While institutional Europe is often associated with political distance and Euroscepticism, less attention has been paid to how Europe is constructed and experienced in everyday life. This paper approaches the European public sphere as a set of communicative practices through which citizens encounter, interpret and enact Europe in their daily interactions with media, institutions and digital platforms.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework combining communication studies, European studies and political science, the paper examines how institutional narratives and media dynamics contribute to the social construction of Europe as a people’s union. It explores how European issues are mediated, discussed and assimilated in everyday contexts, shaping citizens’ perceptions of EU identity, values and belonging beyond formal political arenas.

Empirically, the study combines a systematic literature review with in-depth interviews conducted with journalists, EU communication professionals and policy experts. This qualitative approach allows for an assessment of how European communication strategies translate into media practices and, ultimately, into citizens’ everyday engagements with European affairs.

Particular attention is paid to the role of digital media in enabling participation, fostering transnational conversations and mediating responses to challenges such as disinformation, populism and democratic disaffection.

The paper argues that the European public sphere should be understood not merely as an institutional project, but as an evolving everyday practice shaped by media routines and communicative interactions. By analysing these processes, the study contributes to understanding how Europe is constructed from below and how communicative practices can support a more inclusive, informed and socially embedded European polity.

With the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), questions about the emergence of European unity in the form of a common identity have arisen. Since then, European identity debates have often come to the fore of European Union (EU) developments. The paper explores the puzzle surrounding the EU’s climate actorness, asking how the Green Deal is contributing to the European identity construction. Particularly, it investigates European identity in the policy context of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). It aims to evaluate what role the CBAM plays in the construction of European identity and how it shapes the EU’s image as a climate actor. The investigation of European identity formation in the case of the CBAM is significant owing to the potentially wide-ranging impact of this policy, which has not been significantly studied due to its relative novelty. The contrasting opinions on CBAM by third countries (non-EU member states), understood broadly as dissatisfaction with its present design, put the issue of European identity as normative power at the heart of the policy debate. The paper adopts qualitative research methods with a case study design relying on the process tracing technique. Based on the relational identity theory, the research constructs a multi-layered European identity formation framework, whereas all processes related to identity construction are examined systematically. These layers include structural, relational and normative ones. The paper argues that CBAM facilitates European identity co-construction between the EU and its strategic partners in the emerging hydrogen economy.

Despite the extensive development of EU gender equality and anti-discrimination legislation, significant disparities in gender equality outcomes persist across EU Member States. This is also the case of the Czech Republic, where a relatively comprehensive national legal framework exists, yet the transposition of EU gender equality directives remains incomplete or partial. While issues of incomplete transposition have been widely analysed in legal and political scholarship, the gendered dimension of the transposition process has received limited attention in the Czech context. In particular, resistance and backlash against EU gender equality measures remain underexplored.

This paper addresses this gap by applying the theoretical framework of feminist institutionalism to the analysis of resistance to the transposition of EU gender equality directives. It argues that institutions involved in the transposition process are inherently gendered and that these gendered structures significantly shape both the form and the outcomes of transposition. In particular, they contribute to resistance and backlash against specific gender equality measures, which in turn result in incomplete transposition.

To illustrate this argument, the paper draws on the example of Directive (EU) 2019/1158 on work-life balance for parents and carers. The Directive introduced, inter alia, a minimum of two months of non-transferable paid parental leave for each parent. In the Czech Republic, this requirement was not fully implemented, with national authorities arguing that existing legislation already provides sufficient protection. The paper demonstrates how this justification reflects deeper institutional resistance to policy measures aimed at increasing fathers’ involvement in early childcare.

The paper argues that the incomplete transposition of the Directive cannot be explained solely by the existence of adequate national legislation. Rather, it is rooted in gendered institutional arrangements and resistance to specific transformations of gender roles promoted by EU law. While the share of fathers taking parental leave in the Czech Republic remained below 2% in 2023, this paper does not aim to exhaustively explain such outcomes. Instead, it focuses on the institutional dynamics underpinning the transposition process itself.

The main contribution of the paper lies in conceptualising the transposition of EU law through the lens of feminist institutionalism. This approach enables the identification of gendered power structures that shape the implementation of EU gender equality law, offering a novel perspective on resistance to gender equality norms within national legal systems.

The transfer of sovereign rights by nation-states to the supranational level has enabled the emergence of a new institutional structure—an international organization with an integrative character—and, concomitantly, a new actor on the international stage. Although the legal nature of the European Union has been settled since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, its political nature remains the subject of ongoing scholarly debate. To what extent does the European Union conform to the classical definitions of an international organization, and to what extent does it represent a qualitatively distinct form of political authority?

Constructivism, which emphasizes the role of language, norms, identity, culture, and shared beliefs, conceives international actors as products of social processes. Through interactions, meanings are generated that shape norms and identities, which in turn construct social reality. While the European Union is an economic, political, and legal community, it is also a social construct—a community of norms and values grounded in shared meanings, identities, and practices.

The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate how the image of the European Union is constructed through language, narratives, and practices, enabling it to be interpreted at times as a conventional international organization and at others as a federation-like polity—interpretations that are grounded not only in objective premises but, above all, shaped by actors’ perspectives and shared beliefs.