Beyond the federalist interpretation

The place of conflict in a European deliberative online platform

Abstract

This article examines the digital platform set up for the Conference on the Future of Europe (2021-2022). It more broadly questions the place of conflict in online deliberation. Contrary to the work on European deliberative procedures, the article pinpoints that online participants do not constitute a unanimous ideological community on the future of European public action. To this end, I quantitatively and qualitatively measure the share of conflict in the exchanges that took place on the online platform, between federalists and actors who are more critical of European integration, but also between federalists who put forward different visions of the deepening of the community construction. The results thus contribute to European studies as well as to work on online deliberative mechanisms outside the EU, by shedding light on conflictual dynamics that cannot be reduced to the classic dichotomies of conflict analysis in deliberation.