EU-Tube
Civitas, 6 May 2009
YouTube (the online video forum owned by Google) and Euronews (an international news channel) have collaborated to launch ‘Questions for Europe’, a new online forum to encourage debate ahead of the European Parliament elections in June.
The site professes to be “dedicated to the European elections” and it invites people to “ask us your questions” by submitting videos before 3rd June. The engineers of the new site promise to “seek expert advice, or even relaying question to MEP candidates themselves … to find the answers”. The site will also feature opinion polls in a ‘Europe interactive’ section.
The EP elections have sparked a plethora of online “support sites”, such as a new online profiler that invites people to “Discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections”. The question is, will these sites foster much needed debate ahead of the elections in June?
Euronews promises that the new Questions for Europe site is not simply an advertising campaign for its channel, whose half-hourly news bulletins reach 256 million households in 144 countries. The creators also assert that Questions for Europe will not simply duplicate the EU’s own Europarl TV because this new site has “no official partnership with the EU institutions”. They recognise that they “need all points of view for it to be credible” and they have also professed that they are prepared for a majority of contributors to be EU-sceptic “… please Eurosceptics, come to us…”
Online media is still a relatively unknown quantity to many people: Barack Obama used the power of the internet very effectively to bolster his Presidential election campaign. In contrast, Gordon Brown’s recent YouTube effort has been much ridiculed because online media demands charisma and impecable interpersonal skills, which Barack Obama has in bucket loads. Brown, on the other hand, needs to work on his smile…
It has been predicted that the EP election could have a record low voter turn-out (from a high of over 65% in 1979, Eurobarometer predicts an EU-wide turnout of less than 40%). As Timothy Garton Ash recently commented in the Guardian, “The people of Europe vote by not voting. They speak about Europe by not speaking about Europe”. Apathy towards the EU is encouraged by the UK political parties, for example if David Cameron’s launch of the Conservatives’ Euro election campaign is anything to go by, the campaigns in the UK are destined to concentrate on national issues rather than EU issues. It remains to be seen whether the other UK political parties will dare to mention Europe in their Euro-election campaigns after tomorrow’s deadline for MEP candidates to be submitted.
Debate is being thwarted elsewhere in the EU. For example, despite its impending second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland has shut down its National Forum on Europe, which “animates and promotes public debate on the EU.” The Forum has been in existence since 2001 (after the Nice Treaty) and its website states that it does “not promote a particular course of action. It is to be a politically neutral public space”.
Perhaps all efforts to facilitate EU discussion ahead of the EP election should be welcomed. To enable people to cultivate informed opinions about the EU there must be open debate, otherwise voter apathy will spread like swine flu.