If the EU is to get rid of its infamous democratic deficit, transferring power to the Parliament at the expense of Commissioners and Ministers, this growth process must continue at a pan-European level. But there remains a long way to go. As it is, the representatives of each country, including EU Parliamentarians, address themselves primarily to their own electorates. Other opinion leaders are usually based in national organizations, unions, academic institutions, think tanks and so on, and also address their respective national audiences.

Importantly, there are no pan-European media; pioneering efforts such as The European have so far failed. The few publications widely read throughout Europe, notably financial outlets like The Economist and Financial Times, are slanted toward an Anglosaxon - and accordingly, rather Euroskeptical - perspective. Besides, they are elite; a public sphere requires media with a broader mass appeal.

Numerous studies find that even in the national media, 'European' issues have low salience. When they do appear, they are often event-specific ('Chirac visits London') and rarely framed from a pan-European point of view but rather in terms of the national interest. The European identity remains weak, which no doubt is both a cause and an effect of the poverty of the European public sphere.

A prosaic yet most fundamental hurdle must somehow be overcome for this to change: the language barrier. Again speaking historically, the evolution of standardized national languages from a fray of local dialects was key to the establishment of mass democracy. The US, having inherited one of these, could assimiliate generations of immigrants from all over the world into this linguistic fold.

If the United States of Europe is to have a contemporary lingua franca, English is the only game in town here too, la resistánce notwithstanding. However, this inevitably favors native anglophones to such an extent that it arguably becomes a democratic problem. Anyhow, for the overseeable future most people will want to consume and produce discourse in their mother tongue, so the question may be chiefly academic.

As far as print media are concerned, the most promising approach so far is parallel translation to and publication in many languages, as in Le Monde Diplomatique and the now defunct journal Liber. But to what extent will this be feasible outside of rarefied periodicals? And how could it possibly work in the broadcast media, swiftly gaining ground vis-a-vis the newspapers? One can imagine Dutch tackling Spaniards and Brits confronting French on political TV talkshows with simultaneous translation; it is somewhat harder to see this becoming a hit with TV viewers, though one never knows.

The Internet, for all its participatory potential, remains a marginal locus of political debate. Moreover, language barriers exist here too; a point perhaps obscured by the self-selecting sample now found on the English language European blogs. And native anglophones can rest assured that those of us for whom English is a foreign language spend considerable effort getting it right, let alone idiomatic and tolerably eloquent. Automatic translation is, and may well remain, workable only when the ideas to be put over are so simple that it is unnecessary in the first place. As to posting in other languages on a site like European Tribune, it might just break up the discourse into national categories, with Italians discussing Italy and so on.

So what to do? Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is relaxed ambitions. Sebastian Kurpas argues that the national public spheres should not "be viewed as obstacles to be overcome, but rather as the building blocks of a European public sphere":

In a similar vein, Thomas Risse and Marianne Van de Steeg suggest (pdf) that a viable European public sphere would emerge:

The latter point implies that a full-fledged European identity isn't a must for an effective public sphere at the transnational level.

Which makes sense; but none of this solves the language barrier problem. European federalists must hope that either breakthroughs in translation technology or strides in the English skills of future generations of continental Europeans will take care of that. Until then, however, it is a reason to proceed with caution when it comes to the further federalization of Europe.