A single European identity

Monday, December 29, 2008

A single European identity

Bruno Waterfield had the story on Saturday on how the "EU spends £2bn each year on 'vain PR exercises'".

This was Open Europe doing its stuff, claiming that so-called European "information" campaigns were one-sided and boasted a budget that is bigger than Coca-Cola's total worldwide advertising account.

The Sunday Times picked up the same story yesterday, featuring the commission's massive spend on its "EU-tube", only to be rewarded with a pathetic hit-rate as an indifferent public completely ignored the site.

The ST also allowed a spokesman for the commission his say, whereupon he said, rather sniffily, "This is not propaganda, we are simply providing information." He added that the commission "did not recognise" the €2.4 billion figure, which this paper had flagged up. 

In one sense, the commission is being honest – the figure does not represent the true spending on PR. It is much, much more.

As an example, we see today a report that a new advertising campaign has been set up to promote the .eu domain to the transport industry 

Learn the Value of an .eu domain name at www.goingfor.eu, it warbles, highlighting the growing number of companies within the industry that have "discovered the value of using the .eu internet address."

Right up top, though, it offers the true reason, not only for the campaign, but the .eu domain as well. "The .eu domain," it says, "offers a single European identity on the Internet for 490 million Europeans in 27 different countries."

And, of course, that is what is all about. That is mainly what the EU does. Much of its legislation, much of its initiatives, and most of its money is dedicated to promoting that single cause – a "single European identity". The cost is tens of billions each year.

To the dismay of EU and commission officials – and the rest of the europhiliac "community" - it isn't working. Thus they have recently stepped up "information" campaigns after polling has shown that only two per cent of Britons are aware that European elections are taking place next year.

This was a pre-Christmas Eurobarometer opinion survey which found that the already low levels of interest in next June's elections were actually declining as the vote gets closer. The number of "citizens" who say they are likely to vote is less than it was six months ago.

With a bit of luck, as the election comes near, that percentage will decline to zero and, judging from the euroweenies' panic at being ignored, that perhaps points the way for the election. Methinks the thing to do is spoil the vote. And, funnily enough, when we first wrote about the .eu domain, we had just the message to put on the ballot paper. 

And sending it will cost nothing at all.

COMMENT THREAD

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas is over

No, it was fine – much time spent with friends, at an exhibition and watching films. We even managed to miss by something like 20 minutes the guy being shot in our street on Christmas Eve. Back to reality.

A few (very few) of the blog's readers may have noticed that my presence on it has recently been erratic and occasionally non-existent. There are various reasons for this and one of my new year's resolutions (well, actually, the only one) will be to make some kind of a decision about it all.

In the meantime, I want to widen the issues we normally discuss. No, I am not going to write about Gaza, that most predictable of developments, except to mention that Hamas is not getting the support of Arab leaders that it is, presumably relying on. (See here, here andhere. More on that tomorrow.)

Instead, let me take our readers to a book I have been re-reading in the last week, “Russian Conservatism and Its Critics” by Professor Richard Pipes, probably the best living historian of Russia and the Soviet Union.

In chapter 3, "The Onset of the Conservative-Liberal Controversy", Professor Pipes discusses the inconsistency with which eighteenth century Russian rulers approached the whole subject of public opinion and the amount of freedom it should have. He quotes A. M. Skabichevskii who published in 1892 a history of Russian censorship from 1700 to 1862 (when Alexander II introduced serious political and judicial reforms).

In governmental circles of that time there predominated people brought up in the spirit of old times who simply could not accustom themselves that in society there should emerge any intellectual movement that was autonomous, independent, and lacking in the slightest official sanction. They were accustomed that every undertaking in the intellectual sphere – whether the publication of some periodical or book, or the founding of some educational institution – all this was done not only with the sanction of the authorities but by the authorities themselves, and the entrepreneur, if not previously in the service, by virtue of this very enterprise turned into an official.

Setting aside the argument about people brought up in the spirit of old times, this is a pithy analysis of our rulers and controllers, whether in Brussels or London.

We have remarked on numerous occasions the propensity for assuming that "civil society" is a number of organizations set up by the Commission; of a similar propensity to assume that accountability means discussing proposed legislation with carefully selected organizations and self-appointed "representatives"; of the notion that entrepreneurship consists of obeying a set of rules set up by the government, be that the Commission or the DTI; of the assumption that education and cultural activity cannot exist without some kind of guidance from above.

The point is that this sort of belief is completely genuine. The ever-growing army of regulators at all levels cannot imagine that anything can possibly exist outside their rules and decisions. And then they wonder why European countries are floundering economically, scientifically and culturally.

The most terrible aspect of it all is that this attitude should be acceptable in Britain, the country that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the ideal of private enterprise at all levels for those unfortunate countries that did not know how they would achieve that state of affairs. Instead, we have lost what we had. And yes, we did it ourselves. For once, Dr Heinz Kiosk,s famous comment of "we are all guilty" is actually accurate.