Barbara Berkel examines the extent to which conflicts can stimulate the development of a European public sphere. The author builds on a liberal understanding of mass-mediated publicness and assumes that a process of Europeanization of national public spheres occurs within the framework of policy areas. From a conflict-theoretical and communication-scientific analysis of the phenomenon of publicness, she derives hypotheses about Europeanization, taking into account policy area and country-specific contextual factors. She then tests these hypotheses using data obtained through content analysis in a quasi-experimental design. Finally, a heuristic of public transnational conflict communication synthesizes the findings.