Bernhard Peters (1949-2005) understood the public sphere as a central engine of cultural creativity and societal learning. In contributions that are partly normative-theoretical and partly empirically oriented, he explores the prerequisites and functioning of deliberative public discourse and investigates the connections between public discourses, processes of transnationalization, collective identity, and democratic legitimacy. This volume gathers Peters' scattered and, in part, hard-to-access contributions on the topic of the public sphere from the years 1993 to 2005.