Political Communication in Europe: The Cultural and Structural Limits of the European Public Sphere [Hardcover]

The disconnection between the institutions of the EU and the people of Europe has often been attributed to the existence of a communication gap resulting from the failure of national medias and politicians to convey the importance of the EU. This book challenges that idea instead showing that the fault lies with the idea and institutions of the EU.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The True Deficits of the European Public Sphere: Domesticisation and Politicisation 2. The Anti-popular Bias of Integration by Stealth 3. Governing the EU: Consensus Diplomacy and Associative Corporatism 4. The 'no demos' Conundrum 5. Explaining the Domesticisation Deficit 6. Explaining the Politicisation Deficit 7. Conclusions Methodological Appendix Notes Bibliography Index TBD

'Communicating Europe and awakening and sustaining public interest in the European Union remains problematic for many different reasons. Teasing out why this should be the case nearly sixty years after the signing of the Rome Treaty marking the creation of the perhaps misleadingly named European Economic Community is tackled in this book from a novel perspective. Francisco P?rez confronts the questions key to understanding not so much why people seemingly do not 'love' the EU but why they continue to find engaging with it unappealing. With Euroscepticism rising on the eve of the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, the book could not be more timely.'

Juliet Lodge, Institute of Communication Studies and Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence, University of Leeds, UK

'Seoane P?rez offers a sharp and astute analysis of the EU's chronic malaise coming to the conclusion that it suffers from not one, but a double democratic deficit: a domesticisation deficit, the failure to connect to the EU as is always remote, and a politicisation deficit as EU politics is not 'normal' politics, amenable to a left versus right distinction. Across the axes of comlS2