I was listening to Sony Kapoor the other day who complained about bad summit outcomes during the euro crisis. Actually it was a chilling talk as he basically confirmed that nobody in EU governments or EU institutions seems to have a clue about finance and economics – let alone the political will to look at the underlying problems of the crisis. And curiously we are faced with the following situation: Seemingly incompetent people meet for diner and negotiate about highly complex matters throughout the night – with a press conferences at 4am or 6am… And it seems obvious to me that decisions that are taken at 2am are not necessarily the best decisions – so are we really surprised that the outcomes are sub-optimal?
Here is an idea:
Get rid of evening summits and endorse normal working days – start in the morning with a working breakfast followed by a morning session and a working lunch. Negotiations can continue in the afternoon. Forget about the diner – go to the pub instead for a normal night out. It might also do the trick to create a team spirit among EU leaders!
The issues at stake at the moment are far too important for negotiations after a busy working day – you really need the whole day! This would also improve coordination with national capitals as experts in ministries and parliamentary committees would be at the disposal during summits. And there would be no more press conferences at 4am – good news for all journalists and bloggers…
Askthepresident.eu is the latest attempt of the EU institutions to somehow reach out to the citizens using some fancy online tools. First impression is ok – nothing revolutionary, a normal PR instrument if you ask me. It looks pretty basic – probably they are not sure whether it will actually work. The idea is the you can submit questions that will be answered by Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council. And let’s hope they learned something from the Van Rompuy facebook PR disaster a few weeks ago…
Ok, but let’s think about the content. I don’t know why I should ask the President of the European Council anything. Well, apart from the question whether we actually need a permanent president at all, as I have the impression that it only created another layer of bureaucracy and increased inter-institutional rivalry. But ok, maybe other people may find it useful. And who knows, maybe Van Rompuy himself (or his team) can learn something from the exercise…
After watching this video, I have some basic communication advice:
- So, Herman Van Rompuy, or as I like to call him now “the communicator”, prefers video. But why? Is text not good enough? Why does he mention it in the video? Just because video is the latest online and PR trend? The point I am trying to make is the following: If you ask people to contact you, give as many options as possible and don’t talk down on people! Make it sound positive. Instead of saying “video – that’s what I would prefer” just say “you can also submit a video” or “I will reply by video”.
- In a 28 second video do you really need to emphasize that “maybe not all questions ” will be answered? This is not very encouraging and it sounds quite negative. At least say “I will do my best to answer all questions” or “My team and I will work hard to answer all relevant questions that you may have”.
- And what about languages? The website is currently only in English, probably a sign that it is an experiment (but don’t tell it to the French!). But more seriously, it is the EU and languages are important. I understand that it is a lot of work to provide translations but if you launch a page such as askthepresident.eu make sure that people can at least submit questions in all EU languages.
- Voting without a google account. I understand it is easier to use google or facebook plugins to achieve a meaningful social media integration but at the same time these tools excluding many European citizens. Not everyone has a google account and I certainly would not like to open a google account just to be able to play around with voting on a EU website. Moreover, I don’t want to be forced to use a certain company to get in touch with politicians. I am also suspicious about revealing my political interests to any company…
Anyway, the video is a nice reminder what the POTEC (that sounds quite cool – is there also an official short form?) actually does – arguably not that much. So no need to get overexicted by this new position. A video that should definitely be watched by journalists and governmental website editors:
Jean-Claude Juncker, PM of Luxembourg made a few interesting comments at a conference that took place in Brussels just one day before the European Council:
“Politicians give the impression that Europe is being built against their will. Governments always try to explain in their countries that they have won against Europe”
And asked about a possible Plan B…
“In fact the Lisbon Treaty was the Plan B of the project for a European Constitution. If we still change the text, it will be a very small B”
And he goes on explaining the reasons for the mess we are in:
“Europe is not sufficiently proud of what it does (…) and the reason is that no government in particular can claim the merits from these achievements. Since governments like to attract the public’s attention only on their own achievements and not on common achievements, nobody speaks about common achievements.”
It is campaign time again! (the euro-blogoshpere seems to get into online campaigns…) “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” is one of the best known quotes by Henri Kissinger. Now Jon Worth and Jan Seifert want to answer this question and launched the whodoicall.eu campaign that calls for one president of the EU. The idea is that one person should be President of the European Commission and, at the same time, President of the European Council (the position which is newly created under the Lisbon treaty). Read the arguments here.
Although I am not completely convinced about this idea, I signed the petition because I think that this new position of a European Council president is somewhat unnecessary. It will only create more confusion among citizens that already today are not too familiar with EU institutions. I am also not too convinced that EU policy making becomes more coherent with a permanent European Council president as well as rotating presidencies in the Council of Ministers. It just makes things more complicated!
But one critical remark regarding Kissinger’s quote. He was Secretary of State so his “natural” EU counterpart is actually the High Representative of Foreign Affairs. So he should call Mr Solana and none of the presidents! So, instead of talking about the presidents, one should rather give the High Representative more power (or introduce more QMV in EU foreign policy) to ‘please’ Mr Kissinger.
(I don’t know if I want to please Mr Kissinger though, and anyway I doubt that Kissinger would ever refrain from negotiating with national counterparts…but that is a different story…)
