Understanding EU beim EFA26
Können die Menschen, für die Europa Gesetze macht, diese Gesetze tatsächlich lesen? Bei einem Morning Briefing im Rahmen des EFA26 brachte das Erasmus+-Projekt Understanding EU diese Frage nach Alpbach.
Dieser Text ist nur auf englischer Sprache verfügbar.
It is an unglamorous question. It is also the one on which a great deal of Europe's democratic credibility rests. A regulation that shapes a working day, a shopping basket or a medical record is not a European achievement if the people living under it cannot follow what it says.
What Understanding EU Does
Understanding EU – new ways to better understand EU legislation and principles to raise engagement in EU's democratic life is a two-year Erasmus+ project led by BürgerInnen Forum Europa, bringing together partners from five EU member states.
Its three aims are plainly stated:
- to improve citizens' knowledge of how the EU works, so that they can better understand its legal framework
- to provide better access to material on basic EU principles and EU legislation in easy language
- and to empower citizens across Europe to see how EU legislation and EU core values connect to their daily lives, and so to raise the motivation to take part in the Union's democratic life.
The method runs the other way round from most EU communication. Instead of starting with the institutions and working down, the project started by asking. Citizens' dialogues and an online survey established what people actually want to know, what they find impenetrable, and what they would change about the language of official documents. In Austria alone, three such dialogues took place: in Salzburg, in Vienna and online, with further events in the other participating countries. The early finding was blunt and consistent across Europe: the complexity is real, and citizens experience it as such.
Why This Belongs in Alpbach
Founded in 1945 the EFA has stood for a simple but demanding idea: Europe becomes stronger when it organises the ability to engage in dialogue – across borders, generations, and sectors. Ever since, the European Forum Alpbach has been a place where debate turns into orientation.
That is the ground the two initiatives share. Understanding EU organises the same conversation at kitchen-table level, and brings what it hears back to the people who write the rules.
It also meets the annual theme where the theme is most easily overlooked. 'How Europe Wins' is usually read as a question about capacity, competitiveness and security. But for Europe, winning also has a democratic precondition: democratic legitimacy must translate into democratic performance. In an age of polarisation, disinformation, and external pressure, Europe wins when citizens feel represented, heard, and empowered – and when participation strengthens trust in European solutions. Law nobody can read does not perform.
And it speaks to what Alpbach is for. A defining purpose of Alpbach is the connection between the highest level and the next generation. In 2025, 4,700 participants from over 100 nations – including 500 young scholarship holders under the age of 30 – attended the EFA. The generation that will live longest under Europe's legal framework has the strongest claim on being able to understand it.
The Knowledge Bits
The most tangible result of that listening exercise is a set of Knowledge Bits: short content units in easy language that explain core EU principles and aspects of the EU legal framework.
Each Bit takes one principle and does two things with it. It says what the principle means, without the clause structure of a legal text. Then it gives an everyday example: where this principle turns up in an ordinary life, in a purchase, a journey, a job, a complaint. The Bits sit on the project's platform alongside an interactive lexicon and a video crash course, and they are available in the languages of the participating countries as well as in English.
The ambition behind them is larger than a glossary. The project set out to establish a standard for how the functionality of the EU is explained to citizens, and to think through, together with citizens and legal experts, how the language of official EU communication and documents could be made simpler and more inclusive.
From Findings to Recommendations
Two documents carry the project beyond its own platform.
The Key Findings Report sets out what the citizens' dialogues and the survey produced: the needs and wishes citizens expressed towards more inclusive EU legislation, in their own terms rather than in the categories of an institution.
The Policy Recommendation Paper turns those findings into concrete proposals for the people who draft, translate and communicate European law.
What Alpbach Takes From It
Europe does not come about through slogans. It comes about through encounter — and encounter requires a shared language.
A project that spent two years asking people what they do not understand, and then wrote the answers down in words they can use, is doing the unspectacular work on which the spectacular work depends. Alpbach is a good place to say so out loud.