967: 543) emphasized much earlier, it does not make any sense to think of public opinion if everyone is controlled and because, as Mill (1861/2001: 129–130) argued a century before Key: It is a very superficial view of the utility of public opinion to suppose that it does good only when it succeeds in enforcing a servile conformity to itself. To be under the eyes of others—to have to defend oneself to others—is never more important than to those who act in opposition to the opinion of others, for it obliges them to have sure ground of their own. Nothing has so steadying an influence as working against pressure.

Questions—inherently political—of the nature and purpose of public opinion formation, and of who and/or what is controlled by whom in this process are fundamental for the concept of public opinion. However, “social control” and “rational discussion” are not mutually exclusive, and neither of them exhausts the meaning of the concept “public opinion.” If we analyze the development of public opinion and public sphere, the vital questions arise precisely at the rupture between (hegemonic) “control” and (collaborative) “rational discourse.” Each individual act of opinion formation comprises both elements of control of environment and rational discourse. However, there are significant differences between forms of social control in terms of the level of hegemonic or associative

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control involved. If any form of social control were compatible with public opinion, the concept of public opinion would be an empty concept. The junction between institutionalized (political) decision-making processes and informal debates in the political public sphere could shed some additional light on the problem of the universality of public opinion processes. The former is supposed to be conducted according to the principle of rationality, whereas the latter is endowed with a less binding form of discourse aimed to monitor decision-making processes and influence its agenda. In this relation, it is the institutional part that also has the capacity to regulate channels of communication across the boundaries between the public sphere and decision-making systems. At the periphery of the political system, the public sphere is rooted in networks for wild flows of messages—news, reports, commentaries, talks, scenes and images, and shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, or entertaining content. These published opinions originate from various types of actors—politicians and political parties, lobbyists and pressure groups, or actors of civil society. They are selected and shaped by massmedia professionals and received by broad and overlapping audiences, camps, subcultures, and so on. From the spectrum of published political opinions, we can distinguish, as polled opinion, the measured aggregate of pro or con attitudes to controversial public issues as they tacitly take shape within weak publics. These attitudes are influenced by everyday talk in the informal settings or episodic publics of civil society at least as much as they are by paying attention to print or electronic media. (Habermas, 2006: 415–416)

We may think of the “wild flows of messages” in the public sphere as “neighborhood storytelling,” which Kim and Ball-Rokeach (2006: 177) define as “a generic process of constructing and reconstructing discourse about community identity, issues, and action strategies.” Neighborhood storytelling can take any form; its only limitation is that it has to be about the local community—it has to supply relevant issues, necessary information, and specifying interpretations. If storytelling is not about narrow issues of neighborhood or local community but about broader politically relevant issues of a city, a nation, or even the world, we could see it as “cosmopolitan storytelling” among fellow citizens who meet, often as strangers, in a formal or informal context and discuss shared concerns. The difference is in the storytelling “referent” but not necessarily in the nature of discourse. This perspective of sharing concerns and views was actually introduced in the conceptualizations of public opinion at the beginning of the 20th century (e.g., Tönnies, Dewey). Exchanging opinions, even in private, is positively related to civic engagement and political participation, including voting—which eventually secures the influence of public opinion over decision makers. Chaffee (1972) pioneered in arguing that the more people talk about the information they get from the media,

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the more likely the mass-mediated information is to influence people’s (voting) behaviors. A number of recent empirical studies report findings in support of the normative theory of political discourse, demonstrating that political discussion stimulates various types of political participation (e.g., Kwak et al., 2005). The interactions that publicness allows for are also potentially rich in persuasive power. In the process of public opinion, public expression of opinion is always correlated with individual opinion formation. As Kant argued, not only is opinion likely to become more rational if put to a publicness test; without the freedom of public presentation of ideas, personal freedom of thought (i.e., thinking in private) would be severely restricted, too.

PUBLIC DISCOURSE: COOPERATION VERSUS ANTAGONISM Scholars of the late 18th and 19th centuries acknowledged that the invention of printing introduced substantial changes in the way people (inter)act socially, including the emergence of the public (sphere), which has originated in its separation from the sphere of public power. The rise of printing initiated major debates not only on freedom of expression and publication, but also on the nature and significance of human and social communication, and—in particular—the nature of publicness and public opinion. Even though elements of publicness and public opinion can be found in ancient Greece and Rome, and most likely in other ancient cultures, the public (and the public sphere) in the contemporary (strict) sense originated in its separation from the sphere of public power in 17thand 18th-century Europe. The rational dimension of publicness and the public sphere was essential in its critical conceptualization. “Elitism” of philosophers—from Bentham and Kant to Habermas and Rawls—who laid theoretical foundations of publicness providing for the “public use of reason” (Kant) invites rather than hinders questioning the discrepancy between the universal norm of publicness and its restricted social basis in any given historical-empirical context. Like freedom and suppression, or wealth and poverty, publicness has always empirically coexisted with obscurity (i.e., as a privilege of definite social classes and individuals) and hardly ever as the “privilege” of the human mind, as a universal right. If publicness is not defined as simply a reflection of what is commonly visible to the people at large, this may indeed be considered a kind of “elitism.” Yet it is exactly this “elitism” that has a critical bearing because it opens the space for human action aimed at empowering individuals until then deprived of the possibility to engage in the public sphere. In public opinion, different forms of (public) communication coexist rather than exclude each other. However, as Mill (1861/2001: 10) argued, it was not until “the newspaper press, the real equivalent, though not in all respects an adequate one, of the Pnyx and the Forum”1 had emerged that the “physical condi-

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tions for the formation and propagation of a public opinion” have been established, and the public as “a purely spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental” came into existence (Tarde, 1969: 277). Reading newspapers creates individuals’ “simultaneous conviction or passion and in their awareness of sharing at the same time an idea or a wish with a great number of other men” regardless of his or her specific location (Tarde, 1969: 278). Nevertheless, private conversations in which individuals discuss and interpret news that newspapers provide are no less important. “The newspaper has thus finished the age-old work that conversation began [and] correspondence extended […]—the fusion of personal opinions into local opinions, and this into national and world opinion” (Tarde, 1969: 318). On the one hand, the press “unifies and invigorates conversations, it standardized them in space and diversified them in time”; on the other hand, it helps to cultivate conversation from mere gossip. From Tarde’s Imitation to Mead’s “Generalized Other” What forms of communication help to constitute the public, how they inform public opinion, and what is the dominant type of discourse in the public sphere is a matter of a constant, the widest possible scholarly disagreement since Tarde’s inventive theory of conversation as imitation. It should also be stated, however, that not so seldom, the issue of the kind of discourse needed for the public (sphere) to exist is not even raised. This is not only typical of operational approaches ascending since 1930s, which tend to reduce public opinion to opinion polling, but even of theories grounded in systematic analysis. When discussing the normative legitimacy and political efficacy of public opinion, and the questions of who and how to communicate with in the public sphere, for example, Nancy Fraser (2007: 24) emphasizes the need of critical theory to “envision new transnational public powers, which can be made accountable to new democratic transnational circuits of public opinion” in the era of postnational constellation. Although these questions obviously call for the revision of the classical state-framed conceptualization of actors in the public sphere, the question of what kind of discourse—if any at all—could bring public sphere theory close to “its original promise to contribute to struggles for emancipation,” is not even mentioned, as if neither legitimacy nor efficacy of public opinion depended on the specific qualities of “public discourse,” such as rationality, interactivity, empathy, reciprocity, or argumentation. It is precisely these questions, however, that have marked the dominant theories of publicness in the last century. For Tarde (1969: 300), the entirely new phenomenon was the public rather than public opinion as “a momentary, more or less logical cluster of judgments which, responding to current problems, is reproduced many times over in people of the same country, at the same time, in the same society.” Tarde considered the public a product of “mutual adaptation” between the newspaper and its readers,

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in which the reader selects “his” paper and the paper selects readers it tends to address. The public could not have existed before the press emerged and enabled its readers to be “aware of the similarity of his judgments with those of others. […] The transformation of an individual opinion into a social opinion, into Opinion, is due to public discourse in classical times and in the Middle Ages, to the press of our own time, and at all times, most particularly, to private conversations.” In other words, interpersonal conversation always existed as a constituent part and mover of public opinion, but its role varied with regard to other factors, and the media certainly modified it to a great extent. Hence, contrary to the phenomenon of the public, there is nothing specific for Tarde (1969: 300) in the formation of (public) opinion. Conversation is “the strongest agent of imitation, of the propagation of sentiments, ideas, and modes of action” (Tarde, 1969: 308), and so is the press. Both forms of communication are specific instances of the process of imitation, which Tarde defined, along with opposition and innovation, as universal sociological principles. According to Tarde, invention results from oppositions that appear when “harmonious things […] by multiplying, come into conflict with one another” (Tarde, 1969: 144). There are three principal forms of opposition: (a) war in the sphere of politics, (b) competition in economy, and (c) private and public verbal discussion (Tarde, 1898/2000: 63). Any invention, including a new opinion, needs imitation to become widespread, generalized, and social in a genuine sense. Imitation, Tarde believes, is central to the human condition. How effective imitation is in a society and beyond its borders depends on how compatible the adoption of an imitation is with the receiving environment. In the case of public opinion, the need of imitation of dominant opinions by individuals becomes stronger with the expansion of the public, which has become more influential. In contrast to Tarde, who focused on gradualism, Tönnies (1922: 220) differentiates between the opposing forms of communication established in the Gemeinschaft and Geselleschaft types of social structure. The difference between community and society has been first and foremost constituted by writing; writing marks the transition from a primeval, classless human community to civilization and class society for Marx and Engels in their Manifesto. In Gemeinschaft (community), “traditional opinions,” such as beliefs and dogmas, are transmitted primarily from the older to the younger generation and from higher to lower social strata. In Geselleschaft (society), however, tradition and authority “from upside down” are losing power and give way to verifiable reason and critique in society. The communication of opinions aimed at convincing others is addressed to the very opinion of the addressee or reader. “It offers reasons which are supposed to persuade him but which may be checked and discarded, and appeals to his feelings which may change his minds accordingly” (Tönnies, 1922: 92). The rationality of discourse among the members of the public was further elaborated by Robert E. Park. Tarde’s ideas influenced Park to adopt and expand his distinction between the crowd and the public based on the concept of opposi-

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tion. Park (1904/1972: 57) conceptualized the public as a specific social group (opposite to the crowd) in which “discussion among individuals who assume opposing positions […] is based upon the presentation of facts.” Essential for the public is the process of reciprocity between different interests. Although differences between them are preserved, one side always presumes the existence of the opposite one, and neither of them would be the same without the existence of the other. The process of adaptation through differentiation in the public is similar to that in political life (interaction between opposing political parties) and economy (reciprocal relationship between the buyer and seller). Individuals can only enter the public if they are able to not only feel and empathize with others (as in crowd) but also think and reason with others. In addition, Park emphasized that the public expresses criticism, which is a consequence of the fact that opinions are always divided. If criticism disappeared, the public would cease to exist. George Herbert Mead complemented Tarde’s and Park’s ideas of opposition/division among (public) interlocutors with the need of a mutual cognitive role taking. He perceived the primary aspect of human intelligence to be the cognitive capacity of the individual “to put himself to some degree in the experiential places of, or to take the attitudes of, the other individuals belonging to that society” (Mead, 1934/1962: 300). By reporting and commenting on significant social situations, public communication—from ancient Greek tragedy to modern mass media—serves the function of enabling individuals to “enter into the attitude and experience of other persons” and to take attitudes of “a generalized other”—the community. The social ideal conceived of by Mead (1934/1962: 310) would be “the attainment of a universal human society in which all human individuals would possess a perfected social intelligence, […] such that the meanings of any one individual’s acts or gestures […] would be the same for any other individual whatever who responded to them.” This, however, does not imply that no conflicts exist in the historical process of social integration based on the growing interdependence of human individuals that social evolution brought about. On the contrary, as Mead (1934/1962: 303) argues, social antagonism and social cooperation, conflict and consensus are just two classes of the same “fundamental socio-physiological impulses or behavior tendencies which are common to all human individuals.” Mead’s ideas profoundly influenced 20th-century theorizations of public opinion as a process of coordination, control, and cooperation among individuals, groups, and society as a whole. Many authors, particularly those defending deliberative democracy, took Mead’s ideas as the logical basis of the attainment of consensus in an ideal deliberative situation. “The only reasonable equivalent of ‘mind’ in the individual organism that we can think of as an essential in the social organism can be supplied through consensus,” Wirth (1948: 4) believed.

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The Ideal Speech Situation The symbolic interactionist tradition and its emphasis on empathy also reappeared—without its antagonistic dimension—in Habermas’ conceptualization of the public. “Citizens behave like a public when they can discuss issues of common interest without pressure, i.e., assured that they can freely gather and assemble, and freely express and publish their opinions” (Habermas, 1962/1995: 293). Habermas defines the public as a grouping of politically equal citizens participating in free public discussion, freed from any conflict of interest—because they left their private interests in the private sphere—and, therefore, leading to consensus. Despite its counterfactuality, the consensus should be normatively considered attainable for otherwise “communicative action”-oriented toward reaching understanding and consensus would degenerate into “strategic action” aimed at domination over a (rational) opponent with competing interests. Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice; and this should include mutual criticism of the appropriateness of the languages in terms of which situations and needs are interpreted. (Habermas, 1995: 117)

John Rawls, like Habermas, conceptualizes consensus resulting from rational discourse as a means to provide a justification for political and moral norms in his theory of public reasoning. According to Rawls (1997: 766), public reason is “public” in three ways: “as the reason of free and equal citizens, it is the reason of the public; its subject is the public good concerning questions of fundamental political justice, which questions are of two kinds, constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice; and its nature and content are public, being expressed in public reasoning by a family of reasonable conceptions of political justice reasonably thought to satisfy the criterion of reciprocity.” In contrast to Habermas, and similarly to Tönnies and Lippmann, Rawls (1997: 768) applies the idea of public reasoning only to political discussions of fundamental questions in “the public political forum,” which consists of three categories of the most qualified political actors: (a) judges (especially the judges of a supreme court) justifying their decisions; (b) government officials, especially chief executives and legislators; and (c) candidates for public office and their campaign managers. A different but supplementary function is attributed by Rawls to “the background culture” or “culture of civil society” of a variety of civic associations, including mass media. “Citizens fulfill their duty of civility and

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support the idea of public reason by doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty, like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty” (Rawls, 1997: 769). An ideal speech situation as conceived of by Habermas or Rawls—in either interpersonal or mass-mediated communication—was clearly considered unfeasible in a modern political context already by Tönnies, who argued that opinions are determined by interests: Identical opinions often indicate identical benefits, interests, and life situations, and opinion struggles largely demonstrate fights between social strata and classes (Tönnies, 1922: 187). Tönnies even went on to suggest that, because of a different quality of “organs and means of perception,” consensus might be easier achieved among less educated masses than better educated elites, where members compete for power and, therefore, more often disagree. For Tönnies, the struggle of opinions taking place in the public arena is not so much a struggle inside the formation of public opinion where only “the chosen” can participate. Rather, it is a struggle for public opinion—for individuals to adopt a publicly expressed opinion (and further disseminate it) as their own opinion. The struggle is carried on primarily by political parties and other powerful actors, whereas the public observes it like theatre-goers, able to see only one side of a scene from an elevated box. Newspapers are not the organs of public opinion but rather of political parties, which systematically influence them; thus, their presentation of events and opinions is often one-sided. The “solution” proposed by Lippmann (1922/1998: 32; Splichal, 1999: 117), who compared “the phantom public” with “a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake,” was to replace political parties by expert “insiders” to rationalize public opinion: “public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press, as is the case today.” The main problem with the idea of unforced consensus, either societal consensus at large or among actors of the “strong” public—which could be achieved in an “ideal” public deliberation by somehow bracketing actors’ particularistic interests and inequalities—is that it cannot accommodate for the existing antagonisms in society between individuals and groups with differing interests, and thus potentially irreducible disagreements, which already had been a matter of G. H. Mead’s concern. Contemporary radical-pluralist critics of this model follow Ferdinand Tönnies in claiming that it is impossible to remove actors’ interest as well as differences and inequalities between them from the actual deliberation. Rather, what is needed is to recognize them and make them “visible” because only after they are recognized and scrutinized, power relations be modified and relationships democratized. Between Cooperation and Antagonism Chantal Mouffe, a prominent opponent of Habermas’ model of communicative rationality, reconsiders Tarde’s dialectics of competition, which, according to

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Tarde (1898/2000: 59), tends toward either monopoly or association of competitors—“just as war leads to a crushing of the vanquished, or to the conclusion of fair treaty with him.” In fact, Mouffe follows Tarde’s (1898/2000: 60) conclusion that “competition only resolves itself temporarily into association and it may reappear again, out of association, in the form or rivalries between associations, corporations, syndicates, and so on.” Yet she does not seem to share Tarde’s (1898/2000: 60) belief that “the underlying condition and raison d’être of this enlargement of competition is the enlargement of association” (italics added). According to Mouffe (1999: 751), “the obstacles to the realization of the ideal speech situation are ontological. Indeed, the impediments to the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all on matters of common concern is a conceptual impossibility because, without those so-called impediments, no communication, no deliberation could ever take place.” As Lyotard (1979: 106) argues against Habermas, neither universally valid linguistic rules exist (which would be the necessary condition to reach consensus in a rational discourse) nor can consensus be the purpose of dialogue. On the contrary, as Mouffe suggests, passions and confrontations—as opposed to rationality and cooperation—do not jeopardize democracy but could rather promote it. Only when “we accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power and that always entails some form of exclusion, we can begin to envisage the nature of a democratic public sphere in a different way” (Mouffe, 1999: 756). This would suggest that theory of deliberative democracy should be founded on a nonconsensual basis that allows for antagonisms, where the (coercive) majority rule rather than the (noncoercive) consensus is taken for the decision rule. A reasonable decision process in a political assembly, as it has been suggested already by Bentham, should combine majority rule with sufficient time for the presentation of arguments in favor of particular solutions. In the case of a substantial difference between what a representative would consider the right decision and the will of his constituents, Bentham (1830/1983) argued, the duty of a representative in the assembly would be to publicly argue for his proposal; and “after speaking in support of an arrangement, which in the opinion of his Constituents, is contrary to their particular interest, he gives his vote against that same arrangement. […] By his speech, his duty to the public is fulfilled; by his vote, his duty to his Constituents.” The fairness of that procedure is based on the fact that all voters and all alternatives are treated equally. Yet the normative condition of an equal treatment of all alternatives presupposes the possibility of an unhindered deliberation that could eventually bring about consensus, which would only be possible if irreducibly different “alternatives” never existed. Unfortunately, this is not commonly the case. Although human values and interests are not fixed, and thus they may be changed, they are also socially/historically constructed/determined, and thus they may be different between social groups and societies to the level of temporary irrefutability (but “temporality” may be of a rather long duration; e.g. for one generation or more). Dryzek (1990: 16–19) discusses three possible solutions to the problem of plurali-

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ty of ultimate (temporarily) irreconcilable differences to “adapt” them into the framework of Habermas’ communicative rationality. Differences across a variety of organizational and contextual characteristics may be profound and perhaps ineliminable, but nevertheless “debates among partisans are not only possible but also more or less communicatively rational” (Dryzek, 1990: 19). “Local arbitrariness,” as the simplest solution to overcome such differences, would limit the possibility of reaching a consensus to “particular traditions or ways of life,” which, however, would “create” an overflow of particularistic public spheres. As Dryzek admits, this solution is not very helpful. It actually does not seem to be a solution at all. Not only would transnationalization of public debates hardly be possible, but particularism in general entails exclusiveness in terms of interest and access, which could push the lower limit of the size of “local arbitrariness” to any group of two. Consequently, this “solution” would limit public discourse to identically constructed actors, and thus a priori exclude divergent interests, as Rawls suggested with his qualified political actors, but this substantially limits the moral power of the normative idea of consensus. Another possible but hardly acceptable solution mentioned by Dryzek is the limitation of “communicative rationality” to fundamental procedural criteria, which has been, as Dryzek underlines, advanced by Habermas himself. In fact, we can find the idea to limit the topic of discussions of “the general public” to “the principles of procedure,” which would thus become the only continuous action of public opinion, already in Lippmann’s work (1922/1998: 400). The preferred option suggested by Dryzek is a “communicatively rationalized consensus or compromise,” which can be achieved despite the absence of “a shared commitment to the ultimate reasons why it is desirable,” if it is rooted in the intersubjective understanding of competent actors who are able to recognize that “consensus on what is desirable is possible.” A weaker form of consensus resting on different but reasonable reasons may still preserve democratic legitimacy of the procedure. Essentially, Dryzek shares Mouffe’s argument that the orthodox deliberative model is unable to recognize the link between power and legitimacy. Consequently, it only can see the possibility of rational argumentation if the power is eliminated, and only then can legitimacy be grounded on pure rationality (Mouffe, 1999). Mouffe (1999: 753) argues that “(a) if any power has been able to impose itself, it is because it has been recognized as legitimate in some quarters; and (b) if legitimacy is not based in an aprioristic ground, it is because it is based in some form of successful power.” Similarly to Dryzek, she draws on Foucault to emphasis discursive confrontation. Mouffe’s model resumes Tarde’s opposition between association and monopoly, and Mead’s (1934/1962: 304) idea of “the ultimate basis of societies” resulting from two fundamental tendencies of human behavior: “those which lead to social cooperation, and those which lead to social antagonism among individuals.” The complexity of social organization that is increasing throughout the history implies an ever-greater functional differentiation among the parts constituting society, which in turn implies new instances of

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antagonism evident in a permanent tendency to classify others and ourselves in terms of “them” versus “us.” The primary task of politics is precisely to “organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual” and “defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations” (Mouffe, 1999: 754). The solution that Mouffe (1999: 20) proposes is rather simple: Antagonism between enemies should be substituted with, or transformed into, agonism between adversaries who, “while in conflict, they see themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place.” Instead of trying, in vain, institutionally to reconcile all conflicting interests, the democratic project should aim to create a vibrant “agonistic” public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted (Mouffe, 1999: 3). Although at first glance the model of agonistic pluralism seems to contradict the model of communicative rationality, we may argue—in effect, using arguments developed already by Tarde, Tönnies, and Mead—that the two models actually represent complementary perspectives to the democratization of communication. In both instances, a nonexclusive public sphere is needed—either to achieve a rational consensus or to keep the democratic competition alive in the political framework. In contrast to the radical criticisms of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and communicative rationality, which do not offer a convincing alternative, “corrections” and “improvements” sought for by Dryzek and Mouffe may lead to a considerable contribution to normative insight and analytical power of the entire conceptual universe of publicness. As Dryzek (1990) suggests, the spheres of instrumental and communicative rationality are not incompatible but relatively compatible and they can coexist. His conceptualization of “discursive democracy” represents an attempt to “reconcile” democracy and rationality, and such reconciliation can only make sense “if it proceeds under the banner of communicative rationality” (Dryzek, 1990: 218). On the other hand, if the complete rejection of Habermas’ normative postulates and enforcement of sharp distinctions between consensus and political contestation were acceptable, what else could that imply for the development of the theory of the public sphere and democratic theory generally than an ultimate demise? Arguments in favor of democratic (even global) governance and “monitory democracy” (Keane, 2009) are based on a limited empirical evidence that instrumental and communicative rationality may indeed effectively coexist. A closer look at more or less solidly (mis)institutionalized forms of publicness in the public sphere and their social basis in civil society may bring us closer to an answer to the question of what specific communicative bonds (if any) substantiate the development of phenomena as different as public service media, public opinion polling, public fora and networks on the Internet, and scholarly conversations with publics entrusted to (public) universities. I turn to these issues in the next chapter, together with the underlying question of whether the changing social and technological conditions

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of publicness manifest in the commercialization of publicity, the privatization of public communication, the authoritarianization and adjectivation of public opinion theories, and the industry of public opinion polling challenge the validity of its traditional normative conceptualizations centered around the concept of “the public.”

NOTE 1. Pnyx and Forum were used for popular assemblies in ancient Athens and Rome, respectively.

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In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927/1991: 137) wrote of a public in eclipse because “there is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics […] with little to hold these different publics together in an integrated whole.” More recently, we may speak of another eclipse—eclipse of the very concept of “the public” that is increasingly being substituted by the concept of “the public sphere.” Although similar ideas can be found elsewhere (e.g., in Wilson’s concept of the “public opinion situation”), the newly emerged concept of the public sphere was based predominantly on Habermas’ (re)conceptualization of public/ness (Öffentlichkeit), thus essentially derived from Kant’s principle of publicness. The concept of the public sphere as a specific sphere of social life that emerges between the state and civil society was introduced into English written works with the translation of Habermas’ book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and first published in 1989. It soon became a very fashionable concept. For the period between 1900 and 1984, Ebscohost’s Communications and Mass Media Complete database documents four scholarly journal articles referring in their titles to “the public sphere,” 11 in the period 1985–1989, whereas 343 hits surface for the period 1990–2005. Of 265 book titles that include the words public sphere displayed at the amazon.com website, 7 were published before 1990 but none before 1984. The once prominent concept of “the public” that dominated for 200 years—think of Tarde, Tönnies, Dewey, Park, Lippmann, Blumer, and Mills, not to speak of Bentham—almost disappeared from theories dazzled with the splendor of the new concept. 65

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The disagreements and misunderstandings about the meaning of the concept “public sphere” are partly related to the fact that the German concept Öffentlichkeit, which has been introduced to the English-speaking community through the late translation of Habermas’ Structural Changes, has no direct equivalent in English. The book challenged the English-spoken frameworks of thought prevailing in the U.S.-lead international academic community because the conceptual capacity of the traditional English term the public—a social category or collectivity that forms and expresses public opinion—is much narrower than its much more complex German “counterpart” Öffentlichkeit. Due to the multidimensionality of the German concept Öffentlichkeit, its comprehensive and all-embracing translation into English and many other languages1 is not possible. Not only are the terms Öffentlichkeit and the public far from being synonymous (the public is only one of a range of meanings of the term Öffentlichkeit), the German term actually stands for a number of entirely different concepts—as Tönnies has argued already—which are represented by different terms in English. Although the German concept Öffentlichkeit is not clearly defined and essentially polemical, according to Adorno (1964/2005: 121), it clearly concerns unofficial rather than official aspects of social and political life. It refers to discursive actions of opening issues to public scrutiny and discussion and often presupposes the existence of a critical public. Most notably, “the ‘classical’ democratic-theoretical concept of the (political) publicness [Öffentlichkeit] comprises the double meaning of a social ‘sphere’ (or a ‘space’) and a ‘collective’ (Publikum—the public)” (Peters, 2007: 283). In addition to the public realm (der öffentliche Raum) and a specific social category or collectivity (das Publikum), the term Öffentlichkeit also has many other interrelated but distinct conceptual uses that were discussed in the introductory chapter, such as a specific nature of a particular activity or object, public associated with the state, and an abstract concept, a norm. Nevertheless, the noun Öffentlichkeit is mostly—and quite arbitrarily—translated into English as “public sphere” or even “public space” but hardly ever as “the public” or “publicness,” even if “public sphere” is often not only inappropriate, but directly misleading, because the spatial metaphor (reference to the physical space) is hardly present in the German term (Kleinsteuber, 2001). “Publicness” may be a less awkward and perhaps more thorough translation, but it still excludes the meaning of the public as a social category or collective agent. Another choice would be the term the public as Hannah Arendt (1958/1989) used it (i.e., the public as opposed to the private), which at the same time signifies the public as a social category of people—but it could also trigger even more confusion. As a result of the translation of Habermas’ book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit into English, French, and many other languages, the English/French word the/le public, which had dominated academic discourse for the last two centuries, has been largely—but mistakenly—substituted with the public sphere or sphère publique. In this way, an “innocent fraud […] quietly in the service of special interest” has been committed comparable to the replacement of the word capitalism with the market system in economics and social sciences in general.

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[The word] capitalism […] has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes—indeed, deletes—the role of wealth in the economic and social system. […] Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. (Galbraith, 1999)

Similarly, the presumption of a public sphere detached from the public conceals the most important actor in constituting the public sphere. Reducing the abstract concept of Öffentlichkeit to “the public sphere” without publics thus misses the fundamental distinction between “the public” and “the public sphere.” The public is a social category whose members (discursively) act, form, express opinions, and share the feeling of belonging (similarly to social groups based on nationality or political affiliation), whereas the public sphere is “only” its infrastructure. The public sphere as a sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of [publicness]2—that principle of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities. (Habermas, 1964/1979: 198)

The public sphere is not just technical infrastructure in the sense of a formal availability of public communication channels, which may be used for free and open communication (in the sense of a “negative freedom,” i.e., an absence of interference by others). It also comprises important political, cultural, and economic components, such as specific material conditions and norms that could rule out manipulative instrumental publicity. Nevertheless, it remains “ ‘just’ an infrastructure or a ‘public forum’ resembling the ancient Greek agora or forum Romanum” (Verstraeten, 1996: 348). Because it is an infrastructure, it is not that “[t]he public sphere requires a ‘forum’ that is accessible to as many people as possible and where a large variety of social experiences can be expressed and exchanged” (Verstraeten, 1996: 348); rather, the public sphere is “a forum” required (and essentially constituted) by the public. Bentham’s main concern was how to make sure that all dealings in the political assembly would be subject to surveillance by the public and its main organ, the newspaper. The advent of the public sphere does not change the basic relation between the public and its “opponent,” the state. Arguing that “systematically and critically checking on government policies is the primary task for [the] public sphere” (Verstraeten, 1996: 348), rather than for the public, denies fundamental ontological differences between “the public” and “the public sphere” as two distinct entities and concepts. The conceptual replacement of “the public”

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with “the public sphere” implies the disappearance of the body public through a discursive process.3 Of course, Habermas cannot be blamed for the confusions deriving from the translation and even less for the outcast of the traditional concept of “the public.” He actually clearly defined “the public sphere”—in contrast to “the public”—as “all those conditions of communication under which there can come into being a discursive formation of opinion and will on the part of a public composed of the citizens of a state” (Habermas, 1992: 446; italics added). Clearly, a public sphere cannot act or communicate, but a/the public can. The public sphere is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a/the public to emerge—an infrastructure that enables the formation of the public as the subject, the bearer of public opinion (“opinion of the public”), which is clearly separated from the realms of the state and private property. Nevertheless, the “liberal reading” of Habermas, as Kunelius and Sparks euphemize the emphasis on the rational discourse in the public sphere against the “radical reading” emphasizing the critical role of the public, became a “standard” version “advanced by most writers” (Kunelius & Sparks, 2001: 18). Although they consider the “radical reading […] undoubtedly wrong in the sense that the body of [Habermas’] work, both in the original formulation of the concept of the public sphere and in the later re-workings of the idea, fits much better with the standard ‘liberal’ reading” (Kunelius & Sparks, 2001: 19), they still believe that the “radical reading” is more appropriate for a critical analysis of the possibilities of the development of a (European) public sphere. The long intellectual history of the disappearance of “the public” noticeable in commercialization of publicity, privatization of “public” communication, authoritarianization and adjectivation of public opinion theories, and the industry of public opinion polling proves that the widespread conceptual confusion with “the public sphere” is not just a problem of translating the German term Öffentlichkeit into English and other languages. Terminological and conceptual changes (and perplexities) that took place during the last century reflect wider and deeper social changes and shifts in research epistemologies brought about already by the rise of modern broadcasting based on commercial television but (again) deeply challenged by the advent of the Internet.

NORMATIVITY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN CONCEPTUALIZING THE PUBLIC (SPHERE) With the growing role of the media, conceptualizations of publicness and public sphere became increasingly media-centric, suggesting that the “traditional” normative conceptualizations of publicness turned out obsolete with the rise of television. Conversely, the idea of citizens’ public use of reason—a critical indicator of autonomous power vested in the public sphere—was shoved off; the idea of

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publicness (including personal right to communicate) as the defining principle of the public (sphere) remains a blind spot in contemporary debates about transnational public spheres. The public sphere was conceptualized to include a number of competing and often contradictory tendencies in political, economic, and cultural processes. One can find no agreement in the theoretical body of literature on how and when the historical foundations of the emerging public and the public sphere were constituted. Different conceptualizations led to different (even opposing) answers to the question of the viability of the general concept of the “public sphere” and specifically of a “transnational public sphere.” Yet it should be of no surprise that the concept of the public sphere is not defined any better than the concepts of the public and public opinion.4 Primarily but not exclusively for historical reasons, I think that the critical normative dimension of the concepts “publicness” and “public sphere” should remain essential for any theoretical endeavor to (re)define them in the age of the Internet. In a way, the normative-critical dimension of publicness developed as a modern “substitute” for the divine dimension once associated with the public, which the concept of the public sphere does not comprise anymore. I do not suggest that the normative-theoretical conceptualization of publicness is superior, in terms of validity, to analytical and more empirically oriented conceptualizations, but rather that publicness and public sphere simply cannot be critically theorized without identification of the ideal communication procedures and social actors and conditions for them to materialize in the empirical world—in the future. When public opinion—along with public opinion tribunal as it used to be called in the late 18th and 19th centuries—became the superior authority and replaced in that position the king, it was considered a process in which individuals incorporated into the public expressed approval or disapproval of any weighty actions in particular places and thus shape “public opinion.” In the 18th century, some references were made to authentic bearers of public opinion of the time. The concept of the public did not denote the people or citizenry at large but rather a small fraction of them, such as groups of erudite individuals critically discussing the matters of literature and art, as well as reading and occasionally contributing to newspapers. These were considered the men of letters who, in addition to newspaper editors and journalists, supposedly represented the new bourgeois class. When specific “tasks” of public opinion were referred to, surveillance of the execution of power and formation of the unified will were in the limelight—but public opinion and the public were never exclusively and exhaustively defined. Yet the concepts of “the public” and “public opinion” were not used primarily as descriptive concepts to identify concrete constituents or bearers of public opinion; they had a clear normative and polemical character. The public had challenged and eventually replaced the monarchic power, but it retained the transcendental nature of the supreme authority: Public opinion as an almighty impersonal “tribunal” was a normative basis challenging the established authority of monarchs and nearly identical to the divine voice once exclusively belonging

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to them. Tocqueville (1856/1955: 174–175) wrote that, “the King still used the language of a master but in actual fact he always deferred to public opinion and was guided by it in his handling of day-to-day affairs. Indeed, he made a point of consulting it, feared it, and bowed to it invariably.” Public opinion turned out to be “a secret sovereign” and “the invisible authority of political society”—“the invisible power of the visible” (Luhmann, 1990/2010: 174). In theory, public opinion “replaced the powers of heaven and earth in returning men to possession of their decisions” while preserving the appeal to a divine authority that can never be disrespected (Ozouf, 1988: S11, S13). Tönnies (1922) even compared the role of public opinion in the Gesellschaft type of social structure with that of religion in Gemeinschaft, as did many scholars before him. Similarly to the “divine dimension” of public opinion, by using the concept “the public sphere,” we also make suitability and necessity claims for certain regulation and conduct rather than merely describe the way in which we in fact behave in empirical discursive situations. The emphasis is on the critical reflection of implications and contradictions involved in the concept(s) of “public ness.” Whereas in the early Enlightenment period “public opinion” denoted the prevailing sentiment of the majority on any given issue or set of issues, later definitions (e.g., Kant) added the rational component to public opinion and attributed authoritative power to it. Yet again, since the 1930s, public opinion was largely seen by empirically minded scholars simply as reflecting what is commonly thought or believed at a particular time and place. The rational dimension of publicness is essential for a critical (normative or empirical) approach. It is not difficult to show that the normative model of rationally grounded public opinion cannot—in an absolute sense—withstand any concrete empirical reality. Yet this does not imply that “the model of an ideal, uniform, rational and normative public opinion is incompatible with any empirical approach to the subject” (Chisick, 2002: 67). For a historian, it may well be that “there is a significant gap between the abstract Kantian conceptualization of the public sphere and anything a historian might try to identify as the views of men and women of flesh and blood” (Chisick, 2002: 67). However, the role of critical theory cannot be reduced to that of describing and explaining the onetime or currently existing empirical reality. It cannot live with what is or was empirically existing, prevalent, or “normal” or “anomalous” in a given period of time and historical context; it has to permanently broaden horizons on what is relevant today and possible in the future to identify germs of what may stimulate social transformation and trace its directions. The norm of critical publicness—rather than any of its empirical manifestations—is the fundamental organizing principle of the public sphere. The dimension of normativity may also help us to draw clear distinctions between the normative, critical-theoretical concepts of “publicness” and “the public” and often more descriptive, empirical conceptualizations of “the public sphere” and “civil society.” Public opinion, in contrast, was captured by both “sides” and not surprisingly so, as I try to demonstrate with the case of opinion polling.

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In Kant’s conceptualization, the principle of publicness is not only fundamental to citizen rights but also represents the fundamental principle of democratic order. Any regulation of relationships in the (political) community that would prevent citizens from public reasoning and force them to obey without being convinced of its appropriatness would contradict the public interest and citizens’ freedom. Even the legitimacy of the state can only be grounded on the principle of publicness because the government can only hold authority over people if it represents the general will of the community. Although less empathically then Kant, Bentham (1791/1994: 590) still related publicness to rational discourse enabling the public to form “an enlightened judgement.”5 In Bentham’s (1787/1995: 47–48) theory, surveillance over political power could only be exercised by concrete, physically existing social group(ing)s, “the body of the curious at large—the great open committee of the tribunal of the world.” The “Public Opinion Tribunal” was seen by Bentham (1830/1983: 36) as consisting of all citizens participating in political meetings and assemblies, or publicly discussing activities of public functionaries of the state. The public was clearly detached from those in power, who were subject to its surveillance. At first, however, the concept of the public was very elitist: Only those wealthy enough to spend time in “nonproductive” activities such as arts, leisure, and politics constituted “the public.”6 By the beginning of the 20th century, two distinct theoretical paradigms had been established: (a) the normative-democratic paradigm linking the public and public opinion to political participation and democracy (represented, in particular, by Tarde, Tönnies, Park, and Dewey), and (b) the authoritarian paradigm emphasizing the repressive role of public opinion that hinders individuals’ freedom of expression (e.g., Tocqueville, Bryce, Ross, and Lippmann). Both paradigms nearly crumbled in the face of the polling industry, which challenged traditional normative theories of public opinion. The Normative-Democratic Paradigm of (Opinion of) the Public A century after Kant’s and Bentham’s writings, Tarde conceived of the public as a “spiritual collectivity” of physically separated but mentally connected individuals. For Tarde, the public can only exist with and through the medium of the press because reading newspapers creates a bond among readers based on their awareness of being intellectually “connected” with a large number of people regardless of his or her specific location. The public comes into being with the transformation of already existing social groups because of “a growing need for sociability that makes it necessary for the associates to communicate regularly through a continuous flow of information and common incentives” provided by newspapers (Tarde, 1901: 18). Tönnies followed Tarde’s conceptualization of the public as a social category of mentally connected people. Unlike earlier theories, which have focused on

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the public as it occurs in specific social places (e.g., as a tribunal, a visible group), Tönnies conceptualized “the public” beyond the boundaries of physical settings as a form of imagined intellectual grouping, whose members share similar ideas and opinions without interacting directly, with the “republic of the learned” (Gelehrtenrepublik) at its core. Tönnies conceived of “the public” as a transitory social formation, a group like the mass or “dispersed crowd” (getrennter Haufen) and “present crowd” (versammelter Haufen). The “republic of the learned”—individuals who share “educated opinions”—constitutes the core of opinion of the public—a hub around which the “large public” emerges. According to Tönnies, a physical bond is neither essential nor typical for the public (although possible for a short period of time); rather, it is the spiritual connection among members of the public that is decisive. What distinguishes the public from an incidentally connected, dispersed, or present crowd is its capability to clearly articulate opinions. In Tönnies’ words, “the subject of opinion of the public is a fundamentally connected totality (Gesamtheit), politically in particular, that has been united by thought and judgment, and that is precisely why it belongs to the public, to public life.” However, it “is not assembled as a public or as a subject of opinion of the public, except in spirit— and is normally much too large to be conceived as an assembly” (Tönnies, 1922: 131–132). Even if the public is becoming very large and dispersed (i.e., composed of a limitless mass of people), it represents those “who, in spite of being dispersed and infinitely diverse, may think and judge similarly” (Tönnies, 1922: 84). For Dewey, the public was more than a simple social category of individuals sharing the same information provided by newspapers and discussing them in small groups in the cafés or the people who think and judge similarly, which essentially was Tarde’s idea. Dewey conceptualized the public as a large body of persons having a common interest in controlling the consequences of social transactions in which, for any reason, they did not participate. It consists of “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 15–16). Or, as Habermas (1992/1996: 365; italics original) tacitly adopted Dewey’s idea, “the political public sphere can fulfill its function of perceiving and thematizing encompassing social problems only insofar as it develops out of the communication taking place among those who are potentially affected.” Because a large number of transactions generate important consequences for those not directly involved, those people to whom “the public” refers comprise a continuously emerging, overlapping, and disintegrating group. The lasting, extensive, and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public. In itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public. (Dewey, 1927/1991: 67)

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Dewey’s conceptualization of the public was founded on two normative-critical assumptions: that democracy is built on citizens’ participation in the political process, which can only materialize through public conversation. Communication and democracy are closely linked with education, which is as essential to social life as “nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life. […] This education consists primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession” (Dewey, 1916/2010: 7). The knowledge one needs to participate in political life is continuously generated in the interaction of citizens among themselves and with knowledge elites, and mediated by the press. In his model—which is in contrast to the long tradition of normative theory—the public is related directly to the state, which provides the necessary means for the public to become organized as a distinct entity. However, Dewey did not use the term state in the Weberian sense of an organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical constraint to enforce its order over the population in a given territory, but rather in the sense of the general regulatory and administrative functions that have to be performed in any society. In general, early normative-critical theories of public opinion rested on the basis of an enlightened public as the heart and brain of public opinion. In contrast to what Wilson named “adjective theories” of public opinion, normative-critical theories may be called “substantive.” The shift from “substantive” to “adjective” theories of public opinion was a sign of the decline of the rational-critical conceptualizations of public opinion; instead, persuasion, social control, and conformity became the primary issues in psychological and sociological theories of public opinion. Whereas the early critical theorizations were focused on the relation between the public and the government and differences between the public and the crowd (and later the mass), the adjectivation of public opinion theories brought to the front the disciplinary perspective of public opinion formation and expression. The Authoritarian Paradigm of Public Opinion Since the mid-1800s, surveillance by the public and the press over political authorities has been increasingly replaced with newspapers’ control over their readers and the people in general. The new paradigm stems from Tocqueville’s account of the impelling power of public opinion and the press to discipline the people by promoting majority opinions. Theoretical (particularly social-psychological) reconceptualization of public opinion followed the newly emerging communication practice stimulated by commercialization of the press and its constantly rising circulations. The 19th century was a period of remarkable growth of the newspaper industry. In the period following Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy, in only 20 years—from 1840 to 1860—the annual circula-

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tion of newspapers in the United States increased from 186 to 886 million copies (Pred, 1980: 222). The “disciplinary turn” in public opinion theories followed the historical subordination of press freedom to the property right in the newspaper industry in the advanced capitalist countries and freedom of expression to the freedom of enterprise. In the early stage of the press the principle of publicness was opposed to the economic sphere and its dominant principle of profitability, whereas in the second half of the 19th century the press increasingly became a “legitimate” profitable business. This historical transformation led Marx (1842/1974: 71) to emphasize that, “the primary freedom of the press is in not being a business.” Instead, the press should be free, according to Marx, according to its authentic social nature, as a means used by individuals to communicate with each other because only in community with others—in communication—can the alienated private person achieve the emancipation of the citizen. Eighty years later, however, Lippmann (1922/1998: 321) still called it an “anomaly of our civilization” that “community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to trade or manufacture,” instead of treating the press as “a business pure and simple.” In the late 18th and early 20th centuries, the term the public retained its constitutive status in the public opinion theories of European sociologists Tarde and Tönnies and American pragmatists Park and Dewey. Dewey (1927/1991: 177; italics added), for example, defined public opinion as “judgment which is formed and entertained by those who constitute the public and is about public affairs.” Even in the beginning of the 20th century, when “the public” had lost its strictly political and rational character, it remained an “elementary and spontaneous collective grouping” (Blumer, 1946/1966: 46–50; italics added; see also Park, 1904/1972: 57). The authoritarian paradigm disentangled itself completely from the public in its conceptualization of public opinion. Since the mid-1800s, control over the ruling authorities by the public has been increasingly substituted by control over individuals as the main function of public opinion. It was Tocqueville who first realized that public opinion was not only a safeguard against the misrule of those in power but also a means of coercion in the hands of the majority against any minority of those who would not share the majority opinion. In contrast to Bentham, who believed the primary task of the public was in its surveillance of political representatives who could otherwise fail to advance the public interest, the reconceptualization of public opinion in psychological and sociological theories emphasized the impelling power of public opinion to discipline the people liberated of their critical function and an active part in forming public opinion. Edward Ross (1901/1969: 98), one of the proponents of the new dominant stream, critically considered public opinion merely a “primitive technique” that became “simply one coercive agent alongside of others.” Tönnies clearly identified controversial conceptualizations of public opinion and required not only a strict separation of different meanings of “public opinion” but also distinct concepts and terms for them. He differentiated between

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“unarticulated” public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) and “articulated” opinion of the public (die Öffentliche Meinung). The former is “a superficial whole of multifarious, contradictory opinions, which are publicly voiced,” whereas the latter denotes “a uniformly effective power” (Tönnies, 1922: 131). For both concepts, public manifestation and references to public, primarily political issues remain essential. Yet in the former case—concerning public opinion—the general public is implicated in so far as “all” individuals participate somehow actively or passively in publication of opinions. In contrast, for opinion of the public, the subject is a substantially, for the most part politically united public, which has agreed to opine and judge in a particular way and which, therefore, belongs naturally to the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), to the public life. (Tönnies, 1922: 131; italics added)

Tönnies’ remarkable Critique of Public Opinion (1922) and Dewey’s classic The Public and Its Problems (1927) were the swan songs of classic substantive theories of public opinion. The authoritarian paradigm had paved the way for eclipse of the public as the subject of public opinion. The shift to adjective theories of public opinion after the 1930s indicates the ultimate theoretical “disillusionment” with a rational-critical, “politically united” (bourgeois) public of the Enlightenment. The early dominant paradigm of close connections between opinion of the public, political democracy, and freedom of the press was overwhelmed by the empirical current, which rejected the traditional normative-theoretical conceptualization of public opinion and focused on public opinion polls, propaganda, and public relations. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (1923/1961: 61), who ingeniously used his uncle’s ideas to manipulate the masses, considered public opinion “a term describing an ill-defined, mercurial, and changeable group of individual judgments. Public opinion is the aggregate result of individual opinions— now uniform, now conflicting—of the men and women who make up society or any group of society” (italics added). In the new understanding of public opinion, which was closely connected with the rise of polling, the public as the subject of public opinion (“tribunal”) composed of politically reasoning individuals was substituted with a dispersed mass or just any group composed of two or more communicating individuals. Consequently, Childs (1965: 13) suggested that “the word ‘public’ and the word ‘group’ are for all practical purposes interchangeable.” Public opinion was thus reduced to nothing more than mere “collections of individual opinions.” The social-psychological conceptualizations made public opinion equal to the sum or average of attitudes on a (controversial) issue held by members of a social group of any size. The theoretical regression of the concept “public opinion” was succinctly observed by Habermas (1962/1995: 241):

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Chapter 4 “Group” abstracts from the multitude of social and historical conditions, as well as from the institutional means, and certainly from the web of social functions that at one time determined the specific joining of ranks on the part of private people to form a critical debating public in the political realm. “Opinion” itself is conceived no less abstractly. At first it is still identified with “expression on a controversial topic,” later with “expression of an attitude,” then with “attitude” itself. In the end an opinion no longer even needs to be capable of verbalization.

Soon after the invention of opinion polls, Allport (1937: 9) completely eliminated “the public” from the definition of public opinion as “superfluous for the purpose of research” and reduced public opinion to a “multi-individual situation,” as earlier suggested by Bernays, and opinions to mere “reactions of individuals.” Commercialization of publicity, privatization of “public” communication, authoritarianization, and adjectivation of public opinion processes and concepts, and finally the implosion of public opinion into opinion polls in the age of global governance led to the obliteration of the normative-critical dimension of publicness. In such circumstances, the “invention” of the concept “public sphere” seemed to reinvigorate the ethical norm of publicness.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE The universe of publicness—the public, public opinion, the public sphere, and other public phenomena—has always been grounded on the most advanced forms of (mass) communication, but it is also related to a specific type of interpersonal communication. Moreover, because the principle of publicness only makes sense in reference to forms of communication beyond transitory interpersonal interaction, the nature of “being public” (i.e., publicness) in the strict sense could not have existed before the invention of the first form of mass communication—the press. The invention of printing substantially expanded the social horizon of communication. At the same time, it made it obvious that reading and, particularly, publishing newspapers is not only a matter of individual’s communication abilities but also a matter of ownership (Splichal, 2002: 10–11). The development of the press necessarily implied the growth of the “reading public.” Ever since Bentham, first the press and later other media were considered constitutive of the public and public opinion. Bentham (1822/1990: 45) thought of the press as “an appropriate organ of the Public Opinion Tribunal” and its “only constantly acting” organ. In his essay “On the Liberty of the Press,” Bentham (1820) matched the rule of publicity with “the liberty of the press [which] operates as a check upon the conduct of the ruling few; and in that character constitutes a controlling power, indispensably necessary to the maintenance of good government.” In “Securities Against Misrule,” he went on to suggest that

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a newspaper editor is “the President of the Presidents” in the “Committee of the Public Opinion Tribunal,” thus having the power to arbitrate on behalf of the entire Public Opinion Tribunal (Bentham, 1822/1990: 61–64). Marx was the first to recognize the press as more than just an instrument to create and reflect public opinion. He conceptualized the press in the sense of a mediator between the state and civil society, which more than 100 years later has been named “the public sphere.” He saw the press as the site in which the state and civil society could meet on equal terms, where individuals are emancipated from their authoritative officiality and private interests. The rulers and the ruled alike are in need of a third element, which would be political without being official, hence not based on bureaucratic premises, an element which would be of a civil nature without being bound up with private interests and their pressing need. This supplementary element with the head of a citizen of the state and the civic heart is the free press. In the realm of the press, rulers and ruled alike can criticize their principles and demands, yet no longer in a relation of subordination, but on terms of equality as citizens of the state; no longer as individuals, but as intellectual forces, as exponents of reason. The “free press” is the product of public opinion, and at the same time, also creates public opinion. (Marx, 1843: 189–190)

The free press, Marx suggests, can mediate between civil society and the state because it is based on both reason and emotion; its discourse, both rational and passionate, differs from that of official reports. The distinctive feature of the free press is that it can transform a particular interest to a common interest by confronting the rulers and the ruled, provided that a genuinely public sphere is established in which confrontation between opposing viewpoints is possible because the difference between rulers and ruled vanishes. Yet the press can only perform this critical function if a sphere of “equivalent positions” is established, a genuinely civic sphere in which confrontation and debate between opposing viewpoints become visible. […] [T]he private interests of the members of civil society acquire legitimacy, but come to realize their limited nature; while the administration and government, for their part, can assume their role only if they concede that they are each but one of the agencies of the sittliche state, and that their claims to exclusive representation of the life of the state are illegitimate. (Kouvelakis, 2003: 262)

On the one hand, the press is an organ through which the public can express “public opinion”; on the other hand, it is the condition for public opinion and its “producer”—the public—to come into existence and stay alive. It is the public sphere in which the press “harmoniously combines all the true elements of the popular spirit” (Marx, 1843).

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It took more than 100 years for Marx’s “third element” idea to be conceptualized literally as “the public sphere” by Habermas (1962/1995). Nowadays, the public sphere is normatively understood as a specific sphere, domain, or “imagined space” of social life existing between and constituted by the state and civil society. It is “the place where civil society is linked to the power structure of the state” (Eriksen, 2005: 358). Garnham (2001) suggests that the idea of the public sphere builds a bridge between Marxist theories of ideology and the liberal free press tradition, which Marx in his early works also defended (Splichal, 2002). The concept is believed to revalidate “the specificity of the political, by giving due weight to the emancipatory potential of liberal bourgeois concepts of free assembly and debate, and by shifting attention from worker to citizen” (Garhnam, 2001: 12586). But the idea of the public sphere also follows Marx’s critique of the bourgeois idea that the press might attain its freedom more easily and fully by adopting the laws of free economic operations that rested on the right to private property, which paved the way to the subordination of the press to freedom of ownership as a peril no less dreadful to a genuine freedom of the press than ideological censorship (Splichal, 2002: 113, 115). The public sphere is a kind of communication network, a communication infrastructure enabling the formation of public opinion. It is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, actor, association, or collectivity, [which] eludes the conventional sociological concepts of “social order.” The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organization. […] Just as little does it represent a system. […] The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view […]; the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions. (Habermas, 1992/1996: 360)

The public sphere is more than “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place,” as Eley (1992: 306; italics added) suggests. In contrast to many authors who do not see any difference between “the public” and “the public sphere,” or even expressively deny it, Eley rightly differentiates between the public sphere as the site and the publics as actors acting in it. However, and this is critically important, the network(s) of the public sphere are accessible not only to the publics but to all—both individual and collective—actors in a given environment, such as private and “public” (state) institutions and organizations in a nation state or in an inter- or transnational setting. Public sphere is thus the context of public opinion (Wilson), its “infrastructure,” rather than its generator, which is always a public. The public sphere is a “space” of communication, and as such transcends any particular place, and weaves together conversations from many. It also tran-

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scends particular social groups, involving people who are strangers to each other in communication with each other. Publics grow less place-based as communications media proliferate, yet the spatial image remains apt. (Calhoun, 2005: 4)

The public sphere represents the locus where private citizens engage in “the public use of reason,” as conceptualized by Kant; an infrastructure of social integration through (mass-mediated) public discourse—an “opinion market”—in contrast to political power in the sphere of politics and market mechanisms in the sphere of economy, both of which represent specific forms of social integration through competition. It is activated in the communicative interdependence and rational-critical discourse among citizens potentially affected by transactions in which they do (or did) not participate—thus creating the public as a social category—where the legislated laws of the state and the market laws of the economy are (should be) suspended. Public sphere is a specific “imagined space” of social life existing between and constituted by the state and civil society. The constitutive actor of the (political) public sphere is always a/the public—a specific grouping that appears and/or is imagined as a social actor or an agent (once a “tribunal”) in relation to some important and controversial social issues (traditionally conceptualized in contrast to crowds or masses). There is no public without a public sphere and no public sphere without a public. The existence of the public sphere is vital for a public to become visible through public opinion, and an acting public is a necessary condition for a public sphere to really exist. Only as long as economic and social conditions giving everyone an equal chance to meet the criteria for admission to the public sphere are effectively met, the existence of the public sphere is protected. A clear interest in the (re)production of a genuine public sphere derives from less numerous and less powerful actors, which may be classified into three main categories: (a) audiences’ demand for media uses and interest in receiving information and opinions, (b) various civil society groups’ interest in having access to the media to publish their opinions, and (c) a general (ethical) interest of citizens in maintaining the citizen rights and in the media performing their public service functions. However, citizens qua citizens—either as “publics” or as “audiences”—do not seem to be among key actors in the public sphere anymore but rather, as in the old Lippmann’s theorization, spectators observing power actors from the balcony. The public sphere and the public are inseparably connected to each other— like a system and its component that must produce results congruent with the defined goal or else it is “dysfunctional.” Nevertheless, the difference between the two is important, and we have to draw a clear analytical distinction between them. A fundamental difference between the public and the public sphere is in their relation to the organized power (e.g., the state). The public sphere is inseparably connected with the organized power, which is one of the actors in the public

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sphere and, at the same time, its legal guarantor. The (political) public sphere “forms the periphery of a political system” (Habermas, 2006: 415). In contrast, a public is formed more or less in opposition to the organized power—an idea inscribed in both Bentham’s concept of the public opinion tribunal and Kant’s concept of the public use of reason. We may think of the public sphere as a kind of communication framework of the “body public,” a sphere of channels of opinion circulation binding and protecting its constituent publics. It would be delusive, however, to equate “the public sphere” with “the sphere of publics.” Beside public/s—the bearers of publicness and public opinion—whose participation is constitutive of the public sphere, two major kinds of powerful actors confront publics in the public sphere: (a) state authorities, political parties, interest groups, politicians, commercial corporations, business elite, and similar actors as “coauthors and addressees of public opinions” who provide information subsidies and, thus, “occupy an already constituted public sphere in order to use it”; and (b) media gatekeepers—journalists, editors, and publicists—who set the agenda of public discourse and control the access of contributions and authors to the mass media that control the public discourse (Habermas, 1992: 440, 453–454; 2006: 415–416). In a more recent essay that focused on the empirical findings and pathologies of political communication, Habermas (2006: 416) took up an even more critical and thorough position on the issue. He lengthened the list of “intruders” with additional (partly overlapping) key actors “who make their appearance on the virtual stage of an established public sphere” rather than (re)produce it: (a) journalists, (b) politicians, (c) lobbyists, (d) advocates, (e) experts, (f) moral entrepreneurs, and (g) intellectuals. Yet the list is not exhaustive. First, in addition to politicians (the legislative and executive branches of power), we should add the judiciary. Then the list should be expanded with (at least two) distinct groups of interest in the performance of mass media—(a) media owners’ interest in using their media as a means of self-expression and profit maximization, and (b) the general interest of capital (the corporate world) to advertise commodities on an ever larger scale—which are able to materialize their interests through the media and historically did so very effectively. All these actors—it is not clear why “intellectuals” as a whole, once representing the core of the public(s), should be considered “intruding aliens” in the public sphere rather than (members of) the publics—acting “on the virtual stage of an established public sphere” potentially imperil publicness of the public sphere in the measure that they bring manipulative publicity in the public sphere by subsidizing information and setting the agenda of public issues and framing the public discourse. This “new publicity” or “new visibility,” which political elites use for self-presentation, represents, in terms of conceptualization, a constant danger of misunderstanding what the public sphere genuinely is, as it happens in the case of confounding any “ ‘public activity’ of elites—especially the creation, transformation, and running of local ‘civic’ organizations—with a political public sphere” not only in China, to which Calhoun (1993: 277) referred in the prior quotation, but in any society.

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The public sphere is the arena in which civil society informs itself and exchanges ideas and opinions with other social actors “representing” the two remaining realms, those of the state and the economy. Civil society, in which (the idea of) the contemporary public sphere is rooted, emerged in the 18th century as opposed to, and liberated from, the ancient and medieval communal society. In Kumar’s ( 2001: 145) words, the scientific discovery of civil society and recognition of its historical significance “could only come about at a particular stage in the development of the productive forces: the stage at which the bourgeoisie could establish an economy in principle and to a good extent in practice distinct from the state and all other regulatory bodies.” The principle of publicness, personal freedom of communication, and freedom of the press (newspapers) were quintessential not only for the emergence of the public sphere but also for the development of civil society and the rise of democracy. In the age of Enlightenment, with the spread of literacy and printing culture, public reasoning typically emerged within the growing number of independent social groups, such as literary clubs, learned societies, or professional organizations, making up civil society, which at that time was synonymous to the public. The two terms were often used indiscriminately, as for example by Ferguson (1767), who saw both civil society and the public as an aggregate of individuals and thus suggested that “if the public good be the principal object with individuals, it is likewise true, that the happiness of individuals is the great end of civil society; for, in what sense can a public enjoy any good, if its members, considered apart, be unhappy?” (italics added). However, the question of the nature of the relationship between civil society and the public (sphere) has remained provocative and stimulating until today, which can be easily demonstrated with a wide array of divergent and even mutually exclusive definitions of these concepts. Soon after its first theorization, civil society ceased to be understood as merely another designation for “the civilized state of society” (societas civilis) at large and began to be perceived as a societal entity sui generis. During the last two centuries, “civil society” developed into a concept referring to specific (universal) qualities, values, and norms that distinguish it not only from the “communal society” but also, and primarily, from its counterparts, institutional forms of the political and private-economic sector. Like Janus, the Roman god protecting gates, doorways, and bridges, civil society has got “two faces”: one turned toward the private, the other toward its opposite, the public. In the second half of the 20th century, an ever-increasing diversity in voluntary associations acting across national borders made civil society indispensable for a democratic social order. The concept (re-)gained its present popularity and political currency in the 1970s when it was used by civic movements in Central Eastern Europe and Latin America to conceptualize political opposition against the ruling authoritarian regimes. In that sense, “civil society” constitutes a political project aimed not only at the theoretical reconceptualization of democracy but also at practicalpolitical criticism and changes of the existing social and political orders. The original idea of societas civilis affirming civilized society based on the

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rule of law and opposed to war (noncivilized state of society) rather than the state, which prevailed in the (pre-)bourgeois period from Ferguson (1767) to the mid-19th century, has been surmounted by the concept of bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) based on the emergence of capitalism and markets, on which its autonomy from the state was grounded. It was with Marx’s7 conceptualization in German Ideology, when civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) has been more specifically defined as a type of social organization, which “embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces.” Beginning in the 18th century, the development of civil society was directly related to the bourgeoisie. Like the public sphere of the time was a bourgeois public sphere of private and literate persons, civil society was essentially a bourgeois society of the ruling class embracing the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage [that] transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organize itself as State. […] Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name. (Marx & Engels, 1845/1968: ch01b.htm#b1)

Tocqueville (1840) was among the first to distinguish between “civil society” and “the political world,” which became commonly perceived as a standard delineation in the 21st century: “There may be equal rights of indulging in the same pleasures, of entering the same professions, of frequenting the same places; in a word, of living in the same manner and seeking wealth by the same means [in civil society], although all men do not take an equal share in the government.” Economic roots of civil society grew in the age of the preindustrial economy, which was based on loosely structured and almost perfect and transparent competition among small propertied worker-entrepreneurs. The awareness of the importance of market competition, commodity production, and exchange among private individuals was an essential element of the conceptualization of civil society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Early definitions of civil society were based on the perception of economic individualism of the liberal phase of capitalist production relations as central to the formation of civil society because property was considered by Kant (1793/1914: 245) as a condition for a citizen to be his own master (i.e., economically independent). With the development of capitalist economy to the phase of monopoly capitalism in the late 19th century, however, the “economic world,” the primary groundwork of the autonomy of civil society in its early period, was separated from civil society. The transition to the monopoly phase of capitalism marks a sharp divergence between early, prebourgeois and postbourgeois theorizations of civil society.

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The capitalist economy has been changed during that period significantly. Although traditionally the free market economy was considered the guarantor and the basis of individualism as the key dimension of the autonomy of civil society in relation to the state, the emerging corporate capitalism (re)produced economic inequalities to the degree that they prevented a large part of citizens from participation in, and control of, “democratic” decisions. Oligopolistic and monopolistic forces prevailing over those of “spontaneous” and “free” market forces transformed the economy into a site of substantially asymmetric distribution of power and, consequently, made the liberal assumptions of pluralism and free competition as two central features of civil society as the site of economy problematic and obsolete. Already in the second half of the 19th century, these changes influenced the development of the press, which became dominated by chain-owning proprietors due to the escalation in publishing costs. At the same time, the public sphere, which has been initially established as a bourgeois public sphere, once again proved inaccessible to large (less well-off) sections of society. Being aware of the emerging contradictions in civil society, which the rapidly changing economic structure of capitalist societies generated, Gramsci (2000: 306) “moved” civil society from the sphere of economic necessity to the sphere of social superstructure but—in contrast to later normative approaches—considered it as a sphere in which different social actors strive for hegemony: Whereas “political society” or the state is characterized by “ ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the state and ‘juridical’ government,” civil society corresponds “to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society.” Hegemony in Gramsci’s later works, such as his essay on “Intellectuals and Education” where the previous quotation is from, comes to mean a complex cultural, moral, and ideological but not directly economic leadership, although, of course, it “must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (Gramsci, 2000: 212). Later conceptualizations “liberated” civil society from the Gramscian hegemonic foundation to denote, in most general terms, a system of social relationship based on free association of citizens independently from the state and family, but it remained commonly distinguished from “an economic society based on forms of property and purely economic association, [and] from political society based on suffrage and political parties,” which is “based on rights of communication and civil associations and movements” (Arato, 1994: 47). Nevertheless, the differentiation of the concept of civil society from the economy and thus “bourgeois society” remains particularly important because, as Cohen and Arato (1992: 8) argue, this differentiation is a necessary condition for the concept to “become the center of a critical political and social theory in societies where the market has already developed, or is in the process of developing, its own autonomous logic.” Postbourgeois conceptualizations of civil society emphasize the plurality of nonviolent, discursive, generally not class-based actors capable of genuinely free, nonhegemonic discourse directed toward societal democratization, as constitu-

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tive of civil society. This critical-normative perspective was not entirely absent even in the early, prebourgeois period. From the very beginning, civil society also consisted of a great number of diverse nonentrepreneurial (and even antibourgeois) groups and associations that had in common “the fear of despotism,” which stimulated—much more than the love of capitalism—political fight against state despotism (Keane, 1988: 64). In addition to the rise of the new bourgeois class and its autonomy from the aristocratic state, civil society always implied (a degree of) the rule of law and operation of voluntary associations free of commercial interests. In the 20th century, the roles of the state, political parties, and powerful economic actors and the relations among them have changed significantly, which made the borderline among the state, economy, and civil society less transparent. The separation of the three domains—economy, politics (the state), and communication and culture (civil society)—is grounded on the existence of different principles the domains operate on: the economic domain on the principle of profit maximization of owners, the political domain on the principle of power maximization (hegemonization) of political actors, and the civil society domain on the principle of maximization of communicative or argumentative power. Whereas the first two principles are compatible or even mutually strengthening (both the level of profit and the level of hegemonic power may increase simultaneously), the principle of maximization of communicative power is volatile to the economic and political structures. The economy and civil society are similar by not being directly subordinated to the state, but they differ more significantly in terms of their defining principles. The state is financially dependent on the material base (economy), although it does not organize it and is politically dependent on citizens and their electoral support. Thus, the economy came closer to the state (through either state interventionism or monopolization) than to civil society. Precisely because of this, it is important for the projects of societal democratization to also entail the revitalization of democratic institutions of the state and the extension of principles of democratic association to the economy (Arato & Cohen, 1984: 273). In a broad definition proposed by Barber (1998: 4), the “third sector” of civil society as part of the strong democratic model is conceived of as an independent domain of free social life where neither governments nor private markets are sovereign; a realm we create for ourselves through associated common action in families, clans, churches, and communities; a “third sector” (the other two are the state and the market) that mediates between our specific individuality as economic producers and consumers and our abstract collectivity as members of a sovereign people.8

This obviously cannot be considered a universal definition of civil society. Similarly to publicness and the public sphere, civil society acquired a range of

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different meanings (and connotations) in different theoretical streams and historical contexts. It has never been only one and the same concept, and it is unlikely to become so in the future. On the contrary, it is hard to find a constitutive element that would be shared by all definitions. Barber outlines three distinct views of civil society. The libertarian view sees civil society as essentially synonymous with the private sector. In the communitarian perspective, civil society is considered “a complex welter of ineluctably social relations that tie people together, first of all into families and kinship associations like clans, and then into clubs, neighborhoods, communities, congregations, and more extended social hierarchies” (Barber, 1998: 23). The strong democratic models emphasize the autonomy of civil society from both the state and the market and its openness to civic communities and associations based on voluntary participation. There are many other typologies of conceptualizations of civil society that cast some light on its controversial nature. Kaldor (2003), for example, summarizes contemporary conceptualizations of civil society in three main streams: as (a) an “activist civil society,” which includes social movements and civic activists; (b) a “neoliberal civil society” with charities, voluntary associations, and the “third sector”; and (c) a “postmodern civil society,” which “adds” nationalists and fundamentalists to actors typical of activist and neoliberal civil society. Edwards (2009), in contrast, differentiates among (a) civil society as the good society, (b) civil society as associational life, and (c) civil society as the public sphere. I personally favor Barber’s “strong democratic model” of civil society constituted by uncoerced associations, organizations, and activities that reach beyond economic and political “consumption,” through which citizens as economic and political beings may control the production of economic (profit) and political power. Rather, in civil society, opinions are formed and goals defined to influence opinion formation and, consequently, decision making in given institutional frameworks. Civil society should be seen as a locus for limiting the power of the state and capital, but it does not seek to replace either state or private actors. Its institutional core “comprises those non-governmental and non-economic connections and voluntary associations that anchor the communication structures of the public sphere in the society component of the life-world” (Habermas, 1992/1996: 367). Kaldor’s (2003) enumeration of different social (“civic”) groups with specific interests and ideological backings favored by different authors does not add much to a deeper understanding of the concept. Although Edwards’ typology sheds some light on substantial problems that beset approaches to civil society, his idea of the public sphere as merely “a role of civil society” is obviously at odds with arguments about the different nature of the public sphere and civil society presented in this book. In contrast, Edwards (2009: 64; italics added) believes that “in its role as the ‘public sphere’, civil society becomes the arena for argument and deliberation as well as for association and institutional collaboration,” whereas the public is seen as a (national) geopolitical unit, “a whole polity that cares about the common good and has the capacity to deliberate about it democratically.”

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Civil society is a pattern of social organization established between, and different from, on one side, bureaucratic structures of the state and private corporations in the economy (the market), and on the other side the private domain of family, friendship, and intimacy. In theoretical terms, civil society sets up a bridge between Kant’s opposing and exclusive concepts of public and private use of reason, between private and public roles of citizens. Empirically, it consists of voluntary self-governing organizations, activities, and networks outside the realm of the state and the economy, such as schools and education, public and “alternative” media, churches and religion, trade unions and workers movements, associations of “men of rank” and charity, movements and associations of national and ethnic minorities, and professional associations and chambers, in which people freely associate and communicate—not to gain profit or power but for the sake of sociability, knowledgeability, and self-management. Although civil society consists, in principle, of self-governing organizations and activities detached from the state and the market, a relatively deep interpenetration between the three realms may exist. Neither governments nor private markets are “sovereign” in civil society, and people are supposed to associate and communicate freely not for profit or power but to socialize and/or promote a common cause; yet they can be heavily influenced by bureaucratic structures of the state, political parties, and private for-profit corporations as well.9 They can also quite frankly—publicly—promote their private (commercial) interests or support political parties. Whether actions of civil society are primarily political or just the opposite, politics is beyond the reach of civil society, is largely a matter of dispute and specific cultural-historical contexts. There is no doubt, however, that contemporary civil society either exists autonomously from the state and economy or it does not exist at all. Its autonomy from the state is based on the exclusion of political organizations that compete for public office, notably political parties, from civil society; its autonomy from the spheres of economy protects civil society against the corporate world of capital and profit-seeking organizations. Beyond external threats to the autonomy of civil society, there are other—internal—sources of menace to the existence of civil society, such as “a majoritarian incivility generated by democratization itself,” manifested in “the impulsiveness of an uprooted and disoriented electorate, the short-termism of speculative financial markets, as well as the insecurity arising from […] organized crime,” and last but not least by “the impersonal irresponsibility of modern commercialized mass media” (Whitehead, 2002: 84–85). Although constantly under the pressure of capital and political power, actors in civil society participate in a genuine (re)production of publicness—in contrast to private corporations, political parties, interest groups, and similar actors who occupy an already constituted public sphere in order to use it, and the media as gatekeepers who set the agenda of public discourse and who control the access of contributions and authors to the mass media. In other words, civil society is constituted by social actors who historically set up the public sphere and whose par-

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ticipation in it is still unavoidably constitutive. Actors constituting civil society— if truly independent of both public authorities and private economic entities— are capable of deliberating about collective actions in pursuing their interests and acting in accordance with civil/legal rules, but they do not seek to replace either state or private actors. Their engagement proceeds from specific interests and experiences but always casts an eye over the brim of personal or group interests and experiences to care for general well-being. Precisely in the sense of its autonomy from the sphere of economy and politics, civil society is a vitally important force for the formation of a consensus that may either influence political decision making or provide its legitimization. Associations and institutions of civil society are supposed to guarantee the necessary context to help establish forms and institutions of political communication, which are needed for the communicative generation of legitimate power. Civil society could not exist without a public sphere because it would lack opportunities for participation in debates of policy issues with (indirect) consequences for its members. Because the central part of civil society is occupied by associations that form opinions and serve as a hub for an autonomous public sphere, with which the concept of civil society is closely related, the two distinct concepts are also often confounded. Nevertheless, the public sphere and civil society should not be considered “simply different names for the same socio-historical phenomenon,” as Garnham suggests (2007: 206), or the public sphere considered just “a role” of civil society, as proposed by Edwards (2009). Despite many features that the public sphere and civil society certainly have in common, there are still—perhaps not plenty, but certainly essential—qualities that make them different. The importance of the concept of public sphere is largely to go beyond general appeals to the nature of civil society in attempts to explain the social foundations of democracy and to introduce a discussion of the specific organization within civil society of social and cultural bases for the development of an effective rational-critical discourse aimed at the resolution of political disputes. (Calhoun, 1993: 269; italics added)

Perhaps the most powerful argument against the equation of the two concepts is the fact that “the public sphere” and “civil society” are sometimes considered— paradoxically—altogether incompatible concepts. The idea of a productive conceptual distinction between the public sphere and civil society is even radically challenged, if only by a handful of those believing that “in light of the possibilities and dangers posed by the new digital technologies, [...] critical and democratic theorists [should] jettison the idea of the public sphere and adopt a more complex model of civil society” because “the regulatory fiction of the public sphere privileges a theorization of political norms [whereas] struggles that contest, resist, or reject its idealizations are excluded from the political terrain as remnants of tradi-

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tion, say, or manifestations of a terroristic irrationalism” (Dean, 2001a: 247). I wholly agree with Dean’s argument that “adding an s” to the public sphere does not solve any of its problems; on the contrary, “the s even confuses the theorization of democratic politics as it presumes parity among differing networks and spaces” (Dean, 2001a: 248). Yet rebutting the concept “public sphere” altogether does not solve its conceptual problems any more than the pluralization of the concept. The rejection of the concept of the public sphere as an irrelevant “dimension of civil society” or irrelevant concept compared with that of civil society is “countered” by a straight denial—quite marginal again—of theoretical validity in the concept of “civil society” suggesting that it is merely a descriptive category. Hannah Arendt (1990: 122) is perhaps to be blamed most for these “attacks” on the concept of “civil society” because of her extremely negative view of what civil society is supposed to mean—“that curious and somewhat hybrid realm which the modern age interjected between the older and more genuine realms of the public or political on one side and the private on the other.” As Arendt argued, whereas publicness promotes freedom in politics, the idea of civil society protects citizens from politics and thus promotes political freedom as a nonpolitical phenomenon or “freedom from politics.” A peculiar difference between “civil society” and “public sphere” that indicates the importance of not discarding either of them but keeping them conceptually separated is presented in the idea to equate “the public” with “the audience” because “they are composed of the same people” and “the activities of audiences […] cannot usefully be separated from the activities of publics” (Livingstone, 2005: 17, 21) or to equate the public sphere with the media (contents) or “communication space.” Such efforts are not particularly plausible because the reduction of the public to the audience devaluates the most precious merit of the public—the power of its members to act communicatively on a large scale from interpersonal to mass communication, as both speakers, producers, or authors, and listeners, consumers, or recipients. By employing new technological means and by lowering epistemic entry requirements, electronic media can create a mass audience of such a size as to be conceivably global in scope. But the type of audience so created has certain characteristics: the more socially undifferentiated and merely aggregative an audience is, the less likely it is that its members will be able reflexively to use their public reason in communicating with each other. (Bohman, 1999: 194)

Although the distinction between audience and public may not always be perfectly clear, “publics should be conceptualized as something other than just media audiences” (Dahlgren, 2009: 73). The existence of audiences and publics is based on a social space generated by publicity, but they still significantly differ from each other. In publics, for example, “diverse members of a society interact

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in distinctive ways and thereby come to regard themselves as a public which is concerned with each other’s opinions and endorses some explicit norms of publicity” (Bohman, 1999: 186), and virtually as many people express opinions as receive them (Mills, 1956/2000: 303). This self-identification of the public as a public based on mutual concerns and free and open communication is complemented by efforts to establish ever more inclusive and generalized forms of publicity. The existence of audiences does not imply any of these suppositions, which is why it comes closer to what Mills defined as “a mass.” Nevertheless, if despite pretty feeble arguments it seems conceivable to correlate or even equate “the public” and “the audience” because evidently both of them are communicative social categories, “civil society” and “audience” are obviously incommensurable categories because “audience” cannot be conceived of as a pattern of social organization, which civil society by its very nature is. Although the traditional concept of “audience” related to radio and particularly television viewing has crumbled with the “new media” because of complex and individualized communication practices brought about by the Internet, important conceptual differences still exist between the concepts of “audience” and “the public.” The fact that “participants” in these complex (mass-mediated) communication processes may also take the role of content producers and that new communication technologies enable a kind of convergence of production, communication, and consumption does not diminish the importance of analytical differentiation between the two concepts. In fact, the suggestion to equate publics and audiences reminds us of Ien Ang’s (1991: 28–29) idea to draw a distinction between the (normative) concept of “audience-as-public” (citizens) and the concept of “audience-as-market” (consumers), which comes much closer to the dominant (mass) communication practice in most (if not all) contemporary societies. Yet while Ang’s distinction between the two concepts helps to understand the development of mass media, attempts to make the public, by definition, synonymous to audiences blur it out. New forms of communication may dramatically alter political discourse and increase participation in the political process (audience-as-public), but they may, at the same time, continue to serve a narcotizing dysfunction that reduces participation (audience-as-market). Making the public synonymous to audiences affirms the former option (audience-as-public) but disguises the latter (audienceas-market), which implies either that consumption, reproduction, imitation, and adaptation of what one gets from the mass media is as essential of the public as participation in public discourses or even that audiences should not be considered consumers anymore at all. Fortunately, radical proposals to oust the concept of “audience-as-market” and to enthrone empirically and normatively only the “audience-as-public” at least leave the concept of civil society “untouched.” Indeed, it would be incomprehensible to argue that voluntary citizen organizations are synonymous to the vague social category of dispersed members of audiences not able to act another way than individually. However, when popular tastes and practices of audiences

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are at stake, it would be more convincing to argue that they are closer to “civil society,” which is defined as fully inclusive of all (types of) social groups, in contrast to the public, which indeed, in its “elitist version,” is more inclined toward cultural hierarchy. Last but not least, civil society and the public sphere clearly have in common the main objection to their globalization—the absence of a transnational or global state, which is discussed in the second part of the book. However, although the absence of clearly defined transnational forms and institutions of political society (as a “substitution” of the nation state) may severely hamper aspirations for a transnational public sphere and/or transnational/global civil society, this hypothetically missing element cannot be used as proof of the “convergence thesis” suggesting that civil society and the public sphere are essentially identical.

MASS MEDIA, THE PUBLIC, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE If no difference existed between audiences and the public (or civil society), it would be hard to define any substantial difference between commercial and public service media. Regardless of how broad audiences are conceptualized, it is obvious that civil society only marginally “traverses” audiences. Of course citizens acting in civil society are also constitutive of media audiences, but this is not to say that no substantial difference exists between associative reflexive acting in civil society and individual passive belonging to audiences. When civil society or one of its components is connected with a particular kind of public discourse taking place in the public sphere, it becomes “a public” or “the public.” There is no public sphere without civil society, but there is none without the public either. However, in addition to the public(s), there are many other actors appearing in the public sphere whose interests significantly differ from those of the public or civil society. The public as a specific collectivity does not come into being merely by individual participation in public discourse (e.g., in the mass media); it is also an “imagined communion.” What is needed, then, is that a significant number of citizens collectively imagine belonging to a communion, a public, which deals with issues and problems they have in common, such as a common interest in controlling the consequences of social transactions in which they could not participate. This can only happen with free and democratic forms of communication, which are constitutive of civil society and the public sphere. Due to their general role and influence in society, and specific function in constituting the public and the public sphere, the issues of freedom and democratic formation particularly apply to the mass media. For voluntary associative organizations that form the basis of a democratic society, as opposed to the powers of the state and corporate capital, free and equal access to the media—both in terms of presenting or reflecting specific ideas and personal participation in media operation—is not only invigorat-

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ing but “a matter of life or death.” Mass media are thus considered cornerstones of publicness and public sphere. The concept of the public sphere largely refers to the role of the media and public opinion in modern representative democracies; it also serves “as a normative concept with which to pass judgement on the current performance of the media from the perspective of the creation and maintenance of democracy” (Garnham, 2001: 12585–12586). The normative conceptualization of the media comes to the forefront in the idea of public service broadcasting, or public service media in general, which is my prime concern here. The public sphere as the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse cannot exist without the media. Mass media are constitutive of the public as an “imagined communion,” which can only come into existence through the media and is vitally important for the creation of an institutionalized (infra)structure of the public sphere. It is a distinctive feature of the media that they can transform a particular interest to a common interest by linking “primary publics” (C. W. Mills) and confronting (or linking) the rulers and the ruled. Ideally, they channel the flows of discourses from opinion formation in the networks of the public sphere to the political will formation in the political system and vice versa. However, it is not just any media on which a public sphere can be built up. The media have to perform specific normative functions as organs of (opinion of) the public along the principles of publicness set forth already by Kant and Bentham. Personal freedom of public use of reason and the right of the public to control political authorities are hardly compatible with the media owned by private capital or the political state, which pursue as their main goal maximization of commercial profit or political power rather than “maximization of publicness.” Yet the normative conceptualization may be at strong variance with the empirical evidence that, throughout the history, new means of communication have never been only socially used but always also abused for either business or politics (Williams, 1976: 10). Even if “the media are not the holders of power […] they constitute by and large the space where power is decided” (Castells, 2007: 242). It would be thus rather naïve to believe that the normative postulate of “regulation of the power structure of the public sphere” would correspond to an empirically existing structure that would secure “equal communication and participation rights” and “the diversity of independent mass media, and a general access of inclusive mass audiences to the public sphere” (Habermas, 2006: 412). The main reason is that virtually all political actors, ranging from policymakers and oppositional groups to lobbies and NGOs, are adopting media-centered strategies in order to influence the political decision-making process; the strategies are successful only inasmuch as they influence, directly or indirectly, the media contents. Due to the rise of organized particularistic interests in the political decision-making process, media dependence on money and political power, professionalization of public relations in political communication, and commercialization of the media, mass media often fail to perform a critical role in the public sphere.

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The question is whether “serving” civil society is (or should be) an obligation of all the media—including the commercial media that give every appearance of being free, independent, and objective—or public service media (should) have special obligations. The latter would suggest that, as a matter of principle, although public service media are not uniquely different from commercial media in terms of their obligations, the degree to which they can (or have to) be implemented significantly differs between the commercial and public service media. The historical evidence shows that early demands for the universalization of public service model in the press (as discussed and proposed by Bücher and Tönnies) failed because at the turn of the 20th century, there was no realistic possibility anymore to radically restrict the property right of those owning the incorporated “free press” in favor of the personal right to communicate. Lippmann (1922/1998: 324) called such proposals “an anomaly of our civilization” because the “only truth” of the newspapers at that time was that they were designed for “the buying public” wielding “a concentrated purchasing power”— buying not only newspapers but all products and services advertised in the newspapers. Nevertheless, as Habermas (2007) suggests: The market was the force that created the forum for subversive thoughts to emancipate themselves from state oppression in the first place. Yet the market can fulfil this function only so long as economic principles do not infringe upon the cultural and political content that the market itself serves to spread. […] Distrustful observation is called for, because no democracy can allow itself a market failure in this sector.

Quite obviously, if we assume that, in one way or another, public service media will continue to exist in the future, the differences in the degree and types of responsibilities between commercial and public service media are not likely to fade away. In a narrow economic sense, the idea of public service is associated primarily with the natural scarcity of goods or complexity of services exceeding individual investment capacities (e.g., military defense), which would justify or call for a strict state control or even monopoly. Such a narrow (mis)understanding of the nature of public service is also reflected in the simplified idea of public service (primarily broadcast) media as merely a consequence of the scarcity of radio frequencies in the predigital era. Because there is no such scarcity in the digital era anymore, it should follow—according to this view—that there is also no need for public service broadcasting; thus, consumer preferences and demands could finally “freely” determine the program supply on the media market. Even from the point of view of economic reasoning, the argument in favor of exclusively market-driven media seems problematic for three main reasons. First, a true competition of the media is not likely to materialize because the entry

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costs to the media market are becoming prohibitively high. The present development of economies of scale (mass production for as many customers as possible) and scope (convergence of formerly separated communication platforms and branches of industry) strongly limits the number of players able to enter the media market. Media concentration tends to reduce opportunities of independent producers to offer profitably something different from mainstream supply and foster standardization of program supply across the entire media (particularly television) industry. High levels of investment required to enter the media market, rising program production costs, and media concentration in the hands of a small number of corporations taking place both nationally and globally may severely restrict the possibility of nonmainstream customers or “buying publics” to influence the program supply. Second, legal regulation has been introduced by modern states in virtually all areas of the production of goods and services to protect consumers and society at large. The food industry, for example, faces a number of legal regulations, but it does not even think of them as restrictions of the freedom of economic initiative imposed by the state. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies cannot trade drugs that fail to pass rather rigorous tests under the supervision of the national health agencies. Cars would have probably been half as cheap if producers were not forced to comply with high legal safety and environmental standards, not to mention the aircraft industry and transportation. Third, the mere plurality of even perfectly competitive content providers— if it were somehow miraculously achieved—would not guarantee diversity of the supply. Quite the contrary, extremely competitive media markets may tend toward homogeneity even more likely than monopolistic or oligopolistic media systems because in fierce competition, media markets tend to reflect only mainstream preferences and demands of audiences (Cuilenburg, 2000: 75–76). In praise for the “broadcasting marketplace” as supposedly the best regulator of rational use of all resources, Fowler and Brenner (1983: 667) argue that such regulation is perfectly congruent with the freedom of expression principle because “Those who deliver popular, acceptable speech have little reason to fear the rebuke of the majority. Only words and ideas that trouble or confound need the special aid of constitutional protection.” Indeed, the “free” marketplace effectively eliminates “only” troublesome and annoying ideas. More important, however, reducing the idea of public service to the question of economic (in)effectiveness is analogous to reducing human rights to the property right. The concept of public service is much more complex, deeply rooted in historical processes of human emancipation, and thus closely linked with the virtues of human freedom and equality. It implies a broad societal consensus that certain services should be made available to all members of society on a nonprofitable basis regardless of the differences between them, particularly in terms of income, social status, cultural habitus, or ethnic affiliation. Such a consensus is based on the recognition that those services are fundamental to human life and thus have to be universally guaranteed and provided. The universal pro-

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vision of such services is an ethical imperative if they are associated with fundamental human rights and liberties. Even if some public services are not publicly financed, they are subject to a more strict legal regulation and public control than pure commercial sectors. Such is typically the case of the mass media. As the famed MacBride Report (1980/2004: 119–120) stated: There are essential differences between industries producing everyday consumer goods [...] and those producing information and cultural items. The same commercial logic should not guide both types of enterprises. Circulation of messages cannot be dissociated from ethical and social norms, spiritual and cultural values. This is why we are concerned [...] with issues relating to communication ownership/operation/control structures and their consequences, on both national and transnational levels.

Because any kind of publication through the media has a public nature and public significance, it calls for specific legal regulation that has to keep in mind particularly the implementation of the principle of publicness and the protection of the right to privacy, which are both directly related to human generic ability and need and the personal right to communicate. Mass media have to be, like public education and health, taken care of by the society at large regardless of whether they are privately or publicly owned. They are, or have to be, subject to legal and secondary regulations restraining or encouraging certain forms of organization, financing, ownership, management, control, procedures for licensing, standards of contents, and rules for access. That is why “public broadcasting is not uniquely different from private broadcasting in respect of the content of possible responsibilities to society, only in the degree to which these can be enforced” (McQuail, 2003: 15). The earliest ideas that media freedom can only go together with their social responsibility date as early as from the period of the liberal bourgeois public sphere when the press played a principal part in the rise of liberal economic and democratic political institutions. Despite immense changes in the complexity of the media and media networks, the idea of the public as the key player in the public sphere that was constitutive of the early press is no less important today, and it is getting even richer in terms of its relevance for democratic political, cultural, and economic processes. The spreading of these processes beyond the nation states and national markets sharpens the tensions between the two main functions that the privately owned quality media should fulfill: to provide information, opinion, and education to the audiences and to secure stable profits to the owners. The tensions are often solved in favor of commercial interest: The sensational rather than the significant dominates the media; news is decontextualized, and thus media do not provide citizens with the information they need to participate in the democratic process. The greater part of all media activities is carried out for

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profit according to the market rules that should also, as it is often argued, reflect and satisfy consumers’ preferences, but research shows citizens’ increasing skepticism about the credibility of news media, particularly in the developed part of the world (e.g., BBC poll Trust in Media 200610). In a 2008 U.S. poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting.11 The normative view that mass media have some responsibility to serve (civil) society in which they operate is for some an axiom that hardly needs explanation because the media are an integral part of modern social system with significant political and cultural functions for individuals and society as a whole. The opposite view holds that true freedom of expression implies not only an absence of any outside interference (market forces are considered insiders in the process) but also a lack of obligation to meet any outside claims, especially any claim “made in the name of the society or state and therefore backed by force as well as authority” (McQuail, 2003). The laissez-faire approach advocates the principle that the production and consumption of media contents should be left to the marketplace in which media enterprises produce programs for viewers and sell their audiences’ attention to advertisers. According to McChesney (1999), this position reflects the rise of a new First Amendment theology in the United States, which propagates the belief that the First Amendment grants freedom of expression to the media rather than citizens. Consequently, any interference with the organization and structure of the media is suggested to violate the First Amendment, as if its rationale were to “authorize the corporate control and hyper-commercialization of media and communication” (McChesney, 1999: 257). As Habermas (2007) noted, this organizational principle has inflicted “devastating political and cultural damage wherever it was introduced.” The damages seem to increase with the degree of multiple media ownership, which, in Barron’s (2000: 557) words, makes media contents just “a kind of filler” because “economics, not politics energizes this relentless accumulation of media properties by a few corporate media.” Barron (2000) identifies three “diversity rationales” for multiple ownership rules that would limit the concentration of private economic power in the media: (1) Stimulation of greater gender, ethnic, and racial diversity of media ownership; (2) Maximization of diversity of viewpoints and ideas presented in the media; and (3) Minimization of the ability of a small group of corporate media to dominate the opinion process. The outright denial of the laissez-faire campaigners that privately owned media can ever better serve the public through government regulation—which in itself should be considered a violation of the private property right—is challenged by the “social responsibility” advocates with the argument that not only public regulation of the media may resemble more shared property rights than

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governmental regulation, but also that there is no substance in the belief that private property right is inherently superior to the public speech right. A private proprietor of communication means is not likely to make contents serviceable for democratic public reasoning due to his or her private interest in maximizing commercial profit—if fulfilling democratic functions is merely a moral duty that does not pertain to other proprietors. If left to the owners, the use of communication like any other productive property would result in commercial enterprise. Any communication organization exposed to the market regulation would be forced to respond to popular demand prevailing in the marketplace; it is not likely that it would countenance the expression of dissenting or minority opinions. That marketplace is not the best possible regulator of all human transactions was admitted even by one of the most vigorous promoters of the principle of state noninterference with private transactions in economy, John Stuart Mill (1847: 8), who recognized that, in contrast to business, “there are other things, of the worth of which the demand of the market is by no means a test; things of which the utility does not consist in ministering to inclinations, nor in serving the daily uses of life, and the want of which is least felt where the need is greatest. This is peculiarly true of those things which are chiefly useful as tending to raise the character of human beings.” Education would be a typical case for the kind of products or services for which the market cannot be seen as a test of their value because, as Mill noted, the uneducated cannot judge matters of education. Generally, he believed that the principle that individuals are the best judges of their own interest could not apply to acts of public charity and similar acts by individuals not in their own interest but in the interest of other people; when individuals can only participate indirectly in decision making (e.g., as shareholders in a joint-stock company); or when individual actions could not be effective without governmental interference (e.g., workers’ negotiations with the employers). Consequently, the unique nature and importance of communication for individuals and society not only justify but require public “interference” with the media to prevent (at least some of) them from serving only particularistic lucrative interests. Such interference is not without hazards. Mass media are tightly linked with governments, the corporate world, and audiences. They depend on political and economic actors for much of the news they publish, and they offer them the widest possible audiences to be exposed to their promotional publicity (public relations, propaganda, and advertising). With politics increasingly becoming “mediated”— using the media as the most important vehicle to address citizens—mass media may be regulated in the way to fit in best with the interests of the dominant political actors, and public service media are not an exception per definitionem. Mass media have a dual and controversial role in the public sphere, serving not only the public (and civil society) but also politicians and, first of all, business. Newspapers, film, radio, television, and the Internet significantly contribute to the organization of the public sphere. Ever since Bentham, first the press and later other media were always considered constitutive of the public and the public sphere.

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As the press expanded and grew into a major generator of commercial profit and political influence, newspapers lost their leading position of the organs of public opinion; they became instead organs of corporate interest and political parties. The continuous development of new media from film to the Internet and the enormous increase in the size of audiences made the contradictory role of the media in relation to “the public” ever more disputable. From the normative point of view, mass media became one of the actors in the public sphere with particular (private) interests not necessarily congruent with their obligation to (re)present public opinion. Consequently, the concept of the press (or mass media in general) had to be clearly detached from the concept of the public because not all mass media act as media of the public (e.g., as “public service media”); most of them act, as Lippmann would say, as media “for the buying public.” The difference between the media that are “organs of the public” and those whose main task is to influence “the buying public” (or, rather, audiences) may be used as an indication of the polarization taking place in the public sphere between the actors constituting the public sphere (i.e., the public) and others merely using the public sphere for promotional or disciplinary publicity. Regardless of its immediate consequences, a wide dispersion of communication power among as many actors as possible is a much-desired value in normative theories of democracy. A wide and fair dispersal of power and ubiquitous opportunities to present one’s own opinions in public is considered inherently democratic. Widely dispersed media are also less vulnerable to external political and commercial censorship because they cannot be as easily controlled as heavily concentrated media. However, global media governance, which is characterized by the absence of effective regulation of transnational media conglomerates, deprives nation states of two main elements of their media policy: national regulation and control of media concentration, and public service broadcasting. Autonomous, objective, and trustworthy press as an organ of public opinion produced not only by its own staff and correspondents but also directly by the public (“voices of people”), in which journalists and editors would serve the common good but not particularistic commercial or political interests, represents an ideal-type construct in Tönnies’ normative theory. Ideas of public service broadcasting discussed among critical scholars in the late 20th century demonstrate that the public/private distinction implied in Bücher’s and Tönnies’ ideas of socialization of the press remain valuable and substantiate the concept of “public service broadcasting” despite the fact that the dark scenario prevailed and that even in radio regulatory debates in the late 1920s there were no references to their ideas. Yet one can come across a rather clear echo of their ideas in a modernized version of the definition of public service broadcasting adopted by UNESCO: Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) is broadcasting made for the public and financed and controlled by the public. It is neither commercial nor state-

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The definition, however, fails to recognize the importance of the “direct expression of people’s voices” in the media, which Tönnies proposed as a solution for the increasing dependence of the press on particularistic commercial and political interests that privilege private interests against the public ones. He never argued for the “right to communicate” (or the right of access), but his ideas of press reform definitely come close to the arguments supporting that right as a fundamental civil right. Essentially, critics of the moral decline of the press in the late 1800s and early 1900s argued not only for an independent press but also for autonomous individuals. Paddy Scannell (1992: 317) suggests that “If broadcasting today is defensible as a public service it can only be as a service to the public.” That goes without saying. Yet, is this abstract requirement only necessary or also a sufficient condition? Certainly every public service is related to human rights, suggesting that certain material and spiritual goods and services fundamental for human(e) existence should be universally provided, and not every public service is service to the public; clearly not if it provides material goods such as gas or services such as health care. What about private broadcasting—does it supply any service to the public? Are there also the media, print or broadcast, with no service and, thus, no use value to the public? As we have seen, there are more difficult questions. Is there only one public? What is “the public,” in singular or plural, to which a service is supplied by the media? What diverse relationships can be established between the media and the public(s)? Table 4.1 illustrates the complexity of dimensions relevant for the definition of public service media, which were already thought of by Bücher and, particularly, Tönnies. Contemporary attempts to disavow the ideas of public service broadcasting are not surprising. They are similar to those denoting the ideas of press reform 100 years ago as attacks on “freedom of the press.” “Public service broadcasting” was empirically conceived in early 20th-century Europe as a paternal nationbuilding “service” or system with cultural mission (Jauert & Lowe, 2005) in order to defend it against commercial pressures but also in contrast to how critical sociologists saw the need to re-regulate the press a few decades earlier (e.g., they were not preoccupied with the fear of abuse of the press by nondemocratic movements or governments). Despite those efforts, commercialization and fragmentation that have first occurred in the newspapers in the 19th century and caught the attention of critical scholars of the time soon prevailed in broadcasting, particularly after the development of television. These processes seem natur-

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AUTOCRATIC PRIVILEGE HEGEMONIC (PROPAGANDA) POLITICAL (CENSORSHIP)

LEGAL STATUS OF FREEDOM OF PUBLICATION:

DOMINANT DISCOURSE:

PRINCIPAL FORM OF MEDIA REGULATION: PROPERTY-RESTRICTED

COMMERICAL, LEGAL/JUDICIAL

INSTRUMENTAL PUBLICITY

SUBORDINATED TO PROPERTY RIGHT

PRESS FREEDOM

COMPETITION (MARKET)

OPEN

ETHICAL/ POLITICAL/LEGAL

ASSOCIATIVE (PUBLIC USE OF REASON)

CIVIL RIGHT

RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE

COOPERATION (ASSOCIATION)

PUBLIC SERVICE

tem as an “authoritarian system with a conscience.” In terms of its fundamental principles, it is not a system sui generis.

Note. The so-called paternal media system is considered a special (benign) form of the authoritarian system. Williams (1976: 131) defines a paternal media sys-

STATUS-RESTRICTED

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICNESS

FREEDOM OF PUBLICATION INSITUTIONALIZED AS:

ACCESS TO PUBLIC COMMUNICATION:

CONFLICT (COERCION)

SYSTEM OF MEDIA REGULATION COMMERCIAL

PREVAILING SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP:

AUTHORITARIAN

Table 4.1 Models of Media Regulation.

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al only as long as we do not see that the subordination of the right to communicate to the property right and commercial freedom is unnatural—because the right to communicate has long existed as a natural right before it has been suppressed by the invention of private property and civil property right. Early radical critiques of the commercialization and politicization of the press (e.g., Bücher and Tönnies) considered socialization of the press a fundamental condition and the only way of its liberation from the subordination to the state, political parties, and, particularly, commodity production. They related the ideas of press reforms that would establish the press as public service to the “extension” of personal freedom of expression and democratization of society, which would make the press a matter of genuine common concern and decision making. But the early critiques also realized that reforms could not be limited to the questions of political and economic (in)dependence of the press because the genuine socialization of communication activity stands and falls together with the universal democratization of social relations, which substantially affect all forms of human communication. These radical ideas should not be demoralized by the fact that the idea of public service clearly failed in the field of the press even though newspapers were constitutive of the bourgeois public sphere emerging in the 17th century. The reason seems to be rather simple. The idea of the “public service press” emerged rather late; it was actually behind the times because newspapers already had become powerful economic players, and no social force or political actor was influential enough to limit their power at that time. Newspapers would ideologically legitimize the renunciation of such ideas by denoting them as attacks on “freedom of the press.” Of course, freedom of communication always existed in principle—as a principle and as a privilege—but it did not exist for everyone. Since the 19th century, “freedom of the press,” which has been established as freedom of citizens to publish/print, acquired a conventional sense of a (constitutional) privilege of those using private means of communication to “serve the public.” Despite the formidable growth of the press in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the public space remained essentially unchanged until the development of broadcasting: saloons, coffeehouses, universities, parks, squares, parliaments, theatres, and stadiums brought together, more or less occasionally, a limited amount of people who witnessed an event or, less often, took an active part in it. The press has been constitutive of the public and the public sphere, but it was not technically equipped to widen the access to public events (i.e., to make its readers eyewitnesses of an event). Only radio and later television lifted the spatial restrictions of access to “public events,” and television made them—in principle—even more universally visible, which made the events and their protagonists increasingly famed and popular. Nevertheless, the nature of participation of audiences in these events changed with broadcasting despite the fact that even in the “authentic” events at public places audiences largely remained passive. Whereas the audience in a

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public space such as a theater has to conform to specific rules of public behavior valid for a given location and an event, the dispersed mass audience in front of television screens in their private homes follows norms of private behavior. Could anyone imagine that television viewers at home would stand up each time when the national anthem is played? Or that they would stand up and applaud actors at the end of a play? (I dare not ask, however, whether they would stand up and applaud in front of the screen when their preferred [national] football team scores a goal because they probably would.) It is more than that: Public events (co)produced by broadcasters (rather than just transmitted, to mention football once again) are staged in a way to correspond to the private settings of the viewers who seat comfortably and negligently in front of their TV screens. As a matter of principle, public service broadcasting is not defensible as just any kind of service to the public. Bücher and Tönnies had some specific ideas of what kinds of services the press as an organ of public opinion should provide to its readers. One may disagree with the concrete features of what they drafted as press reforms, but that should not blur their general idea that the reforms not only must help ensure the right to express ideas free of political and commercial pressures—protecting primarily journalists—but also create opportunities for expression, thus helping “people’s voices” to resound in the public sphere. This is where the specific idea of public service in the sphere of (mass) communication substantially diverges from the idea of public service in general. The general idea of public service points out the principle of equal access to consumption of services or goods in question without any reference to the need of publicity in particular. The case of public service media is different. Because the media may be considered the guardians of the principle of publicness in modern societies, this principle is central to the concept of public service media. Indeed, the unique feature of the idea of public service media is the reference to the principle of publicness. The specificity of genuine public service media could be defined in reference to two related issues: (a) the nature of contents produced and published (broadcast) by the media, and (b) the constitution of “the public” that should use public service media as its “organs.” Traditional (in a way “paternal”) definitions of public service broadcasting refer to the first issue and neglect the second one. They emphasize a nationwide provision of a wide variety of contents (i.e., universal availability in terms of technical and financial access and contents). The audience is heterogeneous and dispersed but not stratified in different classes in terms of their social status, taste, or political leaning, in contrast, for example, to social differences maintained in cultural tastes.13 In addition to cultural and social functions, the fundamental role and advantage of public service broadcasting over commercial media should be to provide a comprehensive image of political life. As a political institution, “public broadcasting has the vocation of standing for the integrity and viewer utility of civic communication against the many […] pressures that threaten to subvert it” (Blumler and Hoffmann-Riem, 1992: 33).

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The type of reflexive publicness developed with newspapers and reading publics cannot be compared with publicness as visibility that emerged with television. Television brought about a new type (or at least dimension) of publicness—direct visibility—and consequently changed the nature of the public. The availability of broadcasting to almost every citizen of a nation state (at least in the most developed countries of the time) changed the character of publicness not only because of the (re-)introduction of the visual dimension but also because it widened the notion of “public interest” by the inclusion of ordinary people into the public domain. The 19th-century press never succeeded to achieve such a broad readership, although the “penny press” or “yellow press” made newspapers financially affordable to common people already in the late 19th-century United States. Nevertheless, these technologically driven changes do not radically challenge the historical roots of public service media originating in the late 19th century. They do not challenge the significance of communication for individuals and society, which justifies or even requires a kind of authoritative “interference” with the media. Those admitting the need for such an “interference” may widely disagree on what ground the interference should take place—should it be public (e.g., constitutional, legal) or not; should it prevent the media from serving commercial interests or allow them to be profitable, and so on—but they realize that all forms of human communication relevant for citizen rights and freedoms should be guaranteed in one way or another. In normative terms, public service media provide a service of the public, by the public, and for the public: a service of the public—because it is financed by the public and should be owned by it; a service by the public—not only financed and controlled, but also produced by it; and a service intended for the public— but also for the government and other powers acting in the public sphere. In summary, it should be an organ of the public and thus “a cornerstone of democracy,” which should be reflected in both the nature of its contents and the constitution of the public using public service media as its organs. Table 4.2 presents schematically the differences among paternal, commercial, and public service media in terms of their obligations to those with legitimate power to influence and/or control the media. The media owe responsibility to six major groups of legitimate actors: (a) their owners, private or state/governmental; (b) clients from the world of the corporate capital, such as advertisers; (c) politicians; (d) professional organizations of occupational groups employed in the media (e.g., associations of journalists); (e) media audiences; and (f) civil society. The relationship between the media and six groups of actors differs in terms of the dominant source of legitimacy of responsibility claims and type of regulations. Significant differences exist between the privately owned commercial media and public service media. Normatively speaking, commercial media are most likely to take seriously responsibility claims by their owners, major commercial partners, and audiences. Many investors in the newspaper industry are clearly interested only in turning a quick profit. The decline of the traditional

103 Legal/political

State policymakers and regulatory bodies

Political

Communication rights

Consumers’ rights (e.g., right to choose)

Professional norms

Profit maximization

Property right

Source of Legitimacy of Responsibility Claims

High

None

Low/ none

Low/ none

Low

High

State/Paternal

Moderate

None

High

Moderate

High/ moderate

High

Commercial

Moderate

High

Moderate

High

Low

Moderate

Public Service*

Normative Power of Actors to Influence the Media

* In terms of normative power of actors, “public service media” to large degree also include “alternative media.”

Ethical/political/ legal

Citizens and civil society

Ethical

Professions/content creators/ journalists Cost-effective (market)

Contractual (market)

Corporate economic clients

Audiences

Legal

Prevailing Type of Regulation of Obligations

Media owners

Media Responsibility to:

Table 4.2. Modes of Media Responsibility

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newspaper and the dominance of free dailies and, particularly, online newspapers are even considered “self-cannibalism,”14 resulting from practices once incompatible with professional journalism, such as free Internet publication of newspapers’ content to attract more advertisers, the flood of free newspapers financed by advertisements, free public-relations articles replacing news stories and thus undermining newspaper credibility, advertising in editorial pages—undermining newspaper credibility even further, and reduction of editorial staff and newsroom budgets. In contrast, public service media are expected to have stronger professional (ethical) commitments and, in particular, obligations to civil society. As a result, public service media may enjoy greater autonomy due to more dispersed responsibilities, whereas in commercial media, profit-seeking interests may prevail to such a degree to limit substantially authentic media autonomy. On the one hand, media commitments to civil society are beneficial to media autonomy from the political and economic power actors. On the other hand, and primarily, the inclusion of civil society associations in operation of (public) media not only enables civil society to act more effectively but also contributes to the democratization of society by and large. If the media are ruthlessly kept under state (governmental) surveillance, they are not able to expose political elites to public surveillance. Inasmuch as political and corporate economic elites overlap, corporate control of the media may also disable them from performing their watchdog function. Thus, participation of civil society in media management and control may be the most effective way to bring political (state) power under public surveillance. In modern complex societies, the development of information and communication technologies paves the way for considerable decentralization in decision making, but at the same time it may also foster higher order centralization. It is important for a democratic society to maximize decentralization and reduce the power of the (national) government and political elites, bearing in mind the principle of cost-effectiveness at the same time. The involvement of a greater number of civil society actors from different geographic, ethnic, cultural, social, and political environments in the processes of public deliberation and decision making related to media contents and management may contribute to the broadening of the social basis of democratic processes. Last but not least, representative democracy is facing a loss of democratic legitimacy as a result of the transformation of national parliaments from the locus of public deliberation about social issues into the party-political voting machine steered by the executive power. Since the beginning, the legitimacy of the representative government was linked to an active citizen participation in political deliberation. Citizen participation in various advisory, decision-making, and supervisory bodies of public service media can help overcome the general legitimacy crisis of representative democracy. Without an effective power of civil society to influence public service media in terms of its values, interests, and preferences, the idea of public service media

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would be deprived of its constitutive principles of publicness and personal communication freedom. The power of other actors influencing public service media would excessively increase, and the difference between private and public service media would eventually disappear—to the detriment of civil society and democratic social order. Public service media may be seen as representing a shrinking minority voice in today’s global media landscape. Nevertheless, in the period of (newspaper) crisis, the idea of public service becomes redemptive not only in terms of (normative) theory but also in terms of practical solutions. The most recent (global) newspaper crisis indicates that the production and consumption of media contents could not be left to the market without serious “collateral” damages. For Habermas (2007), in the contemporary crisis of the newspaper industry, the most important step in attempting to “protect” the opinion-forming press, which is fundamental to the existence of the public sphere, should be to accept the idea of press subsidies as an appropriate solution: When gas, electricity or water is at stake, the state must guarantee the energy supply for the population. Shouldn’t it do likewise when this other type of “energy” is at risk—the absence of which will cause disruptions that harm the state? It is not a “system failure” when the state tries to protect the public commodity that is the quality press. The real question is just the pragmatic one of how that can be done best. (Habermas, 2007)

Following the example of public service broadcasting, the idea of subsidizing newspapers (or “even” completely nonprofit newspapers) is not merely a scholastic enchantment, as it can be demonstrated with a recent proposal of endowment as a solution to the financial woes of newspapers. David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale University, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst, believe that only by transforming newspapers into a nonprofit trust “we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities.” Endowments would provide stability to the press and promote journalistic independence necessary to serve the public good more effectively because “endowed news organizations would be in an ideal situation—with no pressure from stockholders or advertisers at all” (Swensen & Schmidt, 2009). A century ago, Tönnies argued in favor of publicly rather than privately owned press by quoting American sociologist Jenks (1895: 168): “We shall never have a paper thoroughly independent in stating its views on public questions until we have a paper entirely independent of its circulation and advertising.” As it became obvious in the recent newspaper crisis, 100 years later, this still seems to be the only solution. Habermas (2007) returned to this idea in his article on “How to Save the Quality Press?” (2007) by suggesting that if the public service status is appropriate for the broadcasting media, the quality press deserves even

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more to be under the auspices of the public due to its central role for the democratic process as a whole because it is the quality press’ political reporting on which all other media largely depend. It is primarily the responsibility of public service media to be instrumental in the formation of an inclusive public sphere because they are best suited—as indicated in Table 4.2—to make it accessible to all citizens regardless of their social status.

THE RISE OF THE INTERNET AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PUBLIC SPHERE The growing popularity of the concept “public sphere” was given a strong impetus by the rapidly growing computer-mediated communication in the 1990s. At the same time, the ubiquity of the Internet in social relations—it is hardly possible to conceptualize the Internet today only in terms of communication technology without referring to its social environment and/or consequences—also brought about new puzzles about the public sphere concept. The Internet is much more than just new information and communication technology; its development embodies, reproduces, and sustains forms of social organization spread through the entire social structure. In contrast to the traditional “mediated publicness” based on the operation of traditional, noninteractive press and broadcast media, the Internet with a variety of new forms of mass-mediated communication offers new opportunities for participatory communication. The Internet substantially increased the amount of horizontal interpersonal (emails, chat rooms) and vertical/hierarchical group communication (fans, followers, friends, and supporters in Twitter, Facebook, and similar social networking and blogging sites) at all levels, from small (primary) groups to society-level and worldwide networks. With the Internet, an entirely new kind of social communication was brought about—“mass self-communication” (Castells, 2007: 248), which is a form of mass communication in terms of its users as audiences now becoming global but at the same time a negation of the traditional mass communication in terms of possibilities offered to individual users as content producers. But the most intriguing and radical social change brought about by the Internet is its ubiquitous penetration into all levels of society, especially among the youth. It is now “institutionally so integrated with how society functions that the sense of its separateness, its distinction, in regard to the way we normally get things done has dissipated” (Dahlgren, 2009: 150). In principle, the Internet could help to eliminate two main deficiencies of the traditional mass-mediated communication: “(a) the lack of face-to-face interaction between present participants in a shared practice of collective decision making and (b) the lack of reciprocity between the roles of speakers and addressees in an egalitarian exchange of claims and opinions” (Habermas, 2006: 414). To a certain degree, the Internet also challenged the dynamics of tradition-

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al mass communication, dominated by the instrumental power of the media to select and frame the contents and thus the “public issues.” Nevertheless, the Internet has no intrinsic technologically driven features; it is much more like writing, which is why “it holds out many different possibilities in its transformation of the public sphere” (Bohman, 2004: 140). The Internet technology also further expands the possibilities of the transformation of an individual opinion into public (at least published) opinion, which was based on public oral communication in the early period, on the press in the 19th century, and other “old media” in the 20th century, “but at all times and primarily, on private conversation” (Tarde, 1901: 41). With the introduction of freely downloadable applications for self-publishing and the new interactive social networks it has created, the Internet considerably enhanced citizens’ possibilities to participate in public discourse. For the first time in modern history, all citizens in developed societies have the means to enter the public realm, which formerly was prohibitively expensive for lower classes and thus reserved for the elites and professionals. The Internet helped to develop a deterritorialized (transnational) communication space not bound to a particular territory. This development may eventually lead to the formation of nonterritorial units with long-term membership, which would replace the territorial units of nation states as the (only) legitimate source of citizenship.15 The Internet had a constitutive role in the development of informal global communication networks of individuals, organizations, and movements, which may help to create an international civil society aspiring at a genuinely cosmopolitan public. “It is there that we find the real ‘vanguard’ of the public sphere, the domain where the most intense developments are taking place—what we might call the cyber transformation of the public sphere” (Dahlgren, 2005: 151). Nevertheless, this is not to say that the Internet inaugurated not only “new media” but also a new and separate “online public sphere.” A public sphere is not formed around a single medium but as an infrastructure, which includes a variety of communication media as its pillars as well as institutional and cultural frameworks for organizing public deliberation. In its early period of the 1990s, the Internet was believed to radically challenge the hierarchical, top-down mass communication model typical of traditional media and to democratize not only communication but also political relations in general, irrespective of all other (former) impediments. Its “anarchist” phase reflected university and scientific environment in which it was created (Bohman, 2004: 141). It was thought to offer new possibilities for political participation, leading to a kind of direct democracy not only locally but even at the (trans)national level: A genuine or “strong” electronic democracy was expected to oust populist democracy dominated by traditional mass media, particularly television. Even today, some authors are still persuaded that the Internet “offers an extraordinary medium for social movements and rebellious individuals to build their autonomy and confront the institutions of society in their own terms and around their own projects” (Castells, 2007: 249).

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Similar hopes were invested already in the appearance of other communication inventions of the 20th century. Perhaps most remarkably, Brecht (1932/2000) referred to radio as potentially “the most wonderful public communication system imaginable,” which will happen as soon as this new “apparatus” becomes “capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of making the listener not only hear but also speak.” Consequently, Brecht called in his cultural-revolutionary radio theory for technical and organizational restructuring of radio from “a distribution apparatus” to “a communication apparatus for the general benefit of the public” (Brecht, 1932/2000: 45), which would need a revolutionary political momentum. Such changes are not feasible in the existing social order, but they are realizable in another one, Brecht (1932/2000: 45) suggested; a “better application of the apparatuses in the interest of the many” would shake up the existing social basis of these apparatuses and “serve the propagation and formation of this other order” (italics added). Brecht also emphasized that the new forms of communication do not leave the old ones unchanged, which seems still more relevant in the age of the Internet and (both technological and social) convergence, which blur the boundaries between traditionally detached parts of an imagined whole. The development of the Internet contributed to the process of fragmentation of the (national) public, which began already with the arrival of the “new media” in the 1920s (radio) and 1950s (television). These technological innovations supported by media deregulation brought about a remarkable increase in communication channels, resulting in the diversification, differentiation, and specialization of media supply and the segmentation of media audiences. Whereas classical public opinion theorists of the early 20th century, such as Dewey or Tönnies, did not have any difficulty “recognizing” a nation-wide phenomenon to be named “the (national) public,” the conception of a unified national public and a “solid public opinion” as Tönnies named it seemed to become hardly tenable by the end of the last century. The differentiation of the public became unavoidable for a simple “technical” reason—an increasing gap between the limited, relatively invariable communicative capacities of individuals and the increasing complexity of social communication. The simultaneous processes of internal segmentation, which brought about more and more widely dispersed public, and external permeation of national borders in the emergent transnational communication networks also made the more lax concept of the “public sphere” more congruent with the rapid development of decentred electronic communication networks and thus usually preferable over the “old” and more restrictively concept of the public. Although new types of engagement are undoubtedly made possible by new communication technologies and established communication infrastructures (in the developed societies), it is much more questionable if they may stimulate and revive political participation and civic engagement and the development of a genuine public. Indeed, new forms of communication and online network communities established with its help may not only contribute to the revitalization of democracy but could also entice us into an attractively packaged surrogate for democratically organized public sphere—the (hi)story well known from the past

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when the press and other “big” media conceived as the pillars of democracy had largely lost their democratic remits and responsibilities. The idea(l) of universal access to the Internet did not materialize (yet). Although there are more than 1 billion Internet users and twice as many mobile communication users worldwide, and most countries continue to make steady progress in terms of access to these technologies, the “digital divide”—the gap among groups of individuals, social classes, countries, and geographic areas with regard to the level of effective access to information and communication technologies and, specifically, to their use of the internet, is far from being a matter of specific “lifestyle.” Rather, it reflects economic and political inequalities. A wide gap in access to the Internet exists between developed and nondeveloped countries and between rich and poor people within most countries. Although the level of Internet penetration in North America, Europe, Oceania, and Australia was more than 50% in 2010 (with the highest 77.4% of population in the United States and Canada), it was only 10% in Africa.16 This gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” often correlates with religious, ethnic, gender, cultural, and racial differences, which mostly hide substantial economic divisions within and between societies. Even in the country with the highest Internet penetration, the United States, Internet usage still significantly depends on education (44% of users among those with less than a high school diploma vs. 91% among college graduates), income (53% in families with less than $30,000 income vs. 95% among the wealthiest with an income of more than $95,000), and race/ethnicity (32% percent among only Spanish-speaking Hispanics vs. 75% among “all Whites”). The differences among different social groups are even larger in using a high-speed connection.17 Although in the developed countries there is hardly any difference in the percentage of male and female Internet users, the gender difference is among the highest in developing countries. In India, for example, where only 5.3% of the total population were Internet users in 2010, 85% of them were male and only 15% female. Similarly, only 4% of Arab women use the Internet.18 Similarly to former revolutionary technologies that have substantially contributed to economic growth and social change but not to the reduction of social inequalities, ICTs are not “classless” technologies. They are shaping a new class structure separating the “rich-and-wired” and “poor-and-unconnected.” Because ICT is becoming indispensable infrastructure for both civil society and the public sphere, exclusion from these “technological” structures has not only economic but much broader and fatal consequences for “unconnected” individuals—it leads to exclusion from civil society and the public sphere and from the citizenship altogether. Such exclusion can have fatal consequences not only for individuals but for the entire society. Participation in the production of “hyperspiritual reality” as Emile Durkheim named it binds members of society together. The inability to interact with other members of society and to participate in the formation of consensus on fundamental values and beliefs not only significantly reduces the frequency of interaction and participation in common activities but also reduces the

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level of (value) integration and, consequently, increases “deviant behavior.” New communication technologies did not change this fundamental “social fact.” Nevertheless, the assessment of democratic achievements or failures brought about by the Internet should not rest merely on the counterfactual ideal of a perfect democracy, as it was often the case in the earliest days of the Internet. Rather, a critical assessment of the Internet’s democratic achievements should not ignore the (in)efficiency of the traditional “old” media in democratizing communication in society. In this perspective, we should not miss to see that despite some unpleasant similarities with the anti-democratic tendencies of the old media (such as commoditization, ownership concentration, hidden forms of censorship), the Internet is more inclusive, less vulnerable to censorship, and less dependent on political and market forces. Indeed, the birth of alternative, more individualized forms of communication spread in the Internet reminds us of great expectations that sprang up with the emancipation of the press from censorship and with the advent of radio. It is true, however, that a greater individualization in computermediated communication does not automatically provide a greater personal autonomy. It can also worsen the conditions of the most vulnerable social classes not able to enter the newly established interactive virtuality or to resist the pressures of commercialization. More generally, the development of the Internet could even follow the old media on the way from being the organ of the public to becoming a tool of suppressing public dissent. A relative absence of state regulation in the Internet may be interpreted as the suppression of censorship, which was a constant danger inhibiting the formation of public spheres. However, states have been largely replaced by commercial corporations such as Google, which design, control, and actually own large sections of the Internet’s architecture.18 Despite the disillusions about the Internet, it “retains” some important advantages over other mass media regarding the level of reciprocity of communication and equality of communicating participants. In terms of C. W. Mills’ classic (empirical) differentiation between the mass and the public, the technology of computer-mediated communication could be argued to significantly reinvigorate “communities of publics” characterized by discussion as “the ascendant means of communication,” in contrast to the traditional mass media, which only “enlarge and animate discussion, linking one primary public with the discussions of another.” The Internet thus offers new ways of private and public communication that challenge the dominant type of communication—the “formal media”—in a “mass society,” thus paving the way for the publics to revive after they have “become mere media markets: all those exposed to the contents of given mass media” in the mass society (Mills, 1956/2000: 304). Cyber citizenship did not solve the problems of democratic political representation and (even less) participation. It is true that a large number of web “communities” were formed both locally (nationally) and globally, which are based on common interests and often imply a certain level of solidarity among participants. Yet they do not significantly enhance democracy because they are just as narrowly defined as traditional public factions defined by racial, gender,

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age, ideological, or religious identities and interests, and they rarely transcend group particularisms. Even (or particularly) the most noticeable “social media,” such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, are not aimed at increasing citizens’ participation in democratic processes but are rather (meant to be) profitable businesses. These virtual “communities” may even not go beyond incidental networking. They are not democratically structured like democratic polity such as nation states, although they may far exceed many of them in terms of the “population” size (e.g., think of the “population” of more than 400 million active users of Facebook, half of them logging on to Facebook every day). The decenteredness of the Internet prevents it from the monopolization typical of the “old media,” but it also stimulates fragmented particularisms of loosely structured and fragile groups rising in the Internet environment. “Participation” in the Internet takes place in the private sphere of home or office; it lacks “social concreteness and immediacy long understood as a precondition for democratic involvement in decision making” (Boggs, 2000: 271). “Feeling at home is not a substitute for public space” (Calhoun, 1999: 217). It would be tenuous to claim that the Internet did not enabled civil society actors, particularly in the realm of “alternative politics” (e.g., women, religious actors, environmentalists, labor, peace activists, gay and lesbian activists, humanitarians) to act on a larger scale and to become more visible both nationally and transnationally; but how effective their actions are because of that—in terms of impact on public opinion and decision makers—is another question. The boom of millions of websites, blogs, chat rooms, forums, and networks of friends across the world do not lead to an inter- or transnational public opinion or public sphere but more likely to “the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics” (Habermas, 2006: 423n). Yet this is only one side of the story; we should not underestimate the hegemonic uses of the Internet by the dominant political and economic powers that want to profit from citizen Internet-based social communication networks and to (re)affirm their domination in the realm of communication and extend it to the new media. The democratic merit of computer-mediated communication is mostly limited to enforcing special interests vigorously and continuously expressed by numerous users, such as an overturn of political suppression and censorship of authoritarian regimes that try to control and repress (mass) communication and public opinion. The “Twitter revolution” in the former Soviet Republic Moldova in 2009, struggles against authoritarian government in Iran in 2010, and massive rebellions against corrupted authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Yemen, Iran and other Arab countries in the spring of 2011 exemplify the political potency of the Internet and mobile phones. What all this cases have in common is a rising popular discontentment converted into a massively expressed dissent in the Internet, which eventually encouraged the dissenters to leave the relatively secure social networks in the virtual world and occupy public spaces beyond it. It is what Brecht 70 years ago expected of radio. Whereas radio never

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challenged the existing social basis (rather, as a propaganda tool it even strengthened it), the Internet truly became a means of “propagation and formation of [a new social] order,” which Brecht (1932/2000: 45) did not live to see of radio. However, we should not disregard effective uses of new media by anti-democratic movements, as the use of Twitter in the preparation of the detention of the Honduran President Zelaya in June 2009 indicates. In some cases, the Internet may have contributed to the transgression of fragmented cultural and political interests, but it also may have deepened the fragmentation. It is less efficacious in stimulating “conversation among strangers” to generate public opinion: Millions of more or less specialized chat rooms and blogs across the world do not lead to an inter- or supranational public sphere but rather to the fragmentation of mass audiences—who are (were) large, dispersed, and predominantly national, but nevertheless focused on political issues defined by the media—into many dissociated “issue publics.” There is something deeply solipsistic about the idea of every man with his web page. Because it can be done, we do it. A mirror makes a poor substitute for the politics of compassion and empathy. Private web pages also create a dangerous illusion of equality. My page and Disney’s page equalize us! My “portal” and Bill Gates’ portal, what’s the difference? The difference is of course that power lies not in the capacity to express yourself but in the ability to get others to listen. This depends in turn on resources, and in resources there is no real equality at all. (Barber, 2002; italics added)

The Internet has ambivalent capabilities: In one way it is clearly “democratic,” but in another way it is also definitely “undemocratic.” It proved essentially inaccessible to a complete authoritative control, but it alone can hardly perform the role of a watchdog or create moral obligations in a way similar to the traditional media. It also makes norms of public discourse more vulnerable by expanding opportunities for disciplinary and manipulative publicity, intrusion of privacy, and disparaging communication. However, the alliance of WikiLeaks and similar “uncensorable systems for untraceable mass document leaking” of the Internet with the “old media” such as political daily press may denote the beginning of a new age of surveillance over the authoritative powers by civil society. Julian Assange, who unveiled wikileaks.org in January 2007, believes that “Journalism should be more like science. . . . As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction.” Assange cannot be blamed for not respecting norms of “professional journalism” (except to the point that at least one of the WikiLeaks’ sources was not sufficiently protected and may spend decades in jail). Furtive files, often from anonymous sources, are verified before the publication, which is realized in careful arrangements with the most internationally renowned classical (print) media. The alliance with newspa-

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pers proves that WikiLeaks recognizes that, although the Internet has a huge potential audience, it lacks of credibility that can provide only a highbrow newspaper. This is a new synergy between the new and the old media—between the new Internet-based provider of information (like a news agency) and the traditional publisher whose reputation helps to promote information and makes it effective in disclosing secret practices carefully concealed from the public. “Uncensorable systems for untraceable mass document leaking” effectuate surveillance not only over political and economic powers but also over the traditional media, which do not perform their Benthamian watchdog function anymore. In that sense, they may contribute to the empowerment of civil society. The idea of “journalism as science” resembles Dewey’s (1927/1991: 166–167) belief that the public can be democratically organized only if two conditions are met (i.e. freedom of social inquiry and of distribution of its outcomes)and full publicity with respect to all issues concerning the public Yet the “uncensorable systems” of the Internet leave unchallenged the Kantian quest for reasoned debates. Internet technology enables dialogical communication that can hardly be effectively restrained by external surveillance, but at the same time it can often hardly ensure any response because websites—although formally visible to all users—are not always genuine “public sites”; often they are more like private clubs visible and accessible only to the “sacred.” The Internet not only presents new opportunities for social interaction; it also stimulates fragmentation and parochialism. In consequence, social isolation and stratification of individuals both within (national) social groupings and communities and on a global level may increase while solidarity and social justice decrease despite the unprecedented development of communication technologies, economic globalization, and cosmopolitism. Nevertheless, the Internet remains a superb communication apparatus that potentially enables reflexive reasoning of participants—to detach themselves from the subjective personal conditions of their judgment and reflect on it from a universal standpoint, as Kant suggested two centuries ago. Perhaps the most significant difference between the Internet and the traditional mass media is in the social nature of communication carried out by the users. On the whole, the new interactive technology provides individuals with a number of new forms of interactive and noninteractive communication and generates new forms of human association. Being at variance with the media-centric conceptualizations of the public sphere, it calls for a redefinition of the boundaries not only between the private and the public but also between the real and virtual, which are constitutive of any theorization of the public/ness. Thus, it also calls for rethinking the concept of publicness to account for changes in the nature of openness and visibility. This does not imply that because of the Internet the “traditional” normativecritical conceptualization of publicness became obsolete; on the contrary even! New forms and opportunities of communication brought about by the Internet “tempt us once again to turn back for inspiration to the traditional model of the

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assemblies of the classical Greek city-states” (Slevin, 2000: 185), which has been almost buried under the heap of conceptualizations of “a new kind of mediated publicness,” “a publicness of openness and visibility, of making available and making visible,” which is supposed to be “very different from the traditional conception of public life” (Thompson, 1995: 236), and “the New Public” whose rise “could be recounted as a tale of Enlightenment betrayed and rationality perverted by good intentions gone awry” (Mayhew, 1997: 189). The Internet brought about a new form of publicness—mediated and dialogical at the same time—supplementary to the mediated publicness constructed by traditional mass media, which could also be considered media-distorted publicness. Whereas the development of the traditional (press and broadcast) mass media primarily extended the possibilities of hegemonic visibility (i.e., of one being made visible by producers of media contents), the Internet is based on widespread possibility of active participation. In contrast to the Internet, traditional mass media primarily favor and facilitate reception and consumption through imitation owing to the tendency of profit maximization and market mechanisms that stimulate only publication of ideas and news stories that would not annoy or confuse their consumers. The development of the traditional media often helps to block innovation, particularly when they are heralds of particularistic interests of powerful interest groups behind them. In contrast, the Internet is pluralistic in terms of both producers and users and diversified in terms of content by its very nature—due to its decentered structure. If the concepts of public/ness have been determined by the internally confined model of community gatherings, by the end of the 20th century, as Bohman (1996: 106) suggests, the rise of the Internet definitely helped transcend this limitation. The Internet is particularly appropriate to initiate processes of casting away prejudices preventing relevant problems from appearing in the agenda of public opinion. However, the interactive potential of Internet technology not only enables individuals and groups to become more socially visible at their own will and facilitates interaction among different cultures but also makes—as a kind of disciplinary technology—others’ behavior overt and widely visible against their will. It also increases the visibility of hate speech and other kinds of communication that violate the rights of citizens. It is an obvious contribution of the Internet that the nature of discussions of public issues (which is not necessarily equal to “public discussion”) has changed and become less exposed to authoritative intervention and the number of active participants in discussions increased, but the outcome of the enhanced “participation” in the Internet is much less satisfying. Whereas initially the Internet was seen and used primarily as a communication technology (protecting individuals from interference by authorities), it later developed also as a powerful surveillance technology. Moreover, the personal right to communicate, which originally dominated the Internet “philosophy,” was soon ousted by private property and privacy discourse and, most recently, by protection from terrorism. The Internet certainly expanded the sphere of communication and also contributed to a

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notable increase in the volume of political communication, but it also—and even to a higher degree—expanded the sphere of capitalist economy. It seems that with the Internet, the media history tragically repeats itself, to paraphrase the famous Marx’s thought on the double repetition of history—first time as tragedy, second time as farce. Similarly to the transformation of “the modern newspaper” of the late 19th century to “a capitalistic enterprise,” the Internet of the early 21st century became the main “promoter of capitalism in general,” as Bücher (1893/1901: 242) in the old days argued for the press. The level of concentration in the Internet is at least comparable to that in the field of the old media: 60% percent of the top 25 web domains are controlled by six corporations: Amazon, Time Warner, Yahoo!, News Corporation, Google, and Microsoft.21 Prominent hardware and software companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, search engines on the web, such as Google, and social networking websites, such as Facebook, nowadays remind us more of Murdoch’s transnational “old media” empire than the democratizing narrative characteristic of the early Internet development. Not surprisingly and similarly to the old media, the Internet is not being developed as a “public service.” Rather, specific technical and legal “rules of the game” on web networking and searching sites are defined by the owners of these sites. Not only did owners of the new media companies become even richer than the press and broadcasting moguls,22 their “business policies” became (quite predictably) friendly toward the development of effective surveillance capacities integrated in the web, which enable filtering of contents of emails and websites and tracking actions of web users. Technologies are used—such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)—to track Internet communications in real time, monitor the content, and decide which messages or applications will get through the fastest (Riley & Scott, 2009). Compared with the traditional mass media with large audiences, the Internet turned out to be less effective in digesting ideas and presenting them in a form that would influence the authorities to heed them. In fact, the contrary is the case: Online and offline debates among web users come close to a form of a public only when they get together around the issues set on the agenda by the traditional “big” media. This is not a deficiency of the Internet’s “logic” but rather of the fact that an egalitarian conversation, even if technologically feasible, cannot be effectual in a wider social setting of the Internet as it has been believed. Not only “reflexive agency of actors within cyberspace was required, to create the ‘software’ that could transform networks into publics making use of the distributive processes of communication” (Bohman, 2004: 145; italics added). As Schudson (1997: 307) suggests, “what makes conversation democratic is not free, equal, and spontaneous expression” (which the Internet clearly enables) but “equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules for discussion, and a set off ground rules designed to encourage pertinent speaking, attentive listening, appropriate simplifications and widely apportioned speaking rights.” Individual public expression does not constitute public visibility by itself; what is also needed

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is the attentiveness of the public to what has been (individually) expressed (i.e. listening, which has been largely ignored among the advocates of the “online public sphere”). This deficit of the Internet, or at least a tacit assumption of it, can be perhaps best illustrated with the fact that the attempts to “identify” a European public sphere or measure Europeanization of national public spheres are largely limited to content analyses of traditional media, such as newspapers and television news programs. Fragmentation thus denotes an absence of “translation mechanism” (such as the big media, experts, or elites)—a break in the circulation of ideas, arguments, and interpretations (Peters, 2007: 286). Differentiation of publics is a “natural” process caused by the growing complexity of social phenomena, but if various lines of differentiation remain permeable, so that different publics would be open to each other, that would still enable their (re)integration. “Important themes have to have a chance of being discussed in larger communication circles, important ideas or arguments have to be diffused in larger publics” (Peters, 2007: 286). Yet the opposite may be the case in everyday life, which can be best illustrated with (the possibility of) mutual closures between expert cultures, a knowledge abyss between experts and lays (signaled already by Lippmann), and particularly with the growth of highly specialized media designed for rather narrow target groups. Without the traditional mass media, the public sphere would lack the most effective channel correlating the public(s) with power actors, who appear before the public and derive their legitimacy from it. This (am)bivalent relation between the public and the state mediated through the media is constitutive of publicness. If properly regulated, it is also the precondition necessary for the advancement of the principle of publicness as the supreme ethical and organizational principle, superior to property right and freedom of the press that is based on it. Mass media have the central significance in the creation of an institutional (infra)structure enabling the organization of the general interest both nationally and internationally (globally). The present lack of such an effective communication structure and practical impediments to its creation should become the central issue in the ongoing discussions on media democratization. I doubt that CMC technologies inevitably and universally invigorate democratic values, although it is beyond doubt that they indeed made it possible in a number of concrete, mostly local, cases. If that were indeed a matter of necessity, we should expect, sooner or later, one single political culture to develop. On the contrary, however, modern political thinking still diverges in a way that was characteristic of political vocabulary in the past (e.g., if we compare German, French, and English political philosophies and democratic theories or their ideas about freedom and necessity). Technological revolutions have never been eo ipso a soci(et)al revolution; without societal interests and social will, technology by itself cannot produce revolutionary changes in social relationships. This is not to say that it does not have any consequences. It does. It certainly fosters globalization. However, globalization may be more fettering than fostering democracy, and technology is often a tool of that obstruction.

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New “fascinating” technological achievements and fashionable modes of communication in many respects do not resolve “old” conceptual issues of communication and media theories and practical problems. The fact that they attract outsized attention may be considered an expression of need and desire for new modes of communication to resolve the failures of old ones in creating a more democratic society. Unfortunately, all new communication technologies developed through centuries reveal that new modes of communication, which potentially expand human powers to learn and exchange ideas and experiences, are also easily misused. This should encourage us to reconsider why so much attention and hope is still placed on technological achievements as if they alone could reform the political and social environments in which they are embedded, rather than the other way around.

UNIVERSITY—A BLIND SPOT IN THEORIES OF THE PUBLIC (SPHERE) One could persuasively argue that the university is an institutionalization of the principle of publicness closest to its normative design, a blueprint of the public (sphere): Freedom of expression manifested in presumably rational (occasionally quasi-) scientific discourse—two main attributes of the public sphere—have always been more affirmed at universities than in society at large despite censorial efforts by the Catholic Church and feudal authorities. Nowadays, the emergence of a transnational public sphere could be exemplified with scholarly debates intersecting and linking together different cultural settings, as when “translations and conferences create a cosmopolitan public sphere in various academic disciplines” (Bohman, 1999: 195; 2004: 138). But more than that, scholars— particularly but not exclusively social scientists—may bring their disciplines “into conversation with publics” to actively participate in the creation and transformation of publics; beyond creating “other publics,” they can also “constitute [themselves] as a public that acts in the political arena” (Burawoy, 2007: 28, 30). Academic freedom is a fundamental condition for the development and circulation of the accumulated social (or public) knowledge. Academic freedom that gives academic staff the right to exercise their “enlightening” mission without fear of repression, “including the right to contribute to social change through freely expressing their opinion of state policies and of policies affecting higher education” (UNESCO, 1997, §26), may serve as a blueprint of Kant’s universal principle of “public use of reason,” constitutive of the public. As a proto-public sphere,23 university is declared to stay “morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power,” as declared in the Magna Charta Universitatum (1987), which 660 universities from 78 countries have signed by 2010.24 In more operational terms, according to the UNESCO 1997 Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel,

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Chapter 4 Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies. (UNESCO, 1997, §27)

Nevertheless, despite its potential to serve as a “model role profile” for the public sphere, the university has never been given an important role in theorizations of publicness. Since the late 18th century until the present, the discourse on “the public” and “public opinion” largely evaded the role of the university in creating “the public sphere.” In his seminal book on public opinion, Tönnies (1922: 207) recognized university professors—both those at “dogmatic faculties” of theology and law and those at “younger faculties” of medicine and philosophy—as the class of social actors who substantiated the legitimate and effective social/political power of public opinion. Because public opinion has—in contrast to religion—“a stamp of science,” scientists and teachers are “the natural and actual leaders of public opinion both directly and, even more, indirectly, whenever their thinking, research and teaching refer to the wide-ranging questions of public importance, such as economy, politics, and morals.”25 Together with the emerging large cities, Tönnies saw universities of the 19th century as key factors of the rising authority of the new form of the “complex social will,” public opinion, and its separation from the formerly dominant power of religion and religious authorities prevailing in the “Gemeinschaft-type” of social structure. Despite their feudal and religious origins, universities were closely tied to the development of economically driven civil society, the rise of secular urban (public) life, and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. Similarly to the Church before the Enlightenment, the social power of universities was based on the appropriation of a certain monopoly of knowledge by training privileged young men for positions of secular power. Similarly to the bourgeois public sphere, however, access to universities was far from being universal; rather, it was denied to women, lower classes, and other disadvantaged social groups. The growing influence of universities on public life did not pass unnoticed by feudal authorities, who wanted to keep their control over university teaching, as the following passage from the 1819 “Karlsbader Beschlüsse, quoted also by Tönnies (1922: 415–416), indicates: Teachers at universities and elsewhere who disseminate pernicious doctrines hostile to the public order and peace or undermining the foundations of the state, and thus unwittingly demonstrate their inability to attend to

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important duties entrusted to them […] shall be removed from universities and other teaching institutions. […] Teachers expelled in such a way should not be given employment in any other federal state by any public teaching institution.26

Through the centuries and up to the present, the state/national security discourse that sought to identify major threats to national security and incapacitate “the enemies of the state” legitimized different forms of intellectual censorship, including such austere measures as “Berufsverbot” and criminal prosecution. A severe censorship over intellectual debates at universities often forced the greatest minds from Locke to Marx, from Rousseau to Tocqueville, from Tarde to Tönnies, to pursue their vocation for the highest-level intellectual contribution without teaching students at universities or even to go into exile. Nevertheless, Kant’s idea that each citizen “would be given a free hand as a scholar to comment publicly, i.e. in his writings, on the inadequacies of current institutions” (Kant, 1784), which postulates scholarship as a condition or blueprint of participation in the public sphere, makes the most important site of teaching and research, the university, central to the conceptualization of publicity and the public (sphere). Of all agents and institutions in the public sphere, the university with its autonomy, scholarship, and commitment to freedom of public speech comes normatively closest to Kant’s “entire public enlightening itself,” where no restrictions to the principle of publicness exist. Normatively, the university may be considered an environment in which a learned individual […] publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice; […] as a member of a complete commonwealth or even of cosmopolitan society, and thence as a man of learning who may through his writings address a public in the truest sense of the word, he may indeed argue without harming the affairs in which he is employed for some of the time in a passive capacity. (Kant, 1784)

In Der Streit der Facultäten (1798), Kant differentiated between “the upper faculties,” in which the government was particularly interested because they had a strong and lasting influence on the people (theology, law and medicine), and “the lower faculty” (of philosophy),27 which enjoyed a perfect freedom from government’s orders but also had no power to give orders. At that time, universities only trained students to become clerics, lawyers, physicians, and civil servants. Kant’s “lower faculty” was a prototypical “entire public enlightening itself” of which Kant speaks in his “An answer to the question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” because there were no restrictions to “freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” In other words, for Kant, “the upper faculties” had primarily a state-constitutive function, whereas “the lower faculty” had a public mission.

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Modern universities—at least those equivalent with Kant’s “lower faculties” or Tönnies’ “younger faculties”—constitute (normatively) “a public” according to all three of Kant’s dimensions: They (a) endorse the principle of publicity in public debates, (b) promote personal enlightenment, and (c) transcend ethnic/national boundaries. They also come close to Dewey’s (1927/1991: 15–16) understanding of the public consisting of “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions [in which they did not participate] to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.” According to Dewey, the public can only come into existence by effect of the interplay between popular participation, which is inherent to democracy, and public communication (particularly interpersonal conversation), on which participation is based. Both participation and communication, however, can only be made possible in the process of education by the development of an appropriate knowledge. What is particularly needed, according to Dewey (1927/1991: 67), is the improvement of “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion,” which essentially depends on “freeing and perfecting the process of [scientific] inquiry and of dissemination of their conclusions.” Due to the accumulated knowledge, the university is able and adapted for the recognition of “lasting, extensive, and serious consequences of associated activity” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 67), which ultimately shape the public. As specific “publics,” universities also foster the transnationalization of the public sphere (Hohendahl, 2005). However, the question is whether the university, as a democratic institution, can really flourish in today’s economically driven and competitive globalized governance. Rather, what would be the consequences if the university as “a public” dies (or did it already)? A long time ago, Dewey (1927/1991) cautioned against alienation of research and education from public life by arguing that “a class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all.” Although the university may be considered a network of individuals and groups discursively engaged in controversial issues that seriously affect a significant part of the population in order to find a (hypothetical) solution, presumably based on argumentative rationality, it lacks the democratic participation of citizens, which is essential for any political conceptualization of the public. With their own interests in informing public policy on particular problems (e.g., relevant for universities) and idiosyncratic discourses, universities have only limited public resonance. To enable a broader participation and/or to contribute to broader debates, universities should address the most pressing social issues and bring their expertise into debates beyond their own “ivory towers.” This is also what “public sociology” is supposed to be about. As Gans (2009) defines it, it refers to “sociological analysis (or if you will, description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation) that is intended, mostly in written form, to reach or actually reaches one or another audience in what is usually called the general public.” Similarly to what Dewey expected of science in general, Gans expects of

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public sociology “to help people, in the general public and elsewhere, understand the society in which they live” by considering issues “relevant to and useful for as many sectors and strata of society as possible.” A fundamental difference between the two conceptualizations of public science is its relation to communication. Dewey who understood very much the nature and significance of (public) communication emphasized the necessity of transforming simultaneously the knowledge sector and the inner nature of the press. He even planned, together with his scholarly colleagues, to set up an exemplary “thought newspaper”—an entirely new type of newspaper “in which ‘intelligence’, information ranging from economic forecasts to metaphysics, would be made readily available to guide anyone in their practical business endeavors” (Ford; cited in Pinter, 2003: 95). Similar ideas on social regulation of the press to better serve public interests were discussed by other progressive European and U.S. scholars of the time, such as Jenks, Bücher, and Tönnies (Splichal, 2007). In contrast, Gans (2009) suggests that “our work can become actual public sociology” only if “the public sociology created to appear in print, electronic, and digital mass and ‘class’ media [is] accepted by those media’s gatekeepers. […] True, we can write what we consider important or interesting, but if the gatekeepers do not agree, they may not open their gates” (italics added). Regardless of whether we agree with Dewey’s emphasis on the need to change not only the university but also the press/the media and thus defatalize their social role, or with Gans’ acceptance of the media as they are, ignoring their negative “achievements,” we cannot ignore the fact that the publicness of the university, as indeed the publicness of the public sphere, is fatally linked with the media industries. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, in particular, revealed the power of the printed word to “fuse opinions” and “unify public mind.” New ideas published in books and journals were spreading in ever-wider circles among educated readers. Universities, in Europe at least, were significantly influenced by this development, which was reflected in their stronger interest in critical thinking and teaching, scientific investigation, reduction of religious influence on academic life, efforts at improving society, and attachment to liberal ideas of personal freedoms. Nevertheless, the public could not have been established without “new modes” of communication beyond transitory face-to-face interaction. The invention of printing paved the way for the realization of the principle of publicness in the first form of mass communication—the press. Newspapers not only created an invisible bond among readers but also stimulated private conversations among readers, in which they discuss and interpret news that newspapers provided. According to Tarde (1901: 83), the press fostered the reflective capacity of the public beyond the borders of the nation state:

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Chapter 4 The newspaper has thus finished the age-old work that conversation began, that correspondence extended, but that always remained in a state of a sparse and scattered outline—the fusion of personal opinions into local opinions, and this into national and world opinion, the grandiose unification of public mind— I say the public mind, not the national, traditional mind, which is distinct in their background despite the double invasion of this rational, serious internationalism, of which the former is often merely an echo and popular resonator.

Universities were not only strongly influenced by the developments brought about by the rising press but, similarly to the press, directly involved in the process of formation of the bourgeois public sphere. This was (and still is) in sharp contrast to the vast literature on the importance of the press and other media—from the early beginnings until the arrival of the Internet—for the emergence of the public sphere and public opinion, whereas the role of the university is hardly mentioned in this context. In practical terms, university professors of the 19th and (early) 20th centuries often became the leading public opinion leaders in many countries (as, for example, Tarde and Tönnies also recognized), but the theorizations of the public and public opinion (including Tarde and Tönnies) hardly denoted them as a relevant “element.” Neither research in higher education nor public sphere literature has ever conceptualized universities in terms of “the public(s)” or “public sphere(s)” outside of control of economic or political, private or state interests. Although universities are typically organized and governed in a way that diverges from the norms of private corporations and state-controlled institutions much more than the media, the latter occupy the central location in the public sphere debates, whereas the former are largely excluded. Historically, both the university and the press were vital components of the national public sphere. The nation (ethnos) and the public (demos) originated from the same process of imagining. “A purely spiritual collectivity, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental” (Tarde, 1901: 9) is not only the public but also the nation. The university and the press, indirectly and directly, created the (national) public through the reproduction and dissemination of information, opinion, and knowledge. In the time of the nascent liberal bourgeois public sphere, both the university and the public sphere were closely linked to the nation state and thus “national” not only in form but also in substance. They both had an important task of nation building: Both the university and the press (books and newspapers) had the symbolic power that created national consciousness. The university provided education for civil servants28 and produced advanced knowledge intended to serve the nation, which was disseminated by other institutions, particularly the press and schools. By disseminating news, opinions, and knowledge, the press, in particular, systematically and continuously (re)produced the image of national political community in the general population (Anderson, 1991: 37). However, its “bond” with the state, if it still existed, was purely negative—the censorship.

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Since the beginning of the colonization of the public sphere by market forces and commodification of the press in the late 19th century, universities represented a more genuine form of the public (sphere) than the privately owned newspapers (and other media). In the early period of the rising newspaper industry, the university and the press became harsh adversaries, as the following quotation from Tarde’s (1901: 41, 21) analysis in Public Opinion and the Mass suggests: In the Middle Ages, reason, represented by universities, councils and courts of justice, had much more strength to resist popular opinion and upsetting than nowadays; but it had much less strength to control and reform tradition. The misfortune is that contemporary public opinion became all powerful not only against tradition […] but also against reason. […] Most of those who formerly would have been passionately curious to hear a speech, say now: “I read in my newspaper. . . .”

Divergent paths of development taken by the university and the press in the 19th and 20th centuries seem to draw close to each other in the age of globalization. Global governance is increasingly seen as lacking democratic legitimacy because it does not provide for citizens’ participation in a democratic dialogue and decision making and for the public accountability of decision makers. Media are nowadays hardly considered a constitutive component of democracy. Partly, this is a consequence of the fact that (in contrast to Bentham’s concept) public opinion is generally reduced to statistically representative “public opinion polls,” so that the media only present statistical results of opinion polls rather than facilitate public deliberation. More generally, privately owned media, which became extremely commercialized with the expansion of the market economy, are largely inapt to operate as “the third element mediating between the state and civil society” pursuing the public interest (as suggested by Marx). Early debates on the public and public opinion conceptualized freedom of the press and publicness as extensions of personal freedom of thought and expression, indispensable for formation of Bentham’s “public opinion tribunal” that exercises control over parliament, and realization of the Kantian quest for the public use of reason. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers largely turned away from the type of journalism motivated by public interest and yielded to the economic interest in profit making that transformed newspapers from cultural to commercial organizations: “The newspaper is a business by its character producing the advertising space as a commodity that can only be realized through its editorial section. This is a fundamental transformation of the essence of the newspaper” (Bücher, 1926: 21; italics added). Although the transformation of newspapers and other media into business was often criticized, the criticism had no significant consequences for either regulatory policies or conceptualization of the public (sphere). As many critical authors from Marx onward recognized, the market enabled newspapers to eman-

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cipate themselves from the repressive measures of the state, but this progressive function of the market could not have lasted forever. When “economic principles […] infringe upon the cultural and political content that the market itself serves to spread” at the beginning (Habermas, 2007), the market loses its progressive function. By such “breach of contract,” the mass media in modern democracies are very much deprived of its basic function to serve the public interest. Even the global breakthrough of the Internet and severe global financial crises that jeopardize the bare existence of some major newspapers do not seem to bring any important changes in terms of media policy. However, they did revive the debate on media regulation that would be modeled on the principles of publicness that the university adopted long ago. Even in the United States, where the belief in the freedom of the press as a form of entrepreneurial freedom is deeply rooted, the financial pressures on newspapers brought about to turn newspapers into nonprofit, endowed institutions—like colleges and universities. As Swensen and Schmidt suggest, endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down. Paradoxically, at the same time, when the ideas of how to replace “the obsolete business model” of newspapers with the model of the nonprofit university seem to supply some new energy to the public sphere debates, the same model of the university is problematized and deemed “unuseful”—in terms of a business model. The 20th century faced a remarkable growth of universities in a variety of ways (e.g., in the number of students and teachers, and the size of financial [both public and private] resources), but the status of universities in public life has generally not kept up with that growth. Their “natural” bond with the public and leadership of public opinion were loosened or even broken. The rapid growth of universities helped them to develop into rather self-referential, “autopoietic” systems organized in the way to primarily regenerate relations and processes that produced them. In a more mundane phrasing, university is becoming “distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world” (Fish, 2009). For example, as Calhoun (2009) suggests, “[a]s academia grew, other academics became an ever more important audience for researchers,” which reduced the need of universities to seek legitimization through public approval of their output that would be seen as beneficial to (dominant) social interests and preferences. There are some obvious parallels between “autopoietization” of universities and mass media. They were both established to serve broader (and “higher”) interests of society. They both passed the way from a strict subordination to external authorities of church and/or the state through different forms of censorship, to autonomous organizations exposed to a more subtle depersonalized external influence, such as “the market forces.” In this way, for a rather short period of time, both the media (the press) and universities have made their great contributions to social life when there was a significant public support for their

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mediating role between the state and civil society, when they—organized as democratic institutions—engaged with important social issues in the societies around them. Such a support does not seem to exist in the age of global governance. Given the increasing financial pressures on universities, it is not difficult to argue that the for-profit university should be the logical choice—if its sole mission is dedicated to delivering skills and competences that would increase the chances of its customers (formerly students) to gain employment. It is questionable, however, whether this is (or should be) indeed the only mission of the university. Donoghue (2008: 88) paints a bleak picture of the university, where “professors of the humanities have already lost the power to rescue themselves” because they never tried to question “the widespread assumption that efficiency, productivity, and profitability are intrinsically good.” As a consequence, “all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary” to success in business. There is no doubt that any issue, including the contemporary public role of university, may also be approached from an economic perspective. However, it is one thing to use the economic perspective as one of a variety of possible approaches and another thing to claim that the economic angle of the issue represents its most important perspective or that the optimal solution of a problem is always based on economic instruments and methods. Or, if I may afford a comparison with framing theory, the issues of efficiency, productivity, and profitability certainly fulfill the conditions of constituting a frame as a specific structure of meaning in determining the social role and value of university. However, the essence of framing is in that it is a process in which always different social actors compete for the definition and/or interpretation of an aspect of social reality. Consequently, a variety of frames always exist; in addition to the “economic framing” of university, many other frames exist that are widely socially shared and have persisted even over a longer period of time than the “economic frame,” notably the “publicness frame.” The relative power of certain frames (e.g., the dominance of the “economic frame” over the “publicness frame”) largely reflects power relations between social actors promoting specific frames. Even in the early liberal age of capitalism, Marx (1842/1974)—while admitting that it was legitimate to call “the goddess of freedom of the press,” which was not known to Germans of the time, freedom of property or freedom of entrepreneurship, in order to prove that freedom of the press should not be excluded from the “general freedom” of entrepreneurship—criticized the argument that freedom of the press is a special case of the general entrepreneurial freedom as a classical example of inconsistency. It is true that, even if the press were regarded merely as a business, it would deserve even greater freedom than any other business because it is a business carried on by means of the brain. Nevertheless, in the long run, the subsumption of freedom of the press in the “general freedom” of entrepreneurship as the fundamental principle is a mortal degradation of the press:

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Chapter 4 As in the universe, each planet, while turning on its own axis, moves only around the sun, so in the system of freedom each of its worlds, while turning on its own axis, revolves only around the central sun of freedom. To make freedom of the press a variety of freedom of trade is a defence that kills it before defending it, for do I not abolish the freedom of a particular character if I demand that it should be free in the manner of a different character? (Marx, 1842/1974)

As the history of the newspaper indicates, freedom of the press, even if based on freedom of property instead of generic personal freedom to communicate, had beneficial consequences for the autonomy of civil society and the public sphere in the early phase of liberal capitalism. With the industrialization, commercialization, and monopolization of the press and other media, such beneficial consequences of incorporated media as private businesses faded away. Similarly, the economic principles of efficiency, productivity, and profitability may not be necessarily at odds with the noble mission of education in critical thinking—at least this was not always the case. However, if such a conflict exists—which was often the case—the cultural and political roles of the university should not be simply sacrificed to make the university better fit in with the business model and its criteria of “usefulness,” “practicality,” and “necessity.” Why should these criteria be more relevant for the university than the “criteria” of publicness defined by Kant: personal enlightenment and public use of reason, public justice, and perpetual global peace? All three Kant’s dimensions of publicness unite as hypothetical “privileges”— privileges in the sense that the university represents that specific site where publicness, which should become the fundamental principle of public life in society at large, is gaining its most developed form—in the “lower faculties” of the humanities and (critical) social sciences, provided that the university maintains autonomy by not being subordinated to market principles (as it once had succeeded to resist authoritative control and censorship). The university, as Kant argued, should be free from authoritative orders and from giving orders, but at the same time it should be free to judge on truthfulness publicly because “reason is by its nature free and does not accept any orders to hold something for true.” Only affection to the norms that maintain the integrity of the public sphere and restrain pursuit of self-interests materialized in commoditization of knowledge can protect university against the domination by the capitalist state and market economy. Kant’s—partly elitist—defense of the faculty of philosophy clearly contradicts the belief that the for-profit university is the logical outcome of the contemporary transformation of universities dictated by global market conditions. On the contrary, and particularly in the period of transition from national government to global governance when the traditional boundaries among the state, economy, and civil society are blurred, the university may assume public (civic) responsibilities, linking multiple civil society initiatives on different issues related to (global) governance and representing the necessary link between the rulers and the ruled that is essential for a democratic order.

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DID PUBLIC OPINION POLLING KILL THE PUBLIC? In the late 19th century, the deterioration of publicness was largely and primarily attributed to the decline of the press as on organ of the public due to its commercialization and politicization. In the 20th century, the advent of polling further deteriorated the public and sponsored the rise of the public sphere by dissociating public opinion from the public and thus desocializing it, so that it finally almost completely imploded into public opinion polls. The historical decline of the public observed by Dewey in the 1920s was soon corroborated by a revolutionary invention in empirical research. The development of surveys and opinion polls brought about significant changes in the conceptualization of public opinion, which was completely separated from the public. Controversies over the function of public opinion for democratic political processes are as old as the idea of public opinion itself, and they represent an enduring issue in theorizing public opinion and democratic government. Ever since the Enlightenment, public opinion bestows an aura of legitimacy on laws, policies, decisions, convictions, or even wars but often for manipulative purposes: They all appear justified or valid if they are in accordance with “public opinion.” Although premodern states legitimized their origin and development with the divine will, in modern democracies, this function is largely assumed by public opinion. It is indispensable to the legitimacy of governments that claim their power is based on the consent of the governed. In this sense, public opinion is functionally equivalent with religion, as Tönnies (1922) argued. Such a “legitimization pressure” can partly explain why the public and public opinion are so differently, even controversially, interpreted and defined, constantly appealed and sworn to, but, at the same time, so often ignored in practice. Before the invention of polling, it was always assumed that public opinion was defined as opinion that was publicly debated and circulated and that “represented” a significant number (group) of people. Regardless of whether public opinion was considered as originating from rational discussion or merely as a widespread diffusion of elite opinion, even by coercion; or whether public opinion presupposed the public either as a corporate social entity or merely a (statistical) aggregation of individuals; or it was even conceived without any specific actor—it was largely assumed that public opinion is (at least) publicly expressed opinion that in some way represents the will of the (majority of) people or citizenry.29 George Gallup was perhaps the most prominent but certainly only one among many scholars and researchers across the world praising the birth of polls as an impetus to democratic revival. He believed, exaggerating James Bryce’s enthusiasm, that with “the science of measuring public opinion,” as he called polls, “it will not be long before we can say with utmost confidence that the final stage in the development of our democracy, as described by Bryce, has been reached—that the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times” (Gallup, 1938: 14). According to Gallup and Rae (1940), polls compensated for

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the growing limitations to citizens’ political participation in parliamentary democracy. They defined polling results as a “mandate from the people” to the government and suggested that polling might help reestablish the town meetings of antique Greece on a national scale. With public opinion revealed through polling as “a continuous monitoring of the elusive pulse of democracy”—Bryce’s dream of a permanent referendum— was believed to have come through. Bryce’s zeal for public opinion was more moderate. Discussing “government by public opinion” in The American Commonwealth, he took the United States as an example of inexpedient “government by public opinion” in which “the wishes and views of the people prevail, even before they have been conveyed through the regular law-appointed organs, and without the need of their being so conveyed” (Bryce, 1888/1995: 925). According to Bryce (1888/1995), public opinion is expressed in practice through four main organs: (a) the press, (b) public meetings primarily during election campaigns, (c) elections, and (d) citizen associations. The idea of “organs” of public opinion goes back at least to Bentham and was further elaborated by authors such as Gabriel Tarde, Ferdinand Tönnies, and many others. They believed that, although none of these diverse instruments or organs can provide a constant, instant, and reliable estimation of public opinion, elites act as if such instruments existed: They “look incessantly for manifestations of current popular opinion, and […] shape their course in accordance with their reading of those manifestations” (Bryce, 1888/1995: 920). Bryce (1888/1995: 919) identified three stages in the historical evolution of public opinion “from its unconscious and passive into its conscious and active condition.” According to his scheme, the most rudimentary stage of public opinion was when it acquiesced “in the will of the ruler whom it has been accustomed to obey.” In the second stage, conflicts arose between the ruling elites and “more independent or progressive spirits” (i.e., the bourgeois class), which were eventually “decided by arms.” In the third stage—in (until then) the most developed phase—the sovereign multitude expresses its will at certain intervals—in elections, and it is supposed that the general will expressed in that way would be heeded by the legislative and executive branches of power. According to Bryce, a fourth stage could be imagined in which “the will of the majority of the citizens were to become ascertainable at all times, and without the need of its passing through a body of representatives, possibly even without the need of voting machinery at all.” In that way, the fifth “organ of public opinion” would be established. Yet Bryce believed that the fourth stage (or the fifth organ) of public opinion was utopian because “the machinery for weighing or measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month has not been, and is not likely to be, invented.” In a very short time, his prediction proved wrong: Such a “machinery” has been invented only a few decades later in the form of public opinion polls, almost in the very form predicted a few years earlier by Carl Schmitt (1928/1954: 245) who, in a cynical way, and alluding to the American “voting machines,” anticipated that someday, “without leaving his apartment, every man could continuously express his opinions on political questions through an

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apparatus, and all these opinions will be automatically recorded in the head office.” A recent expression of this phenomenon is the idea of government by instant polling, as advocated by Ross Perot during the 1992 U.S. presidential race. Bryce was not as unconditionally happy with the rule of public opinion as Gallup was. He expressed two main hesitations. The first was “the difficulty of ascertaining the will of the majority” and the possibility of abuses when immense interests are entangled in an issue. The second was that minority opinion could be completely run down. His conclusion was that “the duty of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion rules [is] rather to resists and correct than to encourage the dominant sentiment. He will […] confront it, lecture it, remind it that it is fallible” (Bryce, 1888/1995: 921). Bryce would probably have been even less happy with government by public opinion if he had realized that the “the machinery for weighing or measuring the popular will” was already looming in the distance at the time when he published The American Commonwealth. Following Bryce’s scruples about public opinion, there were many who, quite contrary to Gallup, disdained polls for either political or scientific (ontological, epistemological, methodological) reasons, or both. In his critique of Gallup’s idea of democratic potentials of polling, Lindsay Rogers (1949) argued that it is misplaced to (try to) substantiate the validity of public opinion polling with its resemblance to referendum because in modern democracy, the vital role is with representative assemblies in which political issues are discussed. Rogers (unknowingly) resumed Carl Schmitt’s “voting machines” argument by suggesting that a “permanent referendum” by polls would be a caricature of democracy because polling prevents the discussion and agreement that are essential to effective democratic government. Ginsberg (1989: 286) noticed a major irony in polling in that “the development of scientific means of measuring public opinion had its most negative effect upon precisely those groups whose political fortunes were historically most closely linked with mass public opinion,” which of course does not speak in favor of democratic merit of polling. The debates on polling never brought about anything close to a consensus on the nature and function of public opinion and (public) opinion polls. Even the opposite was the case: The differences between the “classical and speculative mode of study” and the “statistical and survey techniques,” as Wilson (1962) labeled the two dominant streams of public opinion theories and research, have been firmly stabilized. Lazarsfeld (1957: 41) suggested that empirical research can provide “sharper conceptual tools” that would bring to light “new implications of all sorts” and theory “brings to our attention ideas which might otherwise have been overlooked” in the process of empirical research because “[t]heorizing itself can make progress, and the logic of empirical research can contribute to it,” whereas Wilson (1962: 16–17) argued that it would be impossible to achieve a reconciliation between the two streams of thought. Indeed, preclusive statements of the sort that “public opinion does not exist” (Bourdieu, 1972/1979) and that “public opinion is created by the procedures that are established to ‘discover’ it” (Osborne & Rose, 1999) leave little hope for the “reconciliation.”

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Nevertheless, 70 years after Gallup’s pretentious statement about “the final stage in the development of our democracy,” hopes and scruples about polls are confronted with a new challenge—that of globalization, which may incite some novel conceptual and methodological insights into public opinion studies. The consequences of globalization and the evolution toward “cosmopolitan public spheres” and a postnational politics are becoming key issues of contemporary public sphere theory and research, including polling. Globalization that brought about global interactive communication networks may be seen as an opportunity for the construction of a new—transnational—public sphere that would, to a certain degree, compete with national public spheres but also come closer to materializing the principle of deliberative publicness and personal right to communicate that national public spheres largely fall short of. The invention of polling had an immense influence on conceptualizations of public opinion. Polling was often considered not only a research technique (a scientific instrument) to “measure the popular will” but also a political artifact—a new institution of (political) democracy. Formerly, social sciences made rather unsuccessful attempts at the scientific operationalization of normative concepts such as “public opinion” and “the public” (see Blumer, 1948). But pollsters believed that with polling, the concept of “public opinion” seemed to have achieved a satisfactory degree of empirical validity, whereas the concept of “the public” became superfluous. Swapping the term “opinion polls” for “public opinion” reveals the same type of reasoning as swapping “the public sphere” for “the public” (or “civil society”), which I discussed earlier in the book. Moreover, as Darnton (2000) stated, the concept of the public sphere was often used in the way that attributed agency to the “sphere” that certainly cannot act30 “Public opinion polls” produced a similar effect: George Gallup (1940), for example, attributed to polling a democratic counterweight to the growing independence of political representatives and, therefore, a separation of representation from popular rule; it was thus considered not only a research technique or scientific instrument but a new instrument of political democracy—a new actor, a “mandate from the people” to the government (Splichal, 1999: 238). In his article on “Meinungsforschung und Öffentlichkeit” (1964/2005), Theodor Adorno criticized the misconceptualization of public opinion research, which undermines the very assumptions about the public/ness on which that research should rest. Essentially, Adorno followed Blumer’s (1948: 543) criticism “that the formation of public opinion can only occur as a function of a society in operation, largely through the interaction of groups rather than individuals, which imply that the study of public opinion must reflect the functional composition and organization of society” (italics added). Blumer (1948) strongly disapproved of equating empirical opinion research (or polling for that matter) with research into public opinion, which for him was a perfect example of the invalid dismissal of interaction—the direct reciprocally oriented social action—as the social basis of public opinion. As groups and individuals

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with varying amounts of influence interact as a “public,” they create and express public opinion that might be voiced through a variety of “mechanisms” other than surveys, such as letters, telegrams, petitions, resolutions, lobbies, and delegations (Blumer, 1948: 545). In particular, Blumer (1948: 542) criticized “the inability of public opinion polling to isolate ‘public opinion’ as an abstract or generic concept which could thereby become the focal point for the formation of a system of propositions,” because only “[w]hen the generic object of study is distinguishable, it becomes possible to focus study on that object and thus to learn progressively more about that object.” Whereas Blumer pleaded for more intellectual efforts to understand “the functional composition and organization of society,” which he believed would eventually provide a “better definition” of public opinion, Adorno (1964/2005: 121) argued that, due to the nature of publicness (Öffentlichkeit), such a conclusive (operational) definition is actually impossible: The vagueness, however, with which, certainly in Locke, the ideas of “public” and “public opinion” are tainted cannot be corrected through precise verbal definition. Publicness is not clearly demarcated; it is essentially polemical: what was once not public should become so. Only in this sense is the point to understand, as a criticism of absolute cabinet politics, how the inverted aristocratic orders allow—and contemporary elite theories even celebrate—the secret.

Adorno reproached the German term “opinion research” (Meinungsforschung) with dropping, “for the sake of brevity, a key adjective, which alone identifies its concern: research on public opinion [that] refers to the idea of the public” (Adorno, 1964/2005: 120). Technically speaking, dropping the term “publicness” and swapping the term “public opinion” with mere “opinion” would actually be a good solution because it would “solve” all the problems related to “publicness”— without articulating the theory of public opinion (as opinion of the public). Of course, that was not Adorno’s solution. On the contrary, he suggested that public opinion polls should “not be a mere technique, but just as much an object of sociology as a science that inquires into the objective structural laws of society” (Adorno, 1964/2005: 122). In the discussions on the validity of polls, critical suggestions such as those formulated by Blumer and Adorno have been largely disregarded, whereas opinion polling has been increasingly treated synonymously with public opinion. The core controversies were about reliability and partially about the validity of the research method and procedures, not theory. In the extreme case, what Blumer considered the main fallacy in public opinion research—that the polling procedures are creating the object of study instead of being derived from it—is even celebrated as a major scientific achievement by a competing paradigm modeled on natural sciences. The Gordian knot of public opinion’s operationalization that

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Blumer addressed (and that his intellectual heirs elaborated on but were not able to untie) was “cut” by the idea that polls are actually not a possible operational definition of public opinion but public opinion itself. [P]ublic opinion is created by the procedures that are established to “discover” it. The phenomenon of opinion is an artefact of the technical procedures that are designed to capture it. It is determined by technical considerations […] the artifactual aspect of public opinion brings it closer to the model of the successful natural sciences. (Osborne & Rose, 1999: 382; italics original)

Osborne and Rose (1999: 387) claim that, “Clearly without surveys and forms of measurement we would not know of public opinion at all; we would have no knowledge of what there is to measure without procedures of measurement,” which is just the opposite of Bourdieu (1972/1979: 129), who argues that public opinion may (or does) exist elsewhere but it does not exist “in the form which some people, whose existence depends on this illusion, would have us believe.” In other words, it does not exist in polls. On the one hand, Osborne and Rose (1999: 387) suggest that “public opinion does exist in so far as there are technologies—and respondents attuned to the technologies—to ensure that it does so.” On the other hand, Osborne and Rose (1999: 387) claim that “the existence of questionnaires and surveys themselves promote the idea that there is a public opinion ‘out there’ to be had and measured” (i.e., these procedures suggest that public opinion exists “out there” independently of the procedures). If a procedure is aimed at “capturing” a phenomenon, it is implied that the phenomenon exists prior to and independently of measurement. The suggestion that there could be no knowledge of public opinion without interview response data gathering is based on two invalid assumptions. First, it implies that the presentation of interview response data is public opinion, while in fact the description of an empirical procedure is at best its operational definition. Second, it suggests that there was no observable manifestation of public opinion at all (and thus public opinion was nonexisting in empirical terms or at least nobody was able to comprehend it) prior to the invention of polling, which is obviously historically incorrect. This would imply that, oddly enough, for two centuries at least, public opinion theorists have acted as if public opinion has existed when in fact it has not, and that all “public opinion organs” discussed since Bentham have been mere illusions or phantoms. Were all dissertations on public opinion before the advent of polling discussing (a) “In what form should political institutions recognize public opinion?” (b) “What characteristics should public opinion possess?” and (c) “What kind of political power should it be given?” (Althaus, 2006: 98)? How could there be such discussions on what empirically did not exist? Althaus (2006: 98) argues that “empirical research, from the early twentieth century to the present, eagerly ran with the second question but punted the others to philosophers.” Osborne and Rose (1999) deny that philoso-

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phers can say anything about the first question and make the other two irrelevant: There is only one form in which public opinion exists (polls), and the question of its characteristics and power is purely empirical rather than normative. Yet one should only think of preelection and exit polls that obviously “measure” exactly the same, and in the same way, as elections. How could one say of election outcomes that we would not know of them without—polls? We may consider polling a great (scientific) invention, but we should not leave out other public opinion “technologies” invented earlier in history and thus erroneously take the polls as “the proper discipline necessary for public opinion to exist” (Osborne & Rose, 1999: 382). In addition to polling, there were (and still are) other “technologies to ensure that public opinion exists.” The idea that “the notion of opinion is the product of the particular procedure by which opinion is elicited” omits the fact that opining—as a specific form of “holding for true,” which differs from believing and knowing—exists independently of any external “elicitation” and so are created personal opinions. People “know how to create that phenomenon called opinion,” and they validate their opinions in communication even if they are not asked questions by pollsters to do so. They have known it for thousands of years. In other words, it is not the measuring instrument that “establishes the objective field called public opinion” but the process of communication (including asking and responding to questions in polling) by which individuals express and validate their opinions. Arguing that public opinion can only exist with the technology of polling also implies that public opinion is merely a sum of individual opinions expressed privately to pollsters. Such a privatized conception of public opinion makes political relations, institutions, processes, and outcomes of democratic systems irrelevant to public opinion; what it counts is only the ways that individual citizens (if at all) make sense of them. As Habermas (2007) suggests, “For all their dissonance, public opinions that have been created through discussion and polemic have already been filtered through the relevant information and argumentation. Demoscopy [opinion polling], on the other hand, merely reflects latent opinions in their raw and dormant state.” Yet the latter conception is methodologically very convenient, which is probably the main reason that the privatized concept of public opinion became so popular among many researchers, particularly with computer-assisted telephone interviewing and online polls. In a specific but unfortunate way, however, Osborne and Rose are right. Rather than “eliciting opinions” from respondents, polls often do elicit “nonopinions” or “non-attitudes” (i.e., opinions that appear to be individual opinions because they were recorded by pollsters but did not exist prior to the polling procedure). According to Converse’s (1964: 241) empirically tested nonattitude thesis, people’s opinions may be “extremely labile for individuals over time”; “large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time” (Converse, 1964: 245). Only for “nonattitudes” is it true

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that they are largely, if not exclusively, a product of a particular procedure— which inspired Bourdieu to conclude that public opinion (as elicited in polls) in reality does not exist. The concept of nonattitude suggests that people’s opinions as identified in polls—in contrast to their true opinions—may change to a large extent randomly because they are simply too vague and instantaneously formed but also as a consequence of “measurement errors,” such as vague wording, order of questions, interviewer bias, scaling error, and the context in which questions are asked. This critique blames the tool of opinion polls rather than “the public,” and the experiments with “deliberative polls” carried out by James Fishkin and his colleagues at Stanford University (and earlier at the University of Texas) provide some strong empirical support to this criticism. Deliberative polls clearly suggest that when (additional) information is available to respondents, and if they participate in discussion, they are likely to form a more consistent opinion that is often different from the one instantaneously formed as a reaction to a question asked by an interviewer. In a heretical perspective, we may consider the technology of polling intrinsically similar and functionally equivalent (both epistemologically and ontologically) to some other institutionalized political processes such as elections and referenda. “Participating in a survey, either as investigator, interviewer, or respondent, is no less natural than voting, meeting in a town hall, serving on a jury, or any other political practice” (Sanders, 1999: 256). The technologies of general (or, indeed, any) political elections and the referenda on important social issues differ from polling on party preferences and/or political attitudes in only two respects: (a) polling has no direct political/legal consequences that elections have, and (b) polling is based on random sampling in contrast to self-selection in elections. Elections define the composition of parliaments and other (political) institutions; results of legislative referenda have direct legislative effects (enacting or suppressing a law). In contrast, the consequences of polls in society are indirect, mediated by political or other institutions participating in the governance. In polls, preferences are measured in a random sample of the electorate (with corrections related to the expressed intention of respondents to vote or not to vote), which demonstrates their “scientific” character. In the authentic election, “respondents” are self-selected (and thus less valid or entirely invalid in scientific terms), and this process is considered political participation. Both elections and polls are based on the same idea of representation of popular will: The results of parliamentary elections and results of polling are assumed to fairly represent the general constituency. When discussing a new procedure for “measuring public opinion on issues of the day” called “public opinion referendum,” Gallup (1971: 220) argued that the “chief advantage of the referendum system is that it more closely resembles the election process itself” (italics added). Why then should the division between forms of the political process and a form of research be taken up as a matter of course? The most obvious argument for the thesis that polls are part of the political process, too, is the case of preelection and exit polls. They “measure” exactly the same thing as elections (citizens’ votes

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for political parties and individual candidates for political positions) with exactly the same instrument (secret ballot) but with slightly different procedures and degrees of reliability and, for sure, different consequences. Polls are also similar to any other political process in that they are legally regulated. For example, only a few countries allows the publication of election polls’ findings on Election Day before polling stations are closed and the counting of votes begins, whereas in many countries the embargo is much longer and could extend up to 30 days before elections. The fact that elections and referenda were invented as parts of the institutionalized political process and clearly not as a kind of research, whereas polls were invented as a form of research rather than a form of political institutionalization of public opinion, is quite irrelevant. Specific functions of polls are not their inbred characteristics; instead, they depend on, and are defined by, users and observers; they do not exist in a phenomenon as “natural facts” irrespective of the human context but are always relative to observer and context. In short, functions in the sense of the performance of a social phenomenon to attain an effect congruent with the defined goal are social constructs and thus culturally specific. It may well be that polls have been designed by Gallup and others with the goal to develop a research procedure to “measure public opinion.” However, the embeddedness of polls in the political system has resulted in specific political functions (e.g., fostering vs. weakening democracy) that have been “assigned” to polls irrespective of their scientific functions (e.g., measuring attitudes vs. public opinion). Both functions have been contested because they are related to the value-laden goals; this always happens when we enter the field of “institutional”—in contrast to “natural”—facts. Nevertheless, as a link in the chain of political process, polling contributes to the legitimization of the dominant political order. Polls reinforce and promote “a conception of politics as properly instrumental, individualistic, limited reactive, and power oriented” (Dryzek, 1990: 172); they contribute to the legitimization of the dominant political order and hinder a democratic formation and expression of public opinion emblematic of a cosmopolitan or ortho-public sphere. *** The phenomena of publicness (with the exception of the Internet) and its historical cradle—civil society—discussed in this chapter were usually considered national rather than international in terms of their foundations and functions. As I indicated in Table 1.1 at the end of chapter 1, most of them have undergone substantial changes from early forms of institutionalization before the mid-19th century to what we may presently consider their dominant forms. If we only look at scientific and technological “tools” that were needed for those changes, it is perfectly clear that national developments in publicness—despite some national specificities— were based on globally spread economical and technological changes. In other words, these changes tended to have more global than local (national) traits.

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Masuda (1980/1983) argued in his pioneering book, The Information Society as Post-industrial Society, that in the society to come, private ownership of capital, free competition, and profit maximization as the key economic principles of industrial society should be replaced by “voluntary civil society characterized by the superiority of its infrastructure, as a type of both public capital and knowledge oriented human capital.” The parliamentary system and majority rule as the main components of the political system in industrial societies should be substituted by participatory democracy; the political system should be founded on the principles of consensus, participation, and synergy that pay regard to the opinions of minorities. All these and even more substantial changes should result in a “natural” way “imposed” by the development of communication technologies. Not much has happened in the past 30 years that would prove the feasibility of Masuda’s “Computopia” as he named his “wholly new long-term vision [of a universal opulent society] for the 21st century.” The level of civic engagement implied in Masuda’s view of “Computopia” or Dewey’s view of publicness, which seemed utopian aspirations in the Industrial Age, still seems unlikely to occur in the near future in any of the distinct national environments. A century ago, Dewey (1927/1991: 109) detected a profound contradiction between the achieved level of institutional democratization and the rudimentary state of the public: The same forces which have brought about the forms of democratic government, general suffrage, executives and legislators chosen by majority vote, have also brought about conditions which halt the social and humane ideals that demand the utilization of government as the genuine instrumentality of an inclusive and fraternally associated public. “The new age of human relationships” has no political agencies worthy of it. The democratic public is still largely inchoate and unorganized.

Nevertheless, I do believe that the possibility for the creation of vigorous publics does exist. The global advance of ICTs makes—not only from the technological point of view—Masuda’s “citizen management type of information utility” much more readily attainable than any technological solution in the past. The dialectics of “darkness” and “brightness” in the forces of social change pointed out by Dewey—similarly to Williams’ forces behind “uses” and “abuses” of communication technologies—does not allow for a one-way deterministic conceptualization of the decline of publicness. There is no way to predict possible ways and degrees of citizen participation in the public sphere until “secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity,” as Dewey (1927/1991: 209) argued. For three centuries, newspapers and later electronic media were a test case of possibilities of democratic communication, but the fundamental and complex societal conditions that would allow for the right to communicate (or the right to

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access) were never realized. As Masuda worried, a considerable danger still exists that this tendency continues, the tendency of moving toward a controlled society, which the advanced ICTs—the “dark forces” behind them—make as perfectly feasible as its democratic alternative. What may be a realistic alternative in the 21st century? From a historical perspective, what Masuda suggested may be conceived of as a steady progressive conceptual transition from the idea of instrumental visibility toward reflexive publicness as the normative model that will prevail in the future. Throughout history, the conditions for a genuine public (sphere) have never been fully materialized because of the unequal access to communication channels, uneven distribution of communicative competence, and the reduction of public debates to the legitimization of dominant opinions created by either “business type” or “government type” of power elites. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of possible changes of those conditions comes close to “the end of utopia” in the Marcusean sense in the beginning of the 21st century. According to Marcuse, we should only speak of utopia when a project for social change contradicts real laws of nature. In contrast, if the impossibility of realization of a historical project is due to the lack of appropriate subjective and objective factors or “immaturity of the social situation,” it can at best be designated as “provisionally” unfeasible. In this sense, Masuda (1980/1983: 147) misnamed his “long-term vision” because his main argument is that “the possibilities of a universally opulent society [are] being realized.” The question of utopianism in this context is not just an “academic” question. It is primarily an empirical question of whether “all the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand,” as Marcuse would say. If they are at hand but the project of social change still cannot materialize, the next question should be: What are the obstacles in existing society that prevent the society to use its own potential for liberation? The social conditions for the materialization of the project of democratization through the public sphere have changed and, perhaps, improved a great deal, but the project has not been radically changed because there is no need for it. Technological and social changes embodied in globalization reached the point at which a more radical departure from the drift of previous historical currents may take place. More than any other “traditional tool,” the Internet created broad avenues for transition from a state-protected (or controlled) communication space to the future communication utilities that will transcend national borders. Popular terms such as internationalization, transnationalization, globalization, and cosmopolitanization refer to ubiquitous economic, cultural, and political challenges and contradictions that are supposed to lead to the disappearance of the closed society. By offering practical alternatives, new inter- and transnational actions and movements founded on democratic principles may foster reflexive publicness, which has been fettered by national bureaucratic powers and monopoly corporate elites. Processes of transnationalization and globalization, which are dis-

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cussed in the subsequent chapters, are not simple quantitative extensions or replications of the former nationally framed processes beyond national borders. Rather, they have their own intrinsic laws resulting from the breakdown to the old territorial borders and the necessity of (global) symbiosis of mankind and nature, hopefully generating, in Masuda’s (1980/1983: 70) words, “the spirit of globalism, prevailing over conflicting national interests and differences [that] will become broadly and deeply rooted in the minds of the people.”

NOTES 1. Some languages (e.g., Slovene) have a perfect conceptual equivalent to the German term Öffentlichkeit (javnost), but some others (e.g., Swedish) have even more difficulties with the concept than English. 2. In the original translation of 1974, public sphere with a footnote that the term refers to “a model of norms and modes of behaviour by means of which the very functioning of public opinion can be guaranteed,” which “could still be distinguished from an institution” (note 3 in Habermas, 1964/1979: 198). 3. Strydom (1999: 3) believes that we witness not only “the emergence of the public in the early modern communication revolution, followed by its institutional organization,” but also “the recognition of the authority of the public in late 20th-century communication societies.” This is only true if by “recognition” it is meant that “we” (the author) “have come to recognize that the public plays an active part even at the level of mass communication.” In the wider academic community, however, quite the contrary is the case: “A proper sociological understanding of the role of the public […] in communication societies nevertheless still seems to be lacking” (Strydom, 1999: 2). 4. Several authors follow Gabriel Tarde’s belief that “public opinion” could have existed even before “the public” in a strict sense emerged. This is a typical view of “adjective theories” that primarily observe individual-psychological processes in (public) opinion formation and expression, and thus consider the concept of the public correlative to opinion. The term public is used here as an adjective to describe the specificity or quality of an opinion or opinions. In contrast, most normative-political public opinion theories may be defined as “substantive,” in the sense that they emphasize a tight, authoritative singleness of the actor—a generic collective subject generating public opinion (Splichal, 1999: 2). 5. For a more detailed discussion of Bentham’s concepts “publicity” and “public opinion,” see Splichal (2002: 35–63). 6. Bentham differentiated between three segments of the public: (1) the most numerous class is formed by those who can hardly occupy themselves with public affairs because they “have not time to read, nor leisure for reasoning,” (2) those who borrow judgments from others because they are not able to form opinions on their own, and (3) the elite, i.e. those who are able to judge for themselves (Bentham, 1822/1990: 58). The latter—those “by whom actual cognizance is taken of the matter in question in the first instance”—represent the “Committee of the Public Opinion Tribunal”; those who join their publicly expressed opinions form “the body of public opinion at large,”

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which may consist of any number of members up to the total number of members of society (p. 121). See also Tönnies (1922). After his early critique of Hegel’s theory, Marx did not use the concept of civil society because, as his correspondence with Engels indicates, it tended to obscure the more fundamental relations between the (economic) structure and (social) superstructure. “By the expressions: Bourgeois society, and: industrial and commercial society, we therefore propose to designate the same stage of social development; the first expression referring, however, more to the fact of the middle class being the ruling class, in opposition either to the class whose rule it superseded (the feudal nobility), or to those classes which it succeeds in keeping under its social and political dominion (the proletariat or industrial working class, the rural population, etc., etc.)—while the designation of commercial and industrial society more particularly bears upon the mode of production and distribution characteristic of this phase of social history” (Engels to Marx, Manchester, 23 September 1852; source: MEGW Volume 39: 20). A similar conceptualization of civil society is followed in the definition by the Centre for Civil Society (2004) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which provides a more detailed account of groups constituting it: “Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organisations, community groups, women’s organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trades unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy group.” Public service broadcasting is a typical case that is discussed in more detail in the next section. It is supposed to be an autonomous not-for-profit organization, thus independent from the state and commercial influences. Yet it is surrounded by the private economy, which substantially limits its production autonomy. As a consequence, public service broadcasters behave as business companies: The results of the measurement of audiences determine the value of programming; they are managed similarly to any commercial company, and they are directly involved in transactions with commercial suppliers of programs and equipment. To make it worse, it is often the state that decides on the license fee because the state (in most countries) is the primary income source of public service broadcasters and politics that (directly or indirectly) appoints management organs. http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbcreut.html http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS160770+08-Jan2008+PRN20080108 See http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1525&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Scannell (1992: 337) rightly points to a shortfall in Bourdieu’s empirical researches of cultural tastes, which do not include radio and television: “because the social distinctions maintained by the cultural distinctions of particular taste publics collapse in the common cultural domain of broadcasting.” Helpless Newspaper Industry, Werbewoche No. 4, 2008. http://en.ejo.ch/?p=361

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15. See http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. 16. Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 2008. See http://www.slideshare.net/PewInternet/degrees-of-access-may-2008-data 17. Source: India Broadband Forum < http://www.indiabroadband.net/india-broadbandtelecom-news/11169-some-statistics-about-internet-users-india.html>; Women’s Learning Partnership 18. See, for example, Google vs. Facebook: A Battle Over the Internet’s Architecture.

19. Although the term “web community” is widely used, it is seriously misleading. Communication networks that are emerging in the Internet do not provide a stable social structure of any kind. They may come close to a (public) “sphere,” but again, one should be cautious not to blur differences between a simple “communication space” and much more complex “public sphere.” 20. Stephen Moss: Julian Assange: the whistleblower. The Guardian, 14 July 2010.

21. See: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/know-your-playing-field-the-real-top-100domains. 22. See, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Now Richer than Murdoch or Apple’s Jobs. Guardian, 23 September 2010. 23. The concept of the proto-public sphere is discussed in Chapter 5 (this volume). 24. See http://www.magna-charta.org/magna.html. 25. The idea of conceptualizing the public as “the republic of the learned” advocated by Tönnies and many others at that time may of course sound elitist and thus undemocratic, but in its essence it cannot be proved invalid. As Bohman (1999: 187) argues, “for institutional conditions set by ‘abstract’ publicity and its citizenship role, science and democracy go hand in hand. Both seem dependent on the same consequences of abstraction and impartiality to form an inclusive ‘republic’ of science.” 26. The Decrees of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) were drawn up at the meeting of the representatives of German states and ratified by the Frankfurt Diet in September 1819. They were designed to suppress national and liberal movements in the postNapoleon Germany, notably in the universities. The decrees included control of all educational institutions, the censorship of the press, and the prohibition of political gathering. http://www.verfassungen.de/de/de06-66/karlsbad19.htm 27. Kant called his faculty of philosophy “the lower faculty” because it had no power but added ironically that “a man who can give commands, even though he is someone else’s humble servant, is considered more distinguished than a free man who has no one under his command.” 28. The type and quality of education that the university provided was as often an issue of polemics in the past as it is nowadays. Le Bon (1895/2001: 55, 123), for example, criticized the French system of education because, “From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal initiative being ever called into play. […] Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibi-

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tion of the least glimmer of personal initiative.” Le Bon called French public schools “factories of degeneration,” in contrast to “the American schools, which prepare a man admirably for life.” 29. It is true, however, that the classical “conceptual approach,” which roots the concept of public opinion into intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment, seems to conceal the anthropological regularities of opining as a procedure of sharing differences and individual interests, which speaks in favor of a more “sociological approach” to public opinion. In other words, it overstates “public” in excess of “opinion.” 30. Warner (2002: 419–422) points at this confusion when discussing different senses and inconsistent usages of the noun “public”—as “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse,” which may also be constituted “through mere attention,” while in some cases it is believed that “Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation” (italics added).

II

TOWARD A COSMOPOLITAN PUBLIC SPHERE

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Global Governance and Transnationalization of Public Spheres

Except for its close connectedness to the concept of publicness, not many things can be indisputably said about the genuine nature of the public sphere in general and even less about the transnational public sphere or European public sphere as perhaps the most plausible “operationalization” of the idea of transnationalization in the universe of publicness. As I indicated earlier in the book, the most obvious thing is that there is no consensus among scholars and practitioners (e.g., politicians, journalists) concerning what the constituents of the public sphere are; how it is or could be established; who may or should participate in it, and how; and whether the public sphere is a cause or consequence of democratic developments. The differences extend further in the conceptualizations of the role of communication—and specifically, the media—in democratic processes, not to mention the definition of publicness as the fundamental principle of the public sphere. Even reasoned debates among scholars can hardly provide a consensus on this issue, which is not to speak of “the public sphere” in general.

CHALLENGES OF TRANSNATIONALIZATION AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE One could perhaps argue that in the absence of a commonly accepted definition of the public sphere, it is not worth pursuing the idea of its transnationalization because this would only amplify the existing conceptual perplexities. I would argue that this might be a too hasty reaction, if nothing else for quite pragmatic 145

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reasons. If transnationalization is understood as an absolute increase in the number of transactions between a nationally constituted entity (state, society, economy, public sphere) with its environment, the very concept of transnationalization is directly related to the core of the concept of the public as defined by Dewey (1927/1991). According to his definition, the public consists of “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 15–16). This also applies, via facti, to the public sphere because there is no public without a public sphere and no public sphere without a public, as I stressed in a number of cases earlier in the book. As Habermas (2001) argues, there is no good reason to suppose that the age-long historical process of a continuous expansion of identity and solidarity as foundations of the public sphere would not cross the borders of nation-states: If the emergence of national consciousness involved a painful process of abstraction, leading from local and dynastic identities to national and democratic ones, why […] should this generation of a highly artificial kind of civic solidarity—a “solidarity among strangers”—be doomed to come to a final halt just at the borders of our classical nation-states? (Habermas, 2001: 16)

According to Bohman (2004: 138; 1999: 195), “a transnational public sphere is created when at least two culturally rooted public spheres begin to overlap and intersect.” An absolute increase in the number of external transactions does not necessarily imply their relative increase in relation to internal transactions as well because the number of international transactions may also boost national (“internal”) transactions as a consequence of transnationalization, thus making the consequences of transnationalization even more perplexing. However, when external transactions tend to outweigh the national ones both absolutely and relatively, we may speak of denationalization. In consequence, transnationalization of the national public sphere may lead, but not necessarily, to its denationalization. The idea of transnationalization of the public sphere does not imply that, eo ipso, the European (or any other transnational) public sphere may develop only as a postnational entity. The genuine concept of transnationalization rather denotes the coexistence of nations, national publics, and national public spheres with the emerging transnational entities in the “universe of publicness.” Transnationalization is much more than just the internationalization of the processes once characteristic for societies framed by the nation states. The spatial organization of social relationships goes beyond the relations among the (nation) states; international processes are complemented by transnational and transcontinental as well as subnational (interregional and transregional) actors, transactions, and relations, which generate major implications for the processes of decision making in terms of their democratic legitimacy and effectiveness. The major qualitative innovation pertaining to globalization lies in the technological convergence of communication platforms supported by converging markets and user

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habits, which increases the power of transnational economic actors but also opportunities for civic engagement and participation. Transnationalization refers to many different and complex processes that could not be subsumed under some general principles. It includes both technological and social (economic, political, legal, etc.) processes that blur the boundaries among networks, terminals, services, rhetorics, markets, and regulatory regimes. Its foundation is, however, the digitalization of signals, which enabled a rapid growth of ICTs. Dewey’s conceptualization of the public also helps to solve the problem of the (minimum) size of the public sphere—an issue that is no less relevant for “national” public spheres as for their transnational “extensions.” Although the private and public spheres are inherently connected and the boundaries between them shift incessantly,1 it would not make much sense that the public sphere would be conceptualized in the way to allow relatively “small” social categories to be considered (even if only by themselves) “a public sphere” by accentuating similarities in the group and differences between the ingroup and the outgroup. The decisive moment in the constitution (rather than definition) of the public sphere is the public dealing with important long-term consequences of transactions taking place behind the public stage curtain. Although I do not intend to argue that the sheer number of those affected by such transactions is the most valid (not to say the only) indicator of the significance of the resulting consequences, it is quite obvious that a small-group (private) discussion of consequences—for example, fancying at home with wife and friends, as Hegel put it— does not amount to the “public sphere.” In addition, no public sphere can be conceptualized without being related to some (democratic) regulative power that can be properly controlled. The despotic representative publicness, which does not have the presupposition of universal accessibility, is still characterized as a form of publicness/publicity. However, due to the absence of surveillance over the ruling power and the impossibility of public criticism, it impedes the public sphere (and the public) to arise rather than represents a specific kind of public sphere. The relationship to the regulative or decision-making powers indicates the importance of the potential consequences of transactions discussed in the public spheres: The more important the consequences are, the more power they require in order to regulate them. The hypothetical “size” of a public sphere could be determined based on the “all-affected” principle as primarily the institutional and organizational framework needed to regulate significant long-term consequences of a set of transactions, which activated the emergence of publics. Traditionally, organizations and institutions with regulatory power were typically associated with the nation state as a territorial unit and/or dominant legitimate power. Accordingly, the public sphere was also mainly formed as a national public sphere. Because state regulatory institutions—“the state” in the Deweyan sense—were the proper addressees for an entire range of diverse consequences of economic, political, or cultural transactions, national public spheres were all-inclusive: not in terms of citizen inclusion but in terms of potential regulatory actions to follow after public deliberation.

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Globalization radically challenged the territorial boundaries once used to identify “all affected” by the consequences of a given (trans)action. Whereas formerly a stable structure of organizations and institutions existed within the nation states that could have been addressed by publics, and almost no discrepancy existed between the territorial and functional competences of (state) regulatory institutions, global governance greatly “diversified” regulatory and decisionmaking bodies. It has complemented state actors with corporate private actors, international and supranational institutions, and decision-making process with partnerships, bargaining, negotiation, lobbying, manipulative and nonmanipulative forms of persuasion, and other “steering modes.” With globalization and greater transactional permeability of terrestrial boundaries, not only modes of regulation but also the formation of public spheres became more flexible. In addition to—rather than instead of—traditional nationally defined public spheres, transborder public spheres may be formed either primarily territorially (e.g., regional) or functionally (i.e., to include relevant publics and regulators). The two types of emergence of public spheres are not mutually exclusive. A European public sphere would be a typical representative of the primacy of the territorial principle beyond the nation-state boundaries corresponding to higher level political system (European Union). A “functional,” issue-related public sphere would be a transnational (or, perhaps, global) environmental public sphere, which would include “all affected” (i.e., those interested in controlling the consequences of certain transactions) and potential regulators of those transactions. To the degree that “all affected” and regulators of different transactions would overlap, a more complex and robust form of transnational public sphere could emerge. For example, the rise of a European public is not likely to occur at the level of a pan-European society beyond national borders but at the level of social and political life within and across member states (as it also happened with the emergence of national publics). However, because a greater flexibility of personal membership in territorial units (citizenship) is likely to exist in the future, nonterritorial units with long-term membership could become the primary form of the emergent transnational public spheres. Obviously, transnational public spheres should not be conceptualized simply as an imitation of the national public sphere in its widening circles. Rather, it is suggested that they will emerge from the mutual opening of existing national universes to one another, yielding to an interpenetration of mutually translated national communications. There is no need for a stratified public communication, each layer of which would correspond, one by one, to a different “floor” of the multilevel political system. The agenda of European institutions will be included in each of a plurality of national publics, if these are inter-related in the right way. (Habermas, 2001: 18)

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Nevertheless, to some degree at least, transnationalization did “imitate” the processes of nation-state formation in the 18th and 19th centuries. The spread of territory under a single supreme authority that exercised sovereign power over a larger territory and its inhabitants was the consequence of similar processes that now make up (economic) globalization. In time past, the nation state arose as a mechanism to regulate far-reaching and long-term consequences of private transactions that small local or city states were not able to effectively handle anymore. At the same time, nation states represented institutionalized sovereign powers that the (national) publics influenced to act in the common interest. Transnationalization does “imitate” the pattern of national public spheres by the very process of inclusion of non-national agenda “in each of a plurality of national publics,” which was actually constitutive of national public spheres. It would be inaccurate to conceptualize the public sphere—either in a national or in the transnational framework—only in terms of their integration within. We should rather incorporate the global dimension of the process also into the conceptualization of national public spheres and thus conceptualize the integrative processes as (part of) transnationalization or globalization. Quite clearly, Europe is facing the emergence of a form of transnational social space by which (some) nation states are both weakened and strengthened at the same time (while others, particularly less developed and less powerful states, are primarily harmed). In that process, a European public sphere may develop either “at the expense” (as a negation) of national public spheres or as the savior of the genuine public sphere. By the very definition of the public, “national” publics are becoming “transnational phenomena” due to the constantly increasing number of indirect transnational transactions they are exposed to and have to deal with, even if they do not directly take part in them. In the same sense, national media are transnationalized to the degree that they increasingly report and comment on “transnational” events.2 By these very changes, a “national” public sphere is being continuously transnationalized. In addition to that, transnationalization may also bring new—external, other-national—actors into a national public sphere (e.g., foreign corporations, media, NGOs, etc.) and thus foster transnationalization of the national public sphere. It is almost superfluous to mention the significance of the Internet with its tremendous impact on the amplification of information exchange and transnational transactions in all spheres of human actions worldwide, thus giving rise to globalization, despite the fact that in a number of countries, the number of internal interactions still largely prevail over the external ones (e.g., the number of “national friends” compared with the number of outer friends in social networks). In contrast to a geographically undetermined transnational public sphere, the quest for a European public sphere is based on the traditional idea of the territorially bound public sphere. In fact, Europeanization of the public sphere is not simply an operationalization or empirical form of its transnationalization. It denotes a controversial process, which, in addition to transnationalization, also comprises its negation—reproduction of the formation of national public spheres

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on a higher level. Within its firm geographic boundaries, “[t]he European peoples form a family in accordance with the universal principle underlying their legal codes, their customs, and their civilization” (Hegel, 1820/2001: §339). The formerly decisive “customs of nations” are refined with the universal principle underlying them, which for Hegel was “the universal absolute mind, the world mind,” whereas Europeanization “lowers” Hegel’s absolute to the level of European civilization and its geopolitical borders. On the one hand, Europeanization of the public sphere imitates the conceptualization of a national public sphere; on the other hand, it is inconsistent with the critique of the too-close relationship of the public sphere with power and hegemony. Any “formula” of exclusion—related to class, race, gender, sexual orientation, nation, culture, or any other collective identity or category such as “Europe”—obstructs the universalist discourse supposedly constitutive for the public sphere. The adjective “European” seems to be all-inclusive from a narrow regional (European) perspective, but it sets boundaries and excludes “others” in exactly the same way as any “national” public sphere. It is “constructed” in analogy with the state-centered understanding of societies as “bounded, integral, wholes with distinctive identities, cultures and institutions” (Calhoun, 1999: 217). The idea of a “European” public sphere as a cohesive and unitary space is thus not only a replica of a “national” public sphere suggesting that Europeanization is a process similar to that of establishing nation states but in a sense even quasitheoretically legitimizes the territorial constraint as constitutive of a (“European”) public sphere, which was formerly assumed by “proponents” of national public spheres as being of no “inherent nature or right,” as Dewey put it. If the concept of the public sphere should indeed remain central to democracy, it should remain “a space […] distinct from both webs of interpersonal relationships and large scale categories of cultural identity” (Calhoun, 1999: 219). The transnationalization of the public sphere is not a recent phenomenon. International transactions in economy and politics were important issues in (national) public opinion formation since its earliest days because they were constitutive of the rise of national press. Considering only the increase in the number of transactions, transnationalization actually does not bring much new to the ageold process of the constantly enlarging circles of the public sphere, as found out by Tarde and Tönnies already. It is another—and more intricate—question whether and/or how the processes of formation of the (national) public and public sphere themselves have been changed because of an increasingly transnationalized environment. The idea of a “general public” is still loosely associated with the national population/citizenship primarily for empirical reasons—because this is the only “definition” that makes survey research and polling based on random sampling possible, and because the most powerful actors appearing before the public, such as large interest groups and political parties, draw on this type of research as a resource of their power. We can identify in such practice also a “tacit assumption of nationalist rhetoric [that] reinforces our acceptance of state-centered conven-

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tions of data-gathering that make nation-states the predominant units of comparative research—even when the topics are cultural or social psychological, not political-institutional” (Calhoun, 1999: 218). Even “European” polls, such as “Eurobarometer,” conducted on behalf of the European Commission, are focused on the comparison of “national public opinions” rather than on processes of “Europeanization” of public opinion, and the aggregation of individual opinions is usually still confined to the level of the nation state. Similarly, analysis of media contents must focus on the national or ethnic media because only a handful of genuinely transnational media exist. But this is not to say that other forms of communication particularly relevant for the public sphere are not being inter- and transnationalized to a much higher degree. With new forms of communication and the new media that are emerging, citizens’ involvement in public debate may become more spontaneous and less rigid than before. The Internet is the prime example, with recent developments—such as blogs, wiki sites, and collaborative filtering tools—empowering individuals to make possible the construction of new communions and spaces of shared interest. An example of opening up opportunities for transnational debate in Europe is Eurozine (www.eurozine.com), a nonprofit network of European cultural journals from nearly all European countries and a netmagazine. By translating texts from approximately 100 partner journals from almost every European country into one of the widely spoken European languages and presenting them together with some original texts on controversial issues on the web site, Eurozine is aiming to create “a possibility for texts to be understood and valued outside of their original national context.” It stimulates a common cultural discourse beyond national borders in the same way that newspapers of the 18th century helped create “literary publics” that easily gained in political significance. According to its editorial statement, Eurozine offers “a public space of a new type for open and critical debate on a transnational level.” Indeed, efforts of this kind could eventually bring about a transnational “republic of the learned,” once dreamed about by Tönnies. At the present stage, the loose association of European cultural journals and their readers perhaps most closely resembles the idea of a European public sphere. These journals stimulate a genuinely international debate, spreading political, philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural thought among languages. They reflect the multiplicity of issues, questions, and problems that affect and bind people together irrespective of whether they are in one nation state or another. But we also need to develop democratic political institutions that would parallel this process and respond to and regulate consequences of transnational transactions by which transborder or transnational groupings are affected, and which lower (national) levels of decision making cannot manage to regulate effectively. What seems to be most radically changing in the postnational era is the relationship between the public and the (nation) state as its addressee, and the position of the state in the (national) public sphere. Whereas traditionally, the nation

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state dominated the (national) public sphere and represented the natural addressee of national public opinion, the transnationalized environment of national public spheres deeply shocked its hegemonic status in every possible respect. The very idea of transnational social spaces also “implies a different understanding of territoriality. Transnational space is not necessarily bounded, cohesive, or geographically contiguous” (Rumford, 2003: 26), which was/is a distinctive attribute of the nation states. With the changing role of the state in the national public sphere, a number of important developments took place within or in relation to the public sphere. Perhaps the issue addressed most often in—not only European—academic literature on transnationalization of the public sphere is the democratic deficit. It is argued that transnationalization (or globalization) of governance lacks democratic legitimacy because current arrangements to regulate transnational economy and politics rest on limited, if any, participation by peoples they affect and accountability to them. Theories of deliberative democracy claim that democratic legitimization can be achieved through a deliberative process in which a variety of state and nonstate stakeholders participate. However, new forms of global governance often escape traditional mechanisms of public deliberation and accountability, whereas new mechanisms lack in efficiency or even do not (yet) exist. Proponents of the critique of a “global democratic deficit” argue that transnationalization actually sacrificed democratic politics to the profitability of global economic transactions: It shook economic security and social equalities, weakened citizens’ participation in decision making and democratic institutions once established within democratic political systems of nation states, and degenerated radical demands for denationalization and destatization into neoliberal processes of depoliticization and privatization. Whereas the (Western) nation states have established effective systems of political democracy in the period of late capitalism, contemporary powerful transnational actors in globalization undermine the efficacy of national democratic decision-making authorities. The pressures of the capitalist economic sector toward deregulation weaken the ability of states to mediate and control. A significant part of national political institutions’ decision-making power has been transferred to those operating at the transnational level or to the (global) market, which challenges the power of nation states. Two aspects of the disempowerment of nation states in the globalized political environment are particularly relevant for (the conceptualization of) the public (sphere): (a) the loss of state capacities for control seems to require a kind of transnational equivalent to the nation state and national public—effective transnational decision-making powers and/or regimes accountable to effective transnational public(s) that do not (yet) exist, and (b) the growing legitimization deficits in decision-making processes that weaken the influence of the state over its citizens require that decision makers (re-)enter the public sphere to legitimize their decisions and to gain public support. “State and corporate actors may seek some association with, or even participation in, discursive forums” (Dryzek, 1990:

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81; see also Habermas, 2003: 89–90; Fraser, 2007: 19), which may not only foster citizens’ political participation but also open the door to manipulative publicity in the hands of these actors. In principle, there are two complementary options to reduce the democratic deficit and to achieve a level of cosmopolitan democracy in transnational communities. One is to create democratic institutions’ analogue to the democratic system of nation states, but, at the moment, it is difficult to imagine how such powerful transnational democratic institutions could be established despite the decline of nation-state sovereignty. There are no empirical signs of “transplanting” the model of centralized public regulation from the nation state to the global setting. For instance, who is legitimately supposed to constitute—as demos—the collective subject of representation, and how should they be represented? There are no clear answers to these questions. The question of who should constitute the membership of democratic societies becomes particularly perplexing in a dynamic perspective. Transnationalization not only exposed individuals to the consequences of an increasing number of transnational transactions in which they do not directly participate but also to the kind of transactions in which they are personally involved. Migration is the most obvious case. Border crossing—moving out of a state in which one holds formal membership (citizenship) into another sovereign state (and back)—creates nonresident citizens in the departure countries and resident noncitizens in the destination country, which makes membership in territorial units ever more temporary. Populations of nation states are becoming a combination of citizens and noncitizen residents who are citizens of another nation state without being its residents. We can easily imagine that, in the future, the majority of citizens of a nation state would be nonresidents who moved to other countries, and the majority of residents would be noncitizens because they would consist of immigrants from other countries. Taking the democratic principle seriously would require that the ranks of those who should be entitled to participate in decision making should run even beyond resident noncitizens and nonresident citizens—to include all those outside the state’s boundaries who may be impacted by the state’s decisions. This vision is in strong opposition to what is the dominant practice today. Migrants are noncitizen residents until they become culturally assimilated and politically nationalized. Noncitizen residents are affected by what their “fellow” citizen residents want or decide, but they can hardly affect what citizens want. Even if they may marginally participate in the public sphere, they are not a proper subject but merely an object of public opinion. The issue of legitimate representation of citizens (and nation states) in the transnational environment is no less perplexing. On the aggregate level, the principle of “one state–one vote” would hardly be democratic because it would give—taking the EU as an example—the citizen of Malta 200 times more voting power than the citizen of Germany. Yet treating the EU as a single constituency

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with majority rule does not seem anymore democratic because it would always allow the representatives of a few large national constituencies to outvote the majority of countries. Although qualified majority voting may provide an adequate solution for the European parliamentary elections—leaving aside the issue of resident noncitizens—it is not applicable, as a principle of decision making, to the Council of the EU and the European Commission, and to transnational decision-making institutions in general. In addition, the “imitation” of bureaucratic systems of nation states in the transnational or global framework could “reproduce on a grand scale the instrumental rationalization and other nefarious effects of expanding national states and bureaucracies” (Dryzek, 1990: 90). If this were a plausible course of events in the formation of a transnational “state,” then such a new addressee of (transnational) public opinion would jeopardize rather than facilitate the formation of a transnational public sphere. Thus, another and perhaps more realistic option is to build a more decentralized and diffuse cosmopolitan system of governance with no central (dominant) power, which would ultimately depend on the creation of a transnational public sphere as an arena for public debates and a medium of social integration that fosters solidarity. This may better fit in with the possibility that nonterrestrial units with long-term membership (associations, communions, publics) may replace territorial units as defining the citizenship in the future. As Dryzek (1990: 91) suggests, instead of trying to decentralize the international polity, the instrumental rationality pervading it should be changed to communicative rationality. Global governance should provide opportunities and sites, including mass media, for public deliberation among stakeholders, which would expose the decisions of powerful actors to transnational public scrutiny. By participating in the public discourse, citizens and civic associations could increase transparency, promote accountability, and enhance democratic legitimacy of the rules and institutions of global governance. “Such accountability is not the same as political control; it operates on the force of public opinion and through democratic institutions and public spheres that already exist on more local levels” (Bohmann, 1999: 507). However, participation in the debates among stakeholders does not necessarily increase the level of accountability in inter- and transnational transactions. When civil organizations assume formal roles in international forums, their legitimacy may become jeopardized (Rossiter, 2004: 14) due to the visibility paradox discussed in chapter 2. As free expression and censorship complement each other, an increase in institutional visibility of some actors correlates with a decrease in visibility and, thus, an increased marginalization of other civil society actors. The consequence is that the differentiation in visibility may be considered an indication of the growing inequality in governance. Although publicness is a rather weak form of influence and control, transnational public spheres could pave the way for the formation of transnational public(s), which would establish a close link between global governance and deliber-

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ative democracy. It is even argued that the absence of a transnational authority equivalent to the nation-state bureaucracy is not primarily an impediment for an efficacious transnational public opinion to develop because a clearly defined and empowered addressee of public opinion is thus missing but rather a fortunate opportunity for the development of an autonomous public sphere emancipated from the external political and economic pressures. Widespread transnational networks—such as those of activists who are most visible in the antiglobalization movement—may link together many citizens’ voices on many different issues related to global governance to enhance civil society beyond national borders. Three Sources of Aspirations for a Transnational European Public Sphere The development of a transnational public sphere should enable national publics (and perhaps emerging transnational publics) to cogenerate a transnational public opinion and thus become visible on a larger scale. In the European context, the idea of a transnational–European public sphere is pursued with three specific intentions and partly interwoven perspectives, which could be tagged, perhaps a bit vaguely, as: (a) normative-theoretical, (b) historical-analytical, and (c) practical-political. Normative-theoretical intentions associated with the concept of the public sphere seem to be the central point of contemporary “reasoned debates” on the public sphere. As a normative-theoretical concept and project, the public sphere is a counterfactual ideal central to the contemporary critical theory and political critique. The normative-critical perspective is opposed primarily to what I would call an ideologically frozen concept of the public (sphere) that contributes to the legitimacy of the existing social order nationally and transnationally. This refers to the concepts of “sub/national public spheres” and “European public sphere” as assumingly empirical-denotative concepts. Suggesting that “[t]here is already a public sphere in Europe” because “[t]he public debate in Europe on issues such as the BSE-scandal, the corruption in the Commission or the regulation of migration and the treatment of migrants have led to forms of public resonance that cross national borders” (Eder, 2000: 167) is an example of what I consider a distorted media-centered denotative concept of the European public sphere, which follows Habermas’ (2001: 18) provisory conceptualization of “the general public” as merely relating “at the same time, to the same topics, by taking an affirmative or negative stand on news and opinions.” The obvious problem is who sets the agenda for “the general public” and thus influences the formation of (European) public opinion, and what still (if anything) differentiates “the general public” from “audience.” As a recent (2009) cross-cultural study in eight EU countries showed, 49.3% of politicians believed that the “media decide which issues are important in politics” (against 20.3% politicians who disagreed, 30.4% were undecided).4 Journalists, of course, do not want to take this responsibility: Only 27.4% of them agreed that they determine the agenda (35.2% disagreed, 37.3 %

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were undecided). In addition, the problem also remains as to how globalization is “linked to political will formation which must, of its nature, be oriented towards political power centres where there is at present no substitute at the global or supranational level for existing nation states” (Garnham, 2007: 209). As Bohman (1999: 185) argues, we may speak only of a “public space” rather than a “public sphere” if only the most elementary conditions of publicness are met, as it is the case with the Habermas’ and Eder’s perceptions of the Europeanwide public (sphere). For a public sphere to emerge, at least two additional conditions have to be met: (a) “not just the expectation of a response, but actual responsiveness and accountability to others”; and (b) “the context of a more socially structured and often institutional setting than is available by means of communicative action alone,” which requires an elaborated and properly institutionalized communicative, political, and cultural infrastructure. Opposed to empirically frozen concepts are ideas conceptualizing and proposing necessary changes in society through a normative thought process. They are often called “utopian,” in the sense that it is impossible to realize them in practice. A typical case of an idea often considered “utopian” is the concept of the right to communicate, which is constitutive of an inclusive concept of the public sphere. The very idea of the right of citizens to communicate evolves from 18thcentury conceptualizations of the principle of publicity but was recently empowered by radical changes in social circumstances, which paved its way to materialize. As once the battle for universal suffrage, today the idea of the civil right to communicate points to critical sites, where changes should and could take place to foster human equality, justice, and fairness. Powerful interests exist in all societies against the insistence on this right, although, at least in the developed countries, productivity, wealth, and national incomes have increased to the level that makes it provisionally feasible. The task of critical theory and research is to help remove theoretical misconceptions, practical-political reservations, and empirical obstacles that still impede the enactment of the universal right to communicate. Because any empirical research unavoidably proceeds from certain (even if not explicit) normative assumptions, critical theory also has to guide empirical research—and thus be normative. Social criticism in theory and research is not adverse to empirical research, including quantitative research methods because what we cannot observe we cannot (help) change; we can only interpret it—to modify the famed Marx’s Thesis Eleven. Normative theory can and should build a bridge to political reality and serve as a guide to empirical research. A sort of empirically indefinable aptitude has always been involved in the conceptualization of publicness and public opinion. In this sense, we can accept the belief that “critical work […] is not the opposite of administrative research” (Golding & Murdock, 1991: 17) only as far as it relates to methods and the process of research in the narrow sense (crafting research questions, collecting information, analyzing data, and sharing results). In this sense, we can speak of the unity of the social sciences.

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Both administrative communication research that tends to legitimize the status quo of communications in society and critical communication research (or “theory” for that matter) that questions it, always have the potential of having some regulatory relevance, even if research is conducted without a clear awareness of reasons for it and/or its consequences. In a way, communication research always implies the purpose of either preserving or changing a policy, an institution, or a communication system—by practices as different as those of citizens effectuating their personal communication actions and those of powerful social actors and regulators helping (re)construct the social communication infrastructure central to the public sphere. The notion of “helping” entails a wide variety of meanings (and practices) from theoretical validation to practical actions or from ideological legitimization to empirical critique. In this sense, any discussion of the public sphere is unavoidably political. Yet critical research radically departs from administrative research in taking its social responsibility seriously, that is, in defining the relevance and validity of research questions particularly in terms of social practice. The sense of being critical is expressed in sharing responsibility for the future by identifying those critical (empirical) conditions that stimulate or fetter humane and democratic developments and recognizing their historical roots. In that sense, critical research is not only political but also “policy-oriented.” It does not come as a surprise, then, that the notion of the European public sphere is deeply rooted, in both theory and practice, in a rather general (political) dissatisfaction with, and critique of, the neoliberal domination of economy and global supremacy of corporate capital over political issues essential for democratic citizenship. It theoretically underpins critical reactions to “a disproportion between the dense economic and rather lax political connectedness on the one hand, and the democratic deficit in the decision-making on the other hand” (Habermas, 2001: 63). A kind of elitist neglect of civic engagement to which Habermas is referring is certainly not a specifically European problem; it rather characterizes global political developments of the 21st century where “[t]hose now attempting to implement a new world order seem to hold in disdain the unending and continuous civil discourse and dialogue in which we all can participate” (Shotter, 2003: 2). As Benjamin Barber (2004: 136-7) put it in his interview for Logos, We’ve got doctors without frontiers, we’ve got criminals without frontiers, we have capitalists without frontiers, and we have terrorists without frontiers. The one thing we’re missing is: citizens without frontiers. The Democratic project, I believe, should rest on finding ways to create citizens without frontiers.

Barber only forgot to add governments to those who operate through global networks. The governmental networks are perhaps even the key feature of the world

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order of the 21st century. It is doubtful, however, that this could make the “Democratic project” more feasible and help “citizens without frontiers” to come into being. Democratic forms of transnational communication that would widely open possibilities for public deliberation on national and transnational levels are essential for the project of the transnationalization of national public spheres and the emergence of a transnational public sphere. A variety of national and transnational forms of more or less institutionalized channels of communication are central to the public sphere, provided that institutional regulation “liberates” communications from being limited to privacy and secrecy. It makes them to become public, but that could mean two opposite consequences: The “institutional touch” may liberate them either from social restraints and authoritative censorship through critical publicity or from the safety of the private domain through disciplinary visibility. As a historical-analytical category, the concept of the public sphere is used to analyze and theorize social changes (in Europe and elsewhere) initiated by the Enlightenment. However, the concept of the public sphere is widely contested when applied to specific historic circumstances. Habermas (1962/1995) himself warned against a too extensive and ubiquitous use of the concept “the public” by suggesting that its full validity is limited to its historically specific meaning in England at the end of the 17th century and in France of the 18th century. In other words, the concept of public has a distinctive conceptual heterogeneity that is determined not only (or primarily) by specific theoretical positions but also in relation to specific historical contexts. One of the reasons for controversies about the historical-descriptive and explanatory value of the public sphere among historians—and at large—is the troublesome translation of German word Öffentlichkeit, which was discussed in chapter 4. After the concept of the public sphere has been introduced into English in 1989 with the translation of Habermas’ book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (originally published in 1962), it rapidly and almost completely eliminated the traditional concept of “the public” from the critical-theoretical discourse. The substantive Öffentlichkeit is indiscriminately translated into English as “public sphere” or even “public space” but hardly ever as “publicness” or “the public.” Thus, the English term “public sphere,” in contrast to the original Öffentlichkeit, acquired the character of a spatial metaphor (public space) and even a sort of human agency. Darnton (2000) suggests that the translation of Habermas’ book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, into French had an important negative consequence: The French word “public” has been largely “replaced” by “sphère publique,” which is, as Darnton argues, a mistranslation of Habermas’ concept “Öffentlichkeit.” As a result, for example, “French historians have attributed agency to this ‘space’ and made it the crucial factor, more important than ideas or public opinion, in the collapse of the Old Regime. In fact, spatial metaphors have proliferated so much in historical writing that they are choking out other modes of analysis” (Darnton, 2000).5 As Darnton ironically states, “A researcher who sets

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out to discover the public sphere is likely to find it wherever he or she looks and then perhaps to reify it—that is, to construe it as a force at work in history, an active agent which produces palpable effects, possibly even the French Revolution.” Indeed, a conceptual “replacement” of “the public” with the concept of the “public sphere” paradoxically implies the disappearance of the body public through a discursive process. In the classical model of the liberal bourgeois public, the difference between the state and civil society was the difference between the public sphere (public authority embodied in the state) and the private domain composed of private actions (civil society in its narrow sense; i.e., economy and family) extended to the public of private people. As discussed earlier, particularly after Bentham, the central importance has been given to “the public” conceived of as a sort of tribunal (already by Rousseau), and that concept of the public was also essential for theorizations of public opinion in the 19th and 20th centuries until Habermas, who shifted the emphasis from opinion of the public to the public sphere and reconceptualized the latter as the infrastructure necessary for citizens’ discursive formation of opinion and will. Unfortunately, at present there is no agreement in the theoretical body of literature on differences between the concepts of “the public” and “public sphere.” The public sphere is activated in the communicative interdependence of those potentially affected, who create the public as a social category in which both the legislated laws of the state and the market laws of the economy should be suspended. The significance of the public sphere resides in its potential for the creation of social integration on the basis of public discourse (or communicative action)—in the homology in the sphere of politics with political power and in the sphere of economy with market mechanisms, both of which represent specific ways of social integration and competition. It represents the locus at which private citizens engage in “the public use of reason,” as conceptualized by Kant. Mass media—movies, radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet—significantly contribute to the constitution of the public sphere. Last, but not least, the concept of the public sphere also has practical-political relevance, which effectively refutes the argument of the “regulatory fiction” supposedly associated with the concept according to the critics of the public sphere concept. This dimension is clearly present in the contemporary European political context. According to the Treaty on EU (2008), the EU is normatively becoming a genuine way to create a transnational public sphere at least subglobally. In Art II10 and II-11, the Lisbon Treaty declares the principles of participatory and representative democracy. Specifically, the Treaty provides European citizens the right “to participate in the democratic life of the Union” (I-46, §3). It further stipulates that EU institutions shall “give citizens and representative associations the opportunity to make known and publicly exchange their views in all areas of Union action” (Art II-11, §1). “Open, transparent and regular dialogue” by the

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Union institutions with representative associations and civil society shall take place (Art II-11, §2). However, the declaration of these principles and rights in the Lisbon Treaty is not followed by any detailed provision aimed at enhancing European democracy.6 Nevertheless, the idea of the (European) public sphere has an increasingly important legitimizing function in building (pan-European) democratic institutions. Some politicians and officials are still fearful that public engagement might comprise a threat to effective policymaking and good governance. However, given an overwhelming evidence of public distrust of national and particularly European political institutions after French and Dutch citizens having voted “no” on the proposed EU Constitution in May and June 2005,7 they had to recognize that “democracy can flourish only if citizens know what is going on, and are able to participate fully,” as the European Commission claimed in the White Paper “On a European Communication Policy” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006). The Commission tends to explain “a sense of alienation from ‘Brussels’ ” that has been identified among European citizens with “the inadequate development of a ‘European public sphere’ where a European debate can unfold” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 4). Several reasons for the “communication gap” between the “European Union and its citizens” were identified; however, the single most important factor is believed to be the absence of a European public sphere. Thus, the Commission considers absolutely necessary for the future of the EU that “national public authorities, civil society, and the European Union institutions […] work together to develop Europe’s place in the public sphere” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 5). It proposes a “fundamentally new approach—a decisive move away from one-way communication to reinforced dialogue, from an institution-centered to a citizen centered communication” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 4). Although the meaning(s) of the concept of the public sphere are widely disputed among scholars, the Commission seems to have found with it the solution to close the recurrently indicated “gap between the European Union and its citizens” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 2, 4, 7). But the content of the White Paper reveals that this could hardly be the case due to the vagueness, if not complete misunderstanding, of the concept. Not surprisingly, then, the Commission still feels uneasy about the European public sphere: Throughout the White Paper, the phrase “European public sphere” (in contrast to the public sphere in general) is often used in quotation marks and rightly so. The most curious thing about the “European public sphere” as understood by the Commission is that it is conceived as a result of a top-down political and communication process, although it is emphasized in the White Paper that “a working European ‘public sphere’ cannot be shaped in Brussels. It can only emerge if the objective is backed by all key actors and taken forward at every level” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 11). In 2005 already, the Commission has expressed a “renewed commitment to communication with Europe’s citizens” in its “Action Plan to Communicating Europe by the

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Commission” (July 2005), and drafted 22 specific actions to achieve that goal, but 19 of them merely comprised measures to be taken by the Commission to make its communication (or “public relations,” strictly speaking) more noticeable and effective (including “cooperation with journalists”), and only three actions were planned to step up citizens’ participation. In the 2006 White Paper, the Commission identified five areas for action to “create” a European public sphere: (a) defining common principles, (b) “empowering citizens,” (c) working with the media and new technologies, (d) understanding public opinion, and (e) “doing the job together.” Among “common principles,” the Commission particularly emphasized “the right to information and freedom of expression” as fundamental to democracy (in Europe) and, thus, to “a shared vision for an EU Communication Policy.” One of the actions proposed is to adopt a framework document tentatively named “European Charter (or Code of Conduct) on Communication,” which should define “common principles and norms that should guide information and communication activities on European issues.” Actions toward “empowering citizens” should improve civic education and connect citizens with each other and with public institutions. Actions designed to “work with the media” and “gauge European opinion” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 8–11) clearly reveal the top-down approach of the Commission, whose primary interest is quite obvious to “supply the media with high-quality news and current affairs material” because, at present, “media coverage of European issues remains limited and fragmented” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 8); and to “better anticipate and understand trends in public opinion in relation to issues of crucial importance for the future of Europe” (COM(2006)35 final, February 1, 2006, 11). Although the Commission emphasizes the need to provide “the tools and facilities […] that will give as many people as possible [not only] access to information [but also] the opportunity to make their voices heard,” it remains unclear how this could happen. Besides improvements of civic education, the Commission is living in hopes for opportunities to be provided by new communication technologies, such as “digitally connected European libraries” and similar points of access to EU web sites that should be complemented with online discussion forums. In contrast to the Internet, all other national and subnational media are only seen as tools that EU institutions should use as effectively as possible—using public relations techniques8—in order to promote the idea of a united Europe. It is not surprising then that the public service media—either local or national—are not even mentioned in the White Paper. In the European Commission’s most recent document in the field, its 2010 “Digital Agenda for Europe,” whose declared objectives are to “maximise the social and economic potential of ICT, most notably the internet, a vital medium of economic and societal activity: for doing business, working, playing, communicating and expressing ourselves freely” (EC, 2010: 3), citizens’ participation in political processes is totally ignored.

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A rather narrow view of the public sphere presented in the EC 2006 White Paper and an apparent general lack of interest in citizens’ political engagement and participation match with Commission’s obvious conviction that European citizens (usually referred to as “Europe and its citizens” or “European Union and its citizens” and less frequently as “European citizens” or “citizens of Europe”) already exist, and no action is needed toward a more inclusive European public sphere and active citizenship. As the European Charter of Active Citizenship (2006: 1) states, it is paradoxical that, “while citizens and their autonomous organizations are usually asked to contribute with material and immaterial resources to filling the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union, they are, at the same time, hardly considered and often mistrusted by Public institutions.” It is not surprising, then, that even the term “participation of civil society,” which has been at least mentioned in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (2004, Art I-50) without any further elaboration, later disappeared from the Treaty of Lisbon (2007). The Treaty extends the codecision procedure to the European Parliament, which is now granted legislative powers equal to the Council of Ministers, but this effort to enhance accountability and transparency on decision-making processes in the EU is not accompanied with at least its minimum extension to the European citizens (e.g., by defining the personal “right to actively participate in public life” as one of the fundamental—legally protected—rights of the European citizens, as suggested by the Charter). Such a “civic participation” would enable citizens to provide some input telling politicians what they think of certain issues and potentially influencing the decisions made at the end of the decision-making process instead of politicians gaining support for decisions by explaining and persuading citizens after decisions have been made. Historical (Trans)formations of Public Spheres Before offering a more thorough analysis of the consequences of transnationalization for public spheres, let me reflect on some conceptual problems regarding changes in/of the public sphere reflected in the increase in the number of transactions dealt with. It is of prime importance to conceptualize the public sphere not as a static category or illustrative metaphor, as it mostly appears in contemporary debates, but rather as a contested social space with its own dynamics related to specific social/historical contexts, which is reflected in a wide variety of historical realizations. Taking the dynamism of the public sphere seriously requires the implantation of historicity into the concept because otherwise “the public sphere” would be transformed from a normative (counterfactual) idea to a utopian ideal, which would make a mere myth of it. The historical authenticity reveals different forms of materialization of publicness paralleled to conceptual changes discussed in chapters 1–3. This would suggest that not only publicness existed in and devel-

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oped through a variety of different form(ation)s—primarily as power possibly used in communication even against the resistance of others, and thus as a privilege— but also other phenomena of the universe of publicness have their specific historic trajectories. Moreover, no historically existing form of the public sphere fulfills rigorous requirements of the ideal public sphere. The point I want to make is that the goal should not be to try to “fix” a specific historical form of the public sphere according to the transcendental normative ideal—if its “deficiencies” are believed to be the cause of “democratic deficit”—but to reveal and understand specificities of concrete historical forms of the public sphere in all of their complexity and thus demystify the concept. In order to do this, we must challenge the ahistorical singularity of the empirical concept of the public sphere. Yet this is not to argue that in concrete, historically specific social formations (e.g., in a nation-state) a plurality of public spheres (may) exist that essentially share the same normatively defined characteristics. Rather, the plurality of public spheres denotes a multiplicity of different, historically and culturally specific elements and forms, such as actors, media, and forms of communication, tied into a specific type of the empirically existing public sphere. The main differences between different forms are in the level of general accessibility of the public sphere for social groups, the extent of (in)equality among its actors, and the nature of formation of public opinion. Ortho-public sphere as (closest to the) normative ideal corresponds to the “elitist” concept of a virtual sphere of rational deliberation among educated or at least interested people while bolstering the formation of genuine publics as its dominant subjects/actors. Other types of the public sphere comprise various culturally conditioned and historically bound limitations, such as unidirectional mass communication (in the mediated public sphere) or even disciplinary publicity (of representative publicness). What are the consequences of the transnationalization of “national” public spheres? How does this process influence the conditions of communication under which a public should discursively form opinions on public issues? Do they also change the relationship between publicness and censorship established in the “national era”? Is the very nature of the public sphere being changed because of the transnationalization processes? In theory, any expansion of the public sphere in terms of participating actors entails both strengths and weaknesses. An increase in the number of participating actors implies an increase in the number of transactions with important longterm consequences for them; thus, the number of (controversial) public issues increases. Generally, as Dewey emphasized, quantitative expansion of any process sooner or later stirs up public curiosity so that it eventually “moves” from the private to the public sphere. However, when transactions become highly standardized, uniform, and predictable due to the frequency of occurrence, they may be relegated from public domain. The broader the domain of consequences of transactions, the more public deliberation and regulation are needed; with the changes in the amount of conse-

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quences, the nature of regulation would also change. This is particularly relevant for the transnationalization of the public sphere, where the number of participating actors in public debates is expected to increase due to the increase in the number of transactions, their potential consequences, and the need for the changes in the nature of regulation (from national governments to transnational governance). In practice, the enlargement of a public sphere to include new social groups, categories, and classes may (and did) change the very nature of the public sphere. The fall of monarchy paved the way for the transformation of the crypto-public sphere into the proto-public sphere, which was soon hybridized and thus transformed into a pseudo-public sphere.9 In his sociological analysis, Tönnies critically identified the struggle for freedom of thought and press and other rights of citizens in the 19th century as an expression of the fight of the new (national) bourgeois class that positioned itself as “the civil society,” for power—first for participation in the power of old classes and the monarchy and later increasingly to achieve its own exclusive power. By strengthening its position, the new ruling class also succeeded to impose its own opinions as public opinion, as “a common good of the political public.” Having done this, it would “hit itself into the face” if it tried to deny the political and citizens’ rights it obtained for itself to the subordinate proletarian class (Tönnies, 1922: 128). The expansion of the social basis of the public sphere brought about “a great number and diversity but also contradiction and conflict in publicly expressed opinions,” so that public opinion lost its unity (Tönnies, 1922: 129). Instead, several public opinions may appear to reflect “consonant opinions” within different groupings beyond the level of a nation state (e.g., of cities), which have their internal opinion leaders and mechanisms of influence. The development that Tönnies described is the transformation of the cryptopublic sphere (bourgeois public sphere in the monarchy) into the liberal bourgeois proto-public sphere when it came into the power and “made” the public sphere (particularly the media) accessible to social groupings and strata with “alternative” interests, lifestyles, and views of the world, including the members of the subordinated proletarian class (see Table 5.1). The dynamics of the proto-public sphere is sustained by communicative actions of these groups and their (opinion) leaders rather than individuals, which is reflected in structural inequalities hampering individual participation in the public sphere. If such inequalities are not only reflected but also actively preserved and caused anew—which in the public sphere is done by manipulative publicity—a hybrid pseudo-public sphere may come into being. It is argued, for example, that with the Internet, “the mass public sphere is not replaced by any public sphere at all; rather, communicative mediation is replaced by forms of control that make dialogue and the expansion of the deliberative features of communication impossible” (Bohman, 2004: 142). In a pseudo-public sphere, discursive (associative) and instrumental (hegemonic) actions are “legitimately” combined (e.g., public deliberation and propaganda) to the detriment of a “free competition” of ideas.

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Group competitiveness

Maximization of consumption

Proto-public sphere

Pseudo-public sphere

Communicative rationality

Group identity (categorization)

Crypto-public sphere

Ortho-public sphere

Defining Principle of Its Strength

Type of Public Sphere

Table 5.1. Historical-Analytical Forms of Public Spheres

Interactive transnational media

International(ized) media transmitting content of global events to the rest of the world

(National) public service media

Underground media Alternative media

Communication Infrastructure

Illimitable

Passive

Loosely controlled

Restricted

Access

Cosmopolitan (public/s)

International (audiences)

National (public/s)

National (social category)

“Size” of the public

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Although a pseudo-public sphere can still be considered a version of the public sphere, it is burdened with major distortions of publicness; it is hegemonic to the degree that it allows or even generates systematic distortions of the principle of publicness. It is commonly the case that the personal right to communicate (or public use of reason) is effectively limited to those with a sufficient noncommunicative power (e.g., subordinated to the property right). In consequence to limitations to the principle of publicness, the public sphere becomes extremely asymmetric in terms of Mills’ (1956/2000: 302–324) criteria to differentiate between “mass” and “public”: The pseudo-public sphere favors mass (audiences) and individual consumption against genuine public(s) and personal communicative action. In contrast to “the public sphere” as a normative or “normal concept” in Tönnies’ sense, four types of public spheres in the Table 5.1 are analytical or applied concepts of specific rather than general phenomena. They pertain to specific conditions to be met for the “implementation” of the public sphere at the societal level and the personal right to communicate at the individual level. Thus, the ultimate aim of the “ortho” public sphere should be to secure the conditions necessary for carrying on efficiently citizen communicative actions. According to Cohen and Arato (1992: 455), together with the rights of the intimate or private sphere, the rights of communication should constitute “the center of the catalogue of constitutional freedoms. These would have priority over all political, economic, and social rights, which would constitute only their prerequisites.” In Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom (Splichal, 2002), I identified five clusters of “constituent elements of the citizen right to communicate”: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

right to be given information, which assumes accessibility of all relevant information and public surveillance over actions (in the political assembly or elsewhere) with implications for those not participating; right of transmitting information and expressing opinion, which includes tolerance of others’ judgments; right of free access to the media; rights to participate in setting regulatory rules of public communication; and personal conditions to enter the public sphere, which, however, are socially/culturally “mediated,” such as abilities of reflexive reasoning and communicative action. Because they are not “personal endowments” that one inherits, but social by its very nature, an appropriate system of education is essential for the development of human ability and the need to communicate.

These five clusters may be transposed to the societal level as signposts of the basic goals and demands and the fundamental conditions that would enable the execution of the fundamental citizen rights, which converge in/to the public sphere. In other words, the implementation of a personal right to communicate

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leads, eo ipso, to the formation of the public sphere; vice versa, no genuine public sphere can exist without at least a partial enforcement of the right to communicate (see Table 5.2). The cases of “representative publicness” and “press freedom” exemplify well this point. Without a personal right to communicate, any form of visibility or publicness remains a tyranny of publicity, which the representative publicness essentially was. With the enactment of personal freedom of expression and publication, a public sphere began to emerge; yet the more personal freedom of publication became alienated from individuals (citizens) and conferred on the owners of communication means, the more public sphere changed into a pseudo-public sphere. The broader societal conditions required to establish a public sphere are presented in Table 5.2. They include (a) institutional regulatory support in a narrow sense comprising regulation of different political and economic dimensions of accessibility to, or openness of, the public sphere; and (b) entry requirements related to broader societal conditions beyond normative constraints, which cannot be directly regulated by virtue of law, negotiated, and legally protected. It is Table 5.2. Correspondence Between the Components of Personal Right to Communicate on the Individual Level and Regulatory Framework of the Public Sphere on the Societal Level Goals/Demands

Right to Communicate

Transparency of public authorities Surveillance

Right to be given information

Necessary Conditions of Public Sphere Access to information

Openness to participation Right of transmitting Inclusiveness information and expressing opinion

Access to communication channels

Challenges to public authorities to legitimize decisions Accountability

Right to be given information Right of free access to the media

Access to the media

Access to the means of communication

Right to participate in setting regulatory rules of public communication

Access to the media

Entry Requirements Public use of reason General cultural knowledge (discursive reflexivity, Communicative generalizability, respect competence for freedom and equality)

Social distribution of knowledge Culture of publicness Political culture Communication culture

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this second set of highly complex conditions, in particular, that makes the formation of a genuine public sphere (ortho-public sphere) highly improbable under the present political, economic, and cultural conditions. This applies to the national and transnational public spheres alike; when we discuss the issues of the transnationalization of the public sphere, we should not tacitly assume that the problems we see in that process are historically resolved or surpassed, or even irrelevant, within the nation-state frame. As once Tönnies (1928: 36) suggested for public opinion, “Up till now [it] has never been fully materialized and, under the influence of deeply moving events, experiences ever new blows that hamper and sometimes destructively influence public opinion formation.” If a transnational public sphere emerges, different culturally rooted public spheres overlap. It follows that the transnationalization of the public sphere is likely to protract hybridization from the national to the transnational environment. We increasingly live in a world of multiple citizenships, publics, and public spheres from national to transnational or cosmopolitan. The multiplicity of dually existing and interpenetrating publicities, publics, public opinions, and public spheres—not to say publicnesses—is a perfect nutrient medium of hybridization. In the European context, the hybridity of the process of transnationalization is reflected in Koopmans’ and Erbe’s (2004) empirical forms of Europeanization of public communication and discursive mobilization: 1.

2.

3.

Horizontal Europeanization consists of communicative linkages among different EU member states. In the “weak variant” of horizontal Europeanization, the media in one country cover debates and contestation in another member state, but no linkage exists among the countries in the structure of claim-making. In the stronger variant, actors from one country explicitly address or refer to actors or policies in another member state. Vertical Europeanization consists of communicative linkages between the national and European levels. Two basic variants of this patterns include a bottom-up one, in which national actors address European actors and/or make claims on European issues, and a top-down one, in which European actors intervene in national policies and public debates in the name of European regulations and common interests. Finally, processes of transnationalization may bring about an entirely new entity, a supranational European public sphere, constituted by the interaction among European-level institutions and collective actors around European themes, ideally accompanied by (and creating the basis for) the development of European-wide mass media.

This is an accurate description of the Europeanization processes on the level of “institutions and collective actors.” As I argued earlier, the transnationalization of Type I (horizontal Europeanization of national public spheres) and Type II

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(top-down Europeanization that brings external actors into a national public sphere) is an inbred process of any public sphere. However, the previous typology does not take into account citizens’ capacities to transcend national borders in public debate—because at present, they are simply not among actors of transnationalization. The creation of the public sphere is essentially a matter of the agency of citizens, but they “act” in the Europeanization process as merely an “audience-as-market,” thus cogenerating a hybrid pseudo-public sphere. This discrepancy between the normative-theoretical and empirical-analytical conceptualization of transnationalization/Europeanization of the public sphere brings us to the question of what actually generates its strength and effectiveness. Is it indeed the asymmetrically distributed decision-making power, with strong publics “whose discourse encompasses both opinion formation and decision making,” and weak publics “whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making,” as some theorists suggest (Fraser, 1992: 134)? Or should the strength of the public sphere be sought in a different direction? I return to this issue in the concluding chapter, but the main thing I want to consider before that is the changing conditions of the public sphere brought about in the age of global governance.

THE PUBLIC AND PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE The universe of publicness has long been considered an exclusively, or at least a predominantly, national phenomenon. Or I should rather say that its international dimension has been neglected. In the period of globalization, however, the tacit assumption that the public (sphere) “belongs” to the nation state has been explicitly challenged. The obvious problem with such a tacit assumption is that it implies that a large number of publics may have existed—in principle, there may be as many publics as there are nation states—while it implicitly denied the possible existence of publics not correlated to the state. Why should a nation have the privilege of generating the public? Why can’t collectivities other than nation states have their own publics and/or public spheres? Transnationalization did not only “extend” the conceptualizations of the public sphere beyond national borders but also—as a consequence of the fact that the “natural” tie between the public sphere and the nation state is fading away—unfroze the former internal homogeneity of public spheres within national borders. Contemporary ideas of the transnational public sphere and cosmopolitan democracy are obvious reactions to the development of the complex, interconnected, but at the same time diversified and hierarchically stratified world in which we live. Local, national, regional (subglobal), and global issues, policies, and actions affect us individually and collectively, but mechanisms are lacking that would enable citizens to act effectively beyond the national frame. The rela-

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tion between the nation state and the (national) public (sphere) is significantly changing. Nevertheless, the fundamental normative requirements of the public sphere to be both a forum for citizens’ deliberation generating public opinion as well as a medium for mobilizing public opinion as a political force, which makes it necessary that a public sphere and a sovereign power somehow correlate with each other, remains unchallenged. Common concerns necessary for individuals to consider themselves to belong to a public are hardly ever clearly defined in geopolitical terms. It is trivial to see that there is no single national public (“the national public”) that would incorporate all citizens interested in all and the same controversial issues. It is no less difficult to realize that a (national) public is not established by all its members participating in the same channel of discourse (not to say in a common public gathering). Rather, they use different channels of communications. As Tönnies (1922: 229) argued, the more a public (opinion) becomes a general (e.g., national) public (opinion), the less likely it will survive as a unity, as a unanimous public (opinion). Yet if it succeeds to do so, its power and significance would increase significantly. The public can only have an effective power of influencing and controlling decision makers if its communicative actions have a clearly defined addressee with an effectual decision-making authority, as it used to be (at least normatively) the state. However, in order to ensure that the effective exercise of decisionmaking power arises from public deliberation in which citizens over whom that power is exercised can participate, citizens’ access to the public sphere must be widely open and, preferably, legally protected. Traditionally, national public spheres were dominated by the pursuit of national interests eventually supported by (state) force. This may well remain in the future, but nevertheless the relation between the nation state and the public (sphere) is significantly changing. The central question is whether the transnationalization of public debates leads to or already brought about a public sphere that transcends nation states, a “cosmopolitan public sphere.” The Internet increased the possibility of citizens’ participation in public discourse beyond national boundaries with the new interactive virtual spaces it has created, but the mere extension of communication networks does not yet constitute a transnational public sphere, and even less so a transnational public. The states of the 21st century definitely lost the exclusive power of Dewey’s (1927/1991: 35) “guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, or judges,” who may effectively protect public interest by regulating actions of individuals and groups. Traditionally, the state was indeed able to regulate direct and indirect consequences of transactions to which people not directly involved were exposed, but today states are not the exclusive regulators of those transactions. However, while they lost this exclusive “privilege,” they (some of them at least) also acquired a new one: Some decisions made by states have implications not only for their own citizens but also for others—who can hardly act as “the public” in relation to a foreign state. In other words, although formerly a symmetrical

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relationship existed between national public(s) and the nation state that was held responsible to and by them, in the “postnational constellation,” the state and public sphere have become much more vaguely associated. The absence of a fully developed transnational political community is believed to be “incongruous with the existence of transnational social spaces, and poses a congruency problem that cannot easily be overcome” (Zürn, 2004: 261). The nascent global civil sphere has none of the institutions that, in a fully functioning democracy, allow public opinion to produce civil power and thus regulate the state, such as independent courts, party competition, and elections. Yet this nascent global civil sphere does have access to institutions of a more communicative kind. (Alexander, 2006: 523)

The highly decentralized nature of the transnational polity and the absence of a hierarchical structure analogous to the state are not necessarily only a danger to democratic order. They could also be “a promising place to experiment with discursive institutions” autonomous from interventions by political powers (Dryzek, 1990: 23). Transnational communication networks can help people form identities along the lines of class, gender, and ethnicity that complement state-framed ethnic or national identities. Many people participating in collective actions on a transnational or global scale refer to fundamental civil and political rights, as well as to economic, social, and cultural rights, and civic equality and protection against gender, religious, racial, ethnic, or class discrimination as superior to state sovereignty. Forgotten Cosmopolitans: Tarde, Tönnies, and Dewey Although transnationalization challenged some traditional assumptions about the public sphere as a prevalently national phenomenon, it did not affect its democratic foundations. Despite immense technological and social (primarily economic) changes in the period of globalization, many “old” assumptions about the public, public opinion, and public sphere remain valid, but also many “old” contradictions unresolved. The most often criticized assumption that the public (sphere) “belongs” to the nation state is not an exception. Undoubtedly, the public—and similarly the public sphere and civil society—has generally retained a tacitly assumed national label until recently. An often implicit understanding of the universe of publicness as a totality of “national phenomena” prevailed throughout history because all these phenomena, public opinion in particular, were dominated by the pursuit of national “public” interests eventually supported, organized, and regulated by the state. Or rather, due to empirical circumstances, these questions never attracted much theoretical concern.

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Still, few authors would theorize the public (sphere) as essentially a national (political) phenomenon related to the nation state and confined by national boundaries. I would argue that the international dimension was not really a blind spot in theorizing the public and public opinion for a long time. On the contrary, and explicitly, the public was not seen as existing exclusively under the safeguard of a nation state, and the state (particularly the nation state within ethnic territorial boundaries) did not have a constitutive role in theorizing the public (sphere), although public opinion was assumed to address, first and foremost, actions of “public functionaries belonging to this state” (Bentham, 1830/1983: 36). The international expansion of public opinion has been taking place since at least the late 19th century and, in a way, contained germs of “globalization” from its beginning. At least this is the case with the authors of the 20th century. Before that period, the idea of the nation state preponderated when the issue of the relationship between the public and the nationality was raised, although other voices could have been heard, too. Kant—to mention the most prominent voice—“designed” the principle of publicness with the aim to achieve an eternal global peace that was (and still is) endangered by secret international agreements signed by political elites. Bentham shared Kant’s view that the expansion beyond national borders is inherent in publicness; he emphasized that all functions of the Public Opinion Tribunal might be exercised by “every person, elector, inhabitant, or foreigner” and considered “admission of strangers to the sittings in the assembly” one of the key conditions of the public workings of the parliament. John Stuart Mill was perhaps the most outspoken harbinger of the “nationalistic” stream of thought. He argued that public opinion could only be legitimate in a nation state. Among a people without the feeling of nationality, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.10 For Mill (1861/2001: 182), the idea that the people should be free to choose their government is “one of the worthiest to which human endeavor can be directed, [but it] can never, in the present state of civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same government.” The governed can only decide the question of government in the nation state where “all the members of the nationality [unite] under the same government” (Mill, 1861/2001: 182). He admitted that the distinction “between what is due to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely to a human creature is more worthy of savages than of civilised beings, and ought, with the utmost energy, to be contended against” (Mill, 1861/2001: 183). Nevertheless, he was firm in the belief that “the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” Nevertheless, Mill (1861/2001: 181) also admitted that any of the different causes of “the feeling of nationality” (e.g., common religion, language, literature, descent, race, geographical limits, and the possession of a common history) is neither indispensable nor sufficient by itself. Specifically, he listed the examples of

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Belgium and Switzerland, which had “a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions” (Mill, 1861/2001: 182). However, his controversial argument that, on the one hand, a common language is not an indispensible condition of “the feeling of nationality,” whereas, on the other hand, the lack of a common language prevents public opinion to exist, reflects his belief that the diversity of languages may render it difficult to establish a legitimate government on the account that “[t]he influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another.” Consequently, Mill (1861/2001: 183) suggested that “[f]ree institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”; the government in such countries can only rule “with the iron rod of foreign conquerors.” Mill’s “nationalistic” conception of public opinion was rather sporadic even in the 19th century, whereas the transnational nature of opinion process in everyday life became so obvious in the 20th century (unfortunately, largely provoked by wars) that it hardly could have been overlooked by public opinion theorists. It is true that after Bentham, the public was periodically still considered an exclusively national phenomenon (as we saw in the case of Mill), but that was not the mainstream in theorizing public opinion. In contrast to Mill, for Gabriel Tarde (1969), a proponent of the “European federation” in the late 19th century, it was precisely the permanent tendency toward internationalization—similar to that of human reason—that significantly differentiated public opinion and public spirit from tradition or “traditional national spirits.” It is true that he defined public opinion as “a momentary, more or less logical cluster of judgments which […] is reproduced many times over in people of the same country, at the same time, in the same society” (Tarde, 1969: 300). However, when elaborating on the process of public opinion, he emphasized that “international opinion […] has always existed, even before the press.” In the course of history, specific “strata of public mind”—from local and regional to national and international opinion in Tarde’s terms—differed with regard to their “importance and depth.” In early periods, local opinion prevailed, whereas later on ever broader “strata” of public opinion dominated (Tarde, 1969: 44). Tarde (1969: 40) argued that, in contrast to tradition that is always national, public opinion always tends—“expansive as the wind”—to become international. He suggested that journalism and the press succeeded “to nationalize the public mind little by little and internationalize it even more and more” (Tarde, 1969: 44), and that the newspaper gave rise to “the fusion of personal opinions into local opinions, and this into national and world opinion, the grandiose unification of the Public Spirit” (Tarde, 1969: 83). The transnational dimension of publicity and public opinion was an important part of Tönnies’ conceptualization of public opinion as a specific form of the complex social will in Gesellschaft. Following Tarde, Ferdinand Tönnies (1922: 137) discussed explicitly opinion formation by the international public and even

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public opinion representing “the entire civilized humanity.” He believed that public opinion is “in principle boundless” (Tönnies, 1922: 135). He emphasized that the earliest publics in the Middle Ages were typically transnational (or transregional; i.e., traversing the pre-Westphalian administrative units), which was largely enabled by Latin as the lingua franca among intellectuals and actually imposed by the scarcity of literate individuals. Theologians, for example, constituted an international, educated public with internal differences in opinion. Like religion, Zeitgeist (“spirit of the time”) is an exemplary form of public opinion that transcends national borders and is international by its very nature. His conceptualization of public opinion as a complex form of social will comparable but opposite of religion also clearly indicates that it transcends territorial space. The transnational nature of public opinion becomes particularly clear in Tönnies’ elaboration on the three dominant “complex forms of social will” in the Gesellschaft-type of social structure: convention, politics (legislature), and public opinion. Public opinion is always related and even equated, according to Tönnies, with the “cosmopolitan life,” in contrast to politics (legislature), which equals to “national life,” with the state as its “prime subject,” and “convention,” which is closely linked with city (or metropolitan) life. Whereas politics is based on human self-interests, public opinion emerges from human consciousness; its indigenous subject is Gelehrtenrepublik, the republic of the learned, in contrast to the state as the main actor in legislation, and “society as such” as the main subject of the metropolitan life. According to Tönnies’ conceptualization, public opinion is by its virtue a transnational phenomenon, which in the early 20th century existed for “political reasons”—because the legislature was a domain of nation states—as predominantly a national phenomenon. The same holds true for its “organ,” the press. In his famous work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies (1887/1991: 203) argues that, in contrast to the state power, the press is not confined by national borders: [The press] is in its tendencies and potentialities by all means international, thus comparable to the power of a permanent or temporary union or alliance of states. It can, therefore, be conceived as its ultimate aim to abolish the multiplicity of states and substitute them by creating a unique world republic comparable to the single world market. . . .

This leads him to conclude that, although such radical changes did not materialize yet, recognition of these tendencies may help us to understand that “the formation of nation states is but a temporary limitation of the borderless society” (Tönnies, 1887/1991: 203; italics added). Tönnies also explained why the public, as a purely spiritual, potentially borderless collectivity that never physically assembles, still mostly acts within the boundaries of a nation state. For Tönnies, “the ‘great’ public” is interested primarily in economic and political issues; it is therefore “the political public” that is

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mainly influenced by political processes within the state. Nevertheless, since World War I, it has not been difficult to see that “world events” have increasingly generated “an international public,” primarily in the spheres of arts, science, and technology, whose progress is much less confined by national borders, but also in the sphere of politics (Tönnies, 1922: 84–85). “If the public is not conceptually bound to a specific space and time, it is an idea of indefinable range and duration,” related also to the formation—primarily by and among elites—of global culture (Bildung) providing common understandings and interpretations of “world events.” The expansion of the public beyond the nation state and ethnos is no more a conceptual problem than its site and size in general. Public opinion has always been no more a “national” than a “regional” and even a “local” phenomenon. For Tönnies (2002: 135), “the collective (Gesamtheit) which we imagine as the subject of public opinion” is an “imagined assembly” that does not necessarily match the state. Similarly, Tarde (1901: 9, 18) saw each society “psychologically divided into publics” as “purely spiritual collectivities” and an “extension” of any type of social group; thus the public “can be extended indefinitely.” The volatility of the public and public opinion is clearly reflected in the “mass–public” dialectic discussed by Tarde, Park, Blumer, and Mills and in different “aggregate states” of public opinion conceptualized by Tönnies. Similarly to Tönnies, John Dewey (1927/1991) emphasized the time and space variability of the public, caused by differences in “the consequences of associated action and the knowledge of them” and in “the means by which a public can determine the government to serve its interests.” Dewey conceptualized the public as a consequence of transactions between individuals and groups that affect individuals and groups not involved in these transactions. The public therefore occurs because of the need for the (legal) regulation of such consequences, and regulation was only possible through the political organization of the public—which was, in concrete historical circumstances, the state. What different publics have in common is primarily “the function of caring for and regulating the interests which accrue as the result of the complex indirect expansion and radiation of conjoint behavior” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 33, 47). Even if Dewey (1927/1991: 35) defined the state as an organizational form of the public and the public as “a political state,” the state only meant political organization of the public with the task “to care for its special interests by methods intended to regulate the conjoint actions of individuals and groups.” According to his definition, the state “is founded on the exercise of a function, not on any inherent essence or structural nature” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 77). The public always implies the state, according to Dewey (1927/1991: 72), only in the sense by which also a war or an earthquake “include in its consequences all elements in a given territory,” which means that they have immense consequences for an entire territory, but this does not imply that the inclusion is “by inherent nature or right.” According to Dewey (1927/1991), history clearly reveals that diversity rather than uniformity of political forms is the rule, which demonstrates that the nature of consequences and the ability to perceive and act on them varies with

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time and space. The loose status of the (nation) state in his conceptualization of the public is quite clear from Dewey’s (1927/1991: 48, 88) observation that “in no two ages or places is there the same public” and that “states may pass through federations and alliances into a larger whole which has some of the marks of the statehood.” In other words, either explicitly or implicitly, a different (higher) level of regulation and decision making than the nation state was foreseen as correlative to the publics long ago. Dewey’s concept of the public, for example, directly calls for an appropriate deliberative and decision-making (infra)structure beyond the nation state retaining “some of the marks of the statehood” to be used by those significantly affected by transnational consequences of (inter)national transactions, which would constitute them as a transnational “public.” Thus, we could speak of the transnationalization of publics and/or transnational publics that parallel the formation of transnational political communities with their own regulatory means (e.g., the EU). The founding of transnational regulatory mechanisms does not imply that nation states are dying out, but they are certainly significantly affected. In Dewey’s terms, the transnationalization or globalization of the public (sphere) as part of the totality of the globalized world is a “natural” consequence of the ineffectiveness of the state policies in some areas where the spatial scope of national regulations did not extend as far as the real boundaries of transactions (e.g., social welfare programs or intervention into market process). The First World War was, as Dewey (1927/1954: 128) followed Tönnies’ argument, a major and indisputable proof of how “extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe.” The early beginnings of globalization brought about the contradiction that was only much later identified as the major contradiction of the postnational constellation. Dewey was able to see it to the full already in its elementary form as the contradicition between “intricate and interdependent economic relations” transcending nation-states and the absence of agencies that could “canalize the streams of social action and thereby regulate them.” The failure to solve this contradiction by transforming the outdated (national) political structures into a “comprehensive political organization,” Dewey warned, would engender the eclipse of the public. Imitative Transnationalization In her recent plea for the problematization of the public sphere theory, Fraser (2007: 19) raises the fundamental question of “whether and how public spheres today could conceivably perform the democratic political functions with which they have been associated historically.” The reason for her concern is that, in the transnationalization taking place in the beginning of the 21st century, public opinion loses its (national) grounds. As she argues,

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public spheres are increasingly transnational or postnational with respect to each of the constitutive elements of public opinion. […] The “who” of communication […] is often now a collection of dispersed interlocutors, who do not constitute a demos. The “what” of communication […] stretches across vast reaches of the globe, in a transnational community of risk, which is not however reflected in concomitantly expansive solidarities and identities. The “where” of communication […] is now deterritorialized cyberspace. The “how” of communication […] encompasses a vast translinguistic nexus of disjoint and overlapping visual cultures. Finally, the addressee of communication […] is now an amorphous mix of public and private transnational powers that is neither easily identifiable nor rendered accountable. (Fraser, 2007: 19)

I agree that the changes in the postnational constellation do not provide (yet) a legitimate and effective form of transnational public opinion governance. This does not imply, however, that the “Westphalian” type of public opinion is outdated. On the contrary, as long as the transnational public does not come into existence, the only hope is to (re)create public opinion governance within national boundaries. I do not find convincing the idea that critical theory can normatively unravel the alleged “suspension” of transnationalization of the public sphere by leaning against pioneering communication and propaganda theories of the mid-1900s. Fraser’s plea for a new critical theory is based on the changes of “constitutive elements of public opinion,” which are simply a recycled version of the sixty-year old Lasswell’s (1948: 37) formula, “Who? Says What? In What Channel? To Whom? With What Effect?”, used as “a convenient way to describe an act of communication” and, particularly, propaganda. These “elements” have been constantly changed throughout history, mainly to suit the dominant interests, and we can surely expect them to change in the future, for better or for worse. If transnationalization is claimed to represent a radical departure from the past developments, it cannot be claimed at the same time to be conceptualized in terms of changes in old “elements.” A number of “old” theories of public opinion and public sphere have addressed critical issues of public opinion (theory) in its broader social, political, economic, cultural, and political contexts. They clearly suggest that new modes of communication cannot totally transform our generic ability and need to communicate (Splichal, 2008: 24). Fraser’s “recycled” version of Lasswell’s formula indicates that changes in the public sphere brought about by transnationalization are perhaps less revolutionary than commonly believed. Several contemporary analysts of the (transnational) public sphere tend to believe that new modes of communication (may) lead to a specific, radically new “online public sphere.”11 The formula developed by Lasswell and tacitly adopted by Fraser is instrumental to interpret transnationalization of the public sphere as a (purely) communicative phenomenon. However, Tönnies’ and Mills’ analyses

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show that—even if the claim is accurate—the impact of the media of communication on the constitution of the public (sphere) relative to external social, political, and economic factors is almost insignificant. Tönnies (1922: 135–136), for example, identified six main limits to the “reception of public opinion,” which restrain public opinion to spread in wider, potentially international circles: (a) the language of communication, (b) the political arena in which the topic of a speech is meaningful or relevant, (c) the education of listeners or readers who can understand and deliberate what they hear, (d) the power of the intellectual and moral voice, (e) the reputation and charisma of speakers and the number of already existing followers, and (f) “external ways and means of dissemination, such as the way a book is distributed, the power of capital, and the connections and activities of a publisher; but especially the type and size of the reading public of a periodical.” “External ways” come close to what C. W. Mills (1956/2000: 303–304) specified as four fundamental (operational) conditions of mediated political communication in the public sphere to facilitate deliberative legitimization processes in complex societies: (a) inclusiveness of deliberation, (b) reciprocity or effectiveness in responding expressed opinions, (c) effectiveness in terms of “practical actions,” and (d) autonomy (see chapter 1, this volume). Communication technologies can help to solve only a small part of the problems as defined by Mills and even much less in terms of Tönnies’ limits to the publicness of public opinion. They make possible that (a) as many people express opinions as receive them, and that (b) any opinion expressed in public can be answered back immediately —but not also effectively (Who will visit and read my reply on the web site? Who is my addressee?), which was the second part of Mills’ claim. However, new technologies have no significant impact on two subsequent dimensions differentiating between the mass and the public: (c) the possibility of the materialization of opinions in effective actions, and (d) the autonomy of the public from authoritative institutions. Tönnies’ taxonomy of limits to the publicness of public opinion reveals a further reduction of the impact of the (new) media on the publicness of public opinion: Five out of six limits were not significantly affected, with the only exception of “external ways and means of dissemination.” The relative weight of this specific limit, which alone includes modes of communication, and its complexity increased significantly during the last two or three decades, but this does not change much the efficacy of CMC in building a strong public (sphere) either nationally or internationally. Fraser (2007) believes that denationalization of the media, which is manifested in the profusion of trans- and subnational media, the dominance of corporate global media, and decentred Internet networks, should be confronted and counteracted by a new, transnational communication infrastructure that could (help to) generate public opinion on a transnational scale. This would suggest that a transnational public sphere could only be created by a corresponding (i.e., transnational) communication infrastructure made up of old and/or new media. Again, this is exactly how national public opinion and national publics were con-

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stituted. However, this may not be necessarily the case when it comes to the transnationalization of the public sphere if it represents a radical departure from the formation of national public spheres in the past. Rather than thinking in the dualistic terms of a global public sphere related to centralized global institutions, it is better to project the effects of globalization on publicity somewhat differently: as the gradual transformation of local public spheres through transnational civil society organized institutions as they emerge at different levels, in which each public sphere becomes a location for the public use of reason in acts of criticism, translation, and mutual accountability across boundaries. (Bohman, 1999:197)

This argument also applies to the primary medium of communication—language, which is a self-evident form of the existence of community and the first condition of all other media to develop. The one thing that the “old” theorists of public opinion seemed to agree on is that language represents not only the “vehicle” of the public opinion process but also its natural limit. Despite all cultural and technological changes that took place during the last 150 years and, particularly, in the latest period of global computer-mediated networking, it would be difficult to argue against Mill’s skepticism that, because of the absence of a common language that makes an effective communication easier, the development of the transnational governance and public opinion is more difficult than the one within the national borders. Nevertheless, it is also worth (re)considering Mill’s warning about the relative weight of the linguistic condition. Mill’s reasoning is grounded on the false assumption that, if peoples use different languages, “[t]he same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another” (Mill, 1861/2001: 182). Yet such a lack of mutual understanding could be barely attributed to the absence of a “unifying” language alone. Even within the same nation state, different portions of the population are not likely to be exposed to the same media or to be familiar with each other’s opinions. They read different newspapers, watch different television channels, and, particularly, visit different web sites. On the one hand, “it hardly seems plausible to claim that the public is becoming fragmented if the nation does not all sit down to watch the news at a given time of day” (Peters, 2007: 287). On the other hand, the fact alone that they all speak the same language does not make them more apt to reach a consensus than any other community of interest of an equivalent level of complexity. There are other bonds of solidarity, such as the historic territory of the “homeland,” common myths and memories, and a shared (mass) culture (Jenkins, 1997: 169), which indeed historically matched a good deal with a common (and different) language, but this is not to say that they are only efficacious within linguistic boundaries. In other words, common territory, memories, and culture may well traverse nation-

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al borders, as it is definitely the case with the EU, most obviously with the EU (and, specifically, the so-called Schengen) territory. However, the process of transnationalization with the emergence of “transnational news” and “transnational media” proves that linguistic differences should not be confounded with linguistic barriers: We can read the same books in different languages (well, some would argue that they are not exactly the same), and we get the same news in different media in different languages. Even more, one of the consequences of globalization is that a single (technically speaking, national) space of communication can encompass various “official” languages, as many multilingual democracies demonstrate. Globalization challenges not only the specific language competence (requiring the knowledge of an “international language” beside the mother tongue for the large groups of peoples) but also competence in general. Because there is a constant tension between expert and nonexpert actors within national public spheres, globalization brings together societies and cultures with different, potentially conflicting backgrounds, which not only requires a high(er) level of mutual trust and respect in a transnational public sphere but, first and foremost, the expansion of our background knowledge, perceptiveness, and understanding to include information and knowledge generated by “others.” More important than the common language seems to be a common “background,” including a “public space” constructed by the media in which panEuropean—both national and transnational (i.e., those that significantly affect only a few or the entire EU community)—transactions are reported and discussed from a general point of view. This would demand that the media consider all potential consequences of transactions reported also in terms of the plurality of their “addressees” rather than focusing exclusively on the extent the transactions affect, for better or for worse, one’s home country. Such media agenda-setting may have important cooperation-inducing synergistic effects, which would create a higher level of mutual understanding and thus make entry conditions to the transnational public sphere more accessible. Language has a prominent role in the processes of “primary reciprocity,” as termed by Park (1904/1972: 44) (i.e., processes of almost mechanical diffusion [by imitation] of symbolic goods throughout society in which each generation inherits a large part of its traditions, including language, from the preceding generation). Primary reciprocity is a process that Tönnies associated with Gemeinschaft, in which public opinion in the strict sense does not exist (but religion typically does); the same kind of processes is also characteristic of the formation of crowds. In contrast, Park’s “reciprocity through which a collectivity acts upon itself” would be typical for the Gesellschaft type of social structure. This secondary reciprocity—typical for the public and institutions such as parliaments and courts of law—implies rational reflection; its function is “not only to carry out collective action, but free from external considerations, to direct the collective action toward changing the disposition of the group itself or of some of its members” (Park, 1904/1972: 45). For Park’s secondary reciprocity, much more than just a

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common language is needed—a common cultural infrastructure that would foster rational discourse. Publics in Global Governance Globalization denotes the formation of a global system composed of a variety of combinations among national, international, and transnational political institutions, corporations, associations, individuals, and other groupings.12 It has deeply transformed social relations and loosened their confinement to territorial boundaries as well as the links between territory and collective destiny. Increased global interdependencies are most palpable in the economy (the global marketplace), but globalization also has significant social, political, and cultural dimensions and consequences. One of them is the challenge that globalization poses to the power of national governments and their role in international relations. National governments alone are not able to effectively regulate and control global developments in trade, finances, mass media, and ecology, not to mention global terrorism. They are increasingly becoming pawns on the global chessboard forced to renounce parts of their own autonomy and legitimacy. Thus, new institutional regulatory strategies and mechanisms are required to deal with the growing complexities of globalization. Political globalization can also be observed in the foundation of transnational legal entities, such as the United Nations and the EU, and a growing number of international conferences addressing global problems and cooperation. Hundreds of institutions and organizations regulate the global processes and issues of trade, telecommunications, transportation, health, the environment, and many others. Yet globalization may be more fettering then fostering democracy. It is hegemonic inasmuch as it is based on the diffusion of neoliberal ideological currents and developmental patterns from the most developed capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America to global peripheries and semiperipheries (e.g., Central and Eastern Europe included), rather than on the indigenous social groups engaged in building a new economic and social structure. Although it fosters independence of political elites from national citizenry (which can be clearly seen in a number of referenda across Europe where national publics were less keen on shifting authority to the European level than national political elites), it also endangers their power to mobilize citizens for political participation. Due to a decrease in power relative to transnational and international actors and an increasing role of intergovernmental negotiations that hide decision making from public opinion and are not legitimized in national political arenas, national power actors have to search for new modes of legitimization. Globalization has at least two important and unfavorable consequences for social and political rights of citizens: It shakes economic security and social equalities, and it weakens citizens’ participation in decision making and democratic institutions. It also challenges the efficacy of actions of national govern-

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ments and their responsibility for the common good. Globalization has brought about transnational social actors who “denationalize” decision making and undermine national decision-making authority but do not bear their responsibilities. Denationalization may take different forms, in which responsibility of political institutions at the national level is transferred to those operating at the transnational level or delegated to private or semi-private organizations. In the latter case, issues previously subject to formal political scrutiny by more or less representative political bodies are relegated to a market-driven deliberation and accountability, which brings about “depoliticization.” Depoliticization in global governance is ultimately reflected in the absence of transnational or global demos and public(s). There is no such a thing as, for example, “the people of Europe” or a “European public” in the sense that there are “the people of the United States” or the “American public” in the United States. Processes of globalization go together with the dispersal of authority in all directions, which is the core idea in the concept of “governance.” Like public sphere, the concept of governance is a fairly new addition to the vocabulary of the social sciences. Whereas globalization denotes the extension of social space, governance refers to the expansion of regulation beyond government. It points to the fact that the classical liberal government separated from civil society is vanishing, and new modes of regulation are needed to include nonstate actors, such as NGOs, labor unions, community groups, local authorities, as well as private companies and trade associations. The concept of governance, initially introduced into the social sciences by scholars of international relations, was soon taken up by almost every single discipline, and it largely overshadowed the term “government.” The term is used in relation to very diverse phenomena; thus, one would try in vain to find a commonly accepted definition of governance beyond its reference to “the reallocation of authority upward, downward, and sideways from the states” in a variety of processes with different authority bases in which, according to Paul Hirst (2000: 24), “an activity or ensemble of activities is controlled or directed, such that it delivers an acceptable range of outcomes according to some established social standard.” Broadly conceived, the idea of governance explores the erosion of traditional bases of (political) power and the changing boundary between the state and civil society. It denotes the transformation of government (or governance for that matter) in an increasingly interdependent world and reflects fundamental changes in the decision-making process compared with the classical model of government. In contrast to “government,” “governance” refers to both state and nonstate forms of making and influencing decisions that significantly affect the population in a particular locality or the entire world community. The idea of governance blurs the boundaries of the traditional dichotomy, “the state–civil society,” or, in the more recent trichotomy, “the state–economy–civil society.” In contrast to government, governance is seen as dispersed across multiple centers and levels of authority, both nationally and

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globally. Most agree that the central component of governance is decision making, but it also includes processes and relations through which individuals and groups with an interest in the outcome of decision making (try to) influence it in different ways. Many of the power actors and stakeholders (including mass media) play a significant role in the global system, not by making decisions or determining the precise form of a process or action, but rather by subsidizing information and providing opinions to support the process and activate those not directly involved. This adds an important dimension to decision making—that of instrumental and discursive publicity discussed earlier. Typically, the “civil society” actors in governance lack the traditional enforcement capacities of the state or power of capital—forms of coercion enforcing mandatory action by “targets”—yet they may influence decision making through discussions in the public sphere. However, with the negation of the principle of publicness by the exclusion of national publics and the public in general, the decision-making roles of governing individuals and collective bodies become less visible, less formally recognized, and less binding; thus, the decision makers are less accountable compared with traditional (political) decision-making bodies. Within this context, one can understand the idea of the European Commission to interpret the term “governance” as denoting “new governmental systems to bring the EU closer to ordinary people, make it more effective, reinforce democracy in Europe and consolidate the legitimacy of the institutions” (Glossary of EU jargon). This conceptualization is not only highly controversial but even deceiving in the period when citizens’ democratic rights are losing firm (national) grounds. Although contemporary governance is not limited to inter- and transnational relations but is rather ramified between local and transworld operations, the governance of global relations shows its “post-statist” features and deficiencies most starkly. Major stakeholders in global governance, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, negotiate only with a state’s executive authorities, thus reducing the power of democratic legislature to domestic affairs. Private and semi-public stakeholder organizations and corporations, such as the European Round Table of Industrialists (www.ert.be/ structure.aspx), Social Accountability International (www.sa-intl.org), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org), or the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (www.etsi.org), have no provisions for public participation. For some time, such governance has controlled excessive unpredictability of international (financial) markets despite serious gaps in coordination between different sectors and levels of governance (enabling, for example, offshore trusts and tax oases), but finally it was not able to prevent their collapse. After the collapse of the system, a close connection between political and economic elites became even more visible, which stimulated the “European elected officials” (Members of the European Parliament) to call for a public support to their efforts “to create one (or more) nongovernmental organization(s) capable of developing a counterexpertise on activities carried out

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on financial markets by the major operators (banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, etc.) and to convey effectively this analysis to the media.”13 According to the data collected by the Corporate Europe Observatory, there are more than 15,000 professional lobbyists in Brussels only (16 per one MEP), and half of them are not even registered. We, as European elected officials in charge of regulating financial markets and banks, can see every day the pressure exerted by the financial and banking industry to influence the laws governing it. There is nothing extraordinary if these companies make their point of view known and have discussions on a regular basis with legislators. But it seems to us that the asymmetry between the power of this lobbying activity and the lack of counterexpertise poses a danger to democracy. […] [T]his asymmetry constitutes in our eyes a danger to democracy.14

A similarly close relationship with decision makers is typical of the oil giants. The report “BP—Extracting Influence at the Heart of the EU,” for example, reveals how the BP company has convinced Commissioners and EU political elites that BP’s interests are in the EU’s interest, which allowed BP to promote profit-driven approaches to climate change through emissions trading as well as encouraging risky dependence on Russian gas.15 Attempts at global environmental governance grappling with issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, and air pollution clearly show the controversial nature of (global) governance in terms of state–civil society relationship. Its (meager) performance is explained by some as resulting from a purposefully poor institutional design by its main stakeholders (the states), whereas others believe that it made a significant success and stimulated the establishment of many effective environmental projects and NGOs. The problem is that both interpretations suggest “no-change strategy”: In the case that governments intentionally designed a weak system of global environmental governance, any initiative to reform it will inevitably fail against the power of governments; if the system is successful, then no changes are necessary at all. It is clearer, however, that supranational institutions and corporate hierarchies as the main stakeholders in global governance suffer acutely a lack of legitimacy and accountability if we look at global financial systems. An institutional integration of NGOs in global governance necessarily subordinates them to the “governmental” dynamics. Similarly to the state and commercial corporations, they need skilled staff and thus financial resources to pay them; providing sufficient financial resources becomes a major activity for them. With the professionalized technical experts in a contractual relationship to the state and other funders, NGOs become entrapped in the dominant policy discourse of transnational governance. Professionalization of NGOs represents “a built-in danger of insidious colonization” (Nielsen, 2008: 38). It makes them sub-

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jectively and objectively vulnerable to the organized political (state, political parties) and economic powers (corporations). The staff is personally interested in maintaining or increasing financial backings and the NGOs must somehow accommodate the interests of those supporting them. At the same time, they are involved in the informal, “invisible” networks of governance. In their attempts to respond to the challenges of transnationalization, civil society movements and NGOs have transformed themselves in a kind of lobbies, which is sapping their trustworthiness. The classical liberal separation of state and civil society has been mainly threatened from the side of the authoritarian state because of its surveillance over the private sphere. The danger to democracy from the contemporary permeation of state and civil society is much more complex and is based on the fusion of public and nonpublic bodies and the fragmentation of authority. Hence, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know who decides what and how it is decided. The lack of representation, public deliberation, and public accountability as sources of democratic legitimacy for governing give rise to democratically deficient global “governance without government” as a mere “steering without democracy” (Eriksen and Fossum, 2000: 14). Paradoxically, although the conceptualization of governance does not include the public, it comes confusingly close to the traditional conceptualization of “the public.” Differentiating between two types of multilevel governance— general-purpose jurisdictions versus task-specific jurisdictions16—Hooghe and Marks (2003: 40) define the latter: They are set up to solve particular policy problems, such as managing a common pool resource, setting a technical standard, managing an urban service, or shipping hazardous waste. The constituencies of [these] jurisdictions are individuals who share some geographical or functional space and who have a common need for collective decision-making—e.g., as irrigation farmers, public service users, parents, exporters, homeowners, or software producers. These are not communities of fate; membership is voluntary, and one can be a member of several such groups. (italics added)

This is almost exactly what Dewey had in mind and wrote when he defined the public as consisting of all those affected by indirect consequences of specific transactions in which they could not have participated, to such an extent that they consider it necessary to take some action, which brings forth “the public.” But the public does not make decisions; rather, it “is organized and made effective by means of representatives who as guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, as judges, etc., care for its special interests by methods intended to regulate the conjoint actions of individuals and groups” (Dewey, 1927/1991: 35). The concept of global governance treats governance similarly to “the public” in the Benthamian, Deweyan, Tönniesean, or Habermasian sense—as a “tribunal”

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of individuals and groups discursively engaged in controversial (global) issues that seriously affect a significant part of the population in order to find a solution and/or come to decision, which may even be based on argumentative rationality. However, there are two significant differences. The constituencies of these “jurisdictions” share not only interest but also decision-making power. Therefore, they do not represent an “imagined” communion but genuine “tribunal.” Global governance thus rests on very limited consent by those affected by the consequences of transactions in which they cannot participate. In the processes of governance, which are dominated by neoliberal hegemony, the democratic participation of citizens, which is constitutive of “the public,” is often marginalized or even completely left out from the process of governance. Even if the growing democratic deficit—the failure of traditional decision makers or representatives of the people to offer new ways of democratic problem solving in the changing economic and political environment—stimulated new forms of governance to develop at local, national, and transnational levels, and new actors or networks to grapple with the democratic deficit, participation of civil-society actors and nonstate actors (e.g., nongovernmental organizations, but also private for-profit corporations) in a nonhierarchical environment of (global) governance does not necessarily increase the persuasive and decision-making powers of citizens. The opposite scenario may be the case—namely, that global governance is becoming a subtle form of effective promotion of interests of the most powerful actors and surveillance of other (potential) actors, which are offered an illusive share of power, a fictitious stake in global governance while their democratic participation is deprivileged or even restrained because of depoliticization and the lack of a developed transnational political community.17 An important consequence of globalization for the formation of a transnational public sphere is the changing relation between “ethnos, the ‘people’ as an imagined community of membership and affinity, and demos, the ‘people’ as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights,” in Étienne Balibar’s words (2003: 8). Historically, ethnos and demos were inseparably linked to each other; the creation of a democratic system was closely associated with a specific national affiliation. It similarly holds true for the formation of crypto- and proto-public spheres: these democratic achievements have developed within the ethnic borders of nation states at a time when they had already been firmly established (although as nondemocratic entities). Globalized governance has removed ethnos as the “natural” foundation and framework of democratic processes. As Balibar (2003: 9) suggests, the core of the aporia is: the necessity we face, and the impossibility we struggle against, of collectively inventing a new image of a people, a new image of the relation between membership in historical communities (ethnos) and the continued creation of citizenship (demos) through collective action and the acquisition of fundamental rights to existence, work, and expression, as well as civic equality and the equal dignity of languages, classes, and sexes.

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The absence of a “replacement” for ethnos in a globalized environment has different consequences for the public and for the public sphere. Although new communication technologies, such as the Internet, make transnational communication channels easily accessible to all social actors, including citizens, and thus support the transnationalization of the public sphere, they do not stimulate the formation of transnational public(s). As Bohman (2004: 145) stresses, “while the creation of publics is a matter of the agency of citizens, the sustaining of general conditions that make such a process possible is a matter for formal institutionalization, just as sustaining the conditions for the national public sphere was a central concern of the democratic nation state.” The absence of effective inter- or transnational institutions that would be able to institutionalize such conditions makes at present the emergence of a transnational public unrealistic—but not utopian. The absence of a transnational deliberative infrastructure (e.g., in the form of a public sphere) seems to be less a problem than the nonexistence of a transnational ethnos and transnational public. Although from the technological perspective, the global advance of I&C technologies makes access to communication means much easier than any communication invention in the past, it does not necessarily democratize the communication process. Instead of providing only passive access to the consumption sphere, democratization implies primarily the development of conditions for active participation, that is, a direct and indirect incorporation of citizens into the production and exchange of messages in different forms of communication from interpersonal to mass communication in which the individual can realize his or her interests and meet his or her needs in collaboration with others. The actual democratization is defined by whether not only the number of active participants in the communication processes but also the social basis of communication expands, that is, whether the new forms of communication and democracy contribute to the incorporation of, until then, excluded social categories and groups (e.g., the young; women; socially, economically, or politically deprived groups; national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities; etc.). In other words, democratization should eliminate the major sources of distorted communications and external sources of inequalities (e.g., class and ownership privileges, gender and racial discrimination, age grade exclusion, and political or professional elitism). A realistic option seems to be building a more decentralized and diffuse system of governance, which ultimately depends on the creation of an appropriate transnational public sphere. Global governance should make the decisions of powerful actors accessible for public deliberation. By having access to communication media and participating in public discourse in a global environment, citizens may promote democratic accountability, enhance legitimacy of the rules and institutions of global governance, and contribute to the formation of transnational political communication culture. However, the question remains as to whether a transnational public sphere would include national publics and pave the way toward the formation of

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transnational publics, which could link the governance with deliberative democracy. The public can only be effective in assuming its democratic functions of influencing and controlling decision makers if its communicative actions are addressed to clearly defined actors holding an effective decision-making power comparable to that of the state in the relation to a national public sphere and public opinion. The “postnational constellation” requires transnational “equivalents” to key actors in the national public sphere—effective transnational decision-making powers accountable to effective transnational public(s). For democracy, it is crucial that two-way communication exists between governors and the governed and that decision makers enter the public sphere to legitimate their decisions by achieving public support. Transnational governance implies new actors or networks that could overcome the “democratic deficit,” but this does not suppress the role of states. The fact that global issues and interdependencies exist does not imply that nation states have no responsibilities. The call for a transnational public sphere and transnational institutional political power does not mean that their national “counterparts” lose responsibility; rather, they need to develop new and effective forms of cooperation and, thus, the capacity to supervise transnational bodies of governance. Democratic deficit in global governance does not imply that democracy can be restored only by greater reliance on the existing national institutions of representative government, although they still seem to be the most effective institutions to link different forms of subnational, national, and supranational governance. National parliaments and public spheres in themselves are not ideals of publicness, open access, and democratic participation. National parliaments should be much more involved in the debates and decisions on international affairs and agreements, which are now largely reserved to the executive power. Debates in national parliaments would provide democratic input for transnational bodies and increase the importance of European and global issues in national public spheres and thus help them to “transnationalize” or “Europeanize.” Globalization did not reduce the power and responsibility of democratic nation states to protect (national) public spheres. If democracy is central to governance, the democratic states remain its most important guardians because they are the only democratically organized political actors that legitimately represent their (territorially defined) populations and can effectively control (other) stakeholders in global governance. As the 2009 London summit of “The Group of Twenty” eventually had to admit, there is a need for a “stronger, more globally consistent, supervisory, and regulatory framework for the future financial sector, which will support sustainable global growth and serve the needs of business and citizens.”18 Only under more democratic circumstances could both national and transnational publics as actors in the transnational public sphere breathe civic engagement into the global governance now dominated by official state and corporate actors and expert elites and thus strengthen a global civil society. “Networks that are global in scope become publics only with the development

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and expansion of transnational civil society” (Bohman, 2004: 138). This would reverse the process in which the dominant type of communication is mass media, and the publics are degraded to mere consumers in media markets, but this is “a slow and difficult process that requires the highly reflexive forms of communication, boundary crossing and accountability typical of developed public spheres” (Bohman, 2004: 138).

NOTES 1. It is difficult to denote any form of communication as strictly and exclusively private in the sense that the results of interpersonal transactions are controlled entirely by the people involved and no consequences would appear to the people not directly involved (see chapter 2, this volume). 2. At first glance, the concept of “transnational media” as a large number of the media in different countries reporting and commenting on the same events simultaneously may be seen as circularly defined because it is not a single medium that is “transnational,” but reporting “transnational events” makes it of the kind. The same could be said of the relationship between “transnational events” and (“transnational”) media. Yet this is exactly the point: The “transnationality” of an event or a medium is not an intrinsic quality of a single actor, medium, or event but rather the visibility of actors/events transcending a single nation made by reports in a large number of the media in different countries. The “transnationality” of an actor (e.g., IMF or European Commission) does not make its actions transnational events; a “national actor” and “national event” (e.g., a speech of the U.S. president or parliamentary elections in France) may attract much more attention beyond the borders of the home country and thus amount to a transnational event. The “transnationality” simply refers to the increased number of external transactions, so that even nations and nation states are becoming transnationalized. As Habermas (2001: 18) argues in answering the question of whether the European Union could become a sphere of publics, “A real advance would be for national media to cover the substance of relevant controversies in the other countries, so that all the national public opinions converged on the same range of contributions to the same set of issues, regardless of their origin.” 3. A clear example of the powerlessness of nation states in relation to powerful transnational corporations is the lawsuit of the State of Ecuador v. Chevron. In February 2010, a court in Ecuador has fined US oil giant Chevron (acquired by Texaco in 2001) $8.6bn for polluting a large part of the country’s Amazon region in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it is very likely that the corporation will never pay the fine because the state of Ecuador has no power to enforce the court ruling. 4. The survey on Political Communication Cultures in Western Europe was conducted in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland in 2008–2010. It was part of the project coordinated by Barbara Pfetsch (Freie Universität Berlin) and supported within the ECRP II programme of the European Science Foundation and funded by FWF, FIST, AKA, DFG, MEC, VR, and SNF. For details see www.communication-cultures.eu.

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5. Habermas’ (1962) book on Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was translated into French under the title L’espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise (Paris: Payot, 1978). Literally, the translation of the French title into English would read: “The Public Space: Archeology of Publicity as a Constitutive Dimension of Bourgeois Society.” 6. In the preliminary draft constitution, a Congress of the Peoples of Europe comprising members of the European Parliament and National Parliaments was announced. In the 2004 proposal of the Constitution, however, the Congress did not appear. Instead, a provision was added to Art I-46 (§4) that warrented “not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States” to invite the Commission to submit proposals for measures implementing the Constitution. 7. One can agree, however, that the “No-crisis” has not arisen primarily at a European but rather at a national level. It was perhaps not primarily a failure of the EU institutions but of national methods of dealing with EU treaties, yet it would be odd to argue that it was not connected with the European “democratic deficit.” 8. This includes, among other things, “a European Programme for Training in Public Communication, under which officials from European and national institutions could receive training in communication and media technologies” (White Paper: 9). 9. The proto-public sphere may also refer, to certain degree, to what Dahlgren (2009: 167) calls “the pre- or proto-political domain, which can focus on just about any topic or theme, but gives expression to common interest, social relations, or identities” as a specific form of “online public spheres.” Yet it differs from it significantly because “the proto-public sphere” is a historical form correlated with national public(s) established in the printing age, and it is essentially political. The prefix “proto” in the concept of “the proto-public sphere” denotes the inadequacy and partiality of such a “sphere” in terms of the normatively defined publicness based on critical reflexivity. 10. For Mill (1861/2001: 188), only two reasons existed for a supranational “federal” government among “portions of mankind”: “to prevent wars among themselves, and for the sake of more effectual protection against the aggression of powerful States.” 11. A search for “online public sphere” provided about 22,000 results in Google and 294 results in Google scholar (October 31, 2010). 12. Theodore Levitt (1983: 93) related globalization in one of the earliest discussions of the concept to the irreversible, technology-driven process of homogenization of needs and desires, which erased differences between national markets and made “the multinational corporation obsolete and the global corporation absolute.” I am using the concept in a much broader sense to denote the increased complexity and interdependency of societies due to all kind of transactions across national borders enabled by revolutionary IC and transportation technologies but not simply triggered by them. As Williams (1962: 10) wisely reminded us, we can often see “the growth of modern communications not as expansion of men’s powers to learn and to exchange ideas and experiences, but as a new opportunity for a new method of government or a new opportunity for trade. All the new means of communication have been abused, for political control (as in propaganda) or for commercial profit (as in advertising).” 13. Call for a FINANCEWATCH, August 23, 2010. http://www.finance-watch.org/ 14. Call for a FINANCEWATCH, August 23, 2010. http://www.finance-watch.org/ 15. BP—Extracting influence at the heart of the EU, January 2009. http://archive.corporateeurope.org/extractinginfluence.html

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16. In many cases, new “jurisdictions” have been developed because of the failure of the traditional “general-purpose jurisdictions” to offer new ways of problem solving. In that empirical sense, the term “global governance” implies new actors or networks that could to a limited degree overcome the democratic deficit. 17. In a “range of institutional systems” required for the establishment of a “global democracy,” two are specifically related to the empowerment of citizens, according to Koenig-Archibugi (2008): (a) transnational decision-making bodies should represent, and be accountable to, citizens through electoral mechanisms or through formal and transparent political delegation; and (b) all citizens should be equitably represented as regards territorial and functional representation. 18. See http://www.g20.org/Documents/final-communique.pdf.

6

Europeanization: Redeeming Publicness in the Era of Globalization

Habermas (2001: 65) once suggested that in the European Union, “the deficit in democracy can only be eliminated if ‘a European public (sphere)’ (eine europäische Öffentlichkeit) comes into existence, in which the democratic process is incorporated,” and that “the pan-European political public (sphere) (die europaweite politische Öffentlichkeit) is the solution to the problem of insufficient social integration in the processes of Europeanization.” A genuine European (political) public sphere—running parallel to other national and transnational public spheres—as a necessary (yet not sufficient) condition is supposed to democratize the European society/societies and transform it/them into a “post-national democracy based on the mutual recognition of differences between proud national cultures.” This noble project is counterfactual (as Habermas might say); it reminds me of John Lennon’s lyrical song Imagine, in which he celebrates a “brotherhood of man,” hoping that all the people would someday share all the world—when there will be no religion, no countries (and thus nothing to kill or die for), and no property (and thus no reason for greed or hunger). In contrast to Habermas’ suggestion that the democratic deficit could be eliminated by the establishment of a European public (sphere), which implies that the deficit in democracy is the consequence and the deficit in public/ness its cause, Jürgen Gerhards (2000) argues that quite the opposite is the case: The deficit in democracy in the European Union (EU) generates the deficit in the public/ness. The opposing views and arguments indicate at least that the relationship between a democratic development and publicness should not be trivialized by simplistic causal claims. The public sphere as materialization of the principle of publicness is constitutive to any form of democracy but its bursting 193

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development is only possible in a democratic institutional and cultural environment or else the public sphere is restricted to its most rudimentary forms (e.g. the crypto-public sphere) discussed in chapter 5. Habermas’ positive anticipation of a genuinely European (postnational) public sphere is coherent with his early unconditionally positive assessment of the European Enlightenment in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962/1969), where he conceived of the liberal bourgeois public as a collective actor pretending for universality despite its class particularism. Yet in a similar vein, the project of a pan-European postnational political public (sphere) may also “justify” the fabrication of a fictitious Europe of elites without citizens if not concerned with historical obstacles to its empirical realization. The idea of a European postnational democracy could even unleash nationalistic reactions with the argument that “democratic practices, citizenship especially, are best guaranteed by the survival of the nation-state” (Rumford, 2003: 30).1 Habermas’ early theorization of publicness was often reproached for his neglect of practical-historical limits that prevent(ed) materialization of an allinclusive public sphere. His propensity toward normative-philosophical arguments clearly involves an enlightened humanist ideology focused on the emancipatory potential of the publicness, but his underestimation of historical arguments nonetheless and somehow uncritically endorses exclusion of some actors due to their gender, class, religion, race, or nationality. The gap that exists between the idea of postnational democracy and empirically feasible (or existing—if any) transnational European public sphere(s) can only be resolved practically (historically) or else the humanist dimension of the idea gets lost. Two main streams of “pragmatic” criticism of Habermas’ theoretical conceptualization of Öffentlichkeit seem to be particularly relevant for the idea of the transnational public sphere: the necessity of (a) mutually recognized common/universal values as the basis of an inclusive public (sphere), and (b) the existence of a legitimate authoritative decision-making body to whom appeals by the public should be addressed. The question of inclusion/exclusion of particular classes of citizens or a narrower empirical import of citizenship in the conceptualization of the public (sphere)—the first dominant current of critique—becomes more salient because of great cultural, economic, and political differences between different parts of Europe in the past and at present, which are relevant for the formation of a “unified” public sphere. It is not self-evident at all how “mutual recognition of differences between proud national cultures” could be effectively achieved within a common public sphere unless those who do not accept the differences are excluded from the public sphere. To make it worse, differences between national cultures include national specificities in the relationship between universal norms (e.g., of rationality) and particular culturally shaped values, which is the second main stream of general criticism of Habermas’ theory. In other words, what is considered the “universal” norm may turn out to be part of traditional cultural identities, as, for example,

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Ikegami (2000) demonstrates with examples of politeness and civility, the popularization of distinctive aesthetic tastes, and a high valuation of tacit and ambiguous modes of communication among the Japanese people. Uncritical transfer of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere to Asian countries, particularly China, made a number of Asian scholars increasingly disenchanted about the validity of its application to non-Western societies (Ikegami, 2000). Whether these critiques imply, or should be expanded to, a radical questioning of any common ground that would make possible the existence of a single national public sphere (not to speak of a transnational public sphere; e.g. in the framework of the “Western civilization”) is another question that should be discussed. Dewey (1927/1991) argued that the consideration of long-term consequences by the public leads to the formation of a political community because it integrates diverse interests, from the perspective of which the assessment of the importance of long-term consequences is only possible. Such “community” is at first more a network of interactions than a genuine community. Joint concerns for the common consequences bring different actors together in a common (public) sphere without establishing a fundamental bound. However, it is this common concern for the long-term consequences to which different actors are exposed, and for regulation of them, which in the long run can mold their common identity. No amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes a community; the consequences of combined actions have to be perceived and become an object of desire and effort (Dewey, 1927/1991: 151). If a mutual interest in dealing with such consequences is the condition for the establishment of a political community, then the process in which a common interest is formed is the condition for the “discovery” of the integrative identity of the community. Thus, the EU cannot develop into a genuine community if it does not have a common political identity. Such a distinct common identity can be provided in the process of formation of the European public, not just the European public sphere. The critical problem in that process is that it has to rely on an uneven development of national publics, which can supposedly act communicatively in a transnational public sphere. This unevenness is particularly obvious when it comes to self-reflexive actions performed and perceived by a nascent subject—the public—in either a national or transnational frame. Yet the scarcity of a (self-)reflexive capacity is not exceptional in the formation of a transnational public (sphere), as it is often perceived in the case of the EU. We can trace similar quandaries not only in the development of the publics under the auspices of nation states in the past but also in present time. Periodicity rather than permanency of communicative actions characterizes the public. It may well be that actions in a transnational public sphere are even more inert than in national public spheres, but their visibility could be greater, which could make them even more efficacious despite the fact that the addressees of these actions are perhaps—but not necessarily—less clearly defined. Transnationally coordinated demonstrations against the war in Iraq and actions of environmentalists

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may be taken as examples of how global visibility can be achieved even in the condition of an absence of a transnational public.

DECENTRALIZATION VERSUS HYBRIDIZATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE Another early critique related to Habermas’ theoretical conceptualization of Öffentlichkeit was that he misconceived of the public sphere as having one single authoritative center. Instead of a singular notion of the public and/or the public sphere, theorists increasingly stress the plurality of publics and public spheres and the substantial if not insurmountable differences between them. It is suggested, for example, that the ideal of equal participation in public debates is better referred to by thinking of a “plurality of competing publics.” Publics (but not public spheres, as I argue) in plural indeed better represent the diversity of interests in any given society. As soon as we ask what is the social basis of public opinion, “we inevitably discover that the public is neither unified, because there are different points of view on any issue, nor universal, for discussion is never all-inclusive” (Chisick, 2002: 55). In fact, Habermas (1962/1969: 68) speaks of the fiction of the one public that the liberal bourgeoisie willfully produced: The acceptance of the fiction of the one public […] was facilitated above all by the fact that it actually had assumed functions related to the political emancipation of bourgeois society from mercantilist regulation and from absolutistic rule in general. Because it [the public] turned the principle of publicity against the established authorities, the objective function of the political public could initially converge with the self-interpretation derived from the categories of the literary public; and the interest of the owners of private property could converge with that of the individual freedom in general. (my translation1)

This is far from being a new idea. Gabriel Tarde’s writing on public opinion of 1901 offers a useful “corrective” to the idealized or fictitious concept of the “monolithic” public. As Tarde (1901: 18) wrote, “One has only to open one’s eyes to see that the division of a society into publics (la division d’une société en publics), an entirely psychological division which corresponds to differences in states of mind, tends not to substitute itself for, but to superimpose itself more and more visibly and effectively on, divisions along economic, religious, aesthetic, political lines, and divisions into corporations, sects, professions, schools or parties” (italics added). For Tarde, “publics” were social groups transformed by an increasing need for sociability and social visibility; this process has been decisively influenced by the development of the press, which “modifies the relative force of existing social aggregates.”

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A number of authors (e.g., Negt and Kluge, 1972; Eley, 1992; Fraser, 1992; Garnham, 1992; Beaud & Kaufman, 2000) have righteously criticized Habermas’ insensitiveness, in his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, for specific historical conditions of the emergence of liberal bourgeois public(s), which excluded from participation a wide range (in fact, the majority) of individuals and social groups. His normative-theoretical concept of “the public/ness” (Öffentlichkeit) based on the supposedly universal rational-critical discourse referred to the world of English coffee-houses, French salons, German Tischgesellschaften, and similar exclusive, even semi-private (!) meeting places of the time—crypto-public spheres, as I call them. However, it excluded those who were not “self-dependent” but rather, as Kant named them, “protected fellow subjects”: women, workers, children—generally all those without their own property to live on who also had no right of voting. In normative terms, “rationality” of public opinion justified its universality that legitimized the right of the public opinion “tribunal” to speak out in the name of all classes; but rationality and disinterestedness of the middle class of whose members the (liberal bourgeois) public almost exclusively consisted can certainly be impugned. In fact, “rationality” was used as an effective barrier preventing non-bourgeois classes to promote their own interests and arguments in “public opinion.” By extrapolation, one could argue that the norm of rationality has similar consequences nowadays or even universally because the concept of “rationality” is, as Foucault suggests, preclusive. Foucault’s concept of power, which denies rationality and universality of public discourse, opens a radically different perspective for the discussion of public opinion and the public sphere— a view not unfamiliar already in the 18th century (see Chisick, 2002). Nevertheless, the historical “mismatch” of the counterfactual ideal of publicness and its liberal-bourgeois realization, which Habermas “committed,” should not be transferred to the normative-theoretical issue of the “quantitative relationship” between the public(s) and public sphere(s). In his early work, Habermas (1992) rather clearly differentiated between the public consisting of the bearers of publicness (and of public opinion) and the public sphere as a sphere regulated by the principle of publicness, in which the public is acting together with other actors. In reaction to his critics, he later seemed to “admit the coexistence of competing public spheres” in addition to “a greater internal differentiation of the bourgeois public” (Habermas, 1992: 425; italics added).3 Does indeed a “plurality of competing publics” necessarily entail the “plurality of public spheres” as some critics suggest (Fraser, 1992: 116–117)? I would disagree even if the relation between competing publics were conflicting. Public(s) and public sphere(s) are not the same thing. If we took Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere primarily or even exclusively as a mere description and an attempt to explain what has happened in, or with, a political public sphere, we would have to agree that it is not satisfactory from the historical point of view. But there is even not much new in Habermas’ historical account of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere either. Tönnies, like many authors before him, emphasized the role of the bour-

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geois class in the processes of public opinion formation. Preceding Habermas, Tönnies conceptualized public opinion with a certain degree of intellectual “elitism” that was a common feature among left-oriented intellectuals of the time. Yet he also strongly emphasized the particularistic interests of the new-bourgeois elite in relation to the working class. On the one hand, Tönnies (1922: 202) denoted “the salon” and “the pub” as “sites for meetings of a reflecting, discussing, cleverly chatting, and politicizing ‘world’ ”—sites of rational discourse—that were “exceptionally important in everyday life for the formation of public opinion.” On the other hand, however, he saw the struggle for freedom of thought, speech, and press, which fought out necessary infrastructure for the formation of public opinion, “in its essence an expression of the fight of the new-bourgeois, the national-bourgeois class that positions itself as a ‘public’—and very often as the ‘people,’ or the ‘nation’—for power, i.e., first for participation in the power of old classes and the monarchy which it restrains, and later increasingly for independent power” (Tönnies, 1922: 128). Tönnies’ accurate conclusion was that, despite the fact that the bourgeois class was interested in strengthening its own position and power in society, the universality of rights and freedoms it claimed in order to legitimize its critique of the authoritarian power of the court forced the bourgeois class when it came to power to enact them actually as citizen (universal) rights and freedoms. In other words, the new ruling class simply had to “share” those political rights it obtained by fighting for itself with the subordinate class. Yet that was not primarily an ethical issue; the ruling class granted civil, political, and social rights to the lower classes in order to ensure social order and stability of its own hegemony. More generally, Tönnies (1922: 187) emphasized that opinions are particular and determined by interests because “the reasoning individuals have their ‘human flaws’.” Similarly to Bryce (1888/1995: 950), who wrote of the United States that “differences between one class and another […] produce distinctly traceable influence on political public opinion of the nation,” Tönnies suggested that identical opinions frequently indicated identical benefits and interests, and opinion struggles largely demonstrated fights between social strata and classes. Thus, the idea that opinions only depend on a human aspiration for knowledge cannot represent a general assumption regarding public opinion. Using numerous historical examples, Tönnies demonstrated that public opinion always presupposed and included different opinions, which resulted from differences in a subjective life situation: They were not only aspects of individual differences and distinctions but also constituted (by) the specificity of groups, social strata, and classes. Furthermore, there were always pressures by institutions with power to limit a public display of “inopportune” opinions. Surpassing differences and creating public opinion from individual opinions is possible only in a “large public,” whose members are educated enough and qualified for discussion. Tönnies developed two different concepts of public opinion for this very reason—one purely theoretical (“opinion of the public” as a pure theoretical concept) and the applied concept of “public opinion” denoting empirical phenomena and processes.

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Coming back to the question of whether Habermas’ (or Tönnies’) theory is appropriate for historical explanations of the transformation of the public (sphere) and detection of the plurality of publics or “alternative” publics (e.g., “the plebeian public”), I would suggest that it is perfectly valid on condition that we are interested in historical-empirical changes of public opinion and public sphere related to the Kantian question of subjective and objective validity of opining in relation to knowledge.4 The relevant question would be: Can we identify any historical changes in public opinion processes in terms of rules and principles that steer them? Tönnies discussed this question in terms of historical changes from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Tarde, LeBon, Park, and Dewey, among others, conceptualized it as a question of relationship between “the public” and “the crowd,” and Blumer and Mills differentiated between “the public” and “the mass” in more complex mass-mediated social settings. In other words, it is one thing to say that (Habermas’) normative theory was “applied to historic events” (as Tönnies would say for his “applied sociology”)— or the empirical research procedure was performed—too roughly, which resulted in a failure to recognize important specificities of the period under scrutiny. It can, it did, and it does happen. It is another thing to claim that such deficiencies and inadequacies disprove the validity of a theory. It may be that the press has actually never been “the fourth power,” or the organ of public opinion; that public opinion has never been grounded in rational discourse—but does it falsify the validity of the normative theory of the public sphere that claims the importance of rational discourse for democratic political process and considers the media constitutive of the public sphere enhancing democratic life? A one-dimensional critique of the media that does not see any differences and contradictions in media production and consumption simply considers “delusive” the idea that the media might be “organs” of enlightenment and public opinion (Murdock, 2004) under more democratic conditions. Thus, even those criticizing the singularity of the concept “public sphere” have to admit that it would be “a patent nonsense to see [official and alternative public spheres] as tightly insulated from each other. Rather, the two terms are a way of capturing the reality and significance of different and generally competing zones of public communication” (Downing 1996, 26; italics added). In other words, it is suggested that the “public sphere” in singular should be replaced with “public communication”—in singular. It is perfectly true what Downing suggests: It would be nonsense to overlook the interconnectedness of different “public spheres” (if they existed in plural) in either normative or more analytically oriented theories, which calls for a “meta public sphere” (in singular, of course), no matter how it is named. A “meta public sphere” transcends publicness of social actions by which publics generate public spheres. Debates between proponents of different views defended with different arguments are only possible so long as “public spheres” intersect at some points, thus constructing a common symbolic or virtual network, a common public sphere, similarly to a common market that is a condition for the economic subjects to compete.

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If no overlapping of “public spheres” existed, then no argument would be possible, no dialogue about the norms and forms of publicness, no competition, and no chance to ever come to a disagreement, to say nothing of an agreement. Reminiscent of Tarde’s metaphor of the political public, the (political) public sphere can be seen as a river with many tributaries flowing into it. Both important and enduring indirect consequences of activities of powerful actors and attempts to regulate them, which together bring about publics, are becoming increasingly interrelated and complex with the widening of their scope and expansion of the range of issues that they are concerned with. The broadening of their agendas makes them progressively more overlapping and “flowing into the same river”—the public sphere. Isolated issue publics would lead to the fragmentation of the public sphere rather than to several “independent” public spheres. A public sphere—either national or transnational—from which specific publics/groups would be excluded is not a genuine public sphere at all (but it may be a crypto- or pseudo-public sphere); the genuine public sphere (an orthopublic sphere) eventually exists or disappears with the principle of universal access (Habermas, 1962/1989: 85). As suggested by Bohman (1994: 922–923), the point of the democratic principle is to specify how citizens exercise their political autonomy together in deliberation. It is exercised in the cooperative use of practical reason among citizens within a common public sphere. However institutionalized, some common public sphere is necessary if citizens are to be equal participants in a democracy. The principle of publicity prescribes a form of cooperation that applies even if there are numerous counter- or subpublic spheres. (italics added)

This is even more true if different “public spheres” were invested with different amounts of power; any power relationship, either exertion of power or resistance against power, typically needs a common ground, a common structure—not to say a common sphere—or else there is no power relationship. Of course, to some degree, such “common grounds” are arbitrarily defined in theories by positing constitutive elements of the phenomenon under scrutiny, but such arbitrariness is not unconditional or limitless. G. H. Mead (1934/1962: 308–309) had an analogous idea of the need of an ever broader social organization in his discussion of the relationship between individual autonomy and social control, between antagonism and cooperation. Any “social reconstruction,” by which Mead understands the settlement of conflicts arising in the general human life process, “presupposes a basis of common social interests shared by all the individual members of the given human society in which that reconstruction occurs.” Conflicts can only be resolved on the basis of

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a more or less abstract intellectual extension of the boundaries of the given society[…]—an extension resulting in a larger social whole in terms of which the social conflicts that necessitate the reconstruction of the given society are harmonized or reconciled. (Mead 1934/1962: 308–309)

In terms of Blumer’s (1946/1966: 49) conceptualization of “public opinion” and “the public,” a “universe of discourse” is also needed for the public sphere to exist because, similarly to the public, the public sphere assumes the possession of common language or the ability to agree on the meaning of fundamental terms. […] [I]f the groups or parties in the public adopt dogmatic or sectarian positions, public discussion comes to a standstill. […] The formation of public opinion implies that people share one another’s experience and are willing to make compromises and concessions. It is only in this way that the public, divided as it is, can come to act as a unit. (italics added)

A genuine public discourse ends if the discursive “common ground” is replaced by specific identities constitutive of different public spheres. When such a specific (e.g., gender or race) identity becomes the last, unyielding basis for argumentation, and thus the criterion for access to the public sphere and (meaningful) participation in public discourse, this could indeed bring about a plurality of exclusive discursive entities as it is in the case of national public spheres. The “national” here refers to the nation state as “a united front to the given common danger” or is fused into a single unity in terms of the common end or identity shared by, or reflected in, the consciousnesses of all its individual members. But in contrast to the genuine idea of the public sphere based on the principle of universal access, and striving ideally to achieve consensus based on a common good, such entities are a consequence of and/or based on the exclusion. An “alternative public sphere” would emerge when a set of arguments would not be given validity in the “dominant public sphere,” whereas in the “alternative public sphere” any questioning of those arguments would be illegitimate. Yet such a fragmentation only indicates that no genuinely public sphere exists, which may be perfectly true as an empirical observation but not as a normative-theoretical statement. Habermas’ premise is that if there is no public, no public sphere cannot exist either. “Too many publics,” Dewey suggested, are also prohibitive of “any effective organization,” which keeps the public in eclipse. These two premises lead to the conclusion that “too many publics,” as well as “no public,” thwart the development of shared experiences without which both the public and the public sphere are impossible. We can take as an example competing scientific paradigms (Dryzek, 1990: 11). They are not exclusive but rather competing because they are about the same object or issues. If no common ground existed between different scientific paradigms, there would be no productive disagreement, no competition, and thus no development of science. Even if different paradigms hold significantly oppos-

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ing views, those views are open to confrontation and, perhaps, falsification across the boundaries of scientific paradigms. At first sight, the question of common language may be even a more plausible illustration. The issue of linguistic tools that enable individuals to participate in the public sphere seemed to be irrelevant as long as the public sphere was technologically, politically, and culturally limited to individual nation states and national languages, so that the universe of publicness was seen as basically a “national matter.” With economic, political, and cultural processes of transnationalization, the question of language became part of the problem of individual access to and participation in the transnational public sphere, with a possible implication that a transnational public sphere can only exist if all participants are able to use a single common language. In the previous chapter, I made clear that this is a highly problematic assumption—other conditions may be much more prohibitive—but even if it is plausible, we should not forget that free online language translation services are becoming ever faster and more accurate, so the issue of common language could soon become rather irrelevant in the debates on the transnational public sphere. The question of “common ground” that could compensate for differentiation and plurality of rationalities in discursively generated public sphere may be pragmatically resolved with the proper level of abstraction, as Habermas suggests in his critique of cultural relativism, which discards universal principles of right and wrong, absolute values, and objective standards of truth. “Whether and, if so, how the relativism of value contents affects the universal character of the direction of the rationalization process, depends […] on the level at which the pluralism of ‘basic points of view’ is set” (Habermas, 1981/1984: 181). Clearly, Habermas set the level of abstraction/generalization much higher in his conceptualization of the public sphere than his critics seem to find suitable for practical purposes. But more than that, his critics seem to reject that any such “higher level” exists and see Habermas’ unity of rationality as a particular “power/knowledge regime,” as Foucault names it (i.e., as one among different possible—“public spheres”). An emblematic instance of such an abstraction or “meta entity” is Hardt and Negri’s (2002) concept of “empire” as a new global form of sovereignty that is “composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. […] A theory of mixed constitution is a theory of difference within the constitution that allows for various separations of powers within the framework of a single order.” Identifying a single logic of rule or a single order is the only way, they argue, to conceptualize the concrete totality—not just abstraction— that enables and even calls for a more detailed analysis of “what the various powers are and how they interact and negotiate with or dominate each other, in concert and in conflict.” Hardt and Negri’s analysis of a phenomenon deeply antagonistic to the public sphere gets to the heart of the matter at stake in the disputes about unity and/or multiplicity of public sphere(s). How could multiple spheres exist—in either concert or conflict—if no common ground, no relationship existed among

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them? Could in a similar way the concept of “European public sphere” serve, in principle, the need to identify and explain relationships among different players in the process of transnationalization of national public spheres in Europe? It is important to keep in mind that both a public and a public sphere are established in communication among strangers, and even enemies, as Tönnies wrote (i.e., people with very different and even opposing interests, values, and opinions) only “if the need to talk is strong enough.” The inclusion of strangers requires that the rules that guide our relations, roles, and representations are explicit, depersonalized, and explicitly accepted by all actors. Without communication among strangers, a true publicness would never be possible. In that very process, “primary groups of similar individuals” are transformed into “secondary and far superior aggregate, whose units were closely bound without personal contact” (Tarde, 1901: 42). As Calhoun (2005: 5) suggests, “Publicness is a creature of ‘stranger sociability’ and relatively large-scale communications media, starting with print. Publics connect people who are not in the same families, communities, and clubs; people who are not the same as each other.” It goes without saying that a plurality of publics has always existed, as Tönnies has suggested, and with the proliferation of social complexity, there are more and more opportunities for the formation of new publics and “counterpublics” associated with specific social issues. Some scholars even suggest that there are as many publics as there are different social issues. To the extent that social issues are partly individually constructed, we could end with as many publics as individuals or at least as many as the number of “site[s] of a temporary intersection of two ‘network domains,’ which may be individuals” (Ikegami, 2000). Such a “deconstruction” of the concept that shifts it from the public-political life to “any intersection of two individuals” as the smallest “micropublic” follows, for all intents and purposes, the empirical sociological tradition that tried to reduce public opinion to the smallest possible entity—any public expression of an individual opinion, and eventually even to a statistical aggregate of randomly sampled individual opinions privately expressed in a “public opinion” poll. Historically, the idea to deconstruct the concept of public opinion in the way to comprise any number of somehow interrelated individuals equal to or larger than two originated in the period of the advent of “public opinion polls” in the 1930s. Childs (1965: 13) conceptualized the public as any group of two or more individuals in interaction, which paved the way for the “interchangeability” of the concepts “the group” and “the public” and the reduction of public opinion to an aggregate of individual (private) opinions. Helmut Bauer (1965: 121) radicalized this understanding of public opinion by suggesting that the concept of public opinion could only be meaningful if conceived of as “the sum of all relevant individual opinions,” as an aggregate “of equal or at least similar opinion expressions of citizens inquired by ballot or opinion polls.” Reflecting on this kind of reductionist reasoning, Wilson (1962: 83) pointed out that “there is no suggestion of why, functionally speaking, the public has to be mentioned at all [...] if one says the public is just ‘any group’.”

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The tendency of quantification in the conceptualization of the public was first recognized by Tarde, who connected the formation of publics with counting of opinions—in publics, the number of supporters of an opinion “counts”—in contrast to primary groups, where opinions are weighted rather than counted. This tendency was first—unconsciously, according to Tarde—promoted by the press, which “worked to create the strength of numbers and to reduce that of character, if not of intelligence.” The process of attributing the prime importance to the “strength of numbers” was later “imitated,” as Tarde would probably say, by opinion polling. On the one hand, opinion polls merely count the number of, for example, favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward an attitude object; on the other hand, the results of polls publicly presented in terms of statistical distributions arouse the impression that it is precisely, and only, the number of “opinions” that matters, whereas all specific circumstances—such as particular interests, arguments, and values—are neglected. In the process of polling, the idea of an understanding that is formed in public deliberation is completely discarded. While discarding completely the deliberative dimension of public opinion, polls overrate the dimension of “strangeness” among respondents participating in polling to absurdity: They are all guaranteed complete anonymity. As a consequence, the concepts of the public sphere and public opinion are stripped of the discursive-political context and “liberated” of any democratic (normative) political theory; they became simply irrelevant for democratic theory. Anonymous communication differs significantly from communication among strangers because it lacks “the self-referential features that first emerged in the reading public.” Consequently, they are not likely to be sites of critical reflexivity (Bohman, 1999). In terms of Dewey’s conceptualization of the public, anonymous networks fail to create communicative access to global transactions that significantly affect participants in this network. As Bohman (1999: 195) suggests, “Such access can only be obtained via potential or actual mechanisms of cooperation among previously unrelated actors.” If we take seriously the premise of “communication among strangers”—but not anonymity—as a fundamental condition of genuine publicness—without engaging with the issue of whether a “weak link” may exist among people to be still considered (or considering themselves) strangers—we may even come up with some operational notion of the minimum size of publics. Based on the Bernard–Killworth estimate of the maximum likelihood of the number of personal relationships (friends, acquaintances) people living in the contemporary Western civilization have, we could come to the conclusion that the absolute minimum size of a genuine public should be well over 1,000 members.5 Whereas we may consider, with some reservation, multiple publics as independently existing (forming opinions about different issues) or even competing actors in the public sphere, the “deconstruction” of the public sphere into many spheres is a much greater trial. “Dissection” of a public sphere into a multitude of public spheres would put civil society—and society as such—at a radical risk because the public sphere is not only “an arena for debating possible social

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arrangements” but also “a medium of social integration, a form of social solidarity” (Calhoun, 2005: 4). Civil society and the public sphere have in common that they both include many different and diverse groups, arenas of activism, and social networks. But how can a collective opinion come about unless there is one single public sphere and unless certain commonalities are in place? In other words, how can a collection of actors be transformed into a group with a distinct collective self-understanding capable of exerting influence unless there is a sense of common mission or vision? A certain minimum of unity and solidarity is held to be necessary for actors to at all come together in public spaces to fight for the realization of collective goals and be prepared to take on new obligations, including being prepared to surrender some of their own sovereignty. (Eriksen, 2005: 345)

Such communion of differences and strangers may be conceptualized as “the whole public of publics” (Bohman, 2004: 134), “a sphere of publics” (Calhoun, 1996: 457), or in any other way, but we cannot leave out of account that “democracy requires discourse across lines of basic difference. It is important that members of any specific public be able also to enter into others” (Calhoun, 1996: 457; italics added).

STRENGTH AND INCLUSIVENESS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE A public sphere of multiple publics is always charged with dynamics of power. It is a sound idea to analyze the interrelationships and hierarchical structures of publics to understand their efficacy. We should not tacitly assume that publics are not interrelated or—if an interrelation is recognized—that differences between them are independent of power relations. On the contrary, the fundamental question of the quality of relations between different publics would be that of a different degree (or lack) of practical power reflected in the degree of access to, or exclusion from, major channels of public discourse. Such an analysis may reveal the differences between publics according to the amount of decision-making power they accumulate, which some authors (e.g., Fraser, 1992; Eriksen & Fossum, 2002) use to differentiate between “strong” and “weak” publics. “Weak publics” are characterized by deliberative practice, which “consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making” (Fraser, 1992: 134). It is questionable, however, whether the proper “measure” of strength and/or efficacy of publics is their decision-making power because it is not an intrinsic moment of public opinion or part of the primary function of the public. Consequently, the decision-making power cannot be used as the measure of the “strength” of the public, so that the “strong public” would

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be distinguished for its closeness to decision-making power or even participation in the decision making. Neither the public nor the public sphere can replace institutionalized forms of participation in elections, decision making, or social movements, although the public of course informs each of them. Deliberation has three functions in the democratic process: (a) mobilizing and pooling relevant issues and required information, and specifying interpretations; (b) discursive processing of these contributions by arguments for and against; and (c) generating rationally motivated yes and no attitudes that determine the decisions (Habermas, 2006). By pooling issues and reasons, the debate in the public sphere influences the agenda of the legislative and executive decision-making institutions. The main task of the political public sphere is “to ensure the formation of a plurality of considered public opinions” and in that way “prepare agendas for political institutions,” which indeed “is still a quite demanding expectation.” The public sphere “detaches opinions from decisions”; it forms the periphery of a political system and can well facilitate deliberative legitimization processes by “laundering” flows of political communication through a division of labor with other parts of the system (Habermas, 2006: 416). Decision making is not a function of the public sphere. However, the public sphere is strongly connected with the decision making in political institutions by (a) formal voting, and (b) opinion and will formation of individual voters (Habermas, 2006: 418). The institution of citizen voting secures certain influence of public opinion(s) over decision makers: It is the formal vote and the actual opinion and will formation of individual voters that together connect the peripheral flows of political communication in civil society and the public sphere with the deliberative decision making of political institutions at the center, thus filtering them into the wider circuitry of deliberative politics. (Habermas, 2006: 418)

Indeed, decision making should not be considered a function of either the public or the public sphere, and thus it cannot be taken as the criterion of the strength of either of them. Excessively formalized institutions in which decision-making processes take place are burdened with a constant danger to be “absorbed” by the state (such as parliaments) and/or to co-opt less strongly (hierarchically) organized actors (as may be the case in global governance). Thus, even when “reducing” the public sphere to the political public sphere structured around political institutions, the decision making does not seem to be its prerogative. On the contrary, the public sphere is only linked to, through deliberation, the formally organized decision-making institutions. The deliberative link between the political public sphere and political institutions is largely controlled by the latter. Although this is not always the case, and even if the control is rather collaborative, the constitutive actors of the public sphere—the public(s)—are seldom in a position to impose a decision on the legislative or execu-

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tive bodies. This can be clearly seen in the relationship between the European Commission (EC) and the “European public sphere” as conceived of in the EC’s documents: The Commission welcomes civil society organizations as promoters of the fostering of European integration in the “public sphere” rather than epistemic partners. Normatively, both actors in the political public sphere and in a wider public sphere channeling opinions toward nonpolitical decision makers are in an analogous relation to the decision-making institutions as the media are in relation to their audiences according to the agenda-setting theory: They offer interpretations and “public opinions,” but they do not make decisions. The power produced through communicative action can exert an influence on the foundations of the evaluative and decision-making processes of public administration, without wanting to take them over altogether […]: it cultivates the range of arguments that, though treated instrumentally by administrative power, cannot be ignored by it, in as much as administrative power is conceived along constitutional lines. (Habermas, 1990: 18)

Globalization made obvious that publics do not participate in the governance, as discussed in the precedent chapter, whereas a public sphere as an infrastructure cannot have the capacity to act at all. This would imply that—normatively— decisions are left to the decision-making institutions and, to some degree, informal elites. In contrast to “stealth democracy” (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002), deliberation of possible decisions remains with the public sphere. As I suggested in the previous chapter, two critical issues in this process pertain to both national and transnational public sphere (or governance for that matter): (a) largely invisible and unaccountable decision-making bodies require effective ways of surveillance and/or enforcement capacities in the hands of the public, and (b) the lack of communicative action on behalf of publics requires institutional regulatory support for the development of the communication infrastructure. These “improvements” should make the public sphere “better” or “stronger.” Yet the question of the quality or strength of the public (sphere) is far from being an uncontroversial issue. A recent attempt to grapple the intellectual diversity in theoretical and operational definitions of the public sphere suggests four operational criteria to identify the differences: (a) who should speak, (b) the content of the process (what), (c) style of speech preferred (how), and (d) the relationship between discourse and decision making (outcomes) that is sought or feared (Marx Ferree et al., 2002: 316–317). As the authors suggest, different normative criteria for “a good democratic discourse” are decisive in different traditions: For the representative liberal tradition, it is the question of expertise (elite dominance); for the participatory tradition, it is the question of what the process of engagement in public debate is and does (empowerment); for the discursive tradition, it is mutual respect and civility of the dialogue; and for the constructionists, it is the expansion of political community and the avoidance of exclusionary closure of debates.

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Only the representative liberal tradition values elite inclusion over stronger and more active versions of popular inclusion. In other words, popular inclusion is among those normative criteria widely accepted and least resisted by democratic theorists (Splichal, 2006). Only the constructionists (Fraser, Benhabib, and Young), starting from feminist premises, emphasize the importance of the relationship between public debate and decision making, but this would imply primarily actions toward widening the agenda of decision makers rather than direct participation in making decisions. This analysis of democratic theories of the public sphere brings us close to Barber’s (1998, 2003) concept of “strong democracy.” Again, the key dimension of Barber’s conception of “strong democracy,” as contrasted with traditional concepts of liberal democracy, is in the emphasis on citizen participation in central issues of public debate or “popular inclusion” discussed above. Barber argues that the conceptualization of democracy should not be reduced to its institutional forms but should rather take into consideration the actual participation of people in the process. In other words, Barber’s “strong democracy” presupposes a developed and, I may say, “strong” public sphere. Thus, a “stronger public sphere encompasses a greater diversity of people, and abides by more explicit rules and roles than a weaker public sphere” (Westerman, 2010: 164). This of course is far from being an idea distinctive of the second half of the 20th century. Barber himself explains what he means by “strong democracy” by quoting what Dewey said of democracy: “Democracy is not a form of government, it is a way of life.” Thus, popular inclusion is essential for Barber’s concept of “strong democracy,” which emphasizes opportunities for different kinds of citizens’ participation and civic engagement at the national and local levels. It is fundamental for “strong democracy” that civic participation and engagement spread across the borders and across different sectors of society. With no public use of reason in the media, which is based on the right of citizens to be heard, there is no democracy. With public use of reason only in the media, there is no democracy either: Democracy also rests on the principle of dialogue, not only mass dissemination. As Habermas (1992/1996: 171) states, “Parliamentary opinion- and will-formation must remain anchored in the informal streams of communication emerging from public spheres that are open to all political parties, associations, and citizens.” The informal sphere of opinion formation and expression, which influences political decision making, has to be separated from the institutional sphere of formal political proceedings aimed at reaching decisions. The two spheres have to be constitutionally protected as autonomous spheres enabling discursive formation of will; neither of them must be, as Habermas argues, “organized like corporate bodies,” but they should differ in conditions of communication, which also leads to differences in terms of accessibility of the two spheres. In particular, as Habermas (1992/1996: 364, 375) emphasizes, “We must distinguish the actors who, so to speak, emerge from the public and take part in the reproduction of the public sphere itself from the actors who occupy an already

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constituted public domain in order to use it,” or between the actors, usually only laxly organized, who “emerge from” the public and those merely “appearing before” the public. For Habermas, this is not just a difference between endogenous and exogenous actors. He assumes that “the public sphere together with its public must have developed as a structure that stands on its own and reproduces itself out of itself”—which is per se a valid assumption—before actors with strategic intent can illegitimately capture it, which would always enable those “latent forces” to recapture it. It is not clear, however, how “strategic actors” could be excluded from the constitution of the public sphere. If we only take the example of the press, this assumption seems untenable: The constitutional guarantee of (negative) freedom of the press also gives constitutional protection to the private business of publishing newspapers. There is no public sphere without the press; thus, historically, the public sphere was “infected” by strategic (profit) interests almost with the very act of its constitution. Nevertheless, taking Habermas’ (1992/1996) juxtaposition of “legitimate influence” versus “actual influence” seriously, the question of how to bring “actual influence” closer to its “legitimate” model appears. Habermas’ (1992/1996: 364) judgment seems to be too optimistic: “Public opinions that can acquire visibility only because of an undeclared infusion of money or organizational power lose their credibility as soon as these sources of social power are made public. Public opinion can be manipulated but neither publicly bought nor publicly blackmailed.”6 The trouble is that those “public opinions” are legitimized by the very fact that they appear in the mass media—the most trustful actor of all the actors appearing in front of the public! It makes sense, as Habermas proposes, to test empirically “the relation between actual influence and the procedurally grounded quality of public opinion” because actual influence of public opinion does not necessary coincide with legitimate influence. Yet his conclusion about incorruptibility of public opinion refers only to the extreme case of immoral power sources, whereas—as the empirical evidence shows—at the same time the whole advertising and public relations industry is based on a now legitimate “infusion of money or organizational power” to promote opinions. Habermas’ optimism assumes, as in a fairy tale, that justice eventually always prevails. My experience (more than mere pessimism) is saying that even in the long run this may not always be true. I believe that the postmodern professionalization of political communication and mediatizaton of politics severely threaten the deliberative nature of the public sphere. In contrast to the professionalization of journalism that started in the late 19th century and helped newspapers and journalists to loosen their links to political parties, the contemporary professionalization of political communication refers to the process in which communicative functions of political systems once performed by ordinary citizens are being transferred to professionals, such as public relations officers, advertising agents, pollsters, and other experts. Both at the local and national levels, political communication can be seen as dominated by commercial media and public relations’ elites. As a result, professionaliza-

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tion strengthens the power of dominant political actors in the political process who are increasingly in a position to control public discourse. As Hamelink (2007: 181–182) argues, “Current processes of professionalization emphasize the democracy of representatives, not the democracy of citizens” because they “widen the inequality between politicians and citizens in terms of the capacity to manipulate political messages, perceptions and opinions […] [and] contribute to the development of ‘democracy without citizens’.” Professionalization is exactly what the concept of the “strong public” implies if defined as a “junction” of opinion formation or deliberation and decision making (e.g., as “institutionalized deliberation close to the centre of the political system that is legally regulated”) (Eriksen, 2005: 348). In operational terms, this would suggest that “Parliaments are both decision-making and deliberative bodies. They embody this combination better and more explicitly than any other political body: they are quintessential strong publics” (Eriksen & Fossum, 2002: 411; italics added). It is an irony that parliaments, which 200 years ago Bentham saw as badly in need of strong surveillance by the public if democracy is to survive, are conceived of as the very guarantors of (deliberative) publicness. The strength of these publics was perhaps best exemplified by the UK parliament in 2009, when the press disclosed—owing to the 2000 Freedom of Information Act that came into force in 2005, allowing the public to request disclosure of information from “public bodies”—a huge misuse of the permitted allowances and expenses claimed by members of parliament. Obviously, Bentham’s conviction that a permanent danger always exists that self-interests of professional politicians may be in conflict with the interests of the community that they were supposed to represent and take care of is—unfortunately—still in place. Although criteria for “measuring strength” of the public sphere that focus on the inclusiveness of deliberative process are much more evasive to grasp, they seem to be more promising for conceptualization and policy-oriented research. Three main factors that Guizot (1851: 264) considered decisive for the rise of representative democracy in mid-1800 England—“(1) discussion, which compels existing powers to seek after truth in common; (2) publicity, which places these powers when occupied in this search, under the eyes of the citizens; and (3) the liberty of the press, which stimulates the citizens themselves to seek after truth, and to tell it to power”—may serve as general gauges of the strength of the public sphere. According to these criteria, which I believe are no less relevant than 150 years ago, strong publics are not to be looked for in parliamentary assemblies and similar quasi-discursive bodies in formally organized institutions endowed with decision-making power but rather in discursive networks outside the institutionalized political system. The criteria of the “strength” of the public sphere should be derived from its defining principle—principle of publicness, which is negatively defined as distinct from (a) privacy, (b) mass, and (c) secrecy. The strength of the public sphere thus increases with:

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(a) general accessibility (inclusiveness) of the public sphere, (b) rationality of discourse (public use of reason), and (c) control over political authorities by the public, which secures transparency of power. Similarly to my former considerations on the consequences of globalization, the strengthening of publics and public sphere would require (a) an institutional regulatory support for the development of an inclusive communication infrastructure, (b) effective ways of surveillance and rule-enforcement capacities in the hands of the public, and (c) media regulated as public goods. A “strong public sphere” needs an institutional assurance, an “official sphere” in order to exercise these tasks. As Westerman (2010: 167) suggests, however, the necessity that specific tasks or functions7 have to be officially cared for does not imply any specific institution as the best-fitting to act as “defender of the public realm.”

A EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPHERE—CAN WE SEE IT? The confusion about the nature of the European public sphere proliferates when one tries to answer a “simple” empirical question as to whether a European public sphere does (already) exist. Obviously, different conceptualizations would lead to divergent assessments of empirical evidence in favor of or against a European public sphere, although it is commonly believed that “[i]f one looks for a genuinely transnational European public sphere, there is not much to be found,” as Koopmans and Statham (2010: 36) argue based on their own empirical work and conclusions from previous studies in the field. Similarly to what has happened with the empirical concept of public opinion in the 1930s,8 more empirically oriented approaches toward the European public sphere tacitly assume a sort of “lowest-common-denominator” when defining the European public sphere. This approach seems to be more rewarding than grasping the concept of the public sphere “as a crucial category for a critical examination of the contemporary situation” (Hohendahl, 1992: 100). Some social scientists, for example, draw a distinction between two models of the European public sphere that either (a) transcends individual countries, or (b) integrates or “Europeanizes” national publics (e.g., Gerhards, 2000; Koopmans and Erbe, 2004; Meyer, 2005; Brüggemann, 2009). The latter seems to be more realistic, according to Gerhards, because it does not imply the necessity to surmount huge language differences within the EU (which is believed to be implied by the first model) but only: “(1) thematization of European themes and actors in the national public spheres on the one hand, and (2) assessment of themes and actors in a non-nation-state perspective on the other” (Gerhards, 2000: 293). Others operationalize the European public sphere as “political communication about the same issues under similar aspects of relevance” and “as a watchdog

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of policy making and politics” (Eder & Kantner, 2000), thus reducing it to the circulation of the same issues in different national public spheres and mass media with a more or less explicit European frame of reference (i.e., a kind of “European uniformities” observed in the media). Such a media-centered operationalization of the (European) public sphere may help collect some useful data about the images of Europe in the media, editorial gate-keeping, and agenda-setting, but it is clearly limited. It is exactly how, to paraphrase Darnton (2000) once more, “a researcher who sets out to discover the public sphere is likely to find it wherever he or she looks and then perhaps to reify it.” Furthermore, the critical question remains to what extent the European public sphere, which should be shaped by or help give rise to democratic developments in Europe, depart from the nation-state “model” supposedly hidden in the original concept of the public (sphere). As long as conceptual differences are considered only “a matter of theoretical definition,” any operational definition may be attributed some validity because it seems that the “objective” empirical world is less complex than its “subjective” theorization. It may well be that a “more empirical concept” usually “encounters fewer problems,” as it is argued (van de Steeg, 2002: 507), but unfortunately this is not to say that it is more valid. The reduction of the empirical concept of the public sphere to what one can find in the mass media because, as it is argued, “In the end, what the general public gets to see of the public debate is that which is reported by the media, and, especially, as it is reported by the media,” tacitly (but wrongly) assumes that what is reported by the media is genuinely discussed in the public sphere. Perhaps, in this way, “the public sphere is studied to the extent that the mass media is a forum for it” (van de Steeg, 2002: 507), but (a) there is no reliable indicator(s) of the extent to which the media duly represent the entire public sphere and/or serve as “organs of public opinion,” and (b) such an operational by-passing of conceptual problems cannot eliminate any peril of theoretical uncertainty that would be greater than empirical reductionism. To repeat what I argued earlier: Not just any kind of visibility is compatible with the idea of reflexive publicness: “Mediated visibility,” for example, is not merely a neutral extension of the general visibility in the strict sense but rather a specific kind of visibility, visibility sui generis. It is somehow frustrating that the issue of the press as “the organ” of public opinion/sphere minutely discussed already more than a century ago— indeed, the roots of critical thinking about newspapers date back to the Enlightenment—and during the entire period to follow, returned to the field as if it never had been debated. Before newspapers reached a nationwide circulation in Western Europe, their critics realized that their noble function of serving the public has been largely replaced by that of being an organ of political parties or a bare profit-making business. Ideally, as Karl Bücher (1926: 53) emphasized, the press should play a double role in democratic societies: “The press becomes the organ of public opinion if it adopts mental currents rising from the masses, gives them form and direction, and formulates claims on the state authorities on that

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ground. But it also influences public opinion by suggesting a judgment of individuals or entire groups to the mass.” Yet the capitalist development brought about an entirely different kind of the press based on the fundamental transformation of its essence into the production of “the advertising space as a commodity that can only be realized through its editorial section” (Bücher, 1926: 21). Thus, ideally, the press was supposed to be a “forum of the public sphere,” but in practice the ideal was never materialized. While Bücher (1926: 53–54) recognized that public opinion can only be constituted as public with the press, which substantiates the difference between public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) and popular opinion (Volksmeinung) that appears in interpersonal communications and books, he also warned against the manipulative and demagogic power of newspapers emerging from “the presentation of subjective views and particularistic interests as views and interests of the nation.” In other words, saying that there is no public opinion without the press does not imply that public opinion is the press. As Tönnies argued, newspapers may both express and influence public opinion, but equalizing popular opinion with a “true” public opinion would be misleading because in reality newspapers are neither organs of “opinion of the public” nor are they identical with it (Tönnies, 1923: 78). Rather, they are primarily organs of political parties, and only exceptionally they bring information about public opinion (e.g., the elite metropolitan press); in this way, they can significantly influence public opinion, although mainly indirectly (because only the elite is reading that kind of newspaper). In a similar way, we can nowadays argue that results of public opinion polls, even though they do not represent public opinion, (re)present demands that political power must respect; they also limit the arbitrariness of power over what exactly is “public opinion of the day.” The complexity of the relationship between the press and public opinion let Tom Harrisson (1940: 375)—obviously following Ferdinand Tönnies—to distinguish between public opinion (which is “the overt though often temporary opinion stated to a stranger by the private individual. Strictly speaking, therefore, public opinion when used in a democratic sense means the complex of different points of view stated to strangers by forty million citizens”) and published opinion “as reflected in the Press, B.B.C., newsreels, Parliament. It is the version of public opinion which is given wide currency through these channels.” Newspapers are invaluable in their “help to form an opinion, guide it, give it articulate expression, endeavour to make it prevail.” But as Harrisson (1940) wisely argued, this is not to say that they either represent or even are public opinion. Quite the contrary is the case: Sometimes the only thing these two different sorts of public opinion have in common is the first three letters. Even that is misleading. For the first sort is in the pub’s public bar, but the second sort is concocted over sherry at the Carlton Club, on a terrace overlooking the river, or at Elvino’s in Fleet

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The fact that a substantial difference exists between the “real public opinion” and the version presented by the (elite) press is in itself not really a problem, according to Harrisson. The main problem is that newspapers act as if they were the sublime version of public opinion, and they want their readers to believe it, too. [Newspapers] put forward opinions which are their own, those of the proprietors or editors or some other persons or groups. If they confined themselves to this activity and were frank about it, we should have been spared some of the less edifying spectacles of recent years. Unfortunately, every great newspaper has found it necessary at times to pretend that its own opinion is public opinion—thus giving substance to its own complaints and campaigns” (Harrisson, 1940: 376).

Harrisson naively saw his “mass observation”—an anthropological version of opinion polling—as the solution to the problem “to find out what people really were saying,” which he considered the “real public opinion,” in contrast to published opinion(s) in the newspapers. But leaving aside his belief that “mass observation” could solve the problem of falsification of public opinion in the press, his argument against the fallacy of considering the press a valid or even representative form of public opinion should be taken seriously. Commercialization and concentration of the media on a global scale during the last half of the century even intensified the dependence of “published opinions” on the interests of specific political and economic groups influencing the media through information subsidies. Since the late 19th century, critical voices pointed to a “double corruption of the press,” as Tönnies (1922: 183) named it: Newspapers were ordinary business rather than an organ of public opinion, and, much worse, they were a means for the promotion of the global commercial (private owners’) interests. These critical voices that called for an authentic personal freedom of publication did not manage to reinvigorate alternative conceptualizations of publicness, such as those introduced by Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham by the end of the 18th century. The control of information flow and symbolic representations became an important resource of power, which enables power actors to take full advantage of their relationship with the environment. Although traditionally direct methods to influence the behavior of others, such as censorship, propaganda, and persuasion, dominated, contemporary efforts are primarily based on direct and indirect information subsidies and framing. The notion of information subsidies is based “on

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a recognition that the price of information may be reduced selectively by interested parties in order to increase the consumption of preferred information” (Gandy, 1982: 30). Framing denotes selection of some aspects of a perceived reality and making them “more salient in a communicating context, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 52). As Melucci (1996: 348) emphasizes, “frames are to be defined as discursive representation of collective action organized according to the position of the actor in the field, and they must be located within a theory of ideology.” In fact, as Melucci suggests, ideology is nothing but a set of symbolic frames aiming at the “rationalization” of social relationships according to the actor’s particular interests. Subsidizing and framing significantly affect media contents. They may also exert a significant effect on large parts of audiences through the construction of “dominant meaning,” but one should not confound media effects with public discourse taking place in the public sphere. Thus, subsidizing and framing can be decisive in achieving elite domination over public opinion if no democratic safeguards existed that would prevent a homogeneity of public space. The generalizing assumption that the media represent the public sphere in terms of agendas is contradicted in media research. Many empirical studies have provided systematic evidence of information subsidies and externally driven framing. Financial interests of media owners influence not only editorial material but news reporting as well. “Money is always the first thing we talk about. The readers are always the last thing we talk about,” confessed Leo Wolinsky, a managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. After the disclosure of the newspapers’ profit-sharing agreement with the Staples Center sports arena, whose opening was the focus of its Sunday magazine’s stories, he criticized the advertising inroads in the newsroom that have desensitized editors and managers (Kurtz, 1999: C01). Even media moguls Barry Diller and Ted Turner have raised objections against the Federal Communications Commission’s attempts to gut the rules designed to prevent the growth of media monopolies in the United States, with Turner arguing, “There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear” (Nichols & McChesney, 2003: 5; italics added). Public relations and press releases are becoming increasingly important corporate strategies in subsidizing and framing media contents. Advertisers often directly subsidize and influence the editing of a newspaper so that the advertisements of a certain product are placed on the same page as news related to that product. The most unscrupulous subordination of press freedom to property rights of the owner and breach of the public role of the media may be found in Italy, where one of the richest European businessmen and Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns three national television networks, more than 30 magazines and newspapers—in addition to some 150 other businesses from construction companies and department-store chains to the famous soccer team, Milan— and successfully “combines” commercial advertising, editorial contents, and political propaganda in his media.

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Herman and Chomsky (1994) identified five “news filters” in the U.S. media that favor interests of economically and politically powerful groups and effectively shape the discourse of the mainstream media: (a) profit orientation of the dominant large, privately owned media corporations; (b) advertising as the main income source of the media; (c) media reliance on information subsidized by (public relations’ offices of) governments and business; (d) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and (e) “anti-communism” as a kind of national ideology. These filters “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amounts to propaganda campaigns” (Herman and Chomsky, 1994: 2). As they argue, these filters seem to be excluded from intellectual debate on (the dominant) media discourse; the “Propaganda Model” is often omitted from university media courses, and it has been ignored within the academic literature. Such tendencies in the media lead to the formation of a hybrid pseudo-public sphere, where the media are not a “forum of the public sphere” suggested by the proponents of a “more empirical concept” of the public sphere. We cannot tacitly assume that the media form a “democratic forum” and then analyze their contents as if they were representative of the public sphere; the operation of the media has to be critically scrutinized first. The “propaganda-model” trends not only indicate the danger of a decline of media freedom and/or personal freedom of expression but also problematize the simplistic idea of media contents as a kind of sublimation of the public sphere, which should allow us to survey and analyze the public sphere by merely analyzing media contents. Media competition that has been considered the bedrock to keeping democracy strong by liberal theorists is largely a forgotten past. The staggering consolidation among communication companies suppresses media competition by grabbing control over media contents and distribution. This is not to say that the media play no important role in the formation of public spheres. On the contrary, mass media are constitutive of the public sphere and, particularly, of the public as its “organs,” as I argued in chapter 4. Normatively, they fulfill at least two sets of vital functions: (a) by making political authorities visible, the media should ensure surveillance of political powers and legitimization of their decisions by the public; and (b) by providing citizens access to the media, they should foster formation of public opinion through deliberation.9 Normative functions of the media primarily address the journalistic profession or professional media gatekeepers. Yet the normatively defined democratic performance of journalists is challenged in practice by the actions of other powerful actors in the public sphere. In a critical-theoretical perspective, operationalization of the hypothetically emerging European public sphere with national mediated public spheres should address historical conditions, which either promote or discourage:

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discursive visibility enabling surveillance and legitimation through the media; citizen access or participation in the media; deliberation essential for the emergence of a public sphere on either a national or transnational level; and while focusing on media with varying levels of interaction and differences between public versus private, commercial versus noncommercial, “old” and “new” media, and mainstream versus alternative media.

The issue of how the EU is presented in the mass media is certainly important for the discussions of the emergence of the European public sphere. Yet this should not lead us to a trap—that is, to replace public discourse with the mediated political discourse, which is predominantly a discourse of political (and journalistic) elites, both national and European. Empirical studies may provide some evidence of whether the European perspective increasingly moulds media content and how often similar themes are being addressed simultaneously in different countries, at least in elite media. Information about, and often interpretation of, EU activities is disseminated by its administration through established national and regional networks. National and regional political actors mediate political communication about the Euro-polity.10 Yet what does this say of the nature of the public discourse, public sphere(s), and public(s)? A “common communication space”—which is not a proxy for the public sphere—fulfills mainly the functions of agenda-setting and framing by pooling “relevant issues and required information, and to specify interpretations,” while the rest of deliberation—debating these issues in order to form and express opinion—is left out. No doubt, national mass media cannot (yet) provide opportunities for these functions to be fulfilled in the way to influence the “outcome of procedurally correct decisions” made at the European level by the European Parliament, European Commission, or European Council. Media content is not representative in a statistical sense of either “public agenda” or “public discourse” (i.e., of “what the general public gets to see” or “the ‘texts’ emanating from the interaction of people in public debate”). Not only may members of the public(s) use, in addition to the general news media, other and different sources, but also each member interprets what he uses (sees and hears) individually. Otherwise, the public is considered as if it imploded into a mass audience of media consumers. To make it worse, following Habermas’ (1992/1997: 375) distinction between the key players in the public sphere, indigenous actors emerging from the public can influence the contents of privately owned media much less than powerful commercial groups and political actors merely appearing before the public. Rather, as Niklas Luhmann (1994: 63) suggested, in such circumstances, public opinion becomes an “inner media” of political system, a mirror “generated by mass media to regulate the watching of the observers.” With its help, politicians

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observe themselves, their adversaries, and ordinary people, who are mere observers. As a consequence, the picture we get from quantitative or qualitative analysis of media contents only is distorted—the only question is, how much— and thus media contents cannot be considered a valid operationalization of (either a national or transnational) public sphere. As Garnham (2001: 12585) emphasizes, “to analyze the media from the perspective of the public sphere is to focus upon the media’s relationship with democracy” (italics added). The age-old disagreements on the nature and definition of the public and public opinion discussed earlier point to other autonomous constituents of the public sphere coalescing with the media, which have to be studied to get “the broad picture.” They include (a) the nature and structure of the public; (b) conditions of an effective public opinion; (c) the issues discussed in public and their importance in terms of consequences; (d) the kind(s) of discourses and rhetorical forms created in the public sphere (not reduced to the dominant media discourse); and (e) the role of mediators (journalists, publicists, but also communication organizations). According to Peters’ (2007: 289–295) provisional “typology,” at least five dimensions of the internationalization and/or transnationalization of the public and public sphere should be scrutinized: (a) news coverage, (b) circulation of cultural products, (c) media pluralism and concentration, (d) issue publics, and (e) cultural background and identity. (1) International news coverage is the most elementary and traditional form of the internationalization of the public (sphere). The sheer visibility of the EC or other EU (transnational and national) actors, for example, may be a necessary condition for the emergence of a European(ized) public sphere, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition that alone would allow us to estimate either the degree of “Europeanization of a national public sphere” (tacitly assuming that it exists) or the intensity of materialization of a genuinely European public sphere. Amounts of attention paid by national media to EU and characteristics of the EU coverage may even reveal the level of “maturity of European communication” (van Noije, 2010: 260) if defined in operational terms but no more than that. It is not really the “international content” in the national media that allows any conclusion about the development of a transnational public (sphere) because it is always based on the observation of “foreign” events from a national perspective, while a genuine internationalization implies “internationalization of public communication networks and communication flows.” Thus, much more than an analysis of mass media contents is needed to answer the question of the denationalization of the public sphere. (2) Imports and exports of cultural products, contributions, and ideas are an elementary form of such cross-border communication, which has been referred to already in the late 19th-century public opinion studies (e.g., Tarde, 1898/2000, 1901). Cultural diffusion, too, always existed. It traditionally included books,

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newspapers, and journals, but then it greatly expanded with films and television programs and most recently exploded in innumerable communication networks and flows on the Internet. Large imbalances exist in the global “cultural market” in favor of the most advanced and populated countries—a problem analogous to the position of marginal groups and “counterpublics” in national public spheres. (3) Transnational mass media are an important infrastructural component of the transnational public sphere, similarly to the role the national media have in national public spheres. However, mass media with a genuinely inter- or transnational structure of production and distribution are either rare or nonexistent. Many of the changes brought about by global concentration of media ownership and market convergence could be detrimental to cultural and political diversity and citizens’ participation in the public sphere. (4) Germs of transnational issue publics with specific communication channels and networks as well as special “organs” can be seen particularly in the environmental movements but also in scholarly attempts to bring their disciplines into conversation with publics or to constitute issue publics on their own. Environmental issues are not the only ones discussed in public. To ascertain the level of transnationalization and denationalization, we also have to look, in a comparative way, to the dominant issues (in terms of their consequences) debated in the public sphere(s) and the ways they are debated. (5) The development of a transnational public sphere requires “a common agenda, shared structures of relevance, consonant interpretative framework, shared cultural background knowledge and a collective identity (at least in the sense of belonging to an active, responsible collectivity)” (Peters, 2007: 294; italics added)—socially and culturally based practices and institutional structures. This is not to say that such complete unity could be attributed to national publics. It is also quite hard to pin down the combined effect of cultural, political, and economic differences; mutual influences; and overlappings by which national publics are marked. Nevertheless, this effect stamps a particular character on a national public sphere in a manner that is even harder to observe in an international context, which—to come to the point—indeed makes a sufficiently inclusive operational definition of a European public sphere—as either international or transnational—very difficult. (6) These specific instances of inter- or transnationalization reflect the changing nature of publicness and conceptualizations there from. The questions of how publicness as the defining principle of the public sphere is normatively conceptualized, legally codified, and socially materialized (institutionalized) are essential components of the path that supposedly leads to the transnational public sphere. Traditionally, for example, the press was normatively considered constitutive for the public and public opinion—not expressed by a spatially gathered public

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but by an imagined or virtual public—in two senses: (a) by having played an important role because it delivered information to the public and, thus, significantly influenced public opinion formation; and (b) by having been the main “expression means” or “organ” of the public. In practice, however, newspapers were neither organs of public opinion nor identical with it; they were primarily “organs” of political parties and commercial corporations, and “the public,” by definition, was usually a “newspaper reading public” (i.e., an elite minority). Nevertheless, in Tönnies’ sense of the public, the press remains normatively and empirically its constitutive element. Empirically, Tönnies identified the public opinion as the most substantiated opinion about a public issue rephrased by the most important metropolitan newspapers and approached beyond partisan bias. In other words, the real public opinion has to be displayed in/by the media or else it does not exist. It is another thing if such a (national) consensus can hardly be found anywhere except in states of emergency. Using Tönnies’ empirical “indicator” of public opinion, a European public opinion would be—almost by definition—a nonexistent phenomenon. This is clearly reflected, for example, in great variability of “national public opinions” in the Eurobarometer polls11 (although the variability is not necessarily larger than within national samples). Using the same criterion of consensual (public) opinion for mass media contents, the same conclusion should be made. Yet it is not the question of a nonexistent consensus that prevents us from defining media contents as an operational version of the public sphere. If such consensus in the European media existed, would it be legitimate to infer that a European public/sphere exists? The answer is negative—because what really matters is the way consensus is achieved, rather than consensus itself. As Wilson (1962: 7) suggested, only those decisions that are agreed to by the public should be considered legitimate: “Public opinion is participating opinion. […] Since we can hardly say that non-existent opinion can be public opinion, we can hardly say that a primitive and inarticulate acceptance of a governing order is really consent” (italics added). If decisions or ruling opinions are accepted but not agreed to by the people, such a general but nonreflexive acceptance is an opposite of public opinion: “In the manipulated public sphere an acclamation-prone mood comes to predominate, an opinion climate instead of a public opinion” (Habermas, 1962/1995: 217). The lesson taught is that we should be much more careful when coming to empirical “testing” of normative-theoretical concepts. As indiciated above, results of media content analysis can hardly provide a valid and reliable “representation” of public opinion or public sphere. Media coverage is only one dimension of the transnationalization of the public sphere. Other dimensions, such as characteristics of cultural markets, media ownership and regulation, differentiation (and fragmentation) of publics, as well as public cultures and identities, should be studied to get “the big picture.” The criticism of operational (re)conceptualizations of public opinion discussed in chapter 4, which Harrisson (1940: 375) nicely wrapped up already in

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1940 by saying that “the Press and Parliament version of public opinion is frequently miles away from ‘real public opinion’,” also applies to the attempts at equating the public sphere with certain characteristics of media contents. In other words, for the same reason for which “public opinion” should not be confused with polling results, “public sphere” (and also “public opinion” for that matter) should not be confused with the results of media content analysis. This kind of results may be relevant for a critical reflection on the public sphere only if they are related to analysis of other dimensions constitutive of the public sphere. Without such “extension” of research to contextualize information on media contents, analysis of (European) media coverage only provides “freely floating” data with no indication whatsoever of whether media contents were created under the auspices of freedom, publicness, and association of competitors or under conditions of external control, monopoly, and promotional or disciplinary publicity (see Figure 2.1).12 The difference between the two kinds of publicness is essential if we want to estimate the level of consolidation of transnational(ized) public sphere(s). Otherwise, “Europeanness” may easily become a cover for “non-publicness.” Mass media have to fulfill specific normative functions in the public sphere that cannot be inferred from media contents alone. They primarily determine the performance of journalistic profession or professional media gatekeepers but also actions of other powerful agents in the public sphere on which media depend. As presented in Table 4.2, the media owe different kinds of responsibility to, and promote interests of six major groups of actors who have the legitimate power of influencing the media: (a) their owners, private or state/governmental; (b) clients from the world of the corporate capital, such as advertisers; (c) occupational groups employed in the media (e.g., associations of journalists); (d) media audiences; (e) civil society; and (f) policymakers and regulatory bodies. The relationship between the media and these actors differs in (a) the ways their influence on the media is regulated, (b) sources of legitimacy of their responsibility claims addressed to the media, and (c) (dis)empowerment of actors to influence the media. It is a poor consolation to admit that empirical studies of “national public spheres” are burdened with the same kind of difficulties, perhaps to a lesser degree. Tönnies’ (1922: 504–569) rather descriptive empirical account of “special cases of public opinion” in Germany, France, England, Russia, and “other countries” before and after World War I is a clear example of how difficult, if not impossible, it is to translate complex normative-theoretical constructs into “empirical characteristics.” Indeed, as Habermas (1992: 455) suggested, “considerable empirical research” is needed to “critically screen” complex relations constituting a public sphere. Otherwise, past fallacies in public opinion research of the kind we can find, for example, in the suggestion that “public opinion” should be scientifically operationalized as “group attitudes” (Newcomb, 1950) or just ostensively defined as “public opinion polls” (Osborne and Rose, 1999), can be easily repeated in public sphere research.

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REBIRTH OF THE PUBLIC? In his 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies compared two ideal types and historical (st)ages of society—(the age of) community [Gemeinschaft] versus that of society [Gesellschaft]—in terms of dominant forms of social life and social will. Three complex “life = will” forms are characteristic of society [Gesellschaft]: 1.

2. 3.

City life = convention. This is determined by the individual human being with all his aspirations. Its proper subject is the society in general. National life = politics. This is determined by human being’s collective calculations. Its proper subject is the State. Cosmopolitan life = opinion of the public. This is determined by human consciousness. Its proper subject is the republic of the learned. (Tönnies, 1887/1991: 216)

According to Tönnies’ conceptualization of historical transformations, the cosmopolitan life beyond the borders of nation states promoted through opinions formed and publicly expressed by cosmopolitan communions should be a major feature of the most developed form of society. By its very nature, opinion of the public formed by its “proper subject, the republic of the learned,” is borderless; it was “only” temporarily—from its beginnings in the 18th century to the beginning of the 21st century—fettered by the nation state. For two centuries, public opinion theories conceptualized the essential “corporeal entity” of publicness or its “proper subject” as the (national) public. Even if the concept of public opinion dominated over that of the public for quite some time, the latter was conceived of as the founder of the former, as in Bentham’s concept of the “public opinion tribunal” or Tönnies’ “opinion of the public,” until the concept of public opinion was reduced to that of polling. The progressive eradication of the public intensified after the concept of “public sphere” was brought into the field. Although the dominance of the new—public sphere—concept seems to be matching the processes of globalization and (global) governance, in which both the nation state and (national) public are losing their historically acquired positions, a closer look reveals that the opposite may be the case. In other words, it may be that the cosmopolitan Tönnies was right. Transnationalization or even globalization of governance needs democratic legitimacy because the existing forms of regulation of transnational transactions are lacking in participation by people they affect. Processes of denationalization and depoliticization challenge the power of national governments and their role in international relations primarily through the loss of state capacities for control and the loss of public trust into the legitimacy of decision-making processes. The double loss points to the disempowerment of the nation state that is accompanied by two additional conduits of disempowerment affecting civil society and public

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opinion. The fusion of public and nonpublic decision-making bodies and the dispersion of authority brought about by global governance make the separation of civil society and the state dangerously permeable. At the same time, transnationalization eradicates the power of national public opinion because it deprives the national public of its natural addressee—the nation state. The establishment of effective transnational decision-making powers, their “return” to the public sphere to legitimize their decisions, and accountability to effective (trans)national public(s) are required to overcome this triple disempowerment of the state, civil society, and public opinion. Such responses to the challenges of globalization could hardly “imitate” the historical forms of empowerment of territorially defined nation states known from the previous centuries. The main reason for this is the increasing temporariness of future membership in territorially defined political entities, which is likely to promote the importance of nonterritorial associations and communions with long-term membership as the dominant form of social organization. The public could be thought of as a typical representative of this changing paradigm. One can think of a kind of “internationalization” of national publics or even transnational publics, which would fulfill the empirical conditions defined by Dewey and the liberating mission envisioned by Masuda. We should not forget that already a century ago Tönnies argued that “the formation of nation states is but a temporary limitation of the borderless society,” which he expected to appear in the future. However, it is less likely that a genuine global public will ever exist, comprising all those affected by transactions with “global consequences” and enabled to participate, with no restriction, in a global discursive will formation. This may seem to give, in the perspective of global governance, preferentiality to the concept of the public sphere over that of the public. Yet focusing on the (either national or transnational) public sphere in isolation from the public/s is problematical for two reasons. First, and generally, there is no public sphere without a public. The public sphere should be understood in relation to democratic citizenship as the space for the spreading out of civil society (i.e., actors constituting publics), according to the communicative principle of publicness. Second, and more specifically, deterritorialized groupings such as publics are becoming particularly important in the process of globalization. Masuda’s global spirit substantiating the need for a transnational public sphere cannot emerge out of the “sphere”; the publics are needed in which the global spirit can develop. A caveat is needed here. As long as Levitt’s deterministic concept of globalization—a tendency of convergence in which everything becomes more like everything else, all differences are erased, and needs and desires are homogenized—will prevail over Masuda’s spirit of globalism as a “spaceship thought,” the realization of the idea of a transnational public sphere is endangered. Although the concept of “the public” is not immune to “administrative” revisions, as I demonstrated in chapter 1, the concept of “the public sphere” is increasingly becoming the “dominant tool” in the service of minimizing the role of the public.

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Instead of the dialectics of (discursive) relationship between the public(s) and other actors—particularly the state and other power actors—appearing in the public sphere in front of it (or them), the concept “the public sphere” suggests the admirable impassive role of actors without specific names. If the public sphere is simply conceived of as an open communication forum used by all those wanting something to say or hear what others say, it blurs the distinction between the conceptualization of the public sphere as a democratic-emancipatory category and the opposing conceptualization that associates the public sphere with the perspective of governance (i.e., as an instrumental resource for the professionalized planning and decision making). The conceptual eclipse of the public is closely related to the experiential decline of the nation-state power in the contemporary process of globalization, in which the state is not only losing the exclusive capacity of sovereign regulatory power but also its democratic integrative role in promoting political equality and engagement, and fostering social solidarity. Instead, to optimize its position in the global “market,” the state is pragmatically oriented toward establishing cost-effective public–private partnerships and networks in the realm of new modes of global governance. The emptiness of the concept “public sphere” is reflected in the flood of derivatives, such as “democratic public sphere” and “online, “electronic,” or “networked public sphere.” The perplexity is perhaps best indicated by the wide circulation of the bizarre idea of a “democratic public sphere” in both scholarly and popular discourses, which implicitly suggests that, in addition to a democratic public sphere, a “nondemocratic” public sphere—a contradictio in adjecto—could exist, too. A search for “democratic public sphere” recently provided about 146,000 results in Google and 2,700 results in Google Scholar. Indeed, Google also found three results for “undemocratic public sphere” and one for “nondemocratic public sphere.”13 Despite the fact that the “undemocratic” public sphere is connected with the revised concepts of promotional and disciplinary publicity14 discussed in chapter 2, in contrast to the genuine idea of publicness, attributing (un)democraticness to the public sphere is an attempt similar to differentiating between democratic and undemocratic—democracy. Nevertheless, despite all the challenges and “compromising” processes the public sphere is facing, there is no substitute for it in either national or transnational democratic constellations. Improving our capacity to articulate the ideas about the public sphere will help to make it more relevant for democratic processes, which is vital in order to deal better with the transnational consequences of transactions both locally and globally. This includes, in particular, a clear conceptualization of the difference and relationship between the transnational public sphere and its publics. It may well be that “the missing [European] public is a desirable element of the process of European integration” (de Beus, 2002: 8)15 because “strong” publics could impede that process. Indeed, even the formation of nation states in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism was not the consequence of (communicative) actions taken by (crypto-)national publics because they were

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largely established only after the national integration had been achieved. However, another question is whether the missing transnational public is a necessary condition for a transnational integration to be accomplished to the point of irreversibility because an existing European public would likely put the process of integration in danger. There is a substantial difference between the political integration based on territorially defined ethnos and the emergence of a national (political) public within its borders, on the one hand, and the formation of an inter- or transnational integration, which is not based on ethnos even if it is still mostly a territorially defined entity, on the other hand. If we look for an emergent European public, for example, we should not focus on the level of a pan-European society beyond national borders but on the deterritorialized forms of political life within and across nation states. This means that transnational publics are not formed to match some territorially defined borders (e.g., within the EU) but rather as a negation of territorially defined (national) borders. As I argued earlier, globalized governance has removed both the public and the ethnos as the “natural” foundation and frame of democratic processes altogether. Only (trans)national public(s) can link up global governance and deliberative democracy in the transnational public sphere. A decentralized and diffuse cosmopolitan system of governance with no central power should be supported by a transnational public sphere as an arena for public debates and a medium of social integration that fosters solidarity, which can only be created by (trans)national public(s). New communication technologies have made transnational communication channels easily accessible to all social actors, but this does not affect directly their competence and power to participate in deliberative and decision-making processes. Publicness is a rather weak form of influence and control compared with direct participation in decision making. Transnational as well as national publics—consisting of free and equal citizens participating in public reasoning sufficiently thoroughly and regularly to generate a sense of “imagined communion” with shared transnational identity—are needed for a genuine transnational public sphere to develop. By taking the constitutive role in the formation of the public sphere, (trans)national publics would strengthen the public sphere both nationally and transnationally. Without publics as the enduring creators of publicness and bearers of public opinion, transnational public spheres would remain wretched prostheses for the genuine spheres of publics. Tönnies’ idea of the republic of the learned as the proper subject of a cosmopolitan public (opinion) comprises a difficulty similar to Habermas’ model of the liberal bourgeois public. Tönnies has been criticized for blurring the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as stages in historical developments and abstract, transcendental categories. I do not find this criticism justified because the two categories are ideal types (“normal concepts” for Tönnies), which can be used in both the normative and analytical sense. The same holds true for his conceptualization of cosmopolitan public (opinion). As a sociological category, it may justly allude to forums dominated by élites. As a normative pos-

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tulate, it fits in with the Deweyan quest for affiliation of intellectuals with the masses to help them to participate in power—instead of being a means in the hands of the capitalist élite. This clearly points toward an important role of the media and universities, among others, in sustaining publics in the processes of globalized governance. Otherwise, with the public in eclipse, democracy is seriously endangered. As Aronowitz (1993: 76) once put it so wisely, “For if one could not presuppose, even in theory, the existence of a public capable of grasping both large (national and international) and local public issues, then the institutions of democracy were fated to wither.”

NOTES 1. Contrary to the idea of a postnational democracy, disapproval of multiculturalism is becoming widespread in contemporary political debates. In October 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced the failure of “multikulti,” which David Cameron followed in his first speech as British Prime Minister in February 2011. They both argued that their (and all European) countries needed to strengthen their national identities and encourage immigrants to assimilate by adopting the language and culture of the host countries, rather than to support interests of ethnic minorities that may conflict with the public/national interest and thus lead to the segregation of minorities. (See http://www.focus.de/politik/weitere-meldungen/merkel-multikultigesellschaft-ist-absolut-gescheitert_aid_562792.html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-politics-12371994.) However, they failed to see that public debate oriented toward self-reflexive understanding might lead to a more compact multi-cultural society than political struggles for power and regulatory policies aimed at assimilation of ethnic minorities. 2. In the 1990 English translation, “politische Öffentlichkeit” and “literarische Öffentlichkeit” are translated as “the public sphere in the political realm” and “the public sphere in the world of letters,” respectively, in contrast to “eine Öffentlichkeit,” which was translated as “one public.” Thus, the translation suggests that “the fiction of the one public” was brought about by the “self-interpretation of the public sphere,” as if the public sphere is capable of communicative action. It also wrongly suggests that although there is only one public, there are many (different) public spheres; quite the contrary to what Habermas proposes. The problem is, however, that Habermas uses three concepts common in German language—Öffentlichkeit, Publikum, and öffentliche Sphere—whose meanings partly overlap: Öffentlichkeit is not only an abstract concept (publicness; e.g., die Öffentlichkeit der öffentlichen Gewalt—the publicness of public authority) but also denotes two types of social phenomena—“the public” (as a social category consisting of “the bearers of publicness,” die Träger der Öffentlichkeit) and “the sphere of private people assembled as a public” (i.e., the public sphere). Discussing early institutions of publicness and their later changes, Habermas emphasizes that in the process, “verändert sich nicht nur die Träger der Öffentlichkeit, sondern diese selbst”—not only the bearers of publicness change but also (the nature of)

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publicness itself. The 1990 translation reads: “The public sphere itself was transformed,” thus omitting the duality “the public-publicness” and replacing it by the third concept, “the public sphere.” Referring to Habermas in this context is perhaps misleading. The interchangeability of the two concepts “the public” and “the public sphere,” in Habermas’ (1992) “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” may be partly also a slip caused by the translation of the term Öffentlichkeit. For example, Habermas (1962/1969: 8) explains why he marginalized the “plebeian public sphere” in his Structural Transformations, whereas in the preface to the original German edition of Structural Transformations, he spoke, in fact, of the beginnings of “the plebeian publicness” (die plebejische Öffentlichkeit), which differs both from the literary determined publicness of a public (literarisch bestimmte Öffentlichkeit eines Publikums) and plebiscitary-acclamatory form of the regulated publicness in the dictatorships of highly developed industrial societies (plebiszitär-akklamitive Form der reglementierten Öffentlichkeit industriegesellschaftlich hochentwickelter Diktaturen). Tönnies (1922: VII) considers public opinion one of the basic forms of the complex social will being established in “society” (Gesellschaft) and performs the role equivalent to that of religion in traditional “community” (Gemeinschaft). The difference between the two forms of complex social will is based on Tönnies’ reinterpretation of Kant’s (1781) hierarchy of modes of “holding-for-true” (Fürwahrhalten): opinion, belief, and knowledge. Kant considered opinion lower than faith because opinion is both subjectively and objectively insufficient, whereas belief is subjectively sufficient but lacks objectivity; only knowledge is sufficient on both accounts (Kant, 1781: 240–241). Tönnies, however, “rationalized” Kant’s opinion and defined it as “a matter of reason” in contrast to faith, which is, according to Tönnies, “a matter of heart,” so that opinion is closer to knowledge than faith on Tönnies’ scale, which is why faith is typical of Gemeinschaft, whereas opinion belongs to Gesellschaft in Tönnies’ famed typology of social structures. The point here is that opinion and, thus, public opinion are formed on the basis of certain rules and principles (i.e., knowledge [Lehre]), whereas belief and faith (religion) are not (Glaube). Killworth et al. (1990) estimated the total size of personal communications network to be between 1,000 and 2,000 before the explosion of social networks in the Internet; thus, the number might have significantly increased since then. “I have around 1k+ linkedin connections, 1k facebook friends, and over 4,300 twitter followers,” blogger J. Morgan reported on January 2010 while criticizing the “Dunbar’s number,” another estimate of the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships (no more than 150 “strong ties”). http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/169132 Habermas (1992: 438), in contrast, denotes his earlier critical judgment in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) that no resisting power and critical potential in mass public existedas “too pessimistic.” Westerman (2010) lists inclusiveness of different interests, explicitness of rules and roles, and abstraction of personal representation as the key functions to be cared for by the “official sphere.” Polling, in particular, conceptually replaced the public as the subject of public opinion with a dispersed mass or even any group composed of two or more communicating individuals. Public opinion was thus reduced to an aggregate of individual opinions. In contrast to neo-classical paradigms, the new conceptualization of public opin-

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Chapter 6 ion was liberated from any historical determination or normative assumption (see Splichal, 1999: 221–269). Gurevitch and Blumler (1990: 270) produced a more detailed list of normative functions that mass media should perform in a democratic political system: (a) surveillance of the sociopolitical environment, reporting developments likely to impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of citizens; (b) meaningful agenda setting, identifying key issues of the day, including the forces that have formed and may resolve them; (c) platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and spokespersons of other causes and interest groups; (d) dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power holders (actual and perspective) and mass publics; (e) mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised power; (f) incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved with, rather than merely follow and kibitz over the political process; (g) a principled resistance of the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert their independence, integrity, and ability to serve the audience; and (h) a sense of respect for the audience member as potentially concerned and able to make sense of his or her political environment. A 2008 comparative content analysis of reports related to the EU in 77 news media of 16 European countries revealed that almost 60% of all statements that journalists quoted in their reports were by politicians followed by journalists themselves, and all other actors were represented with less than one third of quotations. http://eurosphere.uib.no/consortium/index.htm The Eurobarometer survey series is a program of cross-national and cross-temporal comparative social research conducted on behalf of the EC and is designed to monitor social and political attitudes. Since the early 1970s, nationally representative samples in all EU (European Community) member countries are interviewed each spring and autumn. Eurobarometer data files and documentation are stored at the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research in Germany and at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research in Michigan. http://www.esds.ac.uk/International/access/eurobarometer.asp A promising (but very demanding) empirical approach is public claim-making analysis focused on the inclusiveness of social actors in public discourses (in the media and and elsewhere). The method “simulates” the genuine public opinion process in which diverse social actors (or “publics” for that matter) address purposeful political demands to decision-making institutions. Such “public claims” are typical communicative acts, a form of Deweyan quest for regulation of consequences, inherent in public opinion process. As per October 31, 2010.

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14. Guins (2008: 69) reports of “an undemocratic public sphere” emerging “where only contracted recording artists are capable of speech and can ‘represent.’ Here, ‘public’ becomes ‘publicity’.” 15. This seems to be the “official” opinion of the EC and the Presidency of the Council of EU. On April 21, 2010, the Presidency suggested that the demands EU citizens can make in petitions should be limited by bringing in tougher rules on the amount of personal data required to be given by people signing them and to authorize the Commission “to reject the registration of initiatives that are manifestly against the values of the Union” (which are largely determined by Eurocrats). http:// register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/10/st08/st08796.en10.pdf Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, argued similarly in his address to “Notre Europe” in Paris on September 20, 2010: “A Europe completely dependent on the permanent involvement of all the partners might fall apart. […] Shared interests, produced by the constraint of common rules and institutions, hold Europe together.” http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/116691.pdf

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Author Index

Adorno, T.W., 66, 130. 131, 231 Alexander, J.C., 171, 231 Allport, F.H., 76, 231 Althaus., S.L., 132, 231 Anderson, B., 14, 122, 231 Ang, I., 89, 231 Arato, A., 83, 84, 166, 231, 233 Arendt, H., 11, 13, 13(n3), 231 Aronowitz, S., 66, 88, 231 Balibar, É., 186, 231 Ball-Rokeach, S., 54, 238 Barber, B., 84, 85, 112, 157, 208, 231, 232 Barron, J.A., 95, 232 Bauer, H., 203, 232 Beaud, P., 197, 232 Beniger, J.R., 9, 232 Bensaude-Vincent, B., 37, 232 Bentham, J., 6, 8, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 53, 61, 71, 71(n6), 76, 77, 172, 232 Berger, P.L., 51, 232 Bernard, H.R., 204(n5), 238 Bernays, E.L., 75, 232 Binkley, R.C., 9, 232 Blumer, H., 74, 130, 131, 201, 232 Blumler, J.G., 101, 216(n9), 232, 236

Boggs, C., 111, 232 Bohman, J., 5, 12, 14, 88, 89, 107, 114, 115, 117, 118(n25), 146, 154, 156, 164, 179, 187, 189, 200, 204, 205, 232 Bourdieu, P., 10, 129, 132, 232 Bracher, K.D., 5(n2), 235 Brandeis, L.D., 25, 233, 243 Brecht, B., 108, 112, 233 Brenner, D.L., 93, 235 Brown, G.S., 37, 233 Brüggemann, M., 211, 233 Bryce, J., 128, 129, 198, 233 Bücher, K., 17, 115, 123, 212, 213, 233 Buckley, W., 25(n3), 233 Burawoy, M., 117, 233 Calhoun, C., 79, 80, 87, 111, 124, 150, 151, 203, 205, 233 Castells, M., 25(n3), 30, 91, 106, 107, 233 Centre for Civil Society, 84(n8), 233 Chaffee, S.H., 54, 233 Childs, H.L., 9, 75, 203, 233 Chisick, H., 70, 196, 197, 233 Chomsky, N., 216, 237 Cohen, J., 83, 84, 166, 231, 233 Coleman, J., 48, 233

245

246

Author Index

Converse, P.E., 48, 133, 233, 234 Cuilenburg, J. van, 93, 234 Dahlgren, P., 88, 106, 107, 164(n9), 234 Darnton, R., 130, 158, 212, 234 de Beus, J., 27, 224, 234 Dean, J., 37, 42, 88, 234 Dewey, J., 9, 18, 38, 40, 65, 72, 73, 74, 75, 113, 120, 136, 146, 170, 175, 176, 185, 195, 234 Donoghue, F., 125, 234 Downing, J., 199, 234 Dryzek, J.S., 5, 61, 62, 63, 135, 152, 154, 171, 201, 234 Eder, K., 155, 212, 234 Edwards, M., 85, 87, 234 Eley, G., 78, 197, 234 Engels, F., 82, 82(n7), 239 Entman, R.M., 215, 234 Erbe, J., 168, 211, 238 Eriksen, E.O., 78, 185, 205, 210, 234 European Charter of Active Citizenship, 162, 235 European Commission, 160, 234 Ferguson, A., 81, 82, 235 Festinger, L., 38, 235 Fish, S., 124, 235 Fossum, J.E., 185, 205, 210, 234 Foucault, M., 14, 15, 25(n3), 30, 30(n7), 31, 39, 235 Fowler, M.S., 93, 235 Fraenkel, E., 5(n2), 235 Fraser, N., 5, 56, 153, 169, 176, 177, 178, 197, 205, 235 Freud, S., 26, 39, 40, 235 Galbraith, J.K., 67, 235 Gamson, W.A., 5, 207, 239 Gandy, O.H., 215, 235 Gappul, G.H., 127, 130, 134, 235 Garnham, N., 15, 78, 87, 91, 156, 197, 218, 235, 236 Gerhards, J., 5, 193, 207, 211, 236, 239 Ginsberg, B., 9, 129, 236 Glossary of EU Jargon, 183, 236 Glynn, C.J., 48, 236 Golding, P., 156, 236

Gouldner, A.W., 41, 236 Gramsci, A., 83, 236 Gruening, E., 9, 236 Guins, R., 224(n14), 236 Guizot, F., 8, 210, 236 Gurevitch, M., 216(n9), 236 Habermas, J., 3(n1), 4, 5(n2), 16, 18, 29, 44, 54, 59, 65, 67, 67(n2), 68, 72, 75, 78, 80, 85, 91, 92, 95, 105, 106, 111, 124, 133, 146, 148, 149(n2), 153, 155, 157, 158, 158(n5), 193, 196, 196(n2), 197, 197(n3), 200, 202, 206, 207, 208, 209, 209(n6), 217, 220, 221, 236, 237 Halloran, J.D., 18(n4), 237 Hamelink, C., 210, 237 Hardt, M., 202, 237 Harrisson, T., 33, 213, 214, 220, 237 Hauser, G., 5, 237 Hegel, G.W.F., 27, 40, 150, 237 Herman, E.S., 216, 237 Hibbing, J.R., 207, 237 Hirst, P., 182, 237 Hoffman-Riem, W., 101. 232 Hohendahl, P.U., 120, 211, 237 Hooghe, L., 185, 237 Hyman, H.H., 10, 237 Ikegami, E., 195, 203, 237 Jansen, S.C., 32, 36, 38, 237 Jauert, P., 98, 237 Jaworski, A., 39, 41, 237 Jenkins, R., 179, 237 Jenks, J.W., 105, 237 Johnsen, E.C., 204(n5), 238 Jowett, G.S., 9, 237 Kaldor, M., 85, 237 Kant, I., 6, 7, 16, 23, 28, 44, 50, 82, 119, 199(n4), 238 Kantner, C., 212, 234 Kaufmann, L., 197, 232 Keane, J., 3, 63, 84, 238 Key, V.O., 9, 53 238 Killworth, P.D., 204(n5), 238 Kim, Y-C., 54, 238 Kleinsteuber, H.J., 66, 238 Kluge, A., 5, 197, 240

Author Index Knies, K., 37, 238 Koenig-Archibugi, M., 186(n17), 238 Koopmans, R., 168, 211, 238 Kouvelakis, S., 77, 238 Kumar, K., 81, 238 Kunelius, R., 68, 238 Kurtz, H., 215, 238 Kwak, N., 55, 238 Laclau, E., 31, 239 Lang, G., 39, 239 Lang, K., 39, 49, 239 Lazarsfeld, P.F., 129, 239 Le Bon, G., 122(n28), 239 Lee, H., 55, 238 Levitt, T., 181(n10), 239 Lippman, W., 9, 18, 49, 60, 62, 74, 92, 239 Livingstone, S., 88, 239 Locke, J., 36, 53, 239 Lowe, G.F., 98, 237 Luckmann, T., 51, 232 Luhmann, N., 70, 217, 239 Lyotard, J-F., 61, 239 MacBride Report, 94. 239 Machiavelli, N., 26, 28, 29, 239 Marcuse, H., 18, 239 Marks, G., 185, 237 Marx Ferree, M., 5, 207, 239 Marx, K., 43, 74, 77, 82, 82(n7), 125, 126, 239 Masuda, Y., 136, 137, 138, 240 Mayhew, L.H., 5, 9, 10, 114, 240 McCarty, C., 204(n5), 238 McChesney, R.W., 95, 215, 239, 240 McLeod, J.M., 48, 236 McQuail, D., 94, 95, 240 Mead, G.H., 29(n6), 58, 62, 200, 01, 240 Melucci, A., 215, 240 Meyer, C.O., 211, 240 Mill, J.S., 53, 55, 96, 172, 172(n10), 173, 179, 240 Mills, C.W., 16, 48, 89, 110, 166, 178, 240 Montesquieu, C. de S., 35, 36, 240 Mouffe, C., 5, 61, 62, 63, 240 Murdock, G., 156, 199, 236, 240 Nagel, T., 28, 28(n5), 29(n6), 240 Negri, A., 202, 237

247

Negt, O., 5, 197, 240 Newcomb, T.M., 10, 221, 240 Nichols, J., 215, 240 Nielsen, H.K., 184, 240 Noelle-Neumann, E., 33, 38, 49, 50, 53, 240 O’Donnell, V., 9, 237 Osborne, T., 10, 129, 132, 133, 221, 240 Ozouf, M., 9, 70, 240 Park, R.E., 39, 50, 58, 74, 180, 240 Peters, B., 12, 66, 116, 179, 218, 219, 241 Peters, J.D., 30, 241 Pinter, A., 121, 241 Plato, 35, 241 Pred, A., 74, 241 Rae, S.F., 127, 235 Rawls, J., 5, 12, 59, 60, 241 Riley, C.M., 115 241 Rogers, L., 129, 241 Rose, N., 10, 129, 132, 133, 221, 240 Ross, E.A., 52, 53, 74, 241 Rossiter, N., 154, 241 Rousseau, J-J., 36, 241 Rucht, D., 5, 207, 239 Rumford, C., 152, 194, 241 Sanders, L.M., 143, 241 Scannell, P., 98, 101(n13), 241 Schauer, F., 33, 241 Schmidt, M., 105, 124, 242 Schmitt, C., 128, 241 Schudson, M., 115, 241 Scott, B., 115, 241 Shelley, G.A., 204(n5), 238 Shotter, J., 157, 241 Simmel, G., 25, 241 Slevin, J.,114, 241 Soley, L., 34, 241 Sparks, C., 68, 238 Splichal, S., 17, 38, 47, 49, 60, 69(n4), 71(n5),76, 78, 121, 130, 166, 177, 208, 211(n8), 242 Statham, P., 211, 238 Strydom, P., 68(n3), 242 Sumner, C., 51, 242 Swenson, D., 105, 124, 242

248

Author Index

Tarde, G., 28, 56, 57, 61, 69(n4), 71, 107, 121, 122, 123, 173, 175, 196, 203, 218, 242 Theiss-Morse, E., 207, 237 Thompson, J.B., 5, 29, 43, 114, 242 Tocqueville, A. de, 70, 82, 242 Tönnies, F., 4, 14, 38, 38(n8), 51, 57, 60, 70, 71(n6), 72, 75, 118, 127, 164, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 178, 198, 199(n4), 213, 214, 221, 222, 242 UNESCO, 97-98, 117, 118, 242 van de Steeg, M., 212, 242 Van Noije, L., 218, 243 Verstraeten, H., 67, 243

Wang, X., 55, 238 Warner, M., 5, 130(n30), 243 Warren, S.D., 25, 243 Westerman, P.C., 108, 211, 211(n7), 243 Whitehead, L., 86, 243 Williams, A.E., 55, 238 Williams, R., 19, 91, 99(t), 181(n12), 243 Wilson, F.G., 49, 50, 129, 203, 220, 243 Wirth, L., 58, 243 Zaller, J.R., 9, 243 Zolo, D., 5, 243 Zürn, M., 171, 243

Subject Index

Access to the public sphere 13, 40, 45, 67, 78, 91, 163-167, 170, 180, 188, 201, 202, 211 Accountability in the public sphere 56, 156, 167, 179, 223 Addressee/s of actions in the public sphere 195 of communication 57, 177, 178 of the media 180 of public opinion 80, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155, 170, 223 of purposive influence 12 vs. speakers 106 Advertising 9, 10, 13, 25, 38, 43, 95, 96, 104, 105, 123, 209, 213, 215, 216, 221 Agenda setting 280, 207, 212, 217, 228 Agonistic public sphere 5, 43, 47, 63, 202 Anonymity 67, 204 Attention 12, 25, 26, 27, 41-43, 50, 95 Audience 16, 25, 27, 41, 54, 79, 88-97, 100103, 106, 108-115, 120, 155, 165, 169, 207, 215, 217, 221, 228, Autonomy of bourgeois class 84 of civil society 10, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 126 of media 37, 97, 104, 124 personal 14, 44, 107, 110, 200

of the public 16, 178 of public sphere 87, 155 of university 119, 126 Blogging 106, 111, 112, 151 Bourgeois class 4, 69, 84, 128, 164, 198 Bourgeois public/sphere 4, 5, 82-84, 100, 118, 122, 164, 194, 197, 225 Bourgeois society 13, 82, 83, 139, 196 Bourgeoisie 81, 82, 196 Broadcasting 68, 91-105, 139, see also Public service broadcasting Capital 38, 67, 80, 85, 86, 90, 91, 102, 157, 178, 221 Capitalism 66, 67, 82-84, 115, 125, 126, 152, 224 Censorship 6, 23-45, 78, 97, 99, 110, 118, 119, 122, 124, 154, 158, 163, 214,; Census 35 Citizenship 35, 157 cyber-citizenship 110 and ethnos 186 multiple 168 and nation-state 194 and (non-)territorial units 107, 148, 153, 154

249

250

Subject Index

and public sphere 109, 150, 162, 194, 223 and publicness 7 Civil rights 36; see also human rights CMC—computer mediated communication 116, 178 Coercion 74 and governance 183 of public opinion 53, 127 Commercialization and the Internet 110 of media 44, 73, 91, 95, 98, 100, 126, 127, 214 of publicity 64, 68, 76 Commodification of the press 123 Common will 51 Communicative power 84, 166 Conformity 31, 33, 52, 53, 73 Consensus 58-63, 87, 93, 109, 129, 136, 179, 201, 220 Conversation, democratic 115 Cosmopolitan public/sphere 107, 130, 135, 165, 168, 170, 222, 225 ‘Counter-public sphere’ 5, 200 ‘Counterpublics’ 203, 219 Crypto-public sphere 164, 165, 186. 194, 197, 200, 224 Deliberation 12, 27, 43, 60-62, 85, 104, 107, 123, 163, 178, 200 and accountability 182, 185 and control 164, 206 and decision making 169, 176, 206, 210, 225 function of (Habermas) 206 and global governance 154, 187 and public opinion 170, 204, 216 and ‘stealth demiocracy’ 207 transnational 158, 163, 187, 217 and ‘weak publics’ 205 Deliberative democracy 58, 152, 188, 225 Deliberative politics 16, 206 Deliberative polls 21, 134 Deliberative publicness 210 ‘Democratic deficit’ 152, 153, 157, 162, 163, 186, 188, 190, 193 Demos 122, 153, 177, 182, 186 Depoliticization 152, 182, 186, 222 and accountability 182

of public opinion 10 Digital divide 109 Digital media 121; see also New media Digital technologies 87 Dissent 52, 98, 110, 11 Economy, capitalist 82, 83, 115 Editors 19, 34, 69, 77, 80, 97, 214, 215 Education 15, 18, 73, 94, 96, 178 accesss to 18 alienation of 120 civic 161 in criticial thinking 126 of Internet users 109 research in 122 appropriate system of 166 teaching personnel 117-8 university 122, 140 Election 128, 171, 206 campaigns 128 European parliamentary 154 and polls 133-135 Engagement civic 54, 87, 108, 136, 147, 157, 188, 208 disursive 4, 120, 159, 186 and ICT 108 political 162, 224 in public sphere 55, 79, 160, 207 Entertainment 54, 98 Ethics 4, 13, 14, 74, 94, 99, 103, 116 Ethnos, 122, 175, 186, 187, 225 EU accountability 162 web sites 161 Eurobarometer 151, 220, 228 European Constitution 160, 162, 190 Europeanization of the public sphere 116, 149-151, 168169, 193-229 Equality 156 of citizens 77, 171, 186, 210 in communication 110 illusion of 112 political 224 and public service 93 in the public sphere 163 in resources 112 respect for 167

Subject Index Fragmentation of authority 185 and the Internet 111-113 in newspapers 98 of the public/sphere 108, 116, 179, 200, 201, 220 Framing theory 125 Free market fraud (Galbraith) 67 Free marketplace of ideas 37, 83 Gate-keeping 80, 212 General will 35, 48, 71, 128 Global governance 20; see also Globalization; Governance and accountability 123, 152, 154, 184 age of 76, 169 and decision making 148, 223 depoliticization in 182 and lack of democracy 123, 154, 155, 186, 188 vs. national government 126 and NGOs 184 and public deliberation 187 and public sphere 223-225 stakeholders in 183, 184 and university 125 Globalism, spirit of 138, 223 Globalization 181, 182 age of 6, 123, 169, 171 and citizen rights 181 and democracy 116, 152, 181 economic 113, 149 and governance 20, 152, 182, 207, 222 and languages 180 political 181 and polling 130 and public sphere 130, 176, 186, 211 and publicity 179 and the state 90, 156, 188, 223, 224 and technology 116, 137, 146 and territory 148, 223 Governance 182, 207, 222; see also Global governance accountability in 152 actors in, 183 cosmopolitan 154 and decision making 183 and democracy 6, 63, 152

251

global, see Global governance vs. government 182, 183, 185 inequality in 154 and the media 97 multilevel 185 and polling 134 and the public 20, 185 and public opinion 177 and public sphere 224 and publicness 6 Human rights 36, 93, 94, 98 Hybridization of the public sphere 88, 164, 168, 169, 196, 216 Identity 201 collective 14, 150, 195, 195, 219 cultural 150, 218 and European public 195 national 201 political (in EU) 195 and solidarity 14 transnational 225 Ideology 78, 194, 215, 216 Imitation 114 in conceptualizing transnational public sphere 149, 150, 154, 176 in Tarde’s theory 56-57, 89 Inequality, see equality Information, access to 161, 166, 167 Information subsidies 80, 214, 215 Intellectuals 36, 49, 80, 174, 198, 226 Interactionism 51, 59 Internet 19, 20, 26, 45, 89, 96, 97, 106-116, 124, 137, 149, 151, 161, 164, 170, 178, 219, 227 Journalism 15, 50, 104, 112, 113, 123, 173, 209 Journalists 9, 69, 80, 97, 102, 103, 105, 112, 155, 209, 216-8, 221 Judiciary 80 Knowledge 136, 167, 180, 219 and access to the public sphere 13, 73 aspiration for 198 experts 116 and opinion 43, 199, 227 and power 202

252

Subject Index

public 117 and universities 118-126 Language appropriateness of 59 common 201, 202 competence 180 as communication medium 179 differences 180 European 151, 211 ‘international’ 180 majority 28 and nationality 172, 173, 179, 202 ‘official’ 180 and ‘primary reciprocity’ (Park) 180 and public opinion 70, 178, 179 specificities of 39 translation 202 Legitimacy and accountability 185 and censorship 37 of decision making 146, 194, 222 in global governance 123, 152, 154, 181, 184, 185, 187, 222 of influence 209 and mass media 102, 116, 221 and national language 173 and power 62, 87, 102, 118, 127 of private interests 77 procedural 62 and public opinion 56, 127, 172, 177 and publicness 71 and rationality 62 and representative democracy 104, 153 of rules of public discourse 34 of social order 155 sources of 102, 103, 221 Literacy 81 Lobbys 54, 80, 148, 184 Majority ‘ascertaining the will of’ 127, 128 vs. consensus 61 and mediocracy 18 vs. minority 74 opinions of 73, 74 and public opinion 13, 70, 129 rule of 136, 154

‘tyranny of’ 35 Manipulation commercial 24 of masses 75 by the media 213 and political professionalization 210 in public opinion 50, 127, 209 in the public sphere 220 Manipulative publicity 13, 24, 27, 67, 80, 112, 153, 164 Market economy 83, 123, 126 Mass media 32, 79, 96 access to 15, 33, 40, 79, 80, 86, 90, 94, 99, 101, 137, 164, 166, 167, 171, 187, 216, 217 and civil society 86 control of 86 commercial(ized) 37, 86, 189 and democracy 116, 124 development of 89 and the European public sphere 217 European-wide 168 and global governance 154, 183 and hegemonic visibility 114 imitative nature of 114 and the Internet 110, 113, 115 and mass society 110 national 217 normative functions of 228 oligopolized 26, 219 owners of 80 and public opinion 12, 209, 217, 220 and public service 94, 95; see also Public service broadcasting/media and public sphere 18, 90, 91, 96, 97, 159, 212, 216, 218, 221 regulation of 96, 181 responsibility of 103 traditional 107, 110, 114, 115, 116 transnational 219 and university 124 National public sphere 122, 146-152, 169, 187, 188, 195, 218, 219 Nation-state 148, 149, 153, 155, 163, 168. 194, 211, 212, 224 New media 19, 26, 89, 97, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 151, 178, 217

Subject Index ‘New publicity’ 5, 42, 43, 44, 80 News and advertising 104 coverage 161, 218 ‘filters’ 216 vs. information 94 interpreting 56, 121 media 95, 217 and opinions 122, 155 organizations 105 programs 116 and publicity 96 reporting 41, 54, 95, 215 stories 114 transnational 180 watching 179 Newspaper subsidies 105 Nongovernmental organizations 183, 186 Offline debates 115 Online communities 108 Online debates 115, 161 Online newspapers 104 Online polls 133 ‘Online public sphere’ 5, 107, 116, 177, 190, 224 Ortho-public sphere 135, 163, 165, 166, 168, 200 Panopticon (Bentham) 8, 30, 52 Persuasion 25, 40, 148, 120, 214 manipulative 148 and public opinion 73 and publicity 9, 20, 55 Political parties 54, 58, 60, 80, 83, 84, 86, 97, 100, 107, 135, 150, 208, 212, 213, 220 Polls 20, 63, 127-135 anonymity in 204 ‘creating public opinion’ 132-3 deliberative 21 and democracy 127-135 and elections 134 and globalization 130 invention of 9, 130 and ‘mass observation’ (Harrisson) 214 vs. public opinion 10, 48, 56, 64, 75, 76, 123, 127-135, 204, 213, 221, 222 vs. public opinion research 131-2

253

and publicness 19, 63 Principle of publicness 6, 10-13, 24, 25, 33, 65, 71, 74, 76, 81, 94, 101, 116-121, 166, 172, 183, 193, 197, 210, 223 Privacy and accountability 25 intrusion of 24, 25 and promotional publicity 26 and publicness 6, 12 right of 24 and secrecy 26 vs. visibility 30 Propaganda 10, 18, 19, 25, 33, 38, 75, 99, 136, 177, 214-216 Proto-public sphere 117, 140, 164, 165, 186, 190 Pseudo-public sphere 164-167, 169, 200, 216 Public discourse accountability in 27, 187, 189 and collective identity 14 control of 80, 86, 210 exclusion from 205 limitations of 62 and mass media 217 norms of 34, 36, 112 participation in 27, 89, 107, 154, 170, 187, 201 and power 197 and public opinion 57 and public sphere 90, 201, 215, 217 qualities of 56 social integration through 13, 79, 91, 159 Public events 100 Public justice (Kant) 7, 8, 50, 126 Public opinion polls, see Polls Public service broadcasting 92, 101 accountability of 98 access to 101 commercial pressures to 98 definitions of 101 and newspapers 105 regulation of 97 Unesco definition of 97-8 Public service media 63, 103; see also Public service broadcasting vs. commercial media 90, 92, 102

254

Subject Index

normative concept of 91, 98, 102 obligations of 92, 104 and the principle of publicness 101, 105 and the public 97 and the public sphere 105, 106 regulation of 96, 104 Public use of reason 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 43, 55, 80 and mass media 91, 99, 208 and the public sphere 79, 159, 166, 167, 179 and publicity 27, 68 and the Right to communicate 167 in universities 117, 126 Publicity, manipulative; see Manipulative publicity Publicness; see Principle of publicness Publicness, representative; see Representative publicness Rationality argumentative 120, 186 autonomous 8 vs. censorship 6 communicative 49, 60, 62, 63, 154, 165 and consensus 61 and control 51, 52 and democracy 63 of discourse 50, 57, 211 instrumental 49, 154 and power 62, 197, 202 of public opinion 49, 50, 197 principle of 14, 54 Reason, public use of; see Public use of reason Reflexivity of acting 90, 115, 195 critical 204 discursive 20, 167 of public opinion 10, 220 of publicness 20, 47, 102, 137, 212 of reasoning 113, 166 scarcity of 195 Representative publicness 11, 33, 147, 163, 167 Republic of the learned 72, 140, 151, 174, 222, 225 Right to communicate 7, 13, 17, 69, 92, 94, 98, 99, 100, 114, 130, 136, 156, 166, 167

‘Self-censorship’ 38 Silence 33, 39-41, 49 Social control 48-51, 53, 54, 200 Social movements 85, 107, 139, 206 Social will 14, 38, 51, 116, 174, 222 public opinion as a form of 118, 173, 174 Solidarity 110, 113, 146, 154, 179, 205, 224, 225 Sovereignty and civil society 86 moral 7 of multitude 128 of people 84 of power 41, 149, 170 and public opinion 70 of the state 153, 171, 224 supranational 202, 205 Spiral of silence 33, 49 ‘Strong public’ 60, 169, 178, 205, 210, 224 ‘Strong public sphere’ 178, 208, 211 Surveillance 20 and censorship 34 and civil society 112, 113 in global governance 186 hidden 52 and the Internet 113-115 over elites 23 and power 30 by the press 8, 67, 73 by public/opinion 7, 8, 50, 69, 71, 207, 210, 211, 216 by publicness 6, 8, 52, 104, 166, 167 and representative publicness 147 by the state 104, 185 resistance to 30 two forms of 30 and visibility 24, 30, 31, 33, 43, 217 Symbolic interactionism; see Interactionism Television 20, 68 changing the nature of publicness 102 commercial 68, 98 and democracy 107 and ‘new media’ 89, 108 and ‘new publicity’ 5 news 116 programs 219

Subject Index and public events 100 public service; see Public service broadcasting and the public sphere 96, 159 viewers 101 UNESCO 97, 117, 118 University 63, 100, 105, 117-126 access to 118 Utilitarianism 8, 52 Visibility 23-45, 196 and censorship 23, 29, 30 disciplinary 25, 31, 33, 42, 158 discursive 13, 28, 29, 43, 50, 217 forms of 24, 30, 31, 43, 44 of hate speech 114 hegemonic 24, 50, 114

255

instrumental 29, 31, 42 medited 20, 29, 212 ‘new’ 43, 80, 114 and power 30 promotional 25, 31 and publicness 3, 11,13, 15, 19, 33, 47, 102, 137, 167, 212 and surveillance 23, 34 Voting 54, 154, 197, 206 machines 104, 128, 129 Watchdog (mass media) 6, 8, 104, 112, 113, 211 Workers 86, 96, 197 Working class 139, 198, Writing 57, 119 and the Internet 107