I'm EU, You're EU - by Evgeny Morozov
As its popularity flounders, the EU is focusing on "getting itself closer to the people" by, among other things, launching webcasts of its meetings, organizing cake-baking competitions, and attempting hostile takeovers of popular song contests. Not surprisingly, most of the EU's public initiatives have enjoyed little success.
For one thing, incoming and outgoing presidencies in the EU all have their own themes and PR objectives, complicating the creation of a cohesive image. No wonder that the holder of the most recent presidency, Austria, got to promote the image of "sexy Europe" by using racy images on publicity posters only to be followed by Finland's current presidency, which is busy translating all of its EU-related documents into Latin. With the EU leadership acquiring a new identity every six months, who could be blamed for forgetting what it really stands for?
Unfortunately, it is not just the member states that are excessively creative in their communication endeavors. The public initiatives of the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, are often as outlandish and uncoordinated. There is a special commissioner responsible for this—Margaret Wallström—who, judging by her blog, enjoys traveling around and preaching to the converted (meeting a bunch of Europhile students in a pub is one of her many contributions to fostering the public debate).
Note EU-Digest - being critical is easy Mr. Morozov, being constructive is the difficult part. Why don't you focus on Microsoft's problems with the EU?
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