Public narratives of European citizenship: the dialogical citizen in the European public sphere

This chapter uses the ideational site of European citizenship in contribution to articulating the mechanisms of discursive governance. It focuses on one central challenge, that is, the development of the substantial figure of a dialogical citizen, embodied, relational, dynamic, and compelled to act. Understanding this figure provides one answer to a key question for discursive governance—in what ways do political discourses resonate within some quarters of the public sphere and in others they are resisted? To answer this question, as this book demonstrates, is a matter of the bi-directional mechanisms by which political discourses move between political actors, institutional scaffolding, policy implementation, and the public sphere. Our focus in this chapter relates specifically to examining the different ways the public sphere can be understood. How are publics and their opinions conceptualized or perhaps more critically—how do publics constitute themselves?