Change in the air for information policy

Date: 15/05/1997

By Simon Coss

A RADICAL shake-up of the European Commission's information policy is set to be announced this summer once the dust has settled on the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations.

Sources close to Commissioner Marcelino Oreja - whose Directorate-General for information, communication and culture (DGX) is charged with spreading the 'European word' across the Union - suggest the institution will wait until after this June's summit of EU leaders in Amsterdam before formally announcing the changes.

If all goes according to plan, agreement on a revised Maastricht Treaty should be struck in Amsterdam. “We want to see exactly what the governments decide about information policy before setting things in motion,” said one official.

The first clear sign that changes were on the way for DGX came early this year, when the new Director-General Spyros Pappas was appointed to replace outgoing boss Colette Flesch.

The most far-reaching reforms being proposed by Oreja would mean fundamental changes in the way the Commission's satellite information offices in the 15 member states operate.

“The idea is to decentralise information policy. The Commission seems to have finally woken up to the fact that 'Europe' means different things to different people,” explained one official.

One plan is to combine the national Commission offices with those of the European Parliament. This would allow people seeking information on the activities of the EU institutions to visit user-friendly 'one-stop' centres.

“In Brussels, people are always talking about struggles and turf battles between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council of Ministers, but outside the city most people are unaware of the differences. It is confusing, when you want information on the EU, to have to visit two different offices,” said one critic.

Oreja is also planning to rotate the staff in national offices far more frequently. At present, European fonctionnaires assigned to work in member state information centres can spend their entire careers there. Critics say that as most of these offices are based in national capitals, the top officials running them can tend to become part of high-level political cliques and lose touch with what is happening on the ground.

At Commission headquarters in Brussels, the plan is to restructure part of Directorate B as an information agency which would work in the same way as a press agency. This new department would, it is claimed, provide raw information on the EU, as opposed to pre-packaged “propaganda” - in the Commission's own words - designed to sell certain policies or programmes.

Critics argue that an administration such as the Commission cannot play poacher as well as gamekeeper and that any information it puts out will, by definition, be slanted in its favour.