The diminishing returns of the EU (comms) budget

There is a regular drumbeat of disapproval at the EU's attempts to reach the wider public, but the argument skirts around deeper issues within the Commission.

A recent story from Politico has set my feeds abuzz: "The EU is getting a German-infused PR machine — with double the money".

The European Commission plans to double its annual public communication budget from €30m to €60m in order to bolster the public relations capabilities of the Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen.

The reporting on this was rather breathless, to my mind, and I suspect the tone is partly retribution for von der Leyen's penchant for spurning the Brussels press corps*. The actual numbers are difficult for most of us to contextualize. Is €60m a lot or a little? What's the communication budget of, say, Emmanuel Macron, for comparison? Without any frame of reference, the total budget doesn't mean very much. The part of the story that is most notable is that the budget increase will come from within the existing funding, so that €30m will be pulled from elsewhere in the Commission budget - but that isn't what made it to the headline.

My reading apparently puts me in the minority, as the article has successfully stirred the pot and provoked a slew of outraged reactions (beyond those quoted in the article itself).

Here's a Swedish Christian Democrat MEP describing the campaign as 'unacceptable' and calling for the overall EU budget to be reduced.

And a prominent right-wing French journalist calling the announcement 'scandalous' - one of many from the #Frexit crowd to have jumped on the story, especially the suggestion to remove funding from agriculture.

This is a longstanding bugbear. When I first got to Brussels back in 2019, there was another cycle of disapproval when the European Parliament pushed a viral video called Choose Your Future as part of it's "This time I'm voting" turnout campaign**. The spectre of 'propaganda budgets' in Brussels were a long standing canard of the Eurosceptic crowd and was extremely prevalent during the Brexit debate. There is a built-in, almost kneejerk disdain for the idea that European institutions need to invest in communication efforts***.

The truth is, the Commission is extremely bad at public communication. It is absurdly opaque and invisible considering its impact on people's lives, stemming partly from the fact that it's communication is overtly technocratic and abstruse. As research analyzing 45000 official press releases has shown, the Commission is a poor performer even when compared to other national governments, let alone other voices in the public sphere:

The language that the Commission feeds into the public debate is significantly and substantially less accessible than the language that citizens usually experience when consuming political news from tabloid but also from broadsheet newspapers. In fact, the Commission’s public communication is consistently closer to the way that political scientists communicate with each other.

A love of jargon, complex grammar, and a penchant for abstractions makes for highly technocratic press releases and statements that are almost impossible to read unless you live and breathe Commission politics.

In short, they are catering to the Brussels Bubble, not to the general public.

And these problems haven't improved over time, as the study author Christian Rauh puts it:

Strikingly, this has hardly changed over the more than 35 years of European integration observed here – a period in which the Commission’s political competences but also its politicisation in public debates grew markedly. 

The issue isn't constrained to press releases as the finding that the Commission is a highly technocratic public communicator is reinforced by other studies on Commission speeches and social media posts.

So, this is undoubtedly a problem that needs to be solved. But solving it by taking budget away from other areas is setting yourself up for failure. As Politico reported, the chair of the European Parliament's budget committee objected to removing money from funding for research or Erasmus. Again, this is familiar -if more sympathetic. Any comms person will have heard the argument that it's unforgivable to shift money from 'real' topics in order to spend on the flim-flam of public relations; the Commission's decision to do so on the eyebrow-raising basis that it is "in line with the EU’s principles of good financial management" (translation: we can't raise our overall budget without an almighty bust-up) isn't persuasive.

The issue of shuffling EU funding from one project to the next is a topic the team at Clean Air Task Force has been looking into recently. For example, the Innovation Fund - a key climate technology investment source - seems to have been name checked every other announcement coming out Schuman, yet there is no sign that its overall funding will increase****. Likewise, the European Investment Bank has rebranded itself the "EU Climate Bank" but hasn't seen any sizable capital increase to go along with all the new climate policy coming out of Brussels. The pie is being divided into ever more slices, but it's not clear there is enough to go around.

The European Commission itself is creaking under the strain of its vastly increased remit. The scope, ambition and output of the Commission has expanded enormously, especially in relation to climate policy, but its overall headcount remains tiny. There are fewer than 15,000 permanent and temporary staff working in policy related departments; of those just 3,352 support the Commission's climate lead, Frans Timmermans. That's a tiny headcount*****.

This small group is charged with putting together probably the most comprehensive climate policy agenda in the world on behalf of 447 million citizens, while juggling a series of crises and other pressing areas of regulatory need. Politico reported in 2021 that burnout was common and staff were working weekends and overtimes in an effort to keep up. Little wonder.

With the Commission unable or unwilling to increase its headcount, the desire to spend more money on external consultants makes sense - even if the process of choosing those consultants leaves something to be desired. In all likelihood, a €30m increase probably isn't going to cut the mustard, but it was probably the most they could manage in the zero-sum-game of the current Commission budget. This, to me, is the real issue: the Commission is doing more than ever before and is an essential institution for dealing with the plethora of multi-country issues we're facing. The war in Ukraine, climate change, COVID and similar public health outbreaks, mass migration crises - very few of the issues that fill headlines are purely national concerns. So we need EU institutions to step up.

But how can we expect European institutions to handle these issues without a related increase in headcount, budget and capacity?

Communicating in an era of polycrisis is hard work. Each problem, no matter how technical and niche, is interconnected with another series of technical, complex issues. There are no easy answers that we can put on a placard.

This is especially true for institutions like the Commission, as they can also no longer rely on mass media to reach people. Audiences are fragmented by language, platform, channel, disinformation and, perhaps more than anything, by overwhelming choice; many people are turning off news all together. Policymakers need to invest in means of reaching their audiences directly. It might irk journalists that investment is going into sidestepping them - and lack of professional scrutiny of policymakers is certainly an issue - but there is no doubt in my mind that this investment is badly needed.

The inability of EU institutions to reach normal Europeans isn't just a headache for Brussels bigwigs, it is a serious impediment to the European project. Despite the fact that support for the EU has been on a largely upwards trajectory, trust in its institutions have been falling for years. With increasing risks and common crises pushing those institutions to the fore, this is a major weakness of the bloc, as Bruegel - Improving economic policy 's Maria Demertzis highlighted in 2021. When Brussels is the automatic scapegoat for national governments, it is hard to turn around and ask citizens to listen to them when the shit hits the fan. And that's a situation we've run into repeatedly in the last few years.

It's time to actually back these institutions and expanding their comms capacity is major part of that. While it shouldn't come at the expense of other areas, it cannot continue to be an afterthought.

This is part of a monthly series aimed at examining the underlying narratives of the European climate debate, with a healthy dose of media criticism along the way. Read the previous article here. Note that these are personal opinions and do not represent the position of my employer.

*AFAIK there aren't hard statistics on this, but multiple journalist contacts have complained about lack of access to von der Leyen. It does seem to be a trend among world leaders, as there are similar complaints about Joe Biden. Why subject yourself to a room full of hostile reporters when you can simply set up a TV spot or release information on Twitter feeds to deliver the news instead?

**Subsequent research suggests that the highly publicized viral element of the voter turnout campaign may have decreased voter engagement in 2019, as "sharing election-related content online" was a negative indicator for electoral participation.

***Sound familiar, comms people?

****Watch this space for a full analysis at both EU and member state levels.

*****For reference, more than 10,000 people work in the UK's Cabinet Office, which supports the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Almost every department of the British government has a larger head count than the Commission. On the other side of the pond, 1,800 people work in the White House alone.