The European Commission’s turn to deliberation as public debate in times of crisis and its attendant conceptions of a European public (1992-2016)

The call for public debate at a time of significant political decision-making is best understood as an appeal for a public warrant. As such, the request for a public debate is inextricably a political phenomenon associated with political legitimacy. Since 1992, the European Commission has called for a public debate on three distinct occasions. Each occasion was a crisis: the Maastricht crisis (1992/93), the Constitutional Crisis (2005) and the Eurozone crisis (2010). An analysis of the meaning and scope attributed to exactly what the European Commission meant as constituting a public debate at the time of these crises reveals two utterly distinct approaches to and understandings of public debate, deliberative publics and public warrants. The first approach, PD 1, was taken during both the Maastricht crisis and the Eurozone crisis. PD1 needs to be understood ‘as a restricted discussion of Single Market rights’ during which the agenda was set by the European Commission and where public debate was seen as a means to educate Europeans about the value of European integration. In short, the call for and the management of public debate had a didactic intention and purpose. The second approach to public debate, PD 2, emerged during the Constitutional crisis (2005). PD2 was framed by the European Commission as a commitment to an ‘open-ended political deliberation’ where European citizens could set the agenda for debate and were able to decide which topics were of salience to them. PD2 represented the high point of political optimism in deliberation based as it was on the assumption that Europeans were politically interested and active. Each approach to public debate reveals a fundamentally distinct conception of the European public. The first, PD1, saw the European Commission address the European public as students learning the benefits of the Single Market (Scharpf’s ‘output-legitimacy’). The second, PD2, saw the European Commission address a European public consisting of policy advisors that is political deliberators sufficiently knowledgeable to be to influence the political decision-making processes (Scharpf’s ‘input-legitimacy’). And yet, both approaches failed to secure the desired public warrant and the European public, however conceptualized, has remained essentially detached from decision-making processes in any significant way even at times of acute crisis.