Kateřina Čmakalová’s scientific contributions

The aim of this article is to examine the process of online Europeanisation of political communication, both theoretically and through empirical analysis. On one hand, the text emphasises the relationship between the public sphere and the legitimacy of the European Union and examines different concepts of the public sphere on a European level. On the other hand, it touches on the significance of the World Wide Web, a relatively new medium, and its propagation to a pan-European public arena. Furthermore, the article stresses the role of political actors, especially political parties, in communication about Europe. It discusses the extent to which national political partieś arguments and political claims on their official websites contain references to shared values or common EU identity. To illustrate the theoretical framework, seven French political parties have been chosen and the online contents of their official websites will be explored.

The article surveys the current state of the academic debate about actorness and legitimacy of the European Union. It investigates various kinds of EU's actorness, as well as concepts and categories of its legitimacy, and attempts to trace their relationships, which remains an underdeveloped aspect of the discussion. We examine a wide range of scholarly articles, books and other academic sources in assessing the quality and fairness of the respective discussions and suggest that, within the current mostly normative debate, a positive evaluation of the EU's legitimacy is unattainable and that it is necessary to acquire a fairer notion of what kind of international actor the Union is.