The World of European Information

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, a shared diagnosis has thus ascribed the misfortunes of political Europe to poor management of the media and public opinion. From this perspective, one can get a first understanding of the reasons for the success of this rhetoric of the 'insurmountable' challenge and its corollaries, delay and failure. We do not situate our analysis within this rhetoric, or to put it differently, we do not use the same framework. The question of the relevance or effectiveness of the EU's communication policy will not be raised here and we shall only examine it as a belief of the actors studied. Rather, our approach is to attempt to analyse the process which constructs European communication. For this purpose, we will endeavour to explore a world at work, that of the professionals of European information, with its routines, contingencies and conflicts, in the same way as other worlds of Europe have been studied in their concrete reality. When one distances oneself from institutional discourses or from media products to conduct the sociology of their producers, the question of European communication no longer appears as a mere phenomenon of discursive ballistics and comes into view as a universe of multiple and complex interactions.