EU Unveils Internet Site In New Promotion Effort

BRUSSELS - The European Union has launched a multilingual Internet campaign and unveiled other advertising plans to build support among the region's 370 million citizens for the border-free market.

"Everybody has a right to know how the Union affects his or her daily life and I want to make sure that everybody has access to the information, not just a limited well-informed public," European Commission President Jacques Santer told a news conference.

Under the campaign citizens will be able to seek advice, for example, on how to live, work and study in other EU countries by accessing "http://citizens.EU.int"; -- what the EU calls the world's biggest multilingual Web site on the Internet.

The site also contains pages in every European language including Welsh, Basque and Galician, on how to benefit from EU laws on health and safety at work, equal opportunities and consumer protection.

Under the campaign, those unable to surf the Internet will still be able to get information by dialing special telephone numbers in each of the 15 EU countries, a service that ministers, parliamentarians and other guests at a special launch ceremony in Brussels demonstrated.

The start of the campaign -- dubbed Citizens First -- was most low-key in the "Eurosceptical" countries where it might be most needed -- Britain and Denmark.

The EU's single market commissioner Mario Monti explained that the campaign would be conducted differently from country to country to respect local traditions and because the EU wanted to avoid being seen conducting a propaganda campaign.

In Britain, where policy on Europe is the biggest thorn in the side of the conservative government of Prime Minister John Major, the press and citizens harbor the biggest reservations about the Union.

The campaign is also low-key in Denmark, where voters nearly stopped the EU in its tracks in 1991 when in a referendum they narrowly voted against the Maastricht Treaty that laid the foundation for the political and economic and monetary union. The open market where goods, people, services and capital should have been able to move freely from January 1, 1993, has often been criticized for being business-oriented and for ignoring ordinary citizens.

The European Commission has argued that ordinary people often do not make use of the Union because they are unaware of what it can do for them as it has been badly explained.

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