As you might expect, the Irish “no” to the Lisbon Treaty is exercising minds in the European Parliament in many different ways.  Rivers of words on the subject flow in the chamber, meeting rooms and corridors of Parliament, and will continue to do so for some time yet.  This is not the place, and I am not the person, to go into the high politics of how the EU should deal with this new difficulty, but there is one aspect of the debate currently raging which is very close to home for us in the Web Communications team and about which I might chance a word or two here.

Every time one of these crises hits the EU, one of the first reactions from the political world is as predictable as it is essentially true: there has to be far better communication by the EU of what it does and indeed of what it is.  Herculean efforts are made by all the EU institutions to upgrade their communications activities and politicians are quite generous with resources for the purpose.  This is not wrong – it is essential in a democracy that citizen-voters, the stakeholders, know what is being done to and for them by those they have placed in power.  

But this is not going to be about EU, or even EP, communication policy in general (we’ll be back to that, I have no doubt), but about a specific aspect which was brought forcefully to mind by a meeting with Parliament’s Secretary-General last Tuesday.

In this meeting, which he called to give a kind of post-Irish pep talk to the middle managers of EP communications,  the SecGen made the observation that though two-thirds of the young who voted in the referendum voted “no”, two thirds of the young eligible to vote didn’t actually vote at all.  He concluded that the issue for EU institutions vis-à-vis the young was not their hostility, but their indifference, an indifference he attributed not to any lack of relevance to their lives but to low awareness of what that relevance is.  His message therefore, inevitably, was that we have to do better at communicating with the young.

We hear this all the time, of course.  This doesn’t make it wrong, but it does pose the question of why the point has to be made again and again.  I wonder if the answer lies in the implications of really following through on this idea.  It is generally assumed within the EU institutions that communicating with the young means choosing certain subjects – there are plenty – which will interest them.  Well, yes.  It is also assumed to mean a “lighter”, more fun approach.  Nothing wrong with that, as long as it avoids the “happy bouncy Europeans” trap.  It also means using the internet.  Definitely!  But, and here´s the rub, with some honourable exceptions, this is usually to taken to mean, implicitly if not explicitly, the internet in a very Web 1.0 sense.  A good website, the odd video, information presented with good graphics.  Sure, this is all important, but the young inhabit the world of Web 2.0, where they will not be told – however good the graphics – how good or important the EU or EP is for them, but expect to be able to engage in a conversation.  Meaning with people, not with institutions.  And that’s what we are so bad at: being people.

Being people not only means showing a face and revealing a name, but being able to acknowledge real-person thoughts, maybe even doubts and uncertainties, the reality of imperfection in human affairs, even – say it quietly – in European construction…  It also means opening up to debate, accepting the cacophony, anarchy and indiscipline of online debate, where the obsessive, abusive and downright loopy share a stage with those ready to engage in more rational argument.  It means above all accepting loss of control over the communications channels, something that institutions and, dare I say, politicians often have great difficulties in doing. 

So the question is maybe not so much are we ready to communicate with the young, but are we ready to take the consequences?

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