‘Welcome to the Counterjihad’: Uncivil Networks and the Narration of European Public Spheres

Abstract

Accounts of a unifying European public sphere (EPS) can seem bleak in a social policy literature, emphasizing the need for coherent deliberative processes to legitimate the European Union as an enterprise in transnational democracy. The article confronts this impasse, arguing that a vibrant plurality of EPSs emerges once analytical pursuit is decoupled from normative associations with the EU project, and so from understandings of civil society and communicative democracy as axiomatic characteristics of an EPS. After discussing the limits of theorizing a singular public sphere converging on the EU, the empirical section of the article portrays a contrasting sphere of pan-European political traction, examining an ‘uncivil’ arena of anti-Muslim coalition-building and exchange. Noting parallels between this ‘uncivil’ pan-Europeanism and normative depictions of Europe's absent (civil, singular, and democratic) public sphere, the article suggests that a less pallid account of European political life emerges once the preoccupation with achieving deliberative coalescence yields to allow recognition (and study) of EPSs in the plural and contestual—as politically constitutive expressions of a multiplicity of open narrative claims and systems taking European conditions and destinies as their core.