The new public sphere by Manuel Castells (and why the European Union is playing a dangerous game)

Manuel Castells is considered by many to be an expert on the subject of the information age we currently live in. He is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, a frequent visiting professor of technology and society at MIT, publisher of 25 distinguished books and the owner of 15 honorary doctorates and university medals. It's safe to say that after reading his article there weren't much criticisms I could levy at his work.

In this article Castells sets out to define the concept of a global civil society, the sphere in which global organization and policy making takes place, and the lack of grip that most national governments have on global scale. This global civil society is very similar to the national civil society he describes earlier in his article.

The image proposed by Castells is this. Not only is a government responsible for providing security and governance to it's citizens, but it also has to draw on discourse with these very citizens as a way of validating their choice of policy and process. This happens within the Public Sphere. The Public Sphere consists of all space where discourse can take place between a government and its citizens. The collective expressions within the Public Sphere is what's known as the Civil Society.

In order for a government to be considered a democracy, there must be a free civil society in place. One that is not censored nor controlled in any way. The government should limit itself only to the promotion of proper behavior and mutual respect. To quote Castells: "the relationship between the state and civil society is the cornerstone of democracy".

As you have probably read in the title, this post is probably not going to end up with a very positive view towards the European Union. Before I delve into those ravings I would like to point out one more element from the article, which I probably can't stress enough. Global policy should only be considered with global affairs. It should therefore not be desired, or indeed possible, for international governance to overrule democratically chosen national governments! This means that international and global governance should focus on commonly agreed upon policies, such as the counteracting of global warming and the protection of human rights.

Que the EU. An international body of governance that, as we may know, consists of members from each of its member states. These members, known as MEP's, are elected in whatever way member states decide is appropriate. Sadly in multiple cases MEP's are elected through Party-List PR, like in Belgium and France, or through national election results in Germany, Italy and Poland. My second strife with this system is how the nations are represented by each getting to elect an arbitrary number of MEP's based on some degressive proportionality (similar to the electoral votes system used in the US). The thing is, as a dutchman I never voted for any of the Italian MEP's or German MEP's. To be accepted as a democratically elected body of governance the EU MEP's should be elected by ALL european citizens. Sadly, a skewed process based on the size of nations is implemented, many of which never even get the opportunity to elect their own MEP's.

Now I wouldn't object so strongly to this election system if it weren't for the fact that the European Union has the power to actually govern Europeans. A quote from the EU website blatantly states the following: "EU law - which has equal force with national law - confers rights and obligations on the authorities in each Member State, as well as individuals and businesses. The authorities in each Member State are responsible for implementing EU legislation in national law and enforcing it correctly, and they must guarantee citizens’ rights under these laws."

So not only is this international governing power elected through non-democratic procedure, but it also has the ability to propose laws equal in force to national law, and the power to force its member states into enforcing these laws as if they were their own. And we're not just talking about commonly accepted policies like counteracting global warming either. The EU has created several international laws dealing for instance with local economies such as an enforcement of budget deficit limits. In the words of Simon Hix, the EU is now a quasifederal polity (Hix, Simon. The Political System of the European Union (2nd ed.). p. 123).

As my closing statement I would once more like to turn to the work of Castells, who proposes that public governance, just like national governance, should be based on the knowledge within the global public sphere. A sphere in which discourse can take place between everyone in the public and the government, and from which a governing institution must draw justification and inspiration for their decisions. Not a sphere with skewed representations, and especially not with the absence of this sphere. 


"Because we live in a globalized, interdependent world, the space of political
codecision is necessarily global. And the choice that we face is either to construct
the global political system as an expression of power relationships without cultural
mediation or else to develop a global public sphere around the global networks
of communication, from which the public debate could inform the
emergence of a new form of consensual global governance. If the choice is the
latter, public diplomacy, understood as networked communication and shared
meaning, becomes a decisive tool for the attainment of a sustainable world order."
                                                                                                    - Manuel Castells