The EU propaganda machine

New book of mine out about the EU-NGO-media-academia propaganda complex

I have a new book out in Italian in which I synthesise the findings of my MCC Brussels reports on EU funding to NGOs, media and academia. It can be purchased here.

What follows is the English translation of the introduction I wrote for the book.

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Since the early 2010s — that is, since the so-called euro crisis and the economic and social upheavals that followed — an extensive critical literature on the European Union, and in particular on monetary union, has emerged, especially in Italy, to which I can claim to have made my modest contribution. Yet almost all of this analysis has focused on the institutional characteristics and the economic, political and social implications of the European integration process (and of monetary unification in particular): on the way in which the progressive transfer of ever-larger shares of sovereignty — up to and including monetary sovereignty, the cornerstone of state independence — from the national to the supranational level, combined with the adherence to a structurally technocratic and anti-democratic political-institutional order and a radically neoliberal European economic constitution, has negatively affected economic and social development, democratic health and class equilibria in member states, with particularly significant effects in the Italian case.

This body of analysis has, in other words, privileged the hard power dimension of European integration: the ensemble of legal, economic and institutional constraints formally codified in the treaties, in the fiscal rules, in the macroeconomic surveillance mechanisms and in the architecture of the euro, and more broadly the economic and social policies promoted by European institutions. In recent years, attention has increasingly turned to the reckless warmongering policies promoted by Brussels. In short, the critical literature has so far focused, understandably, on the substantive content of European policies and architecture: on the most visible, concrete — and most overtly coercive — aspects of the European external constraint.

Little or no attention has been paid, however, to the soft power dimension of European integration: that is, to the ensemble of cultural, communicative, educational and symbolic instruments through which the European order is legitimised, internalised and “naturalised” in the public debate and in the collective imagination. And yet this is a terrain where a less visible but equally decisive contest is being waged. No regime or political-institutional order, after all, can sustain itself solely through coercive instruments or technical-administrative mechanisms, and the European Union is no exception: like any other political regime, it too requires symbolic frameworks and narratives capable of conferring meaning, justification and legitimacy upon its exercise of power.

From this perspective, the EU has progressively supplemented, over the years, its traditional instruments of functional integration (single market, common currency, technical regulation) with an elaborate discursive apparatus aimed at symbolically legitimising its own project: at constructing a European “common sense” that presents the current configuration of the Union not as a historically determined and politically contestable arrangement, but as the inevitable horizon of political and economic modernity. In essence, while hard power operates through explicit rules and constraints, soft power works through the manufacturing of consent, the definition of interpretive frameworks and the selection of paradigms deemed scientifically and morally legitimate.

Yet if it is true that the Union has progressively intensified its symbolic and narrative production, it is equally true that — especially in recent years — this effort has not translated into open engagement with European public opinion. What we have witnessed is not a genuine deliberative politicisation of the European project, grounded in transparent and equal dialogue with civil society, but rather a more indirect, structurally asymmetric and ultimately authoritarian mode of consent-building.

Rather than openly submitting its strategic choices and institutional architecture to challenge, the EU has tended to channel its narratives through instruments of diffuse legitimation, often largely invisible to the broader public. This has occurred primarily through the systematic use of funding programmes directed at NGOs, think tanks, media outlets, local authorities, academic networks and cultural institutions. Formally, such funding is public and traceable; in substance, however, it remains opaque in the collective perception, since the public is rarely aware of the financial link between certain ostensibly “independent” positions and European funding.

What takes shape is a mode of influence that does not take the classical form of direct propaganda — declaredly institutional and easily identifiable — but rather that of a networked dissemination of interpretive frameworks, “values” and political priorities through formally autonomous actors. European narratives are not merely communicated from the top down; they are “grafted” into the social fabric through a multiplicity of intermediaries operating in the fields of education, information, culture and civic activism.

In this respect, the EU is not exceptional within the contemporary landscape. The forms of legitimation and political influence in the twenty-first century have evolved well beyond the twentieth-century model of propaganda conveyed exclusively through mainstream media or state apparatuses. Increasingly, a “whole-of-society” approach is adopted, in which the production and circulation of particular narrative frames involves multiple levels simultaneously: public institutions, organised civil society, universities, digital platforms, cultural influencers, territorial bodies and transnational networks.

In this model, political communication becomes intertwined with governance and the distribution of resources. Funding becomes an instrument for structurally orienting public debate: not necessarily through censorship or the repression of dissent — which does nevertheless occur — but through the selective promotion of particular themes, perspectives and sensibilities. The boundary between support for civil society and indirect co-optation tends to blur, often to the point of vanishing altogether.

The result is a discursive ecosystem in which the European agenda frequently appears as the spontaneous product of a plurality of actors, when in reality it is sustained — and sometimes made possible — by a financial and institutional infrastructure that favours its reproduction. This contributes to reducing the visibility of real political conflict: consensus is not constructed through an explicit confrontation between alternatives, but through the progressive normalisation of a particular normative and strategic horizon.

In greater detail, the text critically examines the evolution of the European Union’s budget and its growing deployment not merely as an economic or cohesion instrument, but as a political and cultural tool aimed at promoting Brussels’s policy agenda. In recent years, European programmes and funds have been progressively oriented towards the diffusion of so-called “European values” — and very often towards the promotion of the EU and the integrationist project as such — through the direct funding of NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, media outlets and educational projects, with the effect of blurring the boundary between support for civil society, institutional communication and outright political propaganda.

The text shows how budgetary instruments such as the CERV programme, Erasmus+, and other funding lines are used to reinforce narratives favourable to European integration, while simultaneously marginalising critical or Eurosceptic positions. The result is that many formally independent organisations end up functioning as transmission belts for the European Commission’s priorities, transforming civil society from a space of mediation between citizens and institutions into a vehicle for legitimising Brussels’s policies. What emerges is a veritable EU-NGO-media-academia propaganda complex: a self-referential ecosystem in which funding, cultural production and advocacy mutually reinforce one another. This is, in certain respects, the hidden face of external constraint: if hard power narrows the space of decisions, soft power tends to narrow the space of imaginable alternatives.

A central element of the book’s argument concerns the democratic risk inherent in such practices: the way in which the use of public funds to selectively support particular political visions distorts the pluralism of public debate and may constitute — especially in countries governed by Eurosceptic forces — a form of “foreign interference” in the internal affairs of member states.

In sum, the text argues that the progressive politicisation of the European budget has transformed instruments formally aimed at promoting cooperation, rights and civic participation into levers of ideological influence and consolidation of the integrationist project, raising crucial questions about democratic legitimacy, transparency and the very role of European institutions in the public sphere.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green