The Information and Communication Policy of the European Union between Institutionalisation and Legitimation

The massive information campaigns and the numerous initiatives launched by the European Commission after the failure of the constitutional experiment have recently raised the attention of academics and commentators on the information and communication policy of the European Union (EU). Central topics of the debate are the legitimacy crisis affecting the EU—that mainly stems from the lack of citizens’ participation to the policy-making and from the absence of clear mechanisms of accountability—and the possibility and/or need for creating a European public space to strengthen the European democratic foundations. Several scholars, in fact, have recently applied the notion of the public sphere to the European context, trying to assess the extent to which the EU enables its citizens to debate publicly supranational issues and to develop a transnational public opinion on them as conditions for the creation of a truly European democratic polity. According to this perspective, binding decisions taken at the EU level would be legitimate only if citizens’ are allowed to discuss them and to participate in their formation (Fossum & Schlesinger, 2007: 5). Thus communication represents an essential requisite for democratisation since it connects the authoritative power of the European institutions with public participation. This chapter analyses the development of the EU information and communication policy adopting a neo-institutionalist approach. From this point of view, the creation of a viable public sphere represents only one of the possible effects produced by the implementation of the EU information and communication policy while the discourse about communication could be also seen as an essential instrument of institutionalisation and legitimation. From a neo-institutionalist perspective—as it will be lately illustrated—the elaboration of a discourse about communication enables the EU Commission to give coherence and consistence to the institutionalisation of its role and duties throughout the integration process and to reinforce its self-representation as leading institution in the transition towards a more democratic configuration. On the other side, the EU discourse about communication performs an important legitimating function because it delineates the set of concepts referred to the idea of democracy pursued by the Commission that Member States should be socialised to. The chapter is structured in four parts. The first part outlines the theoretical foundations of the relation between the processes of institutionalisation, communication and legitimation. The second briefly summarises main steps in the development of the EU information and communication policy from the 1950s until now and places them within the general context of the integration process. Part 3 identifies the principal issues around which the Commission has structured the discourse about communication. The chapter ends with some critical observations about the EU information and communication policy and its impact as vehicle of institutionalisation and legitimation.