The European Union and all of its ancillary and administrative arms have identified that citizens feel detached and cut off from the union and that more needs to be done to propagate the message.
Yet Europe still misses the wood for the trees and on many an occasion uses far too much technical jargon that the man on the street simply does not understand, or can’t be bothered to decipher.
A case in point happened a few days ago when local MEP Simon Busuttil worked together with The Malta Independent to table a parliamentary question to the European Commission on the issue of exchange rates implemented by online shops.
Dr Busuttil asked, very simply, about the legality and morality of online shops charging one price in sterling and something completely different in euro denomination. In a nutshell, the Commission answered that there was nothing it could do at present as the UK (where the shop is based) is not in the eurozone, but that new directives should be coming into effect by the end of the year which will regulate such behaviour.
The role of MEPs, among many other things, is to put forward queries by their constituents to Europe on various issues and to press for the answers. In this case, Dr Busuttil did the job to the letter and the EC duly complied. But the answer which was given was about 400 words long, was incredibly technical and proved to be quite a job to decipher, even for people whose job it is to do this every day.
In short, the average man in the street would have simply looked at the answer, blinked and thrown it away – sheer gobbledygook.
Quite how the European institutions want to be more relevant and more understood by citizens while delivering such answers is indeed contradictory. No one, whether an institution or an individual, can say that they want to be better understood and part of someone’s daily life, when they use terminology that should be consigned to Post Grad economics books.
The easiest way to alienate someone is to give them an answer to a question in terminology they cannot understand. But to put matters into context, it is not always like this. The European Parliament, for example, has taken the bull by the horns and organised a pan-European information campaign in the lead up to the EP elections to be held in June. The institution has tailor-made its information campaign to individual countries.
MEPs also do their best to inform the general public of the goings on of Europe, but they do tend to get lost in the technical world that the hallowed halls of Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg create. To be fair, it must be very hard for them to first of all understand what is going on, and even more importantly to translate that into layman’s terms for the general public.
We saw exactly how far this has gone in the dealings to solve Europe’s economic slowdown. A lot of jargon was used to accompany the “stimulus plans”, but the overwhelming feeling of ordinary citizens is that they do not understand what is going on, and more so, what is being done to address “what is going on”. If Europe continues in this manner, it will continue to alienate itself from its citizens and runs the risk of eventually locking itself up in an ivory tower more than it already has.
Europe must avert this at all costs and the only way to do this is to forget about preaching salami slicing, strategic short and long-term objectives, the Lisbon Agenda and other such things and instead focus on explaining exactly what they mean to normal everyday people.