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EU spends £2 billion a year on propaganda Open Europe has published new research which shows that the EU is spending billions of euros a year on initiatives to promote itself and its central aim of 'ever closer union'. In 2008 alone, it spent more than 2.4 billion euros, which is more than Coca Cola's global advertising budget. The book, "The hard sell: EU communication policy and the campaign for hearts and minds" shows how EU information policy is geared not towards providing neutral, balanced information, but towards trying to convince people to support EU integration.

As well as a sophisticated information and communication strategy designed to 'sell' the EU and its political message, the EU also spends billions of euros a year on efforts to engender a common European culture and citizenship, with the explicit aim of increasing people's attachment to the EU project. The EU pours hundreds of millions of euros a year into think-tanks and lobby groups which promote its policies and campaign for further EU integration, and many of its efforts are directed very deliberately at young people.

Open Europe's research was covered in the Telegraph and the Mail on 27 December, and in the Sunday Times on 28 December. Open Europe Director Lorraine Mullally was quoted saying, "Taxpayers should not be footing the bill for vain PR exercises to make us love the EU. The EU needs urgent and radical reform, not expensive campaigns to improve its image. People certainly need to know more about the EU, but the EU has proved unable and unwilling to provide neutral, factual information. This senseless spending on dubious PR projects has got to stop." The research also appeared in several European titles, including Courrier International, General-Anzeiger and ANSA.

Telegraph Mail Sunday Times The hard sell: EU communication policy and the campaign for hearts and minds OE press release

Telegraph

Mail

Sunday Times

Skyrsla Open Europe: PDF skrá: The hard sell: EU communication policy and the campaign for hearts and minds

OE press release

Frá síðu 14 úr skýrslu Open Europe

‘Communicating Europe’

the EU’s biased information campaign

“Neutral factual information is needed of course, but it is not enough on its own… Genuine communicationby the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information”

Commission Communication on an Information and Communication Strategy for the EuropeanUnion 45

“The European Union has grown up as a political project but has not found a place in people’s hearts andminds. The White Paper is the Commission’s proposal to respond to this challenge and to lay the foundationof a European Union Communication Policy”

Margot Wallstrom, EU Communications Commissioner46

“Following the rejection of the Nice Treaty in 2001, Ireland knows only too well the importance ofcommunicating Europe. After the French and Dutch rejections of the Constitution, all of Europe knows itnow. This campaign will help not only inform people of the different information sources available but willalso show the benefits of EU membership“

Charlie McCreevy, EU Internal Market Commissioner47

“A sustained effort must be made to explain the benefits that the European Union brings to each MemberStates in a much more effective way. It is not merely a communication issue, it is a raison d’être of theEuropean project. Effective communication by the EU should therefore be seen primarily as a public-serviceduty”

Margot Wallstrom, EU Communications Commissioner48

For 2008 alone, the EU had a €206.6 million budget set aside purely for “Communication”, run by theEuropean Commission’s Directorate-General for Communication, which employs around a thousandpeople.49 This is three times the budget dedicated to tackling fraud, and two and a half times the size of theCommission’s budget for negotiating international trade on behalf of 27 member states.50