“World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it… Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity”.
With these words began the Schuman Declaration, made by the French Foreign Minister on May 9th, 1950. Today, Schuman would be amazed by the achievements of European integration, while frustrated by the current state of the European Union and especially worried about its future. And it is not surprising since in some scenarios the terms used to describe the EU are quite negative: irrelevance, decline, fall, loss of influence, passivity, inaction, incapacity… Some of them are related to the role of the EU on how to overcome the economic downturn, the lack of response to the popular demands against the authoritarian regimes of North Africa or the (non) participation in the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit.
Since the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, the European Union has been increasingly present in our lives. But this new presence is far from be perceived as positive, so often associated with a big shortage of democracy, impositions of the center against the periphery, excess of bureaucracy and failures of the treaties. As a consequence, a turning point where the project of a political, economic and social Union seems to be sinking has been generated. The response to the crisis has not been one characteristic of an organized and integrated structure, thus demonstrating that Europe moves along at two speeds. It is a matter of fact that we are facing an (purely) economic governance along with a series of recipes that seem to question the model of social Europe. However, are the European institutions prepared to deal with these kinds of events?
The Lisbon Treaty reserved many levels of sovereignty. Because of this, Member States took refuge in the Nation-state when facing difficulties and the result has been the semi-integration, unable to construct a single voice. Perhaps this situation is due to a time where national interests take precedence over those of Europe as a whole, in a time when there are no politicians like Adenauer or Schuman to defend the project. Europe seems that no longer dream about itself and no more is able to communicate the “European dream”. But it is also important to take into account what kind of media has Europe to convey its own concept.
Every country in Europe has so many media in order to reproduce its ideological landscape: right and left wing media, nationalist and regionalist. But all of them respond more to their internal dynamics while the Union affairs seem to be categorized as “domestic affairs”. It is possible to build this dream without communication? How should Europe communicate itself?
Both connecting with citizenship and communicating have been acknowledged as a priority within the European Union policy since its inception. This aim has been strengthened as a result of three elements mainly: the lack of citizenship´s interest in EU politics expressed in the European Parliament elections of 2004, the rejection of the EU constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005 and the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish three years later. In this sense, the White Paper on a European Communication Policy (1996) stands for a milestone within the process. For the first time politicians realized the need of taking into account the opinion of people, media and civic society organizations when writing news.
But all these efforts to boost popular trust in the European project don´t seem to work. Moreover, they raise a lot of questions: is the Information Society the same as a well-informed society?. Are we probably more focused on the means than on the message itself?. Can far-right rising in Europe be the consequence of an ill-informed society regarding the importance and complexity of the EU project?.
Perhaps the concept is not clear enough. For example, if you write in Google the words “European Union” the browser deploys the following options to define it: as a trade block, as a global actor, as a supranational organization and as a superpower finally. Which one are we?. Do we know it?. Does the chosen definition meet our expectations?.
In these gloomy times when citizens are taken shelter in social networks, fleeing both from media and politicians, it is more urgent that never to properly inform about the EU. If once there has been a time is now.