Becoming Europe’s Ambassadors: A Political Analysis of the First Pan-European Deliberative Poll Experiment

The first pan-European deliberative poll (Tomorrow’s Europe) took place within in the European Parliament’s building in Brussels in October 2007. Using local observations, the authors propose to analyze the various representations of the Entrepreneurs for Europe who imagined and organized this European public space in miniature. For three days, they watched how four hundred people from the twenty-seven EU Member States talked about the future of Europe within a scientifically proven framework. Beyond the intellectual and political debate on the artificialness or non-representativeness of this incarnation of European citizenship, the authors are primarily interested in the representations of institutions ? here EU institutions, think tanks, and other partners in European public affairs ? on people’s perceptions of Europe. The authors use scientific theories and methods (primarily from political science), the prescribed protocol for the deliberation, and the communication and media strategies of Tomorrow’s Europe presenting Europhile multiculturalism as a way of building a European public sphere. The experiment can be likened to an experience of a new policy instrument capable of constructing a European civil society and make its views predictable.