What is the state of the blogosphere in Europe? Ronny Patz is an editor at Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates the content of 904 blogs on European affairs. He argues that most blogs are written by insiders in the EU bubble and that a fresh look from the outside by more academic and citizen bloggers would enrich the EU blogosphere and provide a much needed way of holding the EU and its politicians to account.
As part of the EU bubble, the EU blogosphere, very much like the EU institutions, is a sphere apart. This sphere, it seems, is very much focused on the narrow lines of Brussels activities, which do not really grasp the more Europe-wide debates that go beyond. The reason is that EU blogs are often written by direct or indirect EU insiders, people who either live in Brussels or whose bodies and brains are frequently travelling, at least virtually, to the hills and valleys of power of the Belgian capital.
In 2008, Nosemonkey, now a Euroblogging veteran of 9 years, produced a list of 110 EU blogs. Today, Bloggingportal.eu, a 3 year old EU blog platform of which I am one of the many editors, lists over 900 EU blogs, an estimated 200 of which are publishing at least one blog post every 1-2 weeks.
To my knowledge, this Euroblogosphere – EU-focussed blogs and blog posts on EU affairs written on non-EU-focussed blogs – has not been the subject of academic study. Fellow Euroblogger André’s Atomization overcome? The Case of the European Blogosphere in Fostering More European Democracy is the only relevant publication one can come across through Google Scholar. Making any remarks on the state of EU blogging is thus quite subjective.
Yet, a systematic study on the current state of EU blogging would very likely find a sphere in which blogs written by EU journalists and European studies majors, Members of the European Parliament and EU Commissioners, EU lobbyists and anti-lobbyists, academics and lawyers, PR/PA people and EU officials, Euroenthusiasts and Eurosceptics mostly coexist without too much interaction (in the form of links and comments).
Most EU bloggers write about their preferred subjects and they stick to them, not too much influenced by what others write about the topic. Most write in English. Many EU blogs are generalist blogs covering a wide range of issues under certain angles. There are not many EU blogs with a meticulous focus on specific policy fields, although there are some. The most read Euroblogs are probably those written by journalists like Jean Quatremer, blogging on newspaper websites that already have a wide readership.
What is missing in my view – for the full argument see my post “Why there is no serious blogging scene in Brussels” – are genuine citizen blogs, watchdogs written by people without particular stakes in the EU systems, citizens who would follow certain politicians and certain developments as regular, independent, and critical voices. So far, there is nobody who regularly follows certain EU politicians and holds them accountable when they say one thing here and another thing there. There are no policy geeks (or very, very few) who go to every public event in their favourite policy field to be able to tell when the tides are starting to turn, who regularly analyse the latest documents so that they become understandable for a wider public.
Furthermore – and I have to write this since I am blogging this on a newly founded academic blog – I also do not see a relevant EU-focussed academic blogging community. There is so much EU research out there, so many specialists on a wide range of EU topics, but they are not out here debating their research and their specialist topics, neither with each other nor with the rest of the world. The don’t bring the academic debate on EU affairs to the digital public and they therefore miss the great chance of making academic research on EU matters more connected to reality and reality more connected to what we find out in often years long research process.
For me, the EUROPP blog is a chance to foster academic involvement online, in the EU blogosphere and beyond. This will only work if those writing here are aware what is written elsewhere in the digital sphere, if they react by linking and debating what was said by others, by going to other blogs, fora, Facebook discussion threads and if they involve in the discussions where they happen instead of just leaving self-sufficient texts here on this blog.
Good blogging is quite easy if one takes the time to do a little research and to understand the dynamics of these discussions In this sense, blogging is like academic work: Cite others, add your own thoughts and knowledge – and once you know roughly what you have found or what you want to say, go to fora where the debate is already going on.
The EU blogosphere is like one of the academic conferences you can go to, and the state of this conference is not bad at all – but I’d say it could be much better with the involvement of more academics.
Please read our comments policy before commenting.
_______________________________________
Ronny Patz –University of Potsdam
Ronny Patz is a political scientist at the University of Potsdam (Germany) with a keen interest in European affairs and network theory. His PhD thesis examines information flows in the context of EU policy-making. Patz is a co-editor of bloggingportal.eu and in 2010 and 2011, he was a volunteer advisor to the EU office of Transparency International.
Ronny,
Is this an annual post? It just seems to echo others I have read before, bewailing the lack of cohesion of the Euro bloggosphere.
The fundamental problem is that the EU is of niche interest. Most people, though they roam the world through t ‘tinterweb remain firmly rooted in the physical reality of wherethey are, the place they buy their milk abnd beer, where they pay their rent. Europe is a chimera, of interest, but not vital.
@ Gawain
Well, in a sense it is an annual or overview post, although my hope is that on this new academic blog it may reach an audience that may not have read last years’ assessments. 😉 I have also complemented it with some empirical back-up this time. It probably shows that not much is changing, but the number of active blogs writing on EU affairs is still slowly rising, so not a desperate situation.
I agree that the EU is a niche topic in some sense, but (a) EU policies do not have niche impacts and (b) many EU researchers who are very much following both the substantive policies of the European Union and the politics happening around them could still enrich the “niches” that exist. That was one of the arguments that I wanted to convey with this post – there is room for (more) EU academics to get involved and leave the cocoon of EU academia.
I’m convinced that it is possible to get some aspects of EU politics out of their niche life, to link political discussions that definitely belong together and to make EU officials, politicians, and bureaucrats aware that their world views may not match real-world discussions across the Union when making yet another EU law for which they self-congratulate themselves afterwards.
It was therefore worth repeating that we need a better linked European blogosphere and that we definitely need more EU watchblogs, whether to show that the EU is obsolete (the EU-sceptic position) or to try to contribute in improving how it functions (the EU-critical or EU-friendly position).
Hi Ronny,
I really appreciate your insight into the matter. Before I started my blog I went back and forth on the idea of what could actually mean to build a citizen (academic) oriented blog on EU topics.
I was surprised to see how many specialized blogs are out there, and I guess most of the specialists do it simply because it is a requirement nowadays to have an online visible profile. Most of the blogs I read are on http://www.euractiv.com, but even these sometimes seem to be too distant from the point of view of the simple citizen.
I do not agree with Towler that Europe is a chimera. The living proof is the fact that a significant part of our legislation comes from Brussels through the European Parliament. There are laws voted on regularly of which we are not even aware.
Additionally, more involved citizens means less speculation in politics on whether or not European Union allows us to do something. Educated citizens understand the process and are able to filter better the messages that are sent to them.
With that in mind, I have started my own blog (website) for the moment bilingual (English and Romanian). I hope to keep it updated several times per week and increase its productivity with interesting contributions from my fellow colleagues in the academia and business sphere.
Lets stay in touch!
Ruxandra
Some thoughts on the lack of audience of EU blogs (critical if they are to contribute to democracy):
1) We blog in English = No engagement with national audiences. This I think is the most fundamental issue. Genuinely popular EU bloggers like Quatremer and Daniel Hannan are also intensely national, often to the point of chauvinism.
2) The EU, mostly, is niche and isn’t all that interesting to people’s daily lives. Barroso/Rompuy/Ashton are more functionaries than actors, policies often have no budgets worthy of the name, and if they require full consensus tend to be completely vapid and insipid. Arguably some of the drama of the real deciders – namely the Council’s ministers on controversial things like an FTT, energy efficiency, climate targets – I think could plausibly interest people. Hmm. That could be worth a blog!
3) On the other hand, when we blog about how bad the EU’s “communication strategy” is, or how useless a commissioner is, or some institutional anecdote – which may or may not be interesting – we’re firmly stuck in the “niche” of the bubble.
4) The eurozone, unlike most EU policy areas, should REALLY interest people given that it has a HUGE impact on something they care about immensely: Their job prospects and economic (in)security. Its management is not only extremely undemocratic (run by the independent ECB, pre-programmed rules and Merkozy), but has also led to rising record unemployment, a double-dip recession, and basically permanent poverty and emigration for entire nations. A blog on this in English probably couldn’t find much of an audience, but there is a huge need for such blogs in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek…
I also note that many people very successfully blog about the EU without being “EU bloggers”. I think of Paul Krugman’s and Olivier Berruyer’s analyses of the eurozone. Berruyer’s blog manages to simultaneously be extremely technical and well-read, very pedagogical (http://www.les-crises.fr/).
I found myself nodding vigorously when I read “There are not many EU blogs with a meticulous focus on specific policy fields,” and then the followup comments regarding EU as a ‘niche’.
My point has long been that while the EU itself – the Institutions, the arcane procedures, the politics – is a niche for EU policy geeks, generally located in the Bubble, the EU’s impact on people is huge, as Ruxandra says (welcome to blogging, btw!).
Given that everyone is interested in something – environment, workers’ rights, trade, whatever – the EU therefore is not a niche for most people. It is instead a major factor in their field of interest… if only they knew it.
Which lead me to conclude a couple of years back that one way to open up the Brussels Bubble is to get Specialists could build bridges between the EU blogosphere and national/sectoral conversations. If the national end of these bridges blog in their national language, this also helps tackle the multilingual issue.
@ Craig
On 1) If we blog in English but link national blogs, there would still be interaction. But we often do not do it.
On 2) Many of the issues discussed in the Commission, the Parliament, the Council are genuinely broad and if they were on the agenda in national parliaments they would stir more debates. I think ACTA, Hugh’s Fish Fight campaign in the UK (and around Europe) on the Common Fisheries Policy reform and other topics are good examples that the niche is pretty large.
On 3) We blog about all kinds of things; only some are focussed on EU communication policy. But even those who focus on this (and there is a lot to discuss at EU level) could refer more to related debates.
On 4) Yes, we need more blogs in different languages – but they will only contribute to a better European sphere if they understand themselves as part of a wider sphere, as brigdes (cf. Mathew’s comment) or as translators, not necessarily with regard to language but with regard to perspective.
Ronny, just a personnel note. Are you related to a Willy Patz from Freiberg?
@Eric
Not that I know.
Ron — you could make bloggingportal.eu more likely to become “the subject of academic study” by publishing a note on how the N ~ 900 sample was built, and by opening an API, esp. if you want to get a text analysis of the content published so far.
@FR.
The blogs listed on Bloggingportal.eu are either added by editors or they can be proposed by anyone else – and if the blog is dealing mainly with EU affairs and not already in our list we add it.
We can however not provide an API because we do not aggregate the content as this could (a) involve copyright issues and would (b) counter our goal that people discover EU-focussed blogs through our platform. Yet, we provide two RSS streams both for our Editors’ Choice and for the full steam of all the 900+ blogs in our list. The RSS feeds include titles and, where available, a very short introduction/summary.