Transnational Public Sphere Research Articles

The Conceptual Plurality in Jürgen Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie

In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Also a History of Philosophy), Jürgen Habermas weaves together various themes such as faith and knowledge, history and theology, naturalism and epistemic justification, learning processes and moral development as well as multiculturalism and deliberative democracy in a transnational public sphere. This article argues that to articulate these multiple elements, Habermas adopts a robust framework built upon four conceptual pillars that can be clearly identified: postmetaphysical, postconventional, postnational, and postsecular. This “conceptual plurality” underlies his genealogy of the centuries-long tension and mutual learning between religious faith and scientific knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition. By considering the interplay of these concepts, it is possible to understand the several ways in which religion emerges in contemporary society and the equally multiple strategies Habermas uses to interpret religion throughout his career, which are masterfully reconsidered and articulated in his opus magnum on religion.

The End of Two Illusions: Islam After the West by Hamid Dabashi

Reviewed by: The End of Two Illusions: Islam After the West by Hamid Dabashi Joseph Evans (bio) The End of Two Illusions: Islam After the West by Hamid Dabashi. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022, 333 pp. Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two Illusions is an insightful socio-political analysis. Dabashi argues that the strictly defined theoretical opposition between "Islam and the West" is a recent, but false, historical construct that is both obsolete and dangerous. This text demonstrates that the prevalence of supposed contradictions between "Islam" and "the West" is a pretense that disguises an exaggerated geopolitics of power. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, makes a compelling argument. He suggests that the "de-formative and dangerous binary" is a repercussion of the encounters between fading Muslim empires and growing global domination by European empires in the seventeenth century that is now utilized for contemporary political purposes (28). Dabashi proposes that the opposition in this false binary is an illusion supported by "the West" thinking that "it is exclusively bestowed with the gift of civilization" (29). The text successfully offers an alternative perspective for reconsidering the popular and influential arguments that place "Islam" in opposition to "the West." The End of Two Illusions begins with a perspective on Islam before its encounter with European colonialism, then a historical archeology of "the West," which allows for a deconstruction of the illusory opposition between them. It broadens the narrow scope of focusing only on military encounters by including cultural and intellectual engagements. After a lengthy introduction, Dabashi presents his argument in three interrelated parts: he accounts for the dissimilar categories of the binary, then he shows how the two parts of this relationship are erroneous, and finally he furnishes the reader with factual evidence to effectively understand the geopolitical reality. The author asks how a religion of one and a half billion people spread over five continents and developed over fourteen hundred years can be set at odds with an "imaginative geography, only recently invented, called 'the West'?" (38) This vital question drives the book's argument and should promote serious reconsideration of the contemporary world. Dabashi's approach is effective because he is equally critical of all sides and perspectives. He recognizes the complexities of global politics and cultural engagement. This text is not simply an attack on the West or an apologetic for Islam but an argument that these are two different entities that should not be oversimplified or even compared. The carefully crafted argument makes [End Page 90] it clear that the lines are blurred, and that this inappropriate binary is a cause, rather than a symptom, of the problem. The text contends that Islam and the West "are not two different phenomena, but coterminous, both the outcome of an identical colonial condition and in need of a simultaneous post-colonial critique" (18). Dabashi places the current state of Islamism in a larger frame of reference, in the global context of its categorical opposition posited against "the West." He concludes by arguing that the historical uses and abuses of that binary opposition are no longer useful or legitimate despite having been politically productive in the past. An important component of Dabashi's approach is the attention he gives to the formation of a transnational public sphere where "Islam and the West" is no longer a credible presupposition. The last three chapters of the book develop this approach by concentrating on the intersectionality of the crucial issues of race, class, and gender. A critical contribution of this text, which is handled skillfully by the author, is his treatment of the concept and practice of dialogue. Dabashi addresses the complexities of interreligious and intercultural dialogue, identifying some of the dangers in common approaches, while offering useful recommendations. He notes in chapter five that a "dialogue of civilizations" was lost after 9/11 because of the wide acceptance of Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilizations, resulting in a monologue rather than a dialogue (174). This model, which Dabashi refers to as "impossible dialogue," became a means of domination, which is a common pitfall of dialogue when utilized to impose one's...

Literature Festivals

Abstract Literary festivals have become authorities in the literary field, promoting works through the charismatic persona of their author, and operating a transfer of symbolic capital from the most famous ones to the newcomers. Some of these festivals are international, and thus play a role in the making of world authorship and of world literature. Based on a quantitative and qualitative study of thirty-eight international literary festivals, this paper focuses on the way international literary festivals reflect, even as they shape, the structure of the transnational literary field. International festivals tend to mirror the unequal conditions of access to world authorship and the power relations that structure the world market for translations. However, some of them develop strategies to counter these power relations. They are also more politicized, and try to construct a more diverse and inclusive transnational public sphere, where writers act as public intellectuals.

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Cross-National Social Influence: How Foreign Votes Can Affect Domestic Public Opinion

Do voters follow the preferences of foreign mass collectives? Despite the growing research on policy diffusion and theoretical debates on the emergence of transnational public spheres, we know little about the impact of foreign votes on domestic public opinion. Yet, the results of elections and referendums may provide a signal to people in other countries and trigger a process of contagion. This study leverages the coincidence of the 2005 French referendum on the European Constitution and the fieldwork of two surveys to analyze the causal effect of cross-national social influence. Results show that the French rejection increased public opposition to the Constitution abroad. A process of cognitive activation explains why knowledgeable voters also grew Eurosceptic after the vote. These findings attest to the interdependence of national publics and contribute to our understanding of mechanisms of social contagion.

Between Europeanism and Nativism: Exploring a Cleavage Model of European Public Sphere in Social Media

The European Union’s common public sphere project dates back to the 1960s and relies on Europeanisation through the gradual eradication of communication boundaries between its member countries. However, it is evident by now that Europeanisation of national public spheres is hard to achieve by increasing overlaps between national public spheres, synchronisation of news reporting across national boundaries, or diffusion of Europeanist norms into national politics. The European Union’s common public sphere project may hence be in danger. This calls for explorations of other imaginable models of the public sphere for Europe. Are there traces of other modes of transnational public sphere emerging in Europe? In this article, we explore a models of the transnational public sphere which is based on an alternative concept of Europeanisation derived from the cleavage theory. By drawing on social media data and employing tools of social network analysis, we demonstrate the empirical possibility of a cleavage model of the European public sphere.

Internationalizing Afghan security? Strategic narratives and transnational public sphere (dis)formation in Chinese, Russian, Afghani, and US media

For most of the past two decades, the United States pursued a policy leveraging its traditional NATO partners to secure Afghanistan’s future against the Taliban with little lasting success. However, in a dramatic reversal of U.S. policy in July 2018, President Trump ordered the start of direct talks between the United States and Taliban with the goal of internationalizing Afghan security. We argue that this move in 2018 by the United States can be understood as an attempt toward forming a transnational community around Afghan security by allowing non-allied nations greater voice and agency in Afghanistan’s political future. However, current theories of transnational public sphere are unable to account for such processes. Thus, the primary aim of this study is development of a theory of transnational foreign policy sphere formation. Drawing upon Wessler et al.’s (2008) four-step process of transnational public sphere development, we conceptualize this process as one of strategic narrative (dis)alignment across and within foreign nations’ media reporting on a common issue of concern. We then use media narratives reporting on Afghanistan’s political future as an empirical case study to demonstrate our theory, by examining over 2000 news articles from 17 different Chinese, Russian, U.S., and Afghani media outlets from February 2017 to January 2020. Theoretically, our study advances research into the transnational public sphere by examining their (dis)formation over time as well as the limits and opportunities of transnational public sphere emergence outside of European contexts and on foreign policy issues among publics with very different sociopolitical interests and cultures.

Media-political inroads for Europeanising national cultural public spheres: EU-level obstacles and national public service perspectives

ABSTRACT This article discusses whether European or national-level media policies are suitable for facilitating a Europeanisation of national cultural public spheres. It is argued that current EU media policy initiatives and the activities of globally operating private corporations (e.g. Netflix and HBO) cannot achieve transnational cultural co-imbrication, strengthen horizontal ties among citizens from different countries, or increase the social inclusivity of public spheres. National public service media (PSM) have a potential to do so, but only to a limited extent, because in many EU countries, they face financial, competitive, managerial and political pressures binding them to nationally delimited roles. Nevertheless, drawing on examples of PSM successes in fostering Europeanisation and normative debates on transnational public spheres, ideals for a network of European PSM are presented, which offer a vision of PSM that (re-)legitimises themselves as key players in the building and accessibility of Europeanised public spheres for EU cohesion.

How do transnational public spheres emerge? Comparing news and social media networks during the Madrid climate talks

In this study, we explore two parallel networks of discourse during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations of 2019 in Madrid (25th Conference of the Parties, COP25): one produced by news media coverage of the talks; the other by Twitter users who shared news content about the talks. Findings show that transnational public spheres can emerge out of relatively homogeneous moments internal to networks and external to networks (i.e. across multiple networks) at the intersection of certain actors and topics, cultural practices, and commercial and non-commercial (state) institutions. Yet there are persistent divisions along language, geographic, and other lines that encourage the formation of distinct micro-spheres of networked actors (internal heterogeneity), as well as distinct media practices that work to differentiate mass media networks from networks produced by a different set of publics on social media (external heterogeneity).

HOW ARE PUBLIC SPHERES TRANSNATIONAL? COMPARING NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS DURING THE MADRID CLIMATE TALKS

In this study, we explore two parallel but related networks of discourse that arose during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations of 2019 in Madrid: one produced by news media coverage of the talks; the other by Twitter users who shared news content about the talks. As these networks disseminated information about the UNFCCC’s 25th Conference of the Parties (COP25), we see them as key channels of communication for a potentially transnational public sphere of dialogue and dissent, even if the existence or efficacy of such a transnational sphere is a matter of great debate (Fraser, 2007). Our aim is to compare the internal (within network) and external (across networks) homogeneity and homogeneity of these two networks in terms of structure (e.g., language, geographic groups, etc.), dominant topics, and sentiments. We find that a potential for the emergence of transnational public spheres lies in contradictory currents of homogeneity and heterogeneity in transnational networks related to 1) the social capital of certain actors; 2) institutional infrastructures such as U.N. processes; 3) media ownership structures; 4) different cultural practices.

An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure

In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, the political commitments embedded in its systems, and how attention to racial justice could transform them. Drawing on fan fiction genres, we offer three potential models for thinking through these possibilities: a fix-it that would extend AO3's existing metadata structures; a canon divergence that would alter the makeup of the content on AO3; and an alternative universe that draws from abolitionist organizing to imagine the broadest structural changes of all.

Performance and the Transnational Public Sphere in Rwanda: An Ethnographic Encounter with Silence

This article considers the relationship between performance and the transnational public sphere, understood as a space in which a range of international actors come together to discuss, debate and advance ideas on topics which are mutually important. It suggests that performance in Rwanda has an important role in terms of reflecting, and facilitating, emerging conversations around the legacies of violence. As evidenced by the Ubumuntu Arts Festival, held annually in Kigali, it is not only at the national level that these conversations are significant. Global publics, including artists, audiences and researchers are all travelling to Rwanda to participate in events which have broader, international, significance.

Framing the frontier – Tracing issues related to soybean expansion in transnational public spheres

Rapid soybean expansion in South America has been linked to numerous socio-environmental problems, including deforestation in sensitive biomes. As a major importing region of soybeans, wider public awareness has also put pressure on the European Union. Different governance initiatives involving various groups of stakeholders have sought to address these issues. However, what is identified as a relevant problem, as a region of interest or which actors are mentioned in this context are all matters of claims-making processes between different groups and mediated through various channels of communication. This study uses a text-mining approach to trace the construction of socio-ecological problems related to soybean expansion and the actors and regions linked with these issues in public discourse. The focus lies on print media from the European Union, but several additional sources are included to investigate the similarities and differences between various communication channels and regions. These include newspaper articles from producing countries and international news agencies, scientific abstracts, corporate statements, and reports from advocacy groups gathered from the mid-1990s to 2020. The results show that European mass media have shifted their focus from consumer labeling, health, and concerns over genetically modified organisms towards more distant or abstract phenomena, such as deforestation and climate change. This has been accompanied with a broader view on different stakeholders, but also with a strong regional focus on the Amazon biome. There has also been much less attention on direct concerns for communities in producing regions, such as land conflicts or disputes over intellectual property rights. We conclude that while European public spheres appear to become more receptive to issues related to impacts in sourcing regions, there remains a narrow focus on specific problems and regions, which reflects a fundamental asymmetry in different stakeholders' ability to shape transnational deliberations and resulting governance processes.

Publics, Scientists and the State: Mapping the Global Human Genome Editing Controversy

AbstractLiterature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyse global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas: China's national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across-sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome editing controversy surrounding research conducted by scientists in China between 2015 and 2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disrupted expert–public relationships as envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to redraw the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.

Speakers (European/Global Public Sphere)

In research on the transnationalization of the public sphere, speakers are coded in claim analysis (Adam, 2007; Koopmans & Statham, 2010) and in research on European identity (Lichtenstein & Eilders, 2015, 2019). Speakers are politicians, societal actors or journalists who are given voice in a news story. In claim analyses, a speaker directs, for instance, a thematic demand or decision towards another actor. In research on European identity, speakers address an EU frame in a news story. The variable “speaker” provides a broad categorization of the first or most important speaker in an article. He or she is more precisely classified using further variables which target the actors’ degree of organization, his or her country of origin and his or her more detailed function within the EU or other international institutions.
 
 Field of application/theoretical foundation:
 In research on the transnationalization of the public sphere, speakers are coded to measure interactions between countries (horizontal transnationalization) and to analyze the extent to which EU actors get a voice in the coverage of national media outlets (vertical transnationalization). They are also coded to analyze to which extent civil society actors are heard compared to politicians. The share of EU and international speakers differs between countries, media outlets, and policy fields. In research on European identity the variable additionally enables to differentiate between the kinds of speakers who are given a voice in the collective construction of European identity.
 
 References/combination with other methods of data collection:
 Content analyses that examine the claims of speakers in transnational public spheres has been combined with interview studies with journalists, politicians, and interest groups (Koopmans & Statham, 2010).
 
 Example study:
 Koopmans & Statham (2010)
 
 Information on Koopmans & Statham, 2010
 Authors: Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham
 Research question/research interest: Analysis of the visibility of the EU level in the transnational public sphere, the inclusiveness of public demands, and public contestation regarding EU decision making
 Object of analysis: National quality newspaper, popular press, regional papers from seven countries
 Timeframe of analysis: 1990–2002
 
 Information about variable
 Variable name/definition: speakers
 “If a claim has more than one actor (e.g., a coalition), the following priority rules apply: 1) actors mentioned in the article as 'leaders', 'organizers', 'spokespersons', etc. have priority, unless, of course, they do not make any claims; 2) organizations, institutions or representatives thereof (e.g., 'National Organization of Peasants') have priority over unorganized collectivities or individuals (e.g., 'peasants', 'farmer X'); 3) active actors or speakers have priority over passive audiences/rank-and-file participants (e.g., if a party representative addresses a crowd at a peace rally, the party representative has priority). If there are several actors or no actor at all who have priority according to these three criteria, the order in which they are mentioned in the article decides (with, again, the main headline as the start of the article). If of one physical actor two functions are mentioned, the highest level capacity in terms of the scope variable (see below) is coded. E.g., if the article says “Portuguese prime minister and current Chair of the EU Presidency Guttierez” would be code as “EU presidency” even if Portuguese prime minister would be mentioned first. However, the precondition would be that the EU presidency function is really mentioned in the article - that you know that the Portuguese prime minister is present Chair of the Council is not decisive, it should be explicitly mentioned. (…) Only if two capacities are at the same scope level the rule is that the first mentioned is coded.” (Koopmans, 2002, p. 24; https://europub.wzb.eu/Data/Codebooks%20questionnaires/D2-1-claims-codebook.pdf)
 Level of analysis: Claim
 Scale level: Nominal
 Reliability: 84%
 
 References
 Koopmans, R. & Statham, P. (2010) (Eds.). The Making of a European Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sports in the Transnational Public Sphere: Findings from the Case of Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong Tweet

On October 4, 2019, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), shared on Twitter a slogan: ‘fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong’ in support of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. This tweet raised a rapidly growing fallout in both China and the US. This paper aims to assess sports in the transnational public sphere through Morey’s case. We monitored ‘Morey (莫雷)’ on Twitter, Sina Weibo, Baidu Index, Google trends, and Nexis News from October 4 to December 31, 2019. Our findings show that Morey's tweet offended Chinese Houston Rockets fans, which urged them to attack Morey on Twitter. The butterfly effect exerted influence onto the Chinese Basketball Association and the NBA, and gradually turned sports-related issues into politics- and business-related issues. Chinese NBA fans made the Chinese, American, and overseas public spheres overlap and contributed to the formation of a transnational public sphere. Therefore, the international political debates went into a ‘spiral of silence’, and faded out with the success of the ‘American value’. With globalization, sports inevitably intertwine with the transnational public sphere, so long as political conflicts continue. However, the globalization of sports ought to stress diversity and multiculturalism and remain uncontaminated by politics.

Between Affects and Norms

Abstract This article seeks to explore the meaning of emotional content in a transnational public sphere, in particular with regard to the concept of solidarity. The main normative question that the author discusses here is how far it is possible – if it’s the case at all – to move beyond the basic structure of nation-linked patriotic feeling to solidarity as a transnational political emotion. He divides his argument into two steps. First, he analyzes how the concept of constitutional patriotism could be reframed around the contours of post-national contexts. He suggests that Hegel’s concept of patriotism as a political disposition can contribute to a transnational framework. In a second step, the author discusses solidarity as a transnational political emotion, arguing that one should have in view both its formative process and its contingencies in order to understand the institutional and symbolic mediation of affective contents of social praxis.

La National Paper and Type Co. y el negocio del panamericanismo (1900-1930)

Este trabajo aborda la historia del panamericanismo a partir del análisis de un caso particular: las actividades mercantiles y el discurso publicitario de la compañía estadounidense llamada National Paper and Type Co. Esta empresa, que estuvo activa en las primeras décadas del siglo veinte, acaparó el nicho de mercado de la exportación de maquinaria y productos para la impresión (papel y tinta) manufacturados en los Estados Unidos para distribuirlos a toda Latinoamérica. Fue la principal proveedora de los insumos con que se hicieron los periódicos más notables de la región. Al dominar este mercado, construyó el andamiaje de la estructura material de la esfera pública. Además de dominar esta importante actividad transnacional, la National fue una activa divulgadora del discurso panamericanista que aprovechó para asegurarse clientes, promover una cultura de negocios en América Latina típica de la sociedad anglosajona y cultivó una mentalidad que propiciaba el consumo. El panamericanismo que manipuló esta compañía distribuidora de manufacturas promovió una muy importante valoración de Latinoamérica y fortaleció los vínculos que proponía aquella utopía de cercanía que imaginaba una Panamérica unida. Esta intermediaria comercial y cultural construyó un puente de comunicación que abonaría al fortalecimiento de una esfera pública transnacional.

Participation and deliberative discourse on social media – Wikipedia talk pages as transnational public spheres?

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the potential societal function of Wikipedia beyond serving as an encyclopedia. That is, it assesses both theoretically and empirically whether talk pages (TP) – Wikipedia discussion sites that accompany the encyclopedic entries and provide spaces for debates among Wikipedia editors – may function as transnational public spheres. Despite the increasing number of studies on citizen engagement and participation in the age of social media, Wikipedia as an example of the participatory internet has received little research attention in this regard. This study redresses this research gap in two steps. Drawing on Habermas’ concept of the public sphere and Fraser's and Eriksen's modifications thereof, Wikipedia's – specifically the TPs’ – modus operandi is explored to evaluate whether TPs may serve as spaces for transnational political opinion formation. This theoretical exploration is complemented with an empirical assessment of a TP dedicated to the EU. The case study addresses if/to what degree Wikipedia editors have appropriated the TP to function as a transnational public sphere. Findings indicate that Wikipedia TPs can – and do – serve as general transnational public spheres.

Towards the European transnational public sphere: Finnish liberal intellectuals and their periodicals between nationalism and internationalism under russification

ABSTRACT An important era for the European Enlightenment-founded ‘republic of letters’ was the cultural internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fin de siècle was also significant in forming the concepts of both the European intellectual and the European public sphere. The starting point of my article is the Finnish liberal cultural intellectuals during this period. In their activities in Europe, these Finnish intellectuals operated in the context of Russification, and that left a national mark. On the other hand, Scandinavia was the first frame of reference for literary-oriented Finnish liberal intellectuals. Through empirical examples from the cultural periodicals they edited, I discuss how periphery intellectuals joined the European republic of letters and how transnationalism in exchanging ideas and sharing universal ideals was realized. The outcome of the article is that although transnationalism in history studies provides a fruitful way to approach the era in question, often nationalism play a significant role in the transnational activities of intellectuals in small nations. Besides the political situation of a young small nation in turmoil, the close relationship between the State and ‘intellectual labour’ makes the Finnish case interesting in terms of transnational history.