Citizen Perceptions of The European Union: The Impact of the EU W ...

slowing down rather than speeding up. But as the groundwork is completed and the foundations have been laid—in the form of the various institutions, treaties, networks, and so forth—the time has come to address the issue of understanding the reservations many EU citizens have towards the workings of the Union, and to seriously consider the public as the fourth pillar—next to politics, the economy, and cultural factors—on which a successful Union can rest. Even though planning and managing a project as big as the political unification of Europe necessarily requires time and the continual improvement of internal and structural issues, those that are not immediately connected to this project and have remained unconnected for some time now—the citizens of Europe—need to be taken into account.

In order for citizens to get more involved and feel connected, every possible method of interaction should be reconsidered, and the way in which it may contribute should be analysed. Next to the mass media, which in many surveys rate as the most important sources for getting information about the EU,¹ the Internet plays an increasingly important role in people's lives. This development is visible, for example, in the Special EB on Safer Internet (European Commission, May, 2006), which showed how much age, education, and occupation determined the use of the Internet, with students (91%), managers (88%), and those aged 15–24 (71%) leading the list of Internet users. And while the Internet may not yet be as important for getting information about the EU as traditional mass media, where a pre-selected composition of what was currently important was presented to the recipient, the Internet continued to increase in importance as a medium of everyday life and for all sorts of information seeking, especially in the younger age groups (Lin, 2002). Accordingly, while users may need to be more active in selecting their information sources, it is a chance to establish direct contact between institutions and citizens. At this point, however, it is an avenue of communication used primarily by those already in touch with EU institutions, while vast parts of the citizenry, including this younger age group, are unaware even of the fact that the EU operates the Web site www.europa.eu. When seeing these developments combined—young people