Abstract
This paper offers reflections on the Eurosphere's proper object domain. It does so by reflecting on two interrelated questions: (1) what is the European public sphere?; and (2) how does diversity shape the character of the European public sphere?
The four articles included in this special issue of Ethnicities are products of a much larger research program on the European public sphere, or “Eurosphere.” That larger enterprise has attempted to examine, theoretically and empirically, what is construed to be the nascent transstate civil society of the European Union (EU). The particular focus of these articles is on various manifestations of diversity and the challenges of inclusion: Peter Kraus and Ruta Kazlauskaitė-Gürbüz on linguistic diversity; Lise Rolandsen Agustin and Birte Siim on gender diversity; Flavia Zanon and Giuseppe Sciortino on religious diversity; and Alberto Arribas Lozando and colleagues on EU immigrant integration policies. Taken together, they provide ample testimony to Giuseppe Sciortino and Peter Kraus' assertion in their introduction that diversity ought to be viewed as a “core concept of the European Project” that has implications for how an evolving European identity might be construed. It should be noted that primary attention in all four case studies is on policies developed within the political structures of the EU, and, as such, the main emphasis is on policy articulation and not on implementation. Moreover, rather little attention is paid to the ways in which civil society actors either played a role in formulating policy or in embracing or rejecting various policy initiatives. Nevertheless, they ought to be read with that larger concern about an emerging European public sphere in mind.
The Eurosphere project was part of a EU Framework 6 program involving 16 countries and over 100 researchers that ran between 1 February 2007 and 31 July 2012. The overall sweep of the larger undertaking can be seen in the sheer range of topics considered: individual citizens, media actors, think tanks, NGOs, and political parties, analyzed in terms of difference—including ethnic, religious, gender, national, and regional. If there is a common thread linking the discrete projects it is one that revolved around determining, on the basis of empirical investigations, how at this moment in history a European public sphere ought to be conceptualized, particularly in terms of its ability to advance a deeper level of democracy and a more inclusive civil sphere.
The researchers named earlier are insiders, citizens of various European nations and citizens of the EU, and they bring to the table all of the virtues of being insiders. I am an outsider, with what is admittedly a more limited repertoire of knowledge about the intricacies of civic life in the EU today and about doing large-scale collaborative research within the bureaucratic parameters of EU funding. That being said, I hope to be able to complement the insider perspective with that of an outsider who was not a part of the Eurosphere project, but who is familiar with many of the research findings that have come from it. In what follows, I will first attempt to frame the four articles by discussing in necessarily broad brush strokes the novelty of the European Union and theoretical perspectives on the Eurosphere, before taking up the matter of diversity.
The European Union as a novel political institution
In the project's final report, Sicakkan (2013: 67) points out that the first mention of the term Eurosphere dates to the 1960s, when it was introduced by Jacques-René Rabier (whose involvement in the European project dates to 1953 with his role as an aide to Jean Monnet in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)) and Jean Meynaud (perhaps best known for his 1964 book on technocracy). Unlike the more recent use of the term by Leonard (2005: 4), which refers to the broad “sphere of influence” Europe exerts far beyond the borders of the continent, the earlier use was more in line with the way the Eurosphere project researchers have approached the term, which is simply a shorthand for a European public sphere, transcending yet implicated in the respective public spheres of the member states.
Over the course of its 60-plus year history, dating to the creation of the ECSC in 1951, what has since 1993 been known as the European Union has evolved into a novel political entity, with no precise parallel anywhere else in the world. In fact, from my North American vantage, the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement might evolve over time from an economic alliance like the original European Community into something akin to the present-day EU strikes me as not even a remote possibility, in no small part due to the asymmetries of size and level of development characterizing the three member states.
That being said, ever since the global financial crisis struck, the future of the European Union has become clouded. With anti-EU parties such as Britain's UK Independence Party (UKIP) on the western edge of Europe to Finland's True Finns on the eastern periphery, with various counterparts in between, having grown in influence in recent years, this is not an especially auspicious moment for promoting further integration of the member states. Indeed, though sometimes called Euroskeptics, these parties are not skeptical about the EU, but rather are overtly hostile to it. The euro crisis has exacerbated the situation by pitting, in the operational rhetoric of the critics, “responsible” nations against “profligate” ones. And with opposition to the EU in the ascendance during the past several years, so too, has there been an intensification of opposition to newcomers—both from outside the EU and from the most recent ascension states of Eastern Europe. Much of the critical discourse is framed in terms of the need for a revitalization of national identity and a reassertion of national sovereignty. Those who seek to dismantle or diminish the EU, or more often to simply succeed in getting their particular country to leave it, fail to fully appreciate the reach of the EU, which extends deeply into the economic and political realms of member states. They do not appear to appreciate the difficulties entailed in disengaging from the EU, nor do they ponder the potential unintended consequences.
The future of the EU cannot be predicted with any certainty—its novelty and the sheer complexity of uniting its constituent states making such an effort particularly challenging. And yet, despite the current impasse over the adoption of a EU constitution by the member states, the challenges to the euro, and the growing strength of anti-EU forces, the EU has, over the course of its existence, managed to become institutionally embedded. Thus, the real issues concern what it will look like in the future, and central to the focus of the Eurosphere project, whether or not it will prove to be a vehicle for forging a continent-wide deeper and stronger democracy by facilitating a public sphere that contains all of the constituent states while transcending each of them.
A considerable amount of writing on the EU concentrates on its presumed shortcomings, in particular its “democratic deficit.” However, when operating with a longer historical perspective and with an appreciation of the protean character of the EU and the European public sphere, the accomplishments and the potential become evident. Recalling two interventions by a quartet of prominent European public intellectuals in the first half of the past decade offers a valuable perspective. This is clearly what Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida had in mind when they published a joint statement (composed by Habermas) on the need for a common European foreign policy. According to their analysis, the mass street demonstrations in major European cities in 15 February 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war might be taken “as a sign of the birth of a European public sphere” (Habermas and Derrida, 2003: 291).
Habermas and Derrida contended that the fact that opposition to the war was widespread throughout Western Europe was an indication of a shared worldview that was shaped by the entire continent's experiences with two world wars in the first half of the past century. They argued that as a consequence of the direct experience with totalitarian regimes from the left and right and the tragedy of the Holocaust, the citizens of the continent can be characterized by their “heightened sensitivity to injuries to personal and bodily integrity” (italics in original; Habermas and Derrida, 2003: 296). One of the outcomes of this immediate historical experience is the felt need for supranational organizations and binding policies that are capable of domesticating the power of individual states.
In this regard, the difference between Europe and the US is quite stark, as opposition to the United Nations has been a recurring theme in American politics from the 1940s up through the administration of George W Bush. One might recall that his UN ambassador, John Bolton, reflected in unvarnished form a neoconservative worldview predicated on a deeply rooted, right-wing antipathy toward what is often characterized as “world government.” His disdain for multilateralism of any kind defined his tenure, as does his editorial writing today in venues such as Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. When this worldview is fused to the religious ideology of the Christian right, replete with millennial end-of-the-world visions, which sees in world government the workings of the Antichrist, there is a potent source for justifying unilateral bellicosity. While the Obama administration has challenged this approach to foreign policy, the key point here is that there is nothing—quite simply, and most fortunately—comparable to such a worldview in Europe today. What this comparison points to is the existence of a European identity that transcends without being separated from the particularities of the national identities of the member states.
In the wake of the rejection of a EU constitution in both France and the Netherlands in 2005, two other public intellectuals, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens (2005), published an editorial that appeared in left-of-center newspapers in several European countries in which they argued that nationalism was threatening Europe, both politically and economically (the coordinated publication of these newspapers can be taken to be a reflection of the European public sphere). They unabashedly argued that the EU had proven to be a remarkable success story, helping, for example, to transform Spain and Portugal into multiparty democracies, transforming the economy of Ireland so that for the first time in its history a substantial portion of the population could live comfortable lives in a prosperous nation (this, of course, before the economic crash), and assisting in the democratization of former Warsaw Pact nations. Viewing the EU, not as an “unfinished nation” or an “incomplete federal state,” but rather as a “new type of cosmopolitan project,” they share the view of Habermas and Derrida that a EU foreign policy would serve the interests of peace, democracy, and open markets (Beck and Giddens, 2005: 28). I'll leave aside what many (me included) see as Giddens' rather uncritical take on the virtues of a largely unfettered market and his antipathy to redistributive policies, reflected in his third way attempt to modernize social democracy. However, one passage from their editorial is relevant to this discussion: “From a cosmopolitan point of view, diversity is not a problem; it is the solution” (Beck and Giddens, 2005: 28).
The task at hand is to locate diversity in terms of the public sphere, treating this as an empirical rather than a normative topic, which is precisely what these four papers do. What I will do in what follows is to sketch out, in necessarily schematic fashion, my understanding of what it is that scholars involved in this and related projects are, in fact, attempting to study. Put another way, I will offer some reflections on the Eurosphere project's proper object domain in order to better frame the significance of diversity for the EU project.
What is the European public sphere?
Any discussion of the public sphere appears to inevitably begin with Habermas' formulation in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and its subsequent revisiting over the next several decades. Certainly, his work looms large in the thinking of Eurosphere researchers—though, as with these four papers, more implicitly than explicitly in many instances. Throughout his career, Habermas has been concerned with explicating the historical and structural factors that have either served to inhibit or to advance participatory (or what he came to define as deliberative) democracy. The public sphere refers to that social space wherein rational, critical, and free and uninhibited discussion of issues germane to public life can transpire. The rise of modern nation-states and the concurrent emergence of industrial capitalism laid the foundations for the emergence of a sector of society that was differentiated from both the economy and the state, the realm of civil society. Habermas' public sphere should be construed as a space located within civil society, and as such, needs to be distinguished from both the private interests of everyday life in civil society and the arena of state power, but conceptually located between the two, or between what Habermas would come to call the “lifeworld” and the “system.”
In his earliest work Habermas contended that what he refers to as the “bourgeois public sphere” came into its own in the nineteenth century, most fully in Britain as a result of the successful decoupling of state and economy brought about by the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism. In its ideal–typical form, it is an arena accessible to all citizens on the basis of equality and thus is not dominated or controlled by powerful economic actors or by state officials. In this forum, the goal is to permit critical reason to prevail, rather than conceding the debate to authority figures from other spheres of social life, such as political, economic, or religious elites. The public sphere requires the existence of independent voluntary associations of citizens, including political clubs, public assemblies, labor unions, human rights organizations, neighborhood associations, and so forth, in addition to the opportunities for dialogue characterized by undistorted communication in such settings as coffee houses, pubs, literary salons, and the like.
There is nothing in this account that is unfamiliar to those involved in the Eurosphere project. If this happened to be the whole story, it would suggest the need to design a research agenda that focused its sole attention on the number of such organizations and communicative sites, the levels of membership, the extent of membership involvement, and so forth. In short, it would be a research agenda that looked an awful lot like Putnam's (2000) “bowling alone” approach, one that entailed exploring the vibrancy of what he prefers to call civil society rather than the public sphere (which permits him to conflate the sorts of associations mentioned earlier with choirs, sport clubs, and other pursuits that involve the collective pursuit of private interests rather than engagement with public life).
However, dialogue or discussion—which tends to transpire in place-specific settings always with limited numbers of participants given the emphasis Habermas placed on face-to-face communication—was necessarily complemented by communications channels that could link the multiplicity of discrete manifestations of public discourse into a national-level public sphere. In this regard, commentators on Habermas' work have frequently raised questions about whether it is desirable and/or possible to speak about one public sphere or many public spheres. This is the question, for example, that Fraser (1992) has posed and has led to discussions about counter-hegemonic public spheres, proletarian public spheres, gendered spheres, and so forth. Fraser has made a case for multiple publics. While this may be persuasive at the level of discursive associations, it fails to speak to the need for multiple publics to communicate with one another. This is the role of the mass media, which historically entailed a particularly prominent role for newspapers, but since the past century has also included a major role played by radio and television. Today, it also includes the Internet. The mass media, in short, are fundamental to the generation of public opinion, and it's not surprising that democratic theorists from Dewey to Habermas to, more recently, Alexander (2006) have been particularly interested in public opinion.
Shifting the focus from discourse to communication means that research on the public sphere needs to shift its attention to explore the various facets regarding the role that mass communication plays in making possible the public sphere. This would include empirical research devoted to the structure, function, and ethos of media institutions, both public and private. It would entail conducting content analyses of the substance and presentational formats of information, with a primary concern being to understand how public issues are framed, how the views of contesting parties (or spheres) are presented, and the depth and range of coverage (is the primary focus on local, regional, national, or international issues?). It would involve examining audiences. Where do people seek information on public issues? Who does so and how often? What are the preferred venues? To what extent are audiences capable of interpreting messages with critical reason and with a preexisting repertoire of contextual knowledge?
These research agendas can be seen as complementary given that both are predicated on holding reality up to an ideal type to see how close or how far reality is from the ideal. Moreover, there is nothing especially novel about such research. In terms of the latter, communications studies and political scientists concerned with public opinion address precisely the sorts of issues just summarized.
However, much of this research lacks the element of critique inherent in Habermas's work where one finds a persistent concern with the distortions of the public sphere from a space devoted to rational discussion, debate, and the search for consensus to a realm of mass cultural consumption and administration by powerful corporate and political elites. In this regard, his debt to the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, specifically their work on the culture industry, is evident. Given that the public sphere was made possible by the differentiation of civil society from the economy and polity, its viability over time is dependent on its ability to maintain its autonomy—its capacity to ward off intrusions by powerful economic and political forces. The concentration of media power in the hands of political and economic elites readily leads to the exclusion of dissenting voices from the public arena and a shift away from facilitating genuine political debate to using the media as vehicles for propaganda and ideological public relations campaigns. To the extent that this is true, we end up confronting what Habermas (1989: 217) refers to as a “manufactured public sphere”—evident today in what we refer to as Astroturf political organizations established and controlled by major corporations in contrast to grassroots organizations.
Some of Habermas' critics have faulted him for romanticizing the past and thus with offering a “fall from grace” narrative that does not faithfully reflect the historical record. While I tend to agree with this assessment, we can set it aside for the purpose at hand, which is to think about what a research agenda would look like that seeks to assess to what extent the autonomy of the public sphere at present has been seriously compromised by the process he describes as “refeudalization.” Part of what is required in attempting to make this determination is to explore the extent to which concentration of ownership of media institutions (print and electronic) has occurred. But the simple fact of ownership is insufficient because owners may opt to permit professional autonomy to characterize the organizations—in effect, being if not exactly absentee owners, at least passive ones.
Schudson (2008: 12) has identified six functions of the journalistic enterprise, each of which is potentially subject to empirical scrutiny: (1) providing information that permits citizens to make informed decisions; (2) engaging in investigative reporting, particularly on concentrated centers of power; (3) offering analytical frameworks to assist citizens to make sense of their social circumstances; (4) presenting narratives of social empathy that allow citizens to see into the lives and perspectives of other people in their society, including those who live socially marginal and economically precarious lives; (5) establishing a public forum for dialogue among citizens; and (6) at times mobilizing people to act in support of particular political projects. A research agenda that analyzed contemporary journalism by differentiating each of these six functions has the capacity to shed light on the extent to which the ideal of journalism has been compromised and resulted in manufactured news.
In similar vein, a research agenda could attempt to examine whether or not the associations making up the public sphere are autonomous or essentially serve as agents for economic or political elites. This isn't an easy task for a variety of reasons, one being the fact that much of the influence of powerful political and economic agents is done covertly. This is particularly true in the United States since Citizens United, the controversial Supreme Court ruling that opened wide the spigots of corporate financing of elections and the increased capacity to prevent public scrutiny of such funding. Obtaining information on such financial arrangements is typically the result of muckraking journalism and not conventional sociological research. But to complicate matters further, the public sphere's precise relationship with the political is not always theoretically well articulated. If the public sphere is more than a giant echo chamber, it will press the state to act, and in so doing will assume an adversarial stance toward officials whose positions are being challenged. In this regard, it's reasonable to ask when push-back on the part of state actors is perceived as legitimate and when it is not.
The discussion thus far has highlighted the complexities and difficulties associated with research on the public sphere when conceived in terms of the boundaries of nation-states. These are compounded when moving to the EU, a sui generis institutional structure that, nonetheless, maintains a connection with its sovereign member states that cannot be severed. Moreover, in conceptualizing “Europe as a political form,” to borrow from Wagner (2005), there is an understandable tendency to view it as a mega-state, and thus to explore at this level the same empirical concerns that we have just reviewed for the nation-state. Thus, there is a concern with identifying the organizations, forums, and media sources operating at the level of the EU or directing their energies toward the European project.
Over a decade ago, van de Steeg (2002), for example, examined weekly news magazines in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain to ascertain the extent to which they have facilitated discourse on the enlargement of the EU. In a related but distinct piece of research conducted around the same time, Trenz (2004) undertook a content analysis of 11 daily newspapers from six EU countries to determine the level of coverage of European news, Europeanized news (by which he means discussions of European events that have an impact on national issues), and national news. On the basis of his research, Trenz concluded that there is evidence to support the idea that a “European public sphere has come into existence.” In a more theoretical paper, Trenz and Eder (2004) see at work a democratic dynamic in the emerging European public sphere, the consequence of the dual processes of expanding transnational channels of communication and institution building and integration within the EU.
Harking back to the question of whether at the national level it is most appropriate to speak of multiple public spheres or one overarching sphere, some have questioned whether a singular European public sphere has materialized, or whether the evidence seems to suggest the emergence of a multiplicity of discrete spheres (Eriksen, 2005). Part of this concern derives from the observation that efforts aimed at creating pan-European media outlets, particularly print outlets, have not succeeded (with the failure in 1998 of the late Robert Maxwell's The European, billed at its launch as “Europe's first national newspaper,” taken to be a cautionary warning about the pitfalls of such an effort). Beyond this particular concern is the related concern about a lack of a common language, the focus of the earlier work of Kraus in addition to his coauthored article herein. Some question whether a EU public sphere is possible in a setting containing 23 official languages. Simply put, this concern comes down to questioning whether the ideal of a sphere where dialogue and debate transpires is conceivable in a setting lacking a singular lingua franca. But, as Kraus and Kazlauskaitė-Gürbüz make abundantly clear in their article, nothing about the EU's policies on language—given a normative commitment to linguistic diversity and a pragmatic need for linguistic unity—is simple.
In contrast to the insistent monolingualism of the United States, the EU's encouragement of bi- or multilingualism is the proposed solution to the challenge of simultaneously respecting linguistic diversity while finding a way to communicate that manages to overcome the potential isolation of discrete linguistic enclaves. Some have questioned the viability and/or desirability of having the citizenry at large educated in one or a limited few shared languages, though the trend is in that direction. Instead, they have suggested that elites need to communicate via a shared language, after which they can serve as the transmitters of information to their fellow citizens in the shared language or languages of specific nations.
The language issue is part of a larger and more fundamental topic that must be addressed in any attempt aimed at determining both the existence of and the character of a European public sphere: the aforementioned matter of European identity. Wagner (2005: 69) notes that, for several decades, discussions about EU institutions have been “accompanied by a discussion about a ‘European identity’.”
In seeking to make European identity part of the research agenda, two obvious questions must frame empirical research. First, to what extent do people view themselves as European versus particular national identities, regional identities, religious identities, etc., and how are these various identities interrelated? This question is significant because it gets at the extent to which individuals define themselves as having a shared European culture with others who reside in different nations, perhaps speak different languages, and differ in other ways. Second, do EU citizens see themselves as sharing the same or similar economic interests? Do different welfare regimes impact perceptions of national versus European identity? How do people define their affinities with fellow EU citizens who happen to be citizens of a different nation (Ivic, 2012)?
While these questions no doubt get at salient aspects of identity, taken either separately or in conjunction they depict a thin version of identity, one based on similarity and instrumentality—and with it a thin version of the European public sphere. Calhoun (2002: 159) contends that such a viewpoint fails to appreciate the fact that the public sphere should also be construed as a “form of social solidarity.” In this regard, it's worth quoting Calhoun on the nature of publics. He writes that: Publics are self-organizing fields of discourse in which participation is not based primarily on personal connections and is always in principle open to strangers. …Engagement in public life establishes social solidarity partly through enhancing the significance of particular categorical identities and partly through facilitating the creation of direct social relations. Beyond this, however, the engagement of people with each other in public is itself a form of social solidarity.
Diversity and the Eurosphere
In her posthumously published Responsibility for Justice, Young (2011: 120) observed that, “As a term and a concept, solidarity need not connote homogeneity or symmetry among those in relations. Some people use the term to imply identification with others or the unity of a group, but such usages can and should be challenged.” Rather, she contends, “solidarity is a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together for one another.” As such, it stands in contrast to common origins, which is an inherited relationship rather than one that must be created.
Alexander (2006), the preeminent theorist of solidarity today, would clarify Young's contention by observing that in the real world, although homogeneity “need not” define solidarity, it definitely does in many instances. Indeed, in his work, which builds on a line of thought rooted in Durkheim and Parsons, he contends that an inevitable and inherent tension exists between parochial and civil modes of solidarity. Moreover, the two do not exist in a neat symmetrical relationship, insofar as parochial solidarity appears as a “natural” form of belonging, rooted in the givens of biology, history, and/or tradition, while civil solidarity is seen as existing, when it does and to the extent that it does, as an emergent and aspirational phenomenon.
In modern societies, characterized by increasing levels of diversity, one of the central issues that needs to be addressed concerns the willingness of core groups to expand the boundaries of what Alexander calls the “civil sphere” in a manner that permits heretofore marginalized and excluded groups to move from the periphery to the center. This, in a nutshell, constitutes what Alexander understands incorporation to entail. What is distinctive about a multicultural mode of incorporation, in contrast to assimilation and what he calls “ethnic hyphenation,” is that it permits outsiders to enter into the civil sphere with their “polluted qualities” intact, rather than requiring them to park those qualities in the private realm. This is made possible insofar as the core group engages in a process of revaluation of outsider qualities, which are no longer viewed with disgust, but rather as meriting respect (Alexander, 2006: 450–457; see also Seidman, 2013). Whereas assimilation and ethnic hyphenation amount to treating the particular qualities of the core group as expressions of the universal, multiculturalism is predicated on the assumption that the various particularities of distinct groups, both from the core and the periphery, must be recognized if a more universal solidarity based on a common humanity is to be possible. When this occurs, nobody remains quite the same in the process. Moreover, the cultures of both core and outsider groups do not remain unchanged as a result of an ongoing dialogue across difference predicated on mutual respect.
Assimilation, ethnic hyphenation, and multiculturalism are ideal types, and in the real world, they can be found in mixes reflecting the distinctive features of various societies (Alexander, 2006: 256). In this regard, it is necessary to recognize the fact that whichever mode of incorporation is advanced, this occurs within the boundaries of the nation-state, where national identity confronts and must be related to a range of identities based on factors such as class, race, religion, gender, sexual identity, and region. And the particular incorporative regime chosen to be pursued by any nation is generally a consequence of the outcome of political contestation. Indeed, the current backlash against multiculturalism is a reflection of the fact that modes of incorporation in an era of rapid change are subject to challenges and of necessity must be flexible (Alexander, 2013; Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2010). In some instances, reflecting particular political cultures, the incorporation regime is determined to large extent from the top down (such as the Nordic social democracies) while in others it emerges to a large extent out of the public sphere and from the bottom up through the social relations forged by ordinary people in the course of their everyday lives. In the former, the Foucauldian idea of governmentality applied to diversity management is appropriate; in the latter, rather less so.
What, then, is the significance of the EU in addressing diversity given the role states play in defining both immigration and incorporation policies? Can the EU find a way of transcending national differences in this regard in the interest of forging a distinctly European approach to migration and inclusion? Or does national sovereignty in this arena trump EU decision-making? Related to these issues, and reflecting on Young's statement at the beginning of this section, is there a European “we” robust enough to serve as the basis for developing the sort of solidarity she has in mind? These are the overarching questions raised implicitly or explicitly by this collection of papers, but as is evident, the varied manifestations of diversity are characterized by their own distinctive features and dynamics which are reflected in the particular issues they raise.
Linguistic diversity, as noted in the preceding section, was of necessity on the minds of EU elites from the beginning, contending as was inevitable with the reality of a multiplicity of official languages in the varied member states. But this is not the whole story. While Kraus and Kazlauskaitė-Gürbüz point to the fate of the languages of such ethnonational groups as the Basques, one can also note the need to deal with the languages of immigrants from outside of Europe. As they make clear, language has been on the EU diversity agenda—an immediate feature of the challenge to forge “unity in diversity”—from the beginning, and it remains so as it seeks to resolve the inherent tensions and contradictions between a commitment to linguistic and thereby cultural diversity versus the pragmatic need for linguistic competence in the main languages of business and government, or as the authors put it, the tension between viewing language as an “identity marker” and as a “strategic device” that has led to “segmented diversity and status inequality.” In their concluding remarks, Kraus and Kazlauskaitė-Gürbüz point to a potentially beneficial outcome of a situation where English has increasingly become the Esperanto of the EU. While the obvious concern about cultural homogenization has been voiced, they suggest that English-language dominance may result in a reduction in the gulf between the dominant languages and the smaller ones insofar as both language groups come to share the same challenge to diversity posed by English.
At the other end of the spectrum, as Zanon and Sciortino stress, religion has been largely ignored by the EU until relatively recently. This is not entirely surprising given that the European project was initially construed in primarily economic terms and subsequently evolved into a political venture. It would appear that matters related to religion were not really on the agenda. The authors point out that the existence of the EU poses a unique challenge for church bodies which have become comfortable with state/church relations and are uncertain about what their relationship might be with the EU. For one thing, although the dominant religious organizations are Christian, they include Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches, each with privileged roles in one or more of the member states. No doubt they wonder what their status would be in the EU vis-à-vis the other Christian churches. Layer onto that issue the impact of secularization throughout the continent (evident in EU constitution discussions about what to say about the continent's Christian heritage). Further complicating matters, despite secularization, as Zanon and Sciortino make clear, the historic compromises between political and religious bodies in Europe have resulted in an “uneven differentiation of Church and State.” Next, consider that some of the former communist states of the East that have recently joined the EU must confront a legacy of religious repression. And then layer on to that the growing impact of non-Christian religions, with Islam being the most significant. Zanon and Sciortino make clear that religious diversity, which they quite aptly characterize as both the newest and oldest diversity, is likely to become increasingly salient in the coming decades. At the same time, it would appear that besides encouraging a proactive approach to combating religious discrimination, the EU is inclined to tread very gingerly on Church/State relations in the member states, and, as the authors point out, has been reluctant “to grant churches a privileged status in the European public sphere.” Unlike linguistic diversity, which the EU simply cannot ignore, in the arena of religious diversity, it has been far more inclined to defer to the member states.
Given Islam's connection to immigration, how it is addressed is directly related to state efforts aimed at controlling migratory flows and incorporation policies for those permitted legal entry. And both immigration and integration policies remain rooted at the national level, leading to nation-specific approaches in establishing which immigrants groups are to be favored and which are not, in addition to defining the legitimate relationship between Islam and the state. This is made very clear in Joppke and Torpey's (2013) recent comparative study of four major nations of immigration: Germany and France in Europe and Canada and the United States in North America. In their comparison of the two EU members in this quartet, they contend that, while Germany has a problem with religious equality, France has a problem with religious freedom due to its radical political secularism. As a consequence, the right to practice Islam at the individual level differs (witness the different ways that the headscarf debate has played out in the two countries), as does the status of corporate Islam.
In their analysis of the EU Framework on Integration, Alberto Arribas Lozano and colleagues point to the EU's entry into the integration arena. As their paper indicates, the EU has avoided entanglements with issues related to the corporate status of religion and instead has concentrated on the inclusion of individuals into Europe's receiving societies. The article reveals the limitations of the EU and the Eurosphere in implementing at the concrete policy level one approach versus another, but it also illuminates existing evidence of, and suggests the increased potential for, its “soft law tools” to play an increasingly significant discursive role in the future—a role that can serve to place various national policies under the spotlight of public scrutiny and critique. Some might be inclined to conclude that much that has transpired to date is, as one of the authors' interviewees put it, “a bit of a show.” However, as the authors assert, a discourse at the level of the Eurosphere can be seen as an engagement in a “symbolic battlefield,” and, insofar as the EU articulates a generalized commitment to antidiscrimination and to the promotion of inclusion in all spheres of social life, it can be seen as exhibiting cultural power in setting the terms of debate over issues related to solidarity and justice.
In a similar manner, Agustin and Siim's analysis of the issue of gender inequality focuses on what they describe as the “EU's complex discursive opportunity structures.” Again, the concrete policy formulations of member states reflect differing welfare regimes, and these, in turn, are reflections of differing historical patterns of addressing structured inequalities. The authors stress the need to employ a conceptual approach predicated on intersectionality. What they have in mind in particular is the need to address the interplay between gender and class, but gender is also located at the intersection where the research task at hand is to sort out the respective impacts of heterogeneity (ethnic or religious) and inequality. Again, a critic (or cynic) might suggest that much of what transpires in EU discourse amounts to bureaucratic chatter, but a more dispassionate, and I think realistic, account would see this, too, as a symbolic battlefield.
Taken together, these four articles illustrate the empirical existence of the Eurosphere, assess its emerging role in addressing diversity in its varied manifestations, point to indicators of its increasing salience, and in so doing constitute models for future research. Sciortino and Kraus, in their introduction to this special issue, contrast the push to homogenize populations during the formative era of the modern nation-state with the embrace of “diversity as a core concept” since the very inception of the EU. What this means is that, in contrast to those member states most suspicious of multiculturalism, at the EU level the discourses concerning policies associated with both redistribution and recognition will be framed with a value orientation committed to living with diversity rather than overcoming it. Given the uncertainties of the moment, where this will ultimately lead is impossible to predict.