This book examines how national public discourses in Western Europe have transnationalized over the past two decades and what this means for the legitimacy of the European Union.The emergence of a European public sphere is a hot topic in academic as well as political debates across Europe. This book provides the only longitudinal study of the transnationalization and Europeanization of public spheres to date (covering the period 1982-2005). It moves the research frontier forward in a number of ways: by thoroughly inspecting the normative expectations directed at the news media (which are often left implicit in other studies), by employing comprehensive multidimensional measures of the transnationalization of public discourses, by combining quantitative and qualitative methods of media content analysis, and by explaining patterns and trends of Europeanization rather than only describing them.

This book takes a fresh look at a widely debated question in international relations and political communication research: How can public discourses contribute to democratic governance beyond the nation state? The book combines quantitative and qualitative analyses of media content and evaluates them from a democratic theory perspective.