Platform Europe

In recent debates about how Europe can escape its permanent state of crisis, people like to brandish the words uttered by the ‘Father of Europe’, Frenchman Jean Monnet: ‘If I were to build Europe again from scratch, I would start with culture’ In fact Monnet never said this – it’s a fake quote that was attributed to him at a later date. According to the Jean Monnet Foundation in Lausanne, this myth goes back to the words of Jack Lange, the former French Minister of Culture, when – with the best of intentions – he commented: ‘Monnet could, or should, have said that if he were to build Europe again from scratch...’ and so on.

The fact that this is something that Monnet could have said is a fitting metaphor for the state of Europe. Much of the European Union’s recent history should also be written in the subjunctive. Since the Brexit referendum, EU politics has revolved around could and should, but with very little do, decide and plan.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombshell in summer 2016, it seemed that Europe was prepared to take the bull by the horns. In politics, civil society, science and literature there was an outpouring of optimism about European renewal. In September 2017, Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne in Paris unleashed a kind of pro-European emotion.

He called for a new start for Europe, waxed lyrical about European sovereignty and presented a long list of specific reform proposals. For many months, citizens took to the streets as part of the Pulse of Europe initiative, painting their faces blue and wrapping themselves in EU flags. For a short time, Europe was actually quite cool.

Experts sketched out scenarios for enhancing democracy in Europe, spearheaded by political thinker Ulrike Guérot with her idea of Europe as a Republic. A new pro-European zeitgeist also swept through the publishing world. Prominent German journalists Heribert Prantl and Evelyn Roll published pro-European works that replaced the ubiquitous literature about Europe’s swansong. And, despite the fact that everything always takes a little longer in Europe, the timing was good: the elections had just been held in France and Germany, there were two years to go before the next European elections, and finally it was possible to get on with the work.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. The German government simply failed to respond to Macron’s proposals until, after more than a year, it ‘scotched them one hundred percent’, as noted by Jürgen Habermas. Germany’s only response to France’s outstretched hand was to offer small-scale reforms to economic and monetary policy. There was no major breakthrough. In today’s Europe, one side’s lack of courage has to be understood in tandem with the excessive courage of the other side.

Citizens painted their faces blue and wrapped themselves in EU flags. For a short time, Europe was actually quite cool.

Populism and nationalism are on the rise in every corner of the European Union, from Scandinavia to Germany, France, Austria, Italy and the Visegrad states. In Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic and Poland, their proponents have now moved from opposition to government, and any hope that they would show moderation when in power has generally been proven naïve. It’s true that parties such as the FPÖ and the Lega have moved away from ‘exit’ demands, whether from the euro or the Union as a whole. Instead of getting out, they now tend to support the EU – but a Union that is totally opposed to the spirit of European integration.

Their fight with politicians like Macron is essentially about the role of sovereignty. It is a conflict between those who support European sovereignty and those who seek national sovereignty. One side believes that EU Member States will only retain their capacity for action and self-determination if they pool their sovereignty within the European institutions. The other side, which includes representatives of both right and left, insists that sovereignty has to be firmly tied to the nation because this is the only source of political legitimacy.

Disputes over the distribution of refugees, which was imposed by a majority against individual governments, are an expression of this fundamental conflict. But it is less about the issue at stake than about who has the last word, whether such decisions should actually be taken according to the majority principle as currently envisaged, and to what extent the European Court of Justice can impose European legal principles on the constitutional law of Member States.

Europe could have turned the tide at the time of this European awakening in the wake of Brexit. Opinion polls throughout the Member States revealed record levels of support for remaining in the EU. It was a window of opportunity for reform, indeed for a meaningful deepening of the EU in certain areas. So why have pro-Europeans not taken advantage of this, while Eurosceptics have been pushing their agenda for years? On the one hand, it is a matter of political will, particularly on the part of the German government. On the other hand, populists and nationalists have a structural advantage in the EU’s political competition: the dysfunctionality of the European public sphere.

Populists benefit from the social media algorithms, which are not driven by the public good but solely by the tech companies’ need to capture our attention.

Nowadays, such public spheres are primarily digital and organised at national level. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, as digitalisation is generally associated with breaking down communication barriers. Technically and structurally this is true, but not discursively. In terms of topics, actors and perspectives, public debates on European policy are very national in character, irrespective of whether they take place via analogue or digital channels. The current structure of the public sphere plays into the hands of populist nationalists in two ways. On the one hand, they do not need to justify their nationalist positions in terms of Europe’s public good, because this is practically nonexistent as a benchmark for evaluation in the public debate.

But, on the other hand, they benefit from the social media algorithms, which are not driven by the public good but solely by the tech companies’ need to capture our attention. It allows armies of trolls, fake news and hate speech free rein to manipulate public opinion. These ‘digital rights’ operate across borders, coordinating global attacks, for example on national elections. In the worst case, the result is misinformed voters, as happened during the Brexit referendum, when specific groups of people were bombarded with mendacious ‘dark ads’ on Facebook. The public spheres in Europe have certainly become echo chambers for populism and nationalism, but they offer an extremely poor environment for the legitimisation of European politics.

In 1995, Helmut Kohl declared that European integration was ‘irreversible’. He went on to explain: ‘For me, irreversible means that the pace of integration in individual policy areas can be discussed later, but the direction can no longer be changed.’ The Brexit vote is merely the most obvious proof that Kohl got it wrong. In 2019, disintegration is a political fact in the EU and, indeed, is the declared aim of some governments.

Meanwhile, other countries are saying: ‘This far, but no further’. And it is not only conservatives and right-wingers who are openly opposed to closer European integration. There are just as many doubters on the left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany lead leftist parties in Europe that have a nationalist orientation. They believe that the EU operates in a neo-liberal fashion and is systematically on the wrong side of the struggle between capital and labour. This makes it impossible to push ahead with redistribution, stronger workers’ rights and higher levels of corporate tax.

Social media allows armies of trolls, fake news and hate speech free rein to manipulate public opinion.

There is also a growing disenchantment with Europe in the social democratic camp, where there is a sense that the social democratic trophies of the 20th century can only be defended where they were gained – within the nation state. Such arguments are not based on sovereignty but on solidarity: the nation is the only community where solidarity in the sense of material redistribution can be reliably organised. In short, Europe is not a welfare state. And it is true that European integration has, to date, been a liberal success story, not a leftist or social democratic one. In the EU, economic freedoms are much more developed than social protections. But harking back to a ‘golden age’ also has its limitations when formulating future policy.

There is always an unresolved contradiction in the apologia of the nation state: how to incorporate a capitalist system that operates independently of national borders into a nation state? Shouldn’t democratic oversight be organised at the level where the actors who are to be overseen actually operate? One does not have to like the real, existing European Union, but one cannot reject it as a framework for action if democratic sovereignty and social rights are to be defended in globalisation. They have to be changed through political majorities. One thing is clear: it is not a contradiction to criticise the EU while supporting the EU. On the contrary, anyone who defends the EU has to criticise it.

Now, at this time of crisis, Europe should be beset by fierce arguments. But they should be about the ‘how’ of common European policy, not about the ‘if ’. In 1970, the renowned economist Albert O. Hirschmann (who escaped the Nazis) wrote a seminal work entitled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. In it, he outlines three options for action for citizens whose institutions are in an existential crisis: exit the institution, collectively raise their voice, or keep their frustration under wraps and remain loyal.

It is not a contradiction to criticise the EU while supporting the EU.

Today, most people in the EU have to resort to the last option, to some extent because many countries’ constitutions prevent the first option, even via a referendum. They would have to elect governments that would somehow make an exit possible. However, it would make much more sense to finally make the second option possible by giving citizens a voice.If we want to change the EU, make it more democratic, more social, more sustainable, then we need an appropriate space for communication where we can discuss how to go about it.

Meanwhile, EU politicians make far-reaching decisions without the public sphere that is needed to legitimise them. On top of that, the fact that the legitimate decisions of European institutions can be ignored by national governments almost with impunity means that any further step towards integration is doomed to failure if it is not accompanied by the creation of a public sphere as an essential mechanism for reproducing precisely this democratic legitimacy.

Over recent years, Europe’s crisis discourse has turned out to be a vicious circle of crisis, news and nationalism. The media love European politics when it can be portrayed as a crisis. Behind the crises there are conflicts between Member States, which the media ramps up in a confrontational manner and which also promotes differences between nations by talking them up and talking them down. This discourse builds citizens’ sense of nationalism, while support for joint solutions is beset by crisis.

The public spheres in Europe have certainly become echo chambers for populism and nationalism, but they offer an extremely poor environment for the legitimisation of European politics.

What are the reasons for this toxic discourse on Europe? Europe has no public sphere, which to date has failed to be created through the Europeanisation of national public spheres, a European super-medium, or with the help of digital channels.

The Member States talk about the EU and about each other, but not to each other. Europe negotiates European issues in national bubbles instead of in a European communication space. This means that citizens are served up information about European politics through a national filter. This filter is not an algorithm but a media discourse system that is characterised by a one-sided, nationalist view of European concerns. It focuses on the national position rather than on European solidarity and constructs the European collective on the basis of national narratives.

In other words, in the public sphere there is an understanding of and a preference for a ‘French Europe’, a ‘German Europe’ or a ‘Hungarian Europe’, but not for a European Europe that is made up of a European France, Germany and Hungary. The walls of the national bubbles are too strong to allow communication. Consequently, there is no sense of belonging in Europe, because this cannot be created solely by the sum of national feelings of belonging to the EU. Social networks have become echo chambers for populists; their algorithms do not distinguish between facts and fake news; they pursue a business model rather than basic democracy.

Tech giants like Facebook, Google and YouTube have privatised the digital public sphere and turned it into an oligopoly. Very little data in the digital ecosystem passes them by. They control the relevance, visibility, dissemination and presentation of public concerns. They have sovereignty over personal data; indeed they own the infrastructure that allows the democratic public sphere to establish itself on the internet.

You could say that digitalisation means the public sphere has been lost to the public sphere. This is the basis for my proposal for a publicly owned European platform. This platform has two main objectives. The first is to make the digital space in Europe more democratic, thus creating a digital public sphere that is in line with European values and serves the common good and European democracy.

You could say that digitalisation means the public sphere has been lost to the public sphere.

Putting such a platform into public hands could certainly be seen as a step towards the institutionalisation of the internet – but first it is necessary to ascertain that the uninstitutionalised internet has failed by democratic standards, or even become a danger to democracy. Second, the decentralised structures of the internet that work across borders should finally be harnessed for the purposes of European integration.

In his highly acclaimed book The People vs Tech, British journalist Jamie Bartlett argues that democracy and the internet are essentially incompatible. My argument is that democracy is very well suited to the digital world, it’s just that the digital world is not yet well suited to democracy. Because the digital revolution is still controlled by the economy, not by democracy. Europe could change that. It has to change it. Because the internet is basically made for European democracy. More than any other medium, it transcends geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries. That’s why a European platform should be concerned with creating the infrastructure for a European communication space that can meet the key requirements of European democracy.

Democracy is very well suited to the digital world, but the digital world is not yet well suited to democracy.

Even if the specific functions and content of a European platform (as opposed to an EU platform) should, without fail, be developed in a bottom-up rather than top-down fashion, I would like to propose four areas that should be at the heart of it: a European newsroom for a pan-European discourse on European issues; entertainment and cultural offerings to represent a European way of life; instruments of political participation to reduce the participation deficit in the EU; and apps that allow all citizens, regardless of their mobility, to benefit from European integration. Today, language barriers can be overcome with the help of artificial intelligence – even in real time. Yes, advances in technology mean that we can expect the next stage in digital development to be the ‘translated internet’. This will be a milestone for the European public sphere.