“Like watching the EU Commission’s Midday Briefing with all the verbs missing”

Generally speaking, the EU’s aesthetics comes in two varieties: 1) soulless technocracy (when it tries to be mature and legitimate, think shiny window panes and lots of grey) 2) postmodern kitsch (when it tries to be young and hip). The WSJ’s blog humorously points to an expensive-looking recent ad which has successfully managed to combined these two tendencies into one mystifying “Euro-pudding” promoting the “Innovation Union”. Best to read the original post and watch the two parts of the ad yourself.

The Commission’s website also has lots of other less obtuse videos highlighting specific technological innovations made across Europe in medicine, renewables and robotics. This is is not a bad thing. The American Right loves to portray the state of the European economy as something akin to the Soviet Union’s sclerotic poverty while politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, if they want to promote a given economic policy, will always cite something the Chinese are supposedly doing as a precedent. In all this you’d forget much of rural China still lives with something like African levels poverty or that Europe is one of the great poles of a largely tripolar world economy, along with North America and East Asia.

As such, Europe is at the forefront in domains like face transplants, mobile telephony (the GSM standard used by 80% of mobiles in the world comes from a French acronym (si, si, pour une fois…), and renewable energies. A little polishing of the European brand so people in Europe and abroad be more conscious of Europe’s economic and technological success is not a bad thing. That said, the Commission’s PR people haven’t found the best way of going about this…