Missed connEUctions

Soon it will be September, back-to-school sweater weather (though less so recently, what with global warming) and the European Commission and its subsidiaries will crank out a huge number of grants and tenders.

These offers will be virtual goldmines of bullsh!t Bingo terms, from digital to democracy to online creative industries and engagement and citizen outreach, etc.

The Commission’s plaintive hook each year with these tender swan songs is “Why aren’t Europeans connecting with us?” The implication being that Europeans are simply failing to appropriately look for and implement the many tools of participation benevolently provided by the EC as a means of politely collecting the dreams, desires, and complaints of its people and then dumping everything into the void that is cyberspace or the European co-decision process, depending.

Because let’s face it, the Commission is not responsible to the European people — at best, Parliament is, and Parliament is even easier for the Commission to ignore than the rest of Europe.

“Oh yes, Parliament. That’s the representative branch of the European Union,” Commission officials gently agree.

Again, the underlying understanding being that the Commission is beholden to no such constituency. The Commission is not paid by the taxpayers to do what the taxpayers want — such motivations are simply not built into the structure of European pluto-bureaucracy. Commission officials are paid to spend large sums of money on themselves and smaller sums…