Thank you very much for these very welcoming and nice words, I'm very pleased to be here
and I thank Irene specifically.
We go back a very long time, I might say until school times, which we spent in the same school
in Vienna and now I'm very honoured to be invited here because I actually come from
a different field.
I come from discourse studies and of course here you are all involved in media and communication
studies and what I'm interested in and what I hope to be able to show is how these fields
might support each other or complement each other or where there are possible synergies.
First I would like to ask if everybody has a handout, they were distributed outside or
when you came in, I will need it later on, you don't need to look through it right now.
As I was told that time is short, I will skip all kinds of anecdotes in the beginning and
so forth, although I know that everybody is tired, it's the end of the conference and
so forth, so I would just like to say what I want to do in the short time available.
I would like to present a multi-level qualitative longitudinal approach to the analysis of the
European public sphere.
I'm aware that there is a lot of different studies in this area and I will try to show
how we distinguish ourselves or how we overlap.
I would specifically like to emphasize the necessity of multidisciplinary research.
Thus what I will be talking about today is actually an intersection of critical discourse
analysis which Irene already mentioned, communication studies, media research, history, specifically
conceptual history or what is in German called bikrifsgeschichte and political sociology.
And thirdly I would like to illustrate the internal heterogeneity and diversity of the
European public sphere as an object of research.
So let me start with a few images of European public spheres of different kinds because
one thing I would also like to emphasize today is the notion of genre, the different
kinds of how we talk and how we discuss in various publics.
Now this is a very famous picture, the signing of the Treaty of Rome in a wonderful setting
in Rome and what we see here is of course if you're interested in gender there are only
men and they're also all, if you're interested in the front stage of politics which I study
a lot you also see that they're dressed in very similar ways and this is one of those
typical familian photos, the family photos of the European family which we see in changing
ways throughout the history of the European Union.
Quite an interesting story accompanies this signing of the treaty which I don't know if
you know, actually the Italians hadn't finished printing the treaty so what the people actually
signed was there was nothing in between the covers except the sheet for the signatures
and the treaty was put in later on which is quite an interesting anecdote for the start
of the EU and maybe tells us something about Italy but I don't want to go on about this.
The second image is a very different genre, this is the virtual public sphere and I don't
know who of you had ever looked at the website and discussion forum Europa which I studied
with the political scientist Scott Wright from UEA but this forum was constructed by
the Commission to allow for more debate and for participation so that topics which were
of concern for European citizens could be debated.
Interestingly as we found out the Commission established this with a lot of money, it was
also moderated and so forth, it had millions of hits but they never looked at it after
they had established it and then about 2005 they closed it down so actually one of the
possible virtual public spheres was constructed, was used a lot but not really taken into account
by the Commission and one could ask why but this is not the topic of my talk.
And the third genre, another European public sphere, you might all recognize this picture
of one of the demonstrations that was London against the Iraq war in February 2003, you
will certainly remember that there were demonstrations all over the world in many capital cities
against the war in Iraq and here we have a transnational but also local public sphere
and of course we have the civil society, so we have a very different genre, we have a very different
space, we have very different discourses and texts which dominate this kind of public sphere
in contrast to the much more formal setting which I showed first on front stage and the virtual
public sphere. So what we are confronted with is very different genres in very different spaces,
some of them transnational, some of them very local, some of them connected intertextuality
intertextually and some of them isolated. Here this is just to show you that of course we are
aware of the various approaches in media studies and communication studies and political science
all sort of taking Habermas as a point of departure and the notion of debilleration
and so forth, some of them structural, some of them processual. We also draw all these studies
into account but what really embraces all of them is that they are quantitative and based on
content analysis basically as the most important mode and methodology to study the European public
sphere and most of them also study media and print media and so they don't study radio broadcasts,
they don't study conversations, they rarely study political speeches and so forth and so forth,
all the different genres. So what we know usually and I don't want to generalize, I'm just saying
that is usually the case, are results from media analysis, print media, usually only the quality
media, not the tabloids or rarely the tabloids and no other channels, no multimodality, rarely the
television, rarely the internet and so forth or they are very specific singular studies which are
not related to these other genres. If we look at the levels of public sphere and I would like to
quote a study, recent study by Carlo Ruzza who's an Italian political scientist working on social
movements who I find has distinguished in very interesting ways the levels of the public sphere
because we have to ask ourselves who is involved, who are the actors and we have the various contexts,
we have the genres but whose voices are heard or to make it even more explicit who's included
and who's excluded, who talks with whom and how. So we are not only interested that that talk happens
but how it happens to whom and with what effect, taking the speech act theory further.
So Carlo distinguishes between the state of course the level of control and execution of
administration, now I'm going to try this. Then we have politics as an intermediate level between
the state and the social, the people where there's a lot of competition for hegemony and for the
control of the state. Then we have the civil society which is closer to the interest of the
people and again sort of intermediates between politics and the social, the social being the
citizens and then we have something which he calls the uncivil society or the fake civil society
which is not guided by the principal values of common good and social solidarity.
This is again taking Habammas as a point of departure so those who are believing in democracy,
who are deliberating, who are discussing, those are part of a specific public sphere and then we
have others who are not taking this into account and here he implies the right-wing populist parties
or however we would like to call them. Now I think this is a very difficult model and I cannot
really discuss this in detail today, I think all of them belong to the European public sphere,
it would be difficult not to include 27% of the Viennese population who just voted for the extreme
right into sort of the European public and the voices and I think we have to distinguish between
a range of different voices, different debates, different discourses and different modes of
argument and I will come back to argumentation a bit later and to take the topic of inclusion and
exclusion further we also what is important in the if we discuss the vectors of the European public
sphere we also have to think about not only who's included like migrants are they included or not,
who is a citizen, who's regarded as a citizen but how are these concentric circles constructed
and who can penetrate those and what is demanded of people to come into this European public sphere
citizenship, various Schengen agreements and so forth and so forth so we have in the European
public sphere we have several vertical levels, we have concentric levels going from the local to
the global and the national and transnational and we have different kinds of voices and obviously
not everybody will be talking to everybody so we have different nexus of discourses which come
together and I take this notion of nexus from Ron and Susie Scollon who developed this in
very intricate ways, it's a bit different from the nodes of Laclau and Muftfel who have never
actually dealt with concrete discourses if I may say so but with very abstract levels of discourse
so branching out from all this as a point of departure I would just like to put some
hypothesis into the foreground first of all that there are multiple tensions and contradictions
between different public spaces and public spheres like I mentioned elite versus grassroots, EU versus
the geographical territory of Europe, majorities versus minorities, real Austrians versus migrants
and so forth and these tensions and contradictions are brought to the fore, are enacted in various
ways in these different public spheres either by negotiation, this would be the Habamasian
sort of tradition that people actually discuss and deliberate and we have validity claims and so
forth or by means of agonistic struggle there is struggle about hegemony or they're not in touch
at all that what is usually called paralel gesellschaften here, I think we have a lot of
these parallel societies of different kinds not only what is usually meant by this term which
means migrants and and the real citizens of a nation state and the main social political
and economic crisis and this is my third hypothesis are the main points of reference
for these different modes of either negotiation or struggle for various ideas, beliefs, ideologies,
programs and so forth and why crisis I will come to this in a minute because
crisis are those points in history where things are getting thematized which are otherwise taken
for granted so we think sort of open up and are renegotiated with possible alternatives turning up
and leading from these sort of more general three hypotheses I have others sort of sub claims
that the European public sphere or I would rather like to use the plural yeah because we're
confronted with many public spheres are crisis dependent because then we have different
alignments and different sort of struggles happening they are globalized sometimes like
the demonstrations of Iraq or the fight against poverty or we have these grand happenings
which cross over the globe usually they're globalized that means something national or
transnational happens in a very local spot and we have a coming together of local traditions
with national or transnational discourses there they are virtual more and more yeah we all know
about youtube facebook and so forth there are multi-generic and multimodal that means we have
images text gestures all the modes of semiosis as we call it of meaning making it's not only
written text we have a fragmentation sometimes they don't talk to each other and we have the huge
leitung to shedung as lumen would call it between inclusion and exclusion so all of these
uh factors are decisive and salient for the definition of public spheres
so now i would quickly like to tell you about the project which irene already mentioned
the acronym is immediate media and ethics of the european public sphere from the treaty of
rome to the war on terror that means we stopped 2006 with the muhammad cartoon crisis
the research questions and you'll have some information about the project also on your hand
out which you can read later on but the research questions were how do media discourses on key
periods of crisis of the post-war european history contribute to the change in the social
and political conceptualization of europe that means does europe or what the european identity
which is constructed the notion of europe change from 1953 56 to 2006 that is something which
conceptual historians are very interested in or what from a discursive point of view
we would call uh sort of discourses in the fukodian sense yeah sort of structured forms
of knowledge on a quite abstract level so has the notion of europe changed and if so how and
where and by whom and when and so forth uh and the second big question was the what do crisis
imply for the construction of european identities and you might know that frequently people say
that europe is stumbling from one crisis to the next and europe is always in a crisis if we follow
uh the media debates uh well we think there have been different kinds of crisis and we decided to
look at eight crisis which you have on page one of your handout below here of in europe and to look
what did those crises imply what were the debates about these crisis and how was europe thematized
and defined during the debates in these crisis
coming back to the notion of crisis in this project which was a very interdisciplinary
multi-disciplinary enterprise between historians at the european university in florence bostrat
for example sociologists media communication people and discourse analysts sociologists
we took koselek's definition of crisis uh his book critiquent crises i think is very well known
as point of departure and i just quote very briefly uh from uh koselek 2006 and you have
all the references again in your handout transformation and change coagulate into an
epochal concept in that it indicates a critical transition period after which if not everything
then much will be different that means things the things which were taken to as granted are
opened up are redefined rediscussed and maybe uh changing to something new
and the second important notion also by koselek is avato's horizon the horizon of possibilities
of the expectations that means that that always admits alternatives pointing not just to
diametrically opposed possibilities but also to those cutting across such opposites that means
that there are sort of qualitative jumps it changes into something which we couldn't predict
beforehand and the salience of crisis in the development of the european public sphere
that was what we wanted to investigate
uh so what did we do we analyzed the press in all these countries we and i will tell you which
in a minute we looked at radio broadcast we looked at liberal and conservative dailies at tabloids
national reporting from the country which is the site of the crisis transnational reporting about
this crisis from various countries we also interviewed various journalists and also observed
the the production of the media reporting uh in in uh in the media sort of uh hubs uh specifically
in the former eastern countries uh because and i cannot elaborate this today if you go back to 1956
until 1989 of course the difference between east and west was salient and no way can you just
compare in any uh sort of superficial way now if again you look at your handout on page one you
will see those various crisis points like the budapest revolution the building of the berlin wall
then uh paris 68 prax 68 solidar nosh poland 1981 the end of uh the east and west of the cold war
the iraq war and we also chose the debates about the mohamed cartoons as something outside
of europe and also something specifically concerned with media ethics which we thought was
sort of a meta level uh to study uh european values and the question of european identities
these nice colors uh just indicate which country which media and which country were looked at for
which uh crisis event now very briefly the discourse analytic approach because that is
where i also want to show you some examples because i contrast this with the purely quantitative
approach and if you look on page two of your handout uh you will find also no page three sorry you
will find our three-step methodology uh which we uh implemented in this project starting out
with the contextualization of the empirical material then quantification of the topics
of the macro topics in van dyke's sense uh which were debated as well as keywords using corpus
linguistic methodology which is very much a linguistic methodology and does not impose
content categories onto the text and third then in in-depth qualitative analysis and i will show
you something of the in-depth analysis uh and i first just want to make these distinctions
uh because usually people talk they are all doing discourse analysis and discourse has become a
totally inflationary term uh maybe you know that Foucault himself used about 23 meanings of discourse
in his Autre du Discours so i think we have to define it so for me discourse is patterns
and commonalities of knowledge and structures about a specific topic or macro topic so discourse
about the european public sphere discourses are realized in various genres speeches media texts
editorials uh discussion fora and so forth and so on youtube facebook and so forth
and genres have inherent characteristics which one has to take into account if one analyzes those
texts otherwise you will find quite banal things which are genre inherent and texts are the specific
realizations uh at a specific moment in time now i will now show you some examples which are texts
which belong to specific genres of the discourse about the iraq war before i do that i also want
to show you what we analyzed a bit in contrast to the frame analysis which i know that many media
analysts do we were very interested in the way people argue for or against the iraq war
in this specific case yeah and a topos aristotelian topos they are formal and also content related top
cannot go into this but they are warrants that means you have an abstract argumentation structure
if p occurs then q will occur yeah so if the war starts then that will be dangerous for europe
yeah so usually these warrants are not spelled out in that way but we have common places
lotsi comunas which are used in everyday talk and i'm i put here one argumentation which i found
in a very nice uh text reported by uh of proddy reported in la republica in in the italian newspaper
where he says and i just want to read you these this very brief text uh in a minute i just have
to find it and proddy said i don't have any illusion that unity will be found tomorrow
in says romano proddy in a press conference but the only possible thing we can do is to think of
the future and make a deeper analysis we must avoid putting our purse in the eu and our security
in us hands we have to share our security our future so we call this the topos of unity proddy
tries to get everybody on board which is also signified by the many personal pronouns we we
we have and our future and so forth but he also makes two arguments in this very brief text
we have to share our security unity will not be found tomorrow thus we must make a deeper
analysis and we must avoid putting our purse and security in the us hands that is if we think of
our future we will find unity now so you can deconstruct most of the debates and texts for
or against the iraq war or whatever other debates in these crises in argumentative terms
and in this way we looked at which arguments were brought forward by which side in these debates in
which national countries in which newspapers and so forth and so on you can also quantify this but
that is quite difficult because arguments as a deep structure are realized in very different ways
in on the surface in language thus we quantified macro topics but this is part of the qualitative
analysis which tells us who does what when and why and how is it understood i will now briefly show
you something about the iraq war which was hypothesized as a tipping point for breaking
the national traditions and interpreting europe from this common united sort of background
of course we all know that that didn't happen and we all know rumsfeld's famous utterance of old and
new europe we know that some countries supported the us and others didn't so we all know post hoc
that there was not such a unity but let us look just at three brief examples and then i will
conclude because irina has already shown me that i have very little time left uh for example the
guardian which is a left liberal newspaper in the in the uk uh and as you know the british were
very much supporting the the war in iraq whereas shakshiraq as the president of france was very
much against the war in iraq together with geher shreuge the german chancellor at that time and
this is one of many many examples shakshiraq the leading anti-war voice in the west yesterday
denounced the us ultimatum to iraq as unilateral unjustified and dangerous warning that washington
was taking on europe now what you have here apart from the topos of threat yeah that if this happens
then that will be very dangerous for europe we have the metonymic account of reducing the us to
washington shiraq and to to france and that's taking on europe so we have two voices signified
in geographical terms and we have the polarization of this debate which comes again and again in all
these newspapers i already deconstructed this proddy statement about the sort of uniting trying
to overcome this rift between the so-called old and new europe and the way two arguments are
embedded in each other the danger the topos of danger into the uh topos of unity and finally the
one example another one from italy the corriara de la sera perplexed stupefied hit offended so much
that in the next days the french ambassador in rome lua in ekin will take some steps of protest
with the italian government italy france we reached the lowest point so you have a totally
national kind of perspective in this reporting it's not about a european crisis it's not about
a unified europe it's about france and italy very much pathos in here you have a very strong
emotional language and again sort of this juxtaposition of two countries italy france
we have reached the lowest point so the general results were that uh there was no european public
sphere yeah in none of our crisis points was there anything which would relate to some kind
of common deliberation of these crisis there were always national standpoints
but on top of that there were of course political differences there was the differences between
quality and tabloid press and various personalities various editorials broadcasters and so forth and so
on so uh there was no convergence from 53 to 2006 some kind of uh teleological point of this
this united europe which one had thought that would be achieved it was sort of an up and down
due to these crisis points and uh various as we know various european countries positioned
themselves very differently so to come to my conclusions uh what we also saw if we regard the
field of media in budger sense uh as sort of interacting with the field of politics we saw
that crisis events cease to be elements or effects of longer historical processes we have snapshots
and we also made an an archive of images in this project we have snapshots everybody who
sees the tank and young palak who set himself in flames 1968 in prac knows that were the soviet
tanks coming into prac but we don't know what happened before what happened afterwards what
were different voices what led to this what were the difficult historical procedures and processes
and struggles which resulted in some one of these snapshots so basically what we see
now when we look back and look at these various images we have snapshots which have become iconic
and where we all think we know what it was about but actually we don't or we know very little
because the complex historical processes have been totally abolished uh the same is true from
9 11 yeah we all know the twin towers image and so forth yeah we all of these uh um crises have
such iconic symbols uh which we all know and also learn about in school probably and they're part of
school books but we have via our very fast image oriented visual turn uh actually not really taken
on board the complex historical uh informations which lead and have led to this crisis and also
what happened afterwards yeah we have static points uh and the second important conclusion for us was
there was no correlation as i said between crisis and the reconceptualization of europe
or its related concepts um the question is what does crisis mean yeah if europe goes back and
forth from one crisis to the other and there has been no significant changes so we are left with
the question were these imposed crisis imposed by politics in the media but not really taken up
by the social by the citizens have not really been enacted upon or are we in this constant crisis
so i leave you with this question or we could also say that the crisis has become
desemanticized or as laklaw and moof would say an empty signifier everything and nothing is a
crisis and if we look at debates about our economic crisis we have a crisis every day in
the media so this this very salient notion actually has lost a lot of its meaning or
can be reloaded in whatever way uh one would like to and to conclude i would like to leave you with
a picture which i like a lot the european parliament and a part of the berlin wall juxtaposed
in brussels which in my view really signifies crisis the rupture and sort of the debate in
the european parliament in a very sort of provocative way thank you very much