4. ‘Europe of Transparency’ (1993–2004)

Following the difficult ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the European Commission believed European citizens were suspicious of the secretive bureaucracy of the European institutions and desired more institutional transparency, easy access to official documents and opportunities to enter into debate and dialogue with the European institutions. In response, the European Commission started to publicly communicate a form of political-dialogical European citizenship in a ‘Europe of Transparency’. Here, European citizens were to be well-informed rational discussants deeply concerned with all forms and sorts of policy matters, and they debated increasingly using both physical and virtual spaces on different levels, namely on Community, national, regional and local levels.