About the campaign "Speak up Europe"

The campaign Speak up Europe was launched in September 2006 in order to facilitate the debate on the European Union (EU). It is grounded in the framework of the Plan D launched by the European Commission and seeks to investigate the opinions and concerns of EU citizens on a wide range of topics related to EU policies.

Activities, tools and methodology

The campaign is presented virtually and face-to-face, combining the thought-provoking animation ‘What has Europe ever done for us?' with a series of around 300 local / national / European events in 25 EU countries. These are supported by 25 localised web portals in 20 languages, containing on-line forums and multimedia content. The aim is to offer a complete debating experience to a large number of EU citizens.

The campaign adopts several qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Through on-line polls, questionnaires, pre- and post-debate voting and on-line chat-rooms; it gathers a large set of comments, concerns, recommendations and opinions.

Feedback to EU decision-makers

Throughout the campaign, feedback from the debates will be collected and the concerns and opinions of the citizens will be directed towards the EU decision-makers. Two comprehensive qualitative reports will be presented in May and December 2007.

Visit www.speakupeurope.eu to learn more about the campaign.

About the animation “What has Europe ever done for us?”

To show the benefits of the EU is no easy task. We rarely see the immediate results of actions taken at the EU level, and most of them are presented from a national perspective. This has meant that the EU has sometimes in the past been blamed for the outcomes of certain actions, but almost never praised for others.
The idea behind the animation “What has Europe ever done for us?” is to tackle this lack of visibility concerning the results of EU action. It is based on the excerpt from the Monthy Python “Life of Brian” movie made in 1979 where the Roman influence on the citizens is presented in a positive light. As the original sketch, the “What has Europe ever done for us?” also uses humour in order to present to the public its goals. The main achievements of the EU are thus presented as a good teaser for the debates.

If you want to see the excerpt from the original Monthy Python film, click here (YouTube).