There is wide agreement that democracy is the only viable legitimation principle in modern societies. At the same time we are constantly reminded of the crisis in representative democracy. These challenges might if anything be compounded by globalization, regionalization (notably the EU) and by exclusion of certain groups of citizens. These developments have given impetus to a renewed interest in deliberative democracy and the public sphere and an attendant quest for deliberative modes of opinion-making and will-formation in both formal political institutions and on different sites and arenas of civil society. Citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polls are held up as some of the institutional mechanisms for harnessing deliberative democracy. Mechanisms for harnessing the public sphere’s democratic potentials are for example (transnational) media debates, story-telling, public protestations, social media and public events locally, nationally, on a European level and globally. It is hardly the case that the standard institutions of representative democracies – elections, party competition and parliaments – are devoid of deliberative qualities of their own. So, are deliberative arenas inside and outside formal representative institutions best understood as substitutes or as complements? What are the democratic potentials of an extra-parliamentarian public? Of a global public sphere? What is the role of public communication in democratic decision-making? Can European publics contribute to the creation of a European demos or a European ‘we-ness’? Are the answers to these questions, in turn, influenced by how far we understand deliberation as directed at a rational consensus and how far we regard it as a means of showing mutual and equal respect for positions that may often be irreducibly different from one another?