Wallström: "Communication should not be a Brussels affair"

At a conference entitled 'Will it work?', organised by Friends of Europe, ECAS, Journalists@yourservice and EurActiv on the same day, a range of civil society stakeholder and invited speakers gave the White Paper a generally cautious welcome.

Giles Merritt, director of Friends of Europe, warned against using voter participation as an expression of support for the European project. Merritt thus recalled that a high turnout had landed the Constitution a resounding 'No' in France and in the Netherlands while it was a low turnout that secured a 'Yes' in Spain. 

Willy De Backer, editor-in-chief of EurActiv.com, stated his disappointment at the absence of a political dimension that would also involve the political parties: "It is very unpolitical. There is very little about where we want the European project to go. There needs to be more interaction between the European public sphere and national politics." 

Maria João Rodrigues, Special Advisor to the European Commission on the Lisbon Strategy, said that there was a need to leverage so-called multipliers to communicate Europe, pointing to persons ranging from business people to school teachers. 

Claes de Vreese, Professor of Political Communication and Director of The Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), called on the EU to stop the victimisation of itself. Getting bad press is part of the game, he said, and argued that news is always driven by conflict, and thus "Euroscepticism is not so bad for the visibility of the EU project". He also urged the Commission to stop dreaming about creating a European public sphere. "There is only such a thing as a Europeanisation of the national public spheres." 

Correspondent of French daily Libération, Jean Quatremer, said that the Commission only tends to worry about communication when things go wrong, i.e the Constitution referenda. He went on to point out that all the Commission has to say about the raging Arcelor-Mittal takeover battle is that it will apply the EU competition rules. This is in spite of the fact that it is a matter which concerns not only people's jobs but also the steel industry, which historically was at the heart of the European project. 

Giles Merritt concluded the conference by saying that the four non-institutional organisers will run a parallel process of debating the EU's communication policy. In that context, Fondation EurActiv presented a draft Yellow Paper in response to the whole communication package of the Commission (see EurActiv 1 February 2006)

Other stakeholders also reacted to the White Paper. JEF, the Young European Federalists, broadly welcomed the White Paper, but questioned whether the EU was ready to pay for the goods: "We support the main features of the document and especially welcome the decision to broaden the existing programmes concerned with involving European citizens in Europe. However, given the financial restraints of the proposed Financial Perspectives for 2007-2013 it is highly questionable if these announcements will not remain as further holes in the cheese," said Jan Seifert, JEF president. 

Timothy Kirkhope, a conservative UK MEP, said: "This plan was supposed to bring the EU closer to its citizens but I fear it will only end up making the gap even wider. People across Europe are communicating their message to the EU and it is a message of dissatisfaction. The Commission should perhaps concentrate less on communicating and more on listening."

Graham Watson, leader of the Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament, welcomed Vice-President Wallström's new focus on a citizen-based approach: "Citizens feel ignored, uncertain of the motives of Brussels' policy makers and no longer certain of what the European Union is actually for. If the EU is to become more relevant it needs to spend more time focusing on what really matters to its citizens."