A European Identity Crisis? The Real Problem is the Juncker Commission’s Break with the Civil Tradition of Public Communication

One of the current main challenges to the emergence of a European identity and with that a feeling of belonging to Europe amongst the general European public is the abstract and poor nature of the European Commission’s public communication policy and activities. Since the Juncker Commission took office in 2014 the European citizen has been reduced to nothing other than an economic-social actor who inhabits the single market circumscribed by rather narrow consumerist Single Market rights. These rights are ascribed based on an instrumental economic rationale of making the Single Market work more efficiently. The attendant conception of civil society promoted by the Juncker Commission is of Hegelian nature; that is a realm of means, ends and instrumentalism where institutions are sustained by our long term self-interest, or those of our particular ‘Stände’ (class). It is a realm of contractual relationships, of non-intimate work and exchange, where actions are co-ordinated according to the desire to maximize personal welfare and the status of the ‘Stände’. The Juncker’s public communication of European citizenship and European integration is narrow and breaks with the European Commission’s civil tradition of public communication. Its narrowness and abstractness does not appeal to many Europeans and doesn’t do the identity of Europe justice. It is a bleak and sober representation of Europe and it is this non-appealing representation that has partly caused citizen’s disengagement with Europe. It is time to return to the way in which public communication was undertaken in an attempt to stimulate a Civil Europe 1951-1972 (and also 2004-09); that is a public communication tradition that communicated ideals of European citizenship irrespective of economic conditions and that attempted to represent Europe as one for all Europeans.