Between “Publicness” and “Publicity”: Conceptualizing Discourse “Assemblages” of Public Legitimacy in Transnational Spaces

Abstract

Over the last two years, a number of debates emerged which aim to reconceptualize the public sphere as a space of public legitimacy in the context of transnational communication. This is obviously not an easy task as the conceptual construction of what we mean by “public discourse” and in fact, “legitimacy” is still today deeply associated with the historical development of public deliberation, enabled through the formation of modern European nation-states. Most of these debates build on the Habermasian framework which is then extended to a transnational terrain. Some of recent approaches, for example, identify a new relation between national and transnational spheres in the formation of social movements or “transgressive” publics (Gilman-Opalsky, 2008), discuss new transnational forms of international relations (Crack, 2008), describe the influence of deliberative transnational publics in the context of new global governance structures (Held & Koenig-Archibugi, 2005) and discuss public deliberation in a variety of societal models (see Weden, 2008).