A Contribution to the Critique of the European Public Sphere

Michele Fiorillo
Co-founder of the campaign We Europeans. He has conceived the idea of a UN World Citizens Initiative. Former member of WFM Council and UEF-Italy Central Committee

Jürgen Habermas
A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics
Polity Press, Cambridge 2023

Globalisation, exponential growth of social inequalities, migratory pressure, climate crisis, pandemics and ultimately the return of war. These are all circumstances that “recommend to the nation states gathered in the European Union the prospect of greater integration, in an attempt to recover those competences lost at national level in the course of this development, creating new capacities for political action at transnational level”. And a precondition for this should be “a greater openness of the national public spheres towards each other” and “a political shift to a socio-ecological agenda, aiming for a greater integration of the core of Europe”.

So writes Juergen Habermas in a crucial juncture of his latest book Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik (2022), recently published in English (J. Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, Cambridge 2023).

As is well known, the concept of public sphere was introduced by the great German philosopher in his young-age essay Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962).

In it, he argued that the emergence of the institutions of liberal democracy, from the late 17th century onwards, coincided with the development of a public sphere, to be understood as a space for the exchange of ideas free from interference by the authorities, enabling citizens to independently form their will on matters of collective interest through a public debate.  

Even today’s mass democracy continues to need, alongside forms of parliamentarianism, a lively public sphere and an active civil society, capable of deliberative practices where even the conflictual character of politics would be the result of the orientation towards the achievement of a rational understanding:

“He who argues, intends to contradict. But it is only by virtue of the right, or rather the encouragement, to say 'no' to each other that the epistemic potential of language unfolds, without which we could not learn from each other. And therein lies the joke of deliberative politics: that in political disputes we improve our convictions and move closer to the right solution to problems.”

As for the possibility of extending the model of deliberative democracy globally, the great German philosopher exercises some caution.  Contained in the book is an interview with John Dryzek – founder of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance –, in which, on the one hand, Habermas is wary of 'exporting democracy', since liberal democracy is a form of government that finds its proper realization “only through the heads of its citizens”; on the other hand, he invites us not to give in to the relativization of the claim of universality of the principles of democratic rule of law, since what is at stake here are “rational principles and not values that can compensated for.”

They must therefore be defended in the international community within the framework of intercultural debates, provided that we participate in them with a “willingness to learn, as one party among others”, overcoming the domination-driven approach that led to Western imperialism; instead, letting ourselves be “enlightened by other cultures in the blind spots regarding our interpretation and application of human rights”. It is therefore no coincidence that Habermas devotes two chapters of his recent history of philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 2019) to the doctrine and practice of the Buddha and to Confucianism and Taoism. In sum, the claim of the universal validity of the principles enshrined to the highest degree in the UN Charter does not entitle one to crusade for the spread of liberal democracies. 

Moreover, in Western democracies too “liberal rights do not fall from the sky” (Habermas uses this expression more than once, and the title of Altiero Spinelli's famous book Europe does not fall from the sky cannot fail to come to mind here). On the contrary, “the citizens who participate as equals in the democratic decision-making process must see themselves as the authors of the rights they grant each other as members of an association of free and equal citizens”. It is a continuous and arduous process based on a delicate balance between the political-institutional sphere and the public sphere. 

Today, it is precisely this balance that is deteriorating more and more every day. Habermas warns us: “the mere appearance of a democratically controlled leadership” is not enough, and politics guided by demoscopy is undoubtedly to be regarded as anti-democratic: such practices are in fact a phenomenon of adaptation of the political elites to a systemic context that tends to reduce the possibilities of state intervention, with the effect of making “the formation of a political opinion and will in civil society and in the public sphere work aimlessly”, and of generating in the people a distrust of governments, which are in essence only forced to simulate their real capacity for action. And since this “erosion of democracy is advancing more and more since politics has more or less abdicated in the face of the markets”, then, the philosopher points out, the theory of democracy and the critique of capitalism will have to merge.

Moreover, if, thanks to progressively higher levels of education, the people tend to become more and more intelligent, a parallel education in political participation and deliberation could, according to Habermas, function as an antidote to the worrying combination of national-populism and neoliberal egocentrism.  

Habermas' proposal thus contrasts both with what he calls the simply pluralist approach and the expertocratic one: if the former is content with a democracy reduced to the procedure of free elections, in which the vote of each individual citizen comes into play in a mere statistical aggregation of individual preferences, expressed without necessarily taking into account the common interest; the latter claims its legitimacy from the increasing complexity of the tasks of government and administration, and from the lack of time, motivation and cognitive effort on the part of the citizens. Yet, the philosopher points out, politicians themselves need to be informed by experts in order to be able to make considered decisions and legislate, and in any case even complex political considerations can be “translated into the everyday language of interested citizens (i.e. all of us)”.

Central, of course, becomes the preservation of a public sphere that gives citizens the effective possibility of forming an informed and considered opinion on public affairs. In a complex society, it is the media that perform the function of a “mediating instance that, in the plurality of perspectives of social conditions and cultural forms of life, coagulates an interpretive core, intersubjectively shared, between competing interpretations of the world, thus ensuring that the general acceptance is rational.”

Then, the transformation of the media system, and thus of the public sphere, brought about by the advent of digital media and social networks – which are gradually replacing the traditional media's sphere of influence – endangers, according to Habermas, the development of a deliberative democracy, based on the progressive and reciprocal rationalization of political opinions. What is at stake is the quality of the public debate: as it deteriorates in the age of digitalisation, so does the crisis of democracy. A strong regulation by the public authorities – intensifying the European Union's effort – and a far-sighted educational campaign are therefore called for, in an epochal transformation to be compared with the transition from orality and handwriting to what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg galaxy: "just as printing made everyone a potential reader, so digitization is making everyone a potential author. But how long did it take for everyone to learn to read?".

In a world that could potentially fall into the trap of a chain of fake news and virtual realities where it would no longer be possible to distinguish what is true from what is false, it then becomes “a constitutional imperative to maintain a media structure that allows for the inclusive character of the public sphere, and a deliberative character for the formation of public opinion and will”. 

This is true in general, and not only for the advocates of the democratic rule of law, which 'does not fall from the sky' – this expression returns –, but is instead 'generated by the constituent assemblies, according, necessarily, to a spirit of solidarity, which must perpetuate itself''. It therefore appears as a duty, also for the promoters of a European republic provided with its own federal democratic Constitution – a perspective to which Habermas dedicated his essay Zur Verfassung Europas (On the Constitution of Europe) (2011) – to deepen and accelerate a critical reflection on the emergence of a European “public sphere capable of allowing deliberative democracy to flourish”, a precondition for the construction of a transnational constituent power.