Communicating Europe between information, communication and participation deficits: prospects for EU public institutional communication in the post-pandemic scenario. Towards a European digital public sphere?

Although over the past 60 years Member States have transferred a large part of their power to European institutions, they do not enjoy a widely accepted democratic legitimacy. In the 1990s, especially following the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and of the single currency in 1999, part of the project constraints became evident. As a consequence, the climate of opinion towards the emerging European Union changed from an initial condition of ‘‘permissive consensus’’ to a ‘‘constraining consensus’’. Numerous studies carried out to investigate the causes of this change, that over the years has taken the form of a growing skepticism towards the whole EU system, provided the theory of the so-called ‘’democratic deficit’’ (G. F. Pasquino), strictly related to another form of deficit: the ‘’informative’’ one (M. Belluati). Within this context, debates and studies about the European Public Sphere (EPS) acquired more relevance and the issue of the EPS for many years restricted to almost exclusively professional circles, recently re-emerged on a larger scale. Paradoxically, when the health emergency caused by Covid-19 drew the attention of EU citizens to the importance of shared values ( solidarity, acceptance and the valorization of cultural diversity, but also dialogue and discussion, all prerogatives of the Habermasian model of the Public Sphere) academics, professionals, researchers, but also EU officers started debating once again about the necessity of the EPS. As a result of the Covid-19 outbreak and its drastic consequences, European policy makers and media, alongside with actors of other nature, focussed on the same issue at the same time. As a result, EU citizens were reached by communication and information flows mainly pivoted around the same core: the pandemic. These are the steps behind the research hypothesis, according to which Covid-19 pandemic has marked a turning point in the history of the European integration, providing solid evidence that EU Institutions recognized the necessity to improve the quality of the European public debate through citizen engagement, digitalization (considering the potential coming from the ‘'platform society’’- Van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal) and media pluralism in the perspective of a European e-governance prototype. Evidence to that is provided by EU Institutions: examples include the Media Action Plan and the European Democracy Action Plan, both adopted by the EU Commission in December 2020. One aimed at regulating the European media ecosystem, and the other at redefining European democracy, these official documents define suitable conditions for the emergence of the EPS. Referring to the so-called ‘'information deficit’’, which alongside the ‘’democratic’’ one, weighs on the European project, the debate about the EPS tends to polarize around a major question: does an EPS or do national public spheres persist? If so, would the EPS model differ from the national one? If so, in which way? To what extent would the EPS result from the Europeanization of the national Public Spheres? Could we think of a digital EPS?