Communicative Power Generation via the European Citizens' Initiative ...

Initiating Transnational Deliberation? Communicative Power Generation via the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) Maximilian Conrad, University of Iceland

Paper prepared for the ECPR General Conference Charles University, Prague, September 7-10, 2016 Panel “5 Years European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) – Dying Patient or Bright Future Ahead? Empirical Perspectives on the Use and Impact of the ECI”

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Abstract: Four years after the introduction of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in April 2012, much of the initial enthusiasm about what was hailed as a significant participatory-democratic innovation has given way to a sense of disillusionment, as the ECI has so far failed to generate any concrete legislative proposals by the European Commission. One aspect that has not been addressed sufficiently in previous empirical research is the question of the ECI’s deliberative impact, that is: the extent to which it can foster transnational normative debates in the increasingly Europeanized public spheres of the member states. Such questions are particularly salient against the backdrop of debates about the feasibility of transnational demo(i)cracy in the EU, as the ECI has been modestly successful at least in its agenda-setting function and has prompted normative debate on issues such as privatization of water services and the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The aim in the proposed paper is therefore to analyze the deliberative role and impact of the ECI in general and of specific ECIs in particular, such as e.g. Right2Water and Stop TTIP. Taking as a starting point the Habermasian emphasis on communicative power generation in the public sphere as well as James Bohman’s emphasis on the relevance of the ability to initiate deliberation as a crucial requirement for transnational democracy, the study analyzes the various ways in which ECI organizers have succeeded in identifying, staging and amplifying controversial issues in various arenas of the public sphere.

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1.

The ECI: Can a participatory failure turn out to be a deliberative success?

Four years after the introduction of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in April 2012, much of the initial enthusiasm about what was hailed at the outset as a significant participatory-democratic innovation has given way to a sense of disillusionment. Beyond the exemption of water services from the 2014 “concessions directive” (European Union 2014), the ECI has so far failed to generate any concrete legislative proposals by the European Commission. Assessments of the ECI’s contribution to reducing the EU’s perceived democratic deficit have similarly tended to emphasize the high hurdles imposed on ECI organizers in terms of e.g. a short time frame for signature collection, a lack of harmonization between member states’ signature verification procedures, or problems with the online signature collection software (e.g. Berg/Głogowski 2016). In addition, the very nature of the ECI as a participatory instrument (or “genre”) remains contested (e.g. Dufrasne 2016). Such assessments have thus broadly concluded that the ECI is in need of fundamental reform if it is indeed to become a meaningful instrument for citizen participation in the EU’s legislative process, even if only in the form an agenda initiative without any formal power to do more than merely invite the European Commission to submit concrete legislative proposals. The starting point in this paper is the observation that previous research has predominantly tended to look at the ECI from the vantage point of participatory democratic theory, studying the ways in which the ECI fosters citizen participation in EU decision making. This research has generated important insights into the ways in which the ECI can be used not only as an agenda-setting, but also as a mobilization tool for civil society organizations (e.g. Bouza García/Del Río Villar 2012; Greenwood/Bouza Garcia 2016). At the same time, ECI research has tended to overlook important questions about the instrument’s deliberative potential, that is: its ability to raise awareness for and initiate deliberation about contested normative issues (cf. Conrad 2016). From the point of view of deliberative democratic theory, citizens’ ability to use their communicative freedom to identify and amplify their concerns in the public sphere and thereby to contribute to the generation of communicative power is a crucial ingredient in probing the democratic legitimacy of the institutional decision-making process (Habermas 1992; Bohman 2010). Although it may be obvious that the question of what constitutes a successful ECI is multifaceted (Greenwood/García 2016), assessments of the ECI’s success as an instrument of EU democracy should certainly include questions about the instrument’s ability to foster public processes of deliberation and communicative 2

power generation. This applies as much to the content of concrete legislative proposals as it does to the underlying normative issues (cf. Etzioni 2007). This paper analyzes the usefulness of the ECI as a channel for the initiation of transnational deliberation by studying the Facebook campaign of the Stop TTIP initiative. This initiative was rejected by the European Commission on formal grounds (European Commission 2014), but has a pending lawsuit on its non-registratoon before the European Court of Justice and nonetheless conducted its own signaturecollection campaign in opposition to the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada. The emphasis in this paper is primarily on developing a theoretical argument about the relevance of the ECI from a deliberative perspective in the broader context of debates about the feasibility of transnational democracy in non-state polities such as the EU (cf. Bohman 2007; Bohman 2010). This discussion draws on fundamental arguments about the role of communicative power generation in the public sphere as part of the Habermasian two-track understanding of democratic politics (Habermas 1992). It further draws on arguments about the role of initiating deliberation in transformationalist accounts of transnational democracy (Bohman 2007). The theoretical discussion furthermore addresses the problematic concept of communicative power generation, which – despite its central role in the Habermasian understanding of deliberative democracy – has only been vaguely defined (Flynn 2004) and has so far proven difficult to operationalize (Conrad 2013). The argument advanced in this paper is that the concept communicative power can be usefully linked both to the (methodological) literature on framing (Gamson 1992; Snow/Benford 1988; Trenz et al. 2007). ECI organizers are actors promoting certain “ready-made interpretative packages” (Trenz et al. 2007: 39) about the phenomena addressed by their initiatives, thereby invoking an image of injustice that in turn serves to generate communicative power. Although a distinction obviously needs to be made between framing efforts and “measurable” communicative power generation, framing is seen here as an important first step in generating communicative power through the use of what Bohman refers to as communicative freedom (Bohman 2010). Communicative power generation can be investigated by analyzing the resonance of frames advanced by initiative organizers, but this is beyond the scope of this paper. The frame analysis presented here merely serves illustrative purposes, showing how the selected Stop TTIP initiative has used Facebook to frame the issue of the ongoing EU-US freetrade negotiations and the CETA ratification process. Following this introduction, the second section presents the theoretical 3

discussion on the relevance of the ECI from the perspectives of deliberative and transformationalist democratic theory, focusing in particular on the relevance of the (empirically) problematic concept of communicative power. The third section then presents a theoretical and methodological argument for the use of frame analysis in exploring the role and impact of the ECI in generating communicative power, before the forth section illustrates the theoretical argument by presenting the findings of a frame analysis of Stop TTIP’s Facebook campaign.

2.

The Failure of the ECI from a Deliberative Perspective

After four years’ experience with the ECI, even optimistic observers tend to point out that the instrument is in need of significant reform in order to become a meaningful tool for citizen participation in EU decision making. One of the biggest problems appears to be the question of how to deal with initiatives that have been successful in terms of signature collection, but whose proposals run counter to the policy preferences of the EU’s legislative institutions. The Commission’s response (after the respective public hearings in the European Parliament) to at least two of the three successful initiatives – Stop Vivisection and One of us – can be seen as testimony to this observation. From a deliberative perspective, on the other hand, the more crucial question concerns the extent to which signature collection through the aggregative mechanism of the ECI has been complemented by deliberation and communicative power generation in the public sphere. Cases such as Right2Water, the first ever initiative to reach the required one million signatures (and reach the quorum in the minimum number of member states), but also the rejected Stop TTIP initiative are remarkable in the sense that they have been part of much broader movements against privatization of water services and the proposed EU-US free trade agreement, respectively; as part of these movements, they have managed to stimulate significant public debate about (and protest against) the two projects. In this sense, it is certainly not entirely unjustified to describe their impact on probing the two projects’ democratic legitimacy as considerably higher than that which e.g. the considerably lesser known One of us initiative has had on anti-abortion discourse in the EU – despite the fact that the latter has in fact been the most successful ECI so far in terms of signature collection.1

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According to the official figures listed on the European Commission’s website, One of us collected over 1.72 million signatures, compared to 1.66 million collected by Right2Water (figures available at http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/successful).

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The first point to be discussed here is therefore to which extent ECIs (whether formal/registered or informal/symbolic) can be claimed to have initiated and fostered deliberation in the public sphere even if they have not led to any tangible legislative proposals and/or outputs. Both the formally registered Right2Water and the informal/symbolic Stop TTIP initiatives provide a strong indication that initiatives can indeed initiate deliberation and generate communicative power with a direct or indirect impact on the legislative process, in particular when they are part of broader social movements. Even though the Commission maintained that the Right2Water initiative was based on the misunderstanding that the planned concessions directive was aiming for a privatization of water and sanitation services in the member states, the initiative resulted in the explicit exemption of such services from the Commission proposal in the summer of 2013, months before the signature-collection deadline on 1 November. Similarly, Stop TTIP collected over three million (formally unverified) signatures, attracted significant media and public attention across the EU and managed to crystallize public criticism of the project around a few highly controversial issues, such as detrimental consequences in terms of democratic accountability and consumer protection. The case of Stop TTIP highlights important issues of deliberative democracy in that the initiative and the broader movement have identified a highly contentious project as well as staged and amplified their concerns in a way that questions the democratic legitimacy of the project. From the perspective of the Habermasian sluice model of the public sphere, public deliberation about the issues addressed by ECIs are ways of probing either the democratic legitimacy of the proposals made in the initiatives, or of probing the democratic (il-)legitimacy of the projects/proposals that they oppose. Democratic legitimacy is not primarily generated via aggregative measures (most notably elections), but needs to be complemented by communicative power generation in the public sphere. With this shift in emphasis from aggregation to deliberation (and justification), legitimacy is no longer defined exclusively in terms of majority support for any given proposal or decision, but rather in terms of whether it can be justified by good arguments. The transnational context of the ECI makes deliberative justification even more important. This argument can be made by reference to Bohman’s work on transnational democracy, in particular the claim that “democracy across borders” requires a fundamental rethinking of the normative ideal of democracy (Bohman 2007). Bohman consistently refers to the EU as a transnational polity, avoiding the cumbersome supranational/intergovernmental dichotomy and underlining that the EU is neither currently a state nor a state in the making. Because of the lack of a unified 5

European demos – and the observation that the EU is founded on 28 already democratically constituted nation states and demoi – attempts to “reconstitute Europe” in such a way as to fit existing (and state-centered) democratic theory by attempting to achieve popular sovereignty at the European level (Eriksen/Fossum 2012) would be normatively problematic. Consequently, Bohman argues that a transnational democratic theory by necessity has to be profoundly more transformationalist than e.g. the alleged gradualism of the Habermasian conceptualization of postnational democracy (Bohman 2007; cf. Habermas 1998). The main challenge in attempting to democratize the EU and the integration process European-level demos construction in order to recapture a sense of popular sovereignty bears a potential for domination and a “hierarchy of authority” among the already democratically constituted demoi that make up the transnational EU (Bohman 2007). Because of its character as a transnational polity, the EU therefore requires a “reconfiguration of democracy” (cf. Eriksen/Fossum 2012), i.e. a novel theory for transnational democracy. Transnational democracy should consequently be conceptualized as rule of the peoples (in the plural), meaning that it has to be conceived in terms of a “democratic minimum” and ensure non-domination rather than aim for a democratic maximum encapsulated in the idea of popular sovereignty. In the pursuit of this democratic minimum, concepts such as communicative freedom, deliberation and communicative power play key roles. Communicative freedom is meant to furnish individuals (or groups) with the means to “initiate deliberation” about perceived injustices; the role of the public sphere is by extension, in line with the Habermasian sluice model, to generate communicative power in relation to the claims raised in this deliberation. Of course, transnational deliberative democracy along these lines also requires responsive deliberative institutions. Bohman’s main works on transnational democracy were published before the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the ECI, but even previously existing elements of participatory democracy – most importantly the Commission’s stakeholder consultations – are listed as examples of how deliberation can be institutionalized at the transnational level. The ECI can be argued to be a further step in the direction of institutionalizing transnational deliberation about issues identified within civil society. The ECI regulation requires that initiatives be organized and supported by EU citizens residing in at least seven different member states, offering reasonably strong incentives for transnational civil-society networking (Conrad 2011) and the emergence of transnational discursive spheres for the construction of shared views on the issues addressed by ECIs (Knaut/Keller 2012; 6

Knaut 2016). Moreover, despite all its present shortcomings, the design of ECI can also be described as at least partly deliberative, although certain distinctions apply with regard to the time during and after the signature-collection phase. When an initiative has successfully completed its signature collection, it is entitled to a public hearing in the European Parliament with the participation of representatives from the Commission, members of the relevant EP committees, as well as external experts, part of which are summoned by the organizers themselves. However, although this could be seen as an example of institutionalized deliberation, the experience of the three initiatives that have been granted an EP hearing so far has rather contributed to the sense of disillusionment described at the beginning of this paper, due to the simple fact that the decision on whether or not to follow up with a tangible legislative proposal is entirely at the discretion of the European Commission. Similarly, no ECI has so far resulted in a request from the European Parliament for a Commission proposal (cf. Conrad 2016). But the question remains whether the ECI as an instrument of participatory democracy gives EU citizens a strong enough means to “initiate deliberation on perceived injustices” at the transnational level, specifically during the signaturecollection process. In this context, the empirical focus needs to shift from processes of institutionalized deliberation to the strategies and activities of ECI organizers with regard to identifying, staging and amplifying their concerns in the public sphere, or in other words: to the generation of communicative power by ECI organizers and their supporters. As we will see in the next section, frame analysis provides a potentially fruitful path to studying such strategies and activities.

3.

Operationalizing communicative power

Although the concept of communicative power plays a pivotal role in the Habermasian understanding of deliberative politics, it runs into problems both with regard to a precise definition (Flynn 2004) and with regard to the question of operationalization (Conrad 2013). The basic idea appears intuitively plausible, i.e. that the institutions of the political system hold the administrative power to make collectively binding decisions, but that the multiple arenas of the public sphere also hold certain power resources that can be summarized under the caption of communicative power. Initiatives such as Right2Water and Stop TTIP underline the relevance of processes of communicative power generation in ascertaining democratic legitimacy, but questions about defining, measuring and spelling out the causal effect of communicative power remain difficult.

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The literature on framing appears promising with regard to developing an operationalization of the concept of communicative power. Ontologically, the literature on framing draws attention to the discursive processes through which the social construction of reality occurs. The very starting point for the literature on framing is indeed Goffman’s observation that reality as such is characterized by such complexity that our perception thereof requires a certain “organization of experience” (Goffman 1974). Consequently, descriptions of existing phenomena tend to highlight particular aspects within them while toning down others (ibid.; cf. Druckman 2001). But although they are mere “images of reality”, they nonetheless play an important role in shaping political behavior (Díez Medrano/Gray 2010: 196). In Goffman’s original understanding, frames are viewed as “mental orientations that organize perception and interpretation”, or as “problem-solving schemata [...] for the interpretative task of making sense of presenting situations” (ibid.; emphasis added). This sense-making understanding of frames has had a significant impact on social movements research, particularly on studying the ways in which social movements frame their issues of concern, and the conditions under which these frames resonate or align with the perceptions held by their supporters. In EU studies, frame analysis has also been used to study the role of journalists as actors in European integration, essentially by looking at the ways in which frames are offered as more or less ready-made interpretative packages allowing “journalists to transmit meaning without necessarily entering an argumentative practice with the audience” (Trenz et al. 2007: 29; cf. Díez Medrano 2003; cf. Díez Medrano/Gray 2010; cf. Conrad 2014). The connection to deliberative theories may be somewhat less clear, most of all because the very idea of framing can appear to run counter to the notion of deliberation as an open and inclusive process of exchanging arguments aimed at finding intersubjectively valid truth. There is a certain ambiguity in the relationship between the concept of deliberation as used in the Habermasian two-track conceptualization of democratic politics and the underlying notion of communicative action. In the former, civil society’s role in “identifying, staging and amplifying” concerns in the public sphere can be viewed as a practice of sense making, i.e. as an interpretation of an existing situation and the consequences that it may entail. This involves communicative processes that may very well be one-sided, possibly manipulative, and at least in part founded on what the Theory of Communicative Action would describe as instrumental instead of communicative rationality. This argument also bears a certain resemblance to the broadening of the concept of deliberation that authors such as John Dryzek have urged (Dryzek 2000). 8

Operationalizing communicative power obviously needs to begin with a precise definition of what the theoretical concept stands for. James Bohman’s definition of communicative power can be highly useful for this purpose. Bohman sees transnational democratization as dependent on two joint conditions, namely the realization of communicative freedom and communicative power (Bohman 2010). In this context, he sees communicative freedom as “the exercise of a communicative status, the status of being recognized as a member of a public” (ibid.: 432). Similar to the point made above about the need for responsive deliberative institutions in his account of transnational democracy, Bohman argues that this communicative freedom “is transferred into communicative power when it is incorporated into institutionalized processes of decision making” (ibid.). Communicative freedom thus becomes transformed into communicative power if and when it has a demonstrable impact on institutionalized decision making. In the context of the ECI, again, Right2Water and Stop TTIP constitute relevant cases to study, as both can be said to have had a significant impact on institutionalized decision making. The former has led to the explicit exemption of water services from the Commission’s concessions directive, whereas the latter has managed to raise awareness for certain key issues connected to the free-trade plans with Canada and the US, respectively, that have fundamentally called into question the viability of the agreements and thus put pressure on the European Commission’s role in negotiating the TTIP agreement on behalf of the member states. It should however also be added that these two are exceptional cases and that they cannot be viewed as representative for the ECI as such. As a matter of fact, their exceptionality in terms of communicative power generation can even be seen to highlight the limitations of the ECI as a participatory tool for “average citizens” in EU decision making (Conrad/Steingrímsdóttir 2016). An operationalization of the concept of communicative power can also be developed through an empirical analysis of the communicative processes through which civil society actors – such as ECI organizers – have generated communicative power in cases such as the ones mentioned above. In this paper, this is done with the help of a frame analysis of the image that the Stop TTIP initiative constructs of the issue on its Facebook page. This is of course only the first step in analyzing the generation of communicative power, since this frame analysis only allows for understanding the attempts made by the initiative organizers to identify, stage and amplify their concerns in the public sphere. The extent to which they succeed in such attempts has to be analyzed by studying also the resonance of the frames promoted here, for instance among supporters of the initiative, but also in wider mass media 9

discourse. This is however beyond the scope of the present paper, where the focus is primarily on developing a theoretical argument about communicative power generation. The choice for analyzing a social medium is motivated by the importance that Bohman attaches to the realization of communicative freedom as a precondition for the initiation of deliberation and the generation of communicative power in the public sphere (Bohman 2005; 2007; 2010). Communicative freedom can only have an impact on institutionalized decision making if it is transformed into communicative power. The realization of communicative freedom therefore requires the availability of channels through which citizens can exercise their communicative freedom. Despite all their shortcomings, social media such as Facebook or Twitter clearly provide ECI organizers with a cheap, inclusive and accessible platform for the dissemination of information about their respective campaigns, thus making them an important tool for the realization of communicative freedom. Frame analysis may be seen as a problematic methodological approach for studying such communicative processes, as critics of frame analysis have highlighted conceptual, ontological and methodological issues connected to the use of frames within qualitative research methods. At the most basic level, the concept of frames is at times defined quite differently, but also the ontological status of frames – whether they are “out there” for the researcher to discover, or whether they are actively constructed by the researcher – remains highly contested. At the same time, online as well as offline ECI campaigns evidently offer (potential) supporters interpretations of the phenomena they address; these interpretations evidently also crystallize around a few aspects connected to the broader issue at stake, and this form of presenting and interpreting the phenomenon at hand can be understood as the kind of “organization of experience” that constitutes framing. From a methodological perspective, it needs to be added that frame analysis – much like most other forms of qualitative content analysis – can be done in an empirically rigorous way, for instance by increasing the transparency of the research process by spelling out clearly how the frames were developed, how they are defined and what criteria have been used in applying them to the empirical material. The frame analysis in this paper analyzes all posts on the Facebook page of Stop TTIP that were published between May 1 and August 30, 2016 and that define the nature and impact/consequences of TTIP. All other posts were excluded from the sample, such as e.g. encouragements to participate in events connected to the campaign or mere reporting on ongoing events. This resulted in an initial sample of 46 posts that were coded in a purely inductive way. There were no predefined 10

frames; instead, frames were developed gradually in successive rounds of coding. Regarding the ontological status of the frames coded here (i.e. whether they are “out there” or actively constructed by the researcher), it should be noted that one advantage of coding social media material is that statements tend to be so short that the frame applied is often fairly explicit, as the examples in the discussion below will highlight. In addition, the effectiveness of a frame obviously increases if they are expressed in a sufficiently explicit way for the recipient to understand them in the way intended by the framer. Lastly, as with most (if not all) qualitative content analysis, the reliability of frame analysis increases with precisely formulated code definition and coding rules, that is: definitions as to what sets apart one frame from another and when to code one frame instead of another (Schreier 2012). Code definitions and coding rules are reviewed in the presentation of the findings in the next section.

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4.

Empirical illustration: Framing TTIP and CETA

In the Habermasian understanding of deliberative politics, the generation of communicative power is a process in which civil society actors identify, stage and amplify concerns for the purpose of channeling them into the institutions of the political system (Habermas 1992: chap. 7). The argument made so far in this paper is that this effort constitutes a communicative process that can usefully be studied with the tools of frame analysis, even though the practice of framing an issue is clearly only the first step in the process of generating communicative power in the public sphere. The following empirical analysis presents the findings of an analysis of frames used by the Stop TTIP initiative in making sense – on their Facebook page – of the twin issues of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada. Frame analysis is obviously no end in itself, but in this concrete case rather a means to demonstrate what image of the two agreements is constructed through this framing process – however one-sided and subjective – and how this process serves to create an image of a democratically illegitimate and therefore unacceptable proposal. Again, the key element in Bohman’s conceptualization of transnational democracy is the idea of a democratic minimum that allows citizens to initiate deliberation about perceived injustices, and framing can play a key role in this process. In the present empirical analysis, only those posts from the Stop TTIP Facebook page were coded that contained a message about the nature and/or perceived consequences of the EU’s planned free-trade agreements with the US (i.e. TTIP) and/or Canada (CETA). In the analyzed time frame, both negotiations/treaties are treated more or less as two sides of the same coin, which is particularly clear in the description of the considerably lesser discussed Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada as a “Trojan horse” that opens the backdoor for the much more controversially discussed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US. Therefore, many of the frames applied in the material refer at the same time to TTIP and CETA. As reflected in table 1, the image of TTIP and CETA conveyed in the analyzed Facebook posts is that the two agreements are most of all a threat to a variety of standards that have been achieved in Europe and that would be compromised if the two free-trade agreements were ratified (see table 1). This notion of threat is invoked in more than half of the coded frames (52%) and appears in 38% of the analyzed posts. The most commonly mentioned threats are those to 12

democracy/popular sovereignty as well as to the environment/environmental protection. Both frames are used in 15% of the analyzed posts. The frame “threat to democracy” is to be distinguished, however, from the frame “lack of democracy”, which is used even more frequently (in 30% of all posts; 24% of all coded frames). In the analyzed posts, the ECI organizers point both to the democratic consequences of the two agreements – namely an undermining of parliamentary democracy due to plans for private “Investor State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) courts – on the one hand, and on the other hand to a lack of democracy and most of all transparency in the process of negotiating the two treaties. Consequently, this distinction is reflected in the distinction between a “threat to democracy/popular sovereignty” frame and a “lack of democracy/transparency”. The latter is also applied consistently when references are made to the question of ratification of CETA. In the time frame of the analysis, there was discussion on the nature of CETA as an “EU only” as opposed to a “mixed” agreement. In the latter case, the agreement would have to be ratified by all member state parliaments, which is framed by the ECI organizers as democratically unacceptable. The “threat to democracy/popular sovereignty” frame, on the other hand, is coded when references are made to the possibility that (American or Canadian) corporations could sue European governments for losses incurred due to e.g. stricter environmental legislation on the European market. As an example of the “threat to democracy/popular sovereignty” frame, the campaign issued a post on July 12 that stated as one of ten “reasons why CETA is toxic” that the agreement is “a backdoor for #TTIP ! CETA will enable roughly 42.000 US corporations to sue European governments in private ISDS courts through their Canadian subsidiaries.” The image created here is clearly one of threat, i.e. that European standards and achievements in terms of democracy and popular sovereignty are sacrificed for the benefit of free trade and (potentially) economic growth. Similarly, the European Commission is frequently made out to be the “bad guy” in the story lin, in particular Commission President Juncker and Trade Commissioner Malmström. The “lack of democracy/transparency” frame also includes references to the European Commission attempting to deceive European citizens by tricking them into accepting agreements that they know little or nothing about, or by performing the magic trick of declaring CETA to be an “EU only” matter, thus only requiring the approval of the EU institutions. In a post from August 4, 2016, this deceit is symbolized by the use of an image from the movie “The Illusionist”, where Commission President Juncker is holding a crystal ball seen in place of the main actor of the movie, Edward Norton. The accompanying text reads: “Hot off our 13

Blog-press: *The Commission of Illusionists* or how forces at play are trying to trick us into #CETA again & how they won't succeed!” Table 1: Frames used in the Stop TTIP Facebook campaign Frame name

% of all frames

Used in % of posts

Lack of democracy/transparency;

24.1

30.4

51.7

37.9

…to democracy, popular sovereignty

12.1

15.2

…to environment

12.1

15.2

…to consumer protection

10.3

10.9

…to public services/health care

6.9

8.7

… to SME’s, local economies

6.9

8.7

… to employment

3.4

4.3

Corporations over citizens

8.6

10.9

Trojan horse

3.4

4.3

CETA pointless after Brexit

5.1

6.5

Miscellaneous

6.9

8.7

deceit Threat (sum)

Similarly, the two agreements are framed as a threat to the environment (in 15% of the posts) and to consumer protection (11%); these two frames are at times also used in conjunction, for instance in a post from May 1 that states that leaked documents about the TTIP negotiations “confirm fears that European consumer and environmental standards are increasingly coming under pressure in the negotiations. They show that exports for Europe’s automobile industry will only be facilitated in the agreement if the EU makes considerable concessions in the area of food safety.”2 The threat to consumer protection is also taken up in the context of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). CETA – and by extension TTIP – are described as “toxic” because they will open the door to the import of GMO farming products, thereby undermining the precautionary principle and also presenting a threat to European farming. In a post from June 29, the initiative argues that “CETA is toxic” because: “It's a threat to food and farming! CETA will increase the volume of agricultural products entering the European market. The intensified competition of imports will endanger the already

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In the German original: “Die Unterlagen bestätigen die Befürchtungen, dass europäische Verbraucherund Umweltschutzstandards in den Verhandlungen verstärkt unter Druck geraten. So geht daraus hervor, dass Exporterleichterungen für Europas Autoindustrie nur dann in das Abkommen einfließen sollen, wenn die EU deutliche Abstriche in der Lebensmittelsicherheit vornimmt.

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difficult position of farmers all over Europe. Since Canada is the third largest global producer of GMOs, CETA will ensure that barriers to GMOs in the European food market are eventually abolished. Put a brake to it!”

Finally, the two agreements are also constructed as a case of the prioritization of the interests of (multinational) corporations over the concerns shared by average citizens. This frame is used in 11% of the coded posts and sees the process of negotiating the two treaties to have taken place behind closed doors with the heavy involvement of “corporate lobbyists”, but with no room for civil society. The overall image emerging from the frame analysis is therefore that the Stop TTIP campaign constructs the issue of the TTIP and CETA agreements primarily as a matter of threat to European standards as well as a process characterized by a lack of democracy, transparency and the heavy involvement of corporations and their lobbyists. In doing so, the message is communicated very clearly that the TTIP negotiations as well as the modalities of the ratification of CETA are an injustice against which civil society and individual citizens need to be mobilized. This attempt at mobilization via a process of framing is of course only the first step in the bigger process of communicative power generation, but it also has to be seen against the backdrop of the over three million signatures that the (informal) Stop TTIP signature-collection campaign has managed to collect and submit to the European Commission for primarily symbolic reasons, but also – as two of the main organizers stated in interviews – to quantify the amount of opposition existing across Europe against the planned free-trade projects with the US and Canada (interviews Roth; Efler).

5.

Conclusion

The main ambition in this paper was to develop a theoretical and methodological argument on the potential deliberative impact of the ECI. From the perspective of the EU democratic deficit, especially from the point of view of participatory democracy, it appears easy to dismiss the ECI after its first four years as a participatory failure that has not brought average citizens any closer to the EU’s legislative decision-making process. But this assessment would be premature in that it overlooks on the one hand the very real impact that admittedly exceptional initiatives such as Right2Water have had on ongoing legislative projects. Maybe more importantly, it would also overlook the impact that the ECI – at least in cases such as Right2Water and Stop TTIP – has had on aspects such as the politicization of EU politics and increased public deliberation about some of the biggest projects that the EU is currently working towards.

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From the perspective of transnational democracy, the ECI can be a relevant tool for citizens as members of publics precisely because it adds an important opportunity for linking public deliberation to the institutions of the EU political system – or, in Bohman’s terms, for institutionalizing deliberation. The question of the extent to which the ECI can serve as an institutional opportunity for transforming communicative freedom to communicative power is certainly a complex one, involving not only communicative processes of civil society actors framing their concerns in such a way as to mobilize opposition and initiate deliberation on what they perceive as injustices, but also processes of frame resonance and frame alignment. But the first step in studying processes of communicative power generation is arguably to analyze the ways in which civil society actors – in this case ECI organizers – frame issues such as the proposed CETA and TTIP agreements. Future research will have to go deeper into such framing processes, but most importantly also address the question of frame resonance, both in terms of the extent to which frames resonate with potential supporters of ECIs, but also to which extent they manage to gain traction in other areas of the public sphere, for instance in traditional mainstream mass media such as daily newspapers or TV formats.

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