During the early decades of European integration, national leaders could fairly assume a permissive consensus on the Common Market among their voters. Citizens were willing to tolerate the loss of national policy authority in matters that were perceived to be far removed from traditional bread-and-butter politics. This unspoken voter approval, the story goes, allowed elites to build economic integration without fully functioning representation at the European level. But since the Maastricht Treaty referenda of 1992, Europe's integration project has moved through multiple crises of confidence and legitimacy as the European Union expanded its reach to 27 countries and to policy areas, such as immigration and defense, that were traditionally thought to define national sovereignty. The ongoing debate over whether economically strong euro-zone countries should bail out their ailing counterparts highlights the trouble with taking popular support for granted. The moment citizens were called upon to show cross-border fiscal solidarity, Europe's permissive consensus was gone, prompting speculation about the impending breakup of the Union or at least its flagship policy, the common currency.

Now that the common currency seems to have taken on redistributive elements, questions about the consent of the governed are very much on the minds of leaders and opinion makers: How exactly do citizens view the EU? What forms of participation can they envision? To what political community or communities do they feel they belong? How do they insert themselves in debates about Europe's future, if at all, and how do national boundaries affect common deliberation about integration?

Among scholars, the issue of democratic representation in the EU has been treated primarily at the normative level. Authors such as Philippe Schmitter, Fritz Scharpf, and Larry Siedentop have diagnosed a democratic deficit, whereas others have disputed its existence and/or relevance. Two important new books explore the empirical implications of Europe's integration for democracy. Both Donatella della Porta and Manuela Caiani's book on European social movements and Thomas Risse's volume on transnational identity and public spheres formulate links between normative and empirical dimensions of transnational politics and cross-border citizenship. Della Porta and Caiani contribute to the vibrant literature on transnational advocacy and protest. Whereas earlier treatments of social movements in the EU found that protest on EU-related issues remained primarily national in target and mobilization, Della Porta and Caiani now show that protest networks on some issues reach beyond national borders. Risse, writing from a constructivist perspective, reflects the rising interest among international relations scholars in empirical work on identity, culture, and civilization as both independent and dependent variables. His contribution is twofold: First, he tackles the thorny question of how exactly we are to recognize transnational identity and debate when we see them. Second, using the sensible criteria he has developed, he argues that Europe has indeed moved toward a partial transnationalization of identities and of public discourse. Both books thus contend that political expression in Europe now sometimes crosses national boundaries, especially in policies where the EU is a major player.

Risse's A Community of Europeans? is an instructive exercise in formulating reasonable indicators of transnational identity and public discourse. Europeanization, Risse tells us, need not mean the obsolescence of the nation-state, whereby transnational collectivity wipes out other forms of territorial attachment. Hence, those who define a hypothetical community of Europeans as identifying exclusively with Europe are setting the bar unrealistically high. Instead, he insists, it makes more sense for European integration to create nested or intertwined territorial identities. A collective European identity exists if people identify with Europe regardless of other attachments, be they national or local.

On the basis of time-series Eurobarometer data, Risse finds that a plurality of Europeans, roughly 40% or more, identifies with Europe and their nation (p. 41). What we are to make of the similarly large group of “don't knows” remains unclear, but those who identify solely with their nationality make up barely 5% of respondents. A second metric of Europeanization of identities is the content and contestation of identity discourses among political elites. Against the unreasonable idea that properly Europeanized elite discourses should look the same across countries, Risse shows that societies appropriate the idea of Europe in nationally specific ways: “Europeanized identities come in national colors insofar as they resonate with … national symbols and historical and cultural memories in different ways” (p. 85). The five member states under investigation here converge around two distinct concepts: a “nationalist Europe” (p. 50) that corresponds with exclusive nationalism at the mass level and emphasizes Christianity and Western civilization in exclusionary terms, and a pluralist “modern Europe” (p. 50) that embraces the alleged universality of liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and market economy (p. 61).

If the Europeanization of identities involves the nesting of territorial attachments, rather than the substitution of a supranational community for a national one, what does a Europeanized public sphere look like? Against the conventional benchmark of a borderless space of debate in which participants from all countries rely on the same information sources and express themselves through the same outlets and in the same language, Risse has us reimagine a European public sphere as the simultaneous discussion of similar themes in similar terms in multiple countries (p. 108). This is a refreshing shift in thinking about cross-border public spheres, moving the concept from prevalent all-or-nothing approaches to a metric that allows for gradation and nuance.

Risse succeeds at conceptualizing the lofty notions of transnational identities and cross-border public spheres at a level that facilitates empirical research and invites further debate. He shows creative ways in which social constructivism can borrow from research into mass and elite behavior to test hypotheses about social identities. The breadth of the literature that he synthesizes is striking. The range of data and the scope of qualitative and quantitative methods deployed in their analysis are likewise impressive. For purposes of consistency, one wishes the author had conducted his own statistical analysis of, for instance, the individual-level determinants of territorial identities, instead of relying on the work of others, who may or may not have used the same data (Chap. 2). This book sows the seeds for detailed multicountry time-series studies of identity and discourse in Europe and elsewhere. One hopes that it will inspire not just political scientists but scholars in sociology and communications as well to follow up with in-depth research on cross-border identity formation and public deliberation.

Social Movements and Europeanization is less concerned with a broad survey of multiple literatures than with a multimethod analysis of original data on transnational claims making. Della Porta and Caiani study social movements as a potential “critical public sphere” that could enhance transparency and improve deliberation in European governance, much as social movements did in the emergent European nation-states of the nineteenth century. Multilevel governance presents social actors with the option of directing protest to that level where decisions are made, but also with the less direct strategies of externalization, that is, aiming dissent at the EU in order to put pressure on their national government, and of domestication, that is, putting pressure on their national government in order to force its hand in European decision making (pp. 14–15, 52). Transnational pressure involves European social movements targeting national authorities, whereas supranationalization implies European social movements targeting European authorities (p. 52). The latter two strategies remain exceedingly rare among social movements.

The authors conclude that the more an issue is governed at the European level or determined by European actors, “the less NGOs and social movements seem to have access to public discourse” (p. 79). Nevertheless, they see a network of “critical Europeanism” (p. 134) emerging from transnational events such as the European Social Forum and European Council countersummits. The most highly mobilized Euro-protesters, the authors show, are not categorically opposed to European integration; in fact, they agree on the need for postnational rulemaking in Europe and elsewhere. But they mistrust the existing representative institutions of the EU, such as they are, and seek to enhance the space for citizen influence on the quality of integration.

The book illustrates both the triumphs and the pitfalls of systematic hypothesis testing in a political space as diverse as the EU. In order to examine protest patterns in Europe, Della Porta and Caiani analyze roughly 24,000 instances of political claims making in six issue areas variously governed by EU or national policy, registered in the mass media in seven countries, and sampled during five years between 1990 and 2002. This Herculean data-collection effort was facilitated by a multicountry research project titled Europub and financed by the European Commission. The Europub data serve as a base for identifying European and national targets of social movement claims making, tracking different types of social movement organizations and their respective evaluations of European integration, classifying frames used by civil society actors in dealing with European integration, and tracing conventional and unconventional modes of claims making by civil society actors. The newspaper data were supplemented by semistructured interviews with 96 civil society representatives identified by press analysis as the most important social movement organizations in three policy fields. A third data set consisted of a survey conducted among participants at the first European Social Forum, held in Florence in 2002.

All this is impressive. Perhaps most exciting is the authors' use of social network analysis to plumb the Europub interview data for interorganizational relationships of conflict, cooperation, and influence in European integration in general, in agricultural policy, and in immigration. This sort of information about interorganizational networks is exceedingly difficult to come by, and the authors deserve credit for making the most of it (pp. 63–78). Nevertheless, their network analysis deals only with Italy and proceeds inductively; results for other countries are gleaned from Hanspeter Kriesi, Silke Adam, and Margit Jochum (“Comparative Analysis of Policy Networks in Western Europe,” Journal of European Public Policy 13:3 [2006], 341–351) and presented in overly condensed fashion. The reader is left to wonder how to generalize from the network data for other domains and countries not included in the analysis. The evaluation of survey data from the Florence European Social Forum suffers from an even greater overrepresentation of Italian actors compared to actors from other countries (e.g., pp. 147, 151). In order to correct for the inherent locational bias and allow for meaningful conclusions, the survey would have had to be repeated at subsequent Social Forums in different countries, a task hinted at (p. 152) but not fully explored in the text.

Both books are likely to inspire new studies on European civil society and transnational public deliberation. Conceptually and methodologically, they suggest innovative avenues for capturing transnational politics.