ABSTRACT
Spurred by negative votes on a European Constitution in France and the Netherlands as well as by a widely recognized gap between the European Union (EU) and its citizens, the European Commission decided in 2005 to make communication one of its strategic objectives.1 Lack of enthusiasm for the process of integration in general and the proposed constitution in particular was linked to the claim that EU citizens had been kept at a distance from the process of integration for too long and that the result of this was a lack of socialization into the Community.2
