Abstract
In the last decade, Jürgen Habermas focused on the economic and political obstacles undermining the “faltering project” of the European Union, along with the technocratic apparatus and the media complexity permeating the mass representation of such an epochal socio-political process. His sociological analysis aims to emphasize the rhetorical flair of the public narration of our common European perspective, in line with the difficult construction of effective deliberative procedures and democratic dissemination. Thus, “more Europe” can be considered a legitimate but treacherous slogan exploited by the “media-based political communication”, in conjunction with the tenets of solidarity, inclusion, cohabitation and social sharing. Therefore, the dialectic of the European people and European citizens provides an insight into the “transnationalizing democracy”, since journalistic narration can influence the public sphere through the convergence of informative inputs and outputs. The project of the European Union has Romantic roots, according to the letter that Heinrich Heine drafted in Genoa in 1828: “There are no longer nations in Europe but parties”. If the lure of technocracy may conceal hidden interests, the European lure of rhetoric emphasizes the new communicative patterns of our supranational destiny, as long as information interlaces with transparency and knowledge in the era of faltering certainties.
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Lombardinilo, A. (2024). The Lure of Rhetoric: Jürgen Habermas and the Faltering European Project. In: The Lure of Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-96084-2_10
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