Not a messaging problem. Why institutional narratives keep failing.

Europe's narrative failure is a choice, not a constraint

We are told, once again, that Europe “has a communications problem.” Too few citizens “understand what the EU does.” The solution, predictably, is another initiative, another task force, another campaign to “connect” Europe to its people. The tone is one of managerial optimism, vaguely self-pitying, as if proximity to citizens were an issue of bandwidth, as if the public's incomprehension were a natural disaster , as if better messaging alone could bridge the distance between institutions and a society.

The European Union doesn’t have a messaging problem. It has a meaning problem - one that cannot be manufactured in a cabinet, tried in a focus group and pushed down the line to be repeated by a thousand “stakeholders”. It isn’t manufactured in comms units or polished into slogans; it is lived, contested, and felt. It emerges when people recognise themselves in a story, trust the teller, and can locate who is acting, who is responsible, and what is at stake. Institutions keep treating narrative as packaging, never as substance - as if clarity of message could substitute for coherence of narrative and for the trust in the narrator. This essay is written for people who work in and around EU institutions, and for anyone trying to understand why official stories so often fail to land. Here, “Europe”, ”the EU”, and “the Commission” are related but not identical: the argument moves between them because the failure does too.

A quick point of order. When we say “messaging”, we mean the outward packaging of information: campaigns, slogans, talking points, press lines. When we say “narrative”, we mean something deeper: the underlying collection of stories that convey a worldview, an understanding of how the world works, of who acts, who benefits, who pays, and what all of this is for. Messaging sits on top of narrative. You can be bad at both, but when the story underneath is incoherent or the source is not trusted, no amount of polish on the surface will hold. The point is not that EU policy is always weak or wrong. The point is that even strong policies can be undermined when the way they are explained does not make that purpose, trade-offs, and benefits legible to the people they are meant to serve.

And so we find each new communication cycle beginning with a familiar confession – “we must do better at telling our story“ - and ending in the same place: frameworks, tone-of-voice toolkits, data-driven segmentation. What could have become a reckoning with reality, an opportunity to listen and learn, becomes another exercise in managing perception.

The illusion of communication

Every few years the EU attempts a new act of narrative self-renewal: citizens’ dialogues that aren't dialogues, listening exercises in which nobody with power hears anything they don't already believe, “conferences on the future“ whose main purpose is to certify that the present course is correct and can’t be meaningfully changed.

This is not communication; it is broadcast theatre. Logic remains strictly one-way: the centre speaks, the periphery listens, and if it doesn't, the centre concludes that the signal must be boosted, simplified, or rebranded. Anyone who has sat through a “citizens' dialogue” knows the choreography: a stage, a row of officials, roving microphones, carefully screened questions, a closing panel that confirms how much has been “heard”. The format mimics participation while protecting the script – people leave with tote bags and brochures, and with a sense that nothing will change.

Institutional communication fails when it treats citizens as passive receivers rather than as active and highly social bearers of identities whose existing stories must be understood before any new story can become credible. People are constantly assessing not just what they are being told, but who is telling it and if the teller has their best interests at heart. Real dialogue begins with story-listening: hearing not just what people say, but the cultural frames and lived stories that shape how they hear. A narrative that ignores that context may be clear on paper and still fail in practice.

And while we know that the Commission is not a single voice with a single mandate - accountable first to the co-legislators and to the political realities of Member States; other parts of the system listen differently and for different reasons. Some of the tension in EU communication comes from this institutional design: a technocratic body asked to speak politically, and a political system that often wants the benefits of narrative without fully agreeing to the terms of engagement.

When people hear “messaging,” they think of direction - one actor transmitting, another receiving. But narrative doesn’t just transmit; it translates and it transports. It builds coherence by connecting inner sense and outer world - Something only genuine and careful story-listening could lead to.

What narrative really is, and why the EU gets it wrong

Narrative isn’t decoration. It’s how we orient ourselves in reality. It allows societies to metabolize change, loss, hope, fear - to understand what happens to and by us. It tells people who they are, what matters, and how power moves through the world.

The EU builds policy architectures but rarely builds narrative worlds. And Brussels persistently mistakes narrative for slogan, reducing experience to procedure – reports turn to success metrics, strategy becomes “Green Deal”, “Fit for 55”, “Farm to Fork”. The idea is to simplify, but what is lost is the why. Strip away the press releases and almost nobody in Europe can explain what these signifiers actually mean for their daily life. This is the basic problem: when the underlying story is incoherent or unbelievable, no amount of messaging polish can hold it together.

This is not because the Union has no real stories to tell. Free movement, Erasmus, the end of roaming charges, and even GDPR, all changed people’s lives in ways that are tangible and worth narrating. The tragedy is that even where Europe has delivered something real, it has often failed to turn that delivery into a story people can recognise and repeat.

Erasmus is a rare exception within the EU repertoire, an perhaps the clearest proof that the EU can tell a story people actually want to inhabit. It works not because of its slogan, but because it is communicated through thousands of concrete, human stories – young people who left home, were changed by encounter, and returned with a tangible sense of European possibility. It turns a policy into something lived, remembered, and passed on.

The Climate Pact is another example worth testing here – it tries to translate a policy agenda into a more participatory story by inviting citizens to see themselves as actors rather than simply recipients. If it succeeds, it does so by making agency legible rather than merely announcing it.

But these examples are bubbles in a vacuum, and into this void step actors who do understand the power of narrative. The far-right and populists have mastered the art of compressing complex realities into emotionally loaded, cognitively sticky stories. They manufacture threat, including that of identity loss, and then offer belonging, action, and agency. “Take back control.” “Our people first”, “Stop the boats.” “Defend our borders.”. These phrases install a world in three words: there is a “we”, there is a threat, there is a clear direction of action.

These slogans work because they condense a potent and resonant narrative in a few words. They tell people who “we” are, what endangers us and what must be done next. It's psychologically efficient, reducing anxiety and offering a ready‑made course of action. Emotionally legible, agent‑centred stories almost always outperform procedural exposition as evidenced by narrative persuasion research and real-world examples.

A slogan that installs a usable world will travel faster than a technically correct sentence that offers no role, no stakes and no direction. The EU cannot and should not replicate this, it governs a complexity that slogans cannot honestly compress. But understanding why phrases work is not the same as endorsing them and refusing to learn from them is not principle; it's complacency.

The EU, by contrast, sloganifies without narrative. “United in diversity”, “Stronger Together”, “Europe Delivers” - these are not stories but mood boards, asserting harmony where lived experience is conflict and trade-off. Pasting comforting adjectives over unresolved tensions, and in doing so they hand the narrative battlefield to those willing to tell harsher, more emotionally honest lies.

None of this is to pretend that a union of twenty‑seven states can be narrated as simply as a national campaign. There are real constraints: legal, political, linguistic. The point is not that Brussels should mimic right-wing populists, but that it cannot afford to ignore why those stories work – or to expect messaging alone to smooth over contradictions the institutions themselves still leave unresolved.

Populists misuse narrative by flooding it with emotion and amputating truth. The EU misuses narrative by amputating emotion and pretending that administrative truth by itself can move anyone. Between these two abuses, citizens are left to choose between a story that feels true and a story that claims to be true.

Baby spider-plants: how the failure multiplies

Institutional narratives don't just fail at the centre, they propagate. Around the EU grow thousands of baby spider-plants: associations, lobby groups, NGOs, consultancies, all feeding from the same light and recycling the same air.

Funded by or structurally dependent on EU processes, these organisations learn quickly which language is rewarded. They internalise the Brussels dialect: “stakeholders”, “ecosystems”, “synergies”, “and “empowerment” of people who somehow never actually gain any power.

Open almost any Brussels NGO website and the pattern repeats. Stock photos of earnest, diverse Europeans; headings about “empowering communities” and “building resilient ecosystems”; projects described in the language of outputs and indicators. You can read pages of text and still have no idea what, concretely, will change for any recognisable human being. The tone signals professionalism and proximity to institutions, not proximity to the people in whose name the work is supposedly done.

Organisations embedded in the same funding and legitimacy ecosystem tend to converge, not only in strategy but in language, perception and what they experience as thinkable. Some of this is through reward structures, some through shared professional training, some is simply copying peers under uncertainty. Linguistic conformity becomes a way of securing access to resources and influence and legitimacy.

By adopting the centre's institutional language, these civil society actors often end up speaking past their supposed constituencies. They speak about people in the third person – “vulnerable groups” “beneficiaries”, “youth”, “citizens”, but rarely with them in a language these people would recognise as their own.

None of this is only the fault of organisations themselves. The Brussels dialect is not freely chosen – it is the price of admission and once you pay it, it is hard to remember how to speak any other way. When your funding depends on the Commission, when your legitimacy is certified by the same ecosystem you are supposed to hold to account, linguistic conformity is not cowardice, it is survival.

The result is a self-referential chorus – Brussels institutions reassuring Brussels-funded intermediaries that Brussels is listening. Meanwhile the public hears a faint hum in the distance, filed mentally under “they”.

The voice that isn’t there, and the faces that can't carry it

It would be comforting to think that Europe's bureaucratic voice is simply an overcorrection towards neutrality and inclusion. The reality is less flattering, the vacuum of voice is not just a structural feature, it is also a leadership failure. Institutions need narrators people can trust, but Europe’s leaders rarely speak in a way that sounds like they share the risks and consequences of their decisions.

This is the logic of the managed presidency. Communication is tightly centralised, heavily scripted, filtered through a small inner circle. Critical questions are avoided, spontaneous interaction minimised, major announcements often made via controlled platforms or carefully staged appearances. Every Commission in recent memory has drifted further in this direction, the current one has simply perfected it.

This is not just an impression. Le Monde's March 2025 portrait of the Commission presidency described a communication culture defined by isolation and control, the Parliament Magazine reported the Commission’s rebuttal of criticism directed at exactly this style; and even the Commission's own spokespeople now admit that “spokesman culture” has eroded trust in the midday briefing. Brussels insiders know the pattern: fewer open press encounters, more scripted video drops, questions deferred to later or handled in writing.

The intent is to protect the institution – and the leader – from missteps. The effect is to drain every appearance of emotional reality. Leaders become unreliable narrators, citizens tune out, not because they reject Europe, but because they expect nothing real to leak through the autocue.

This is where narrative theory meets institutional reality. People assess not just what is said, but who says it and why. A story without a credible teller – one who seems to share the stakes – cannot land, no matter how well it is packaged.

Narrative failure as system symptom

Narrative incoherence is not an aesthetic issue; it is a diagnostic. When a system ceases to produce convincing stories about itself it is usually because the way power is actually being exercised can no longer be defended in public without embarrassment. What follows is a pattern; promises of agency paired with structures of control; claims of transparency undercut by opacity; campaigns against disinformation that ignore institutional contributions to public distrust.

And when people cannot find themselves in the official story, they do not simply “misunderstand Europe”. They look for other storytellers. Some of those storytellers are benign, some are destructive, but all of them are competing to offer the clarity and agency institutions refuse to risk.

Consider two examples that belong in any honest conversation in Brussels. First the Conference on the Future of Europe. Framed as a citizen-led exercise in reimagining the Union, it generated recommendations that were selectively embraced, quietly shelved, or spun as confirmation of existing agendas. Its narrative promise: “you will shape Europe's future” was structurally incompatible with its design – a controlled consultation framed as empowerment. Second, transparency scandals like Von der Leyen’s auto‑deleting Signal messages with Macron (Mercosur) and refusal to release Pfizer texts – ruled unlawful by the EU General Court – exposed the gap between official procedure and public intuition, as the Commission stressed legal compliance while dodging the obvious questions, showing how opacity in doing produces incoherence in telling.

These are not isolated “comms mishaps”. They reveal a recurring pattern: actions and structures that systematically undermine the stories being told about them.

In each case, communication did not fail because the talking points were poorly crafted. It failed because the underlying narrative was incoherent, or plainly unbelievable, given how power was actually being exercised.

Beyond messaging, toward narrative realism

Communicators in Brussels like to say that “we need to meet people where they are”. It seems humble, but in practice it usually means rephrasing the same self-justifying story in friendlier language. What is almost never considered is the possibility that the story itself is the problem – that it describes a political universe in which most people have no agency, no clear place, and no reason to care.

What we call “narrative realism” here – the capacity to tell a story that can survive contact with reality - is not pessimism, and it is not a branding style of “tough truths”. It treats citizens as participants in a shared world, not as target audiences to be managed into confidence. People are more likely to grant legitimacy when they can see how decisions were made, where responsibility lies and whether their perspective could, in principle, matter. Narrative realism permits contradiction because political life is contradictory, permits revision because learning is not reputational collapse and names losses because sacrifice that cannot be spoken cannot be made legitimate.

Narrative realism would mean accepting that Europe's story cannot be a permanent victory march. It would mean leaders who can say, in plain language, “We got this wrong”, “We changed our mind”, without drowning the admission in euphemism. It would mean civil society that stops parroting institutional platitudes and learns to speak again in concrete human stakes, even at the cost of biting the hand that funds it.

Europe does not need another slogan. It needs leaders willing to say something true at the cost of something comfortable. The current narrative failure is not an unfortunate side effect of complexity. It is the cumulative result of choices: to centralise control, to confuse visibility with voice, and to treat citizens as strategic targets rather than active participants in the creation of a shared story of us.

Until then, every new “communication strategy” will be one more layer of language wrapped around a silence that grows louder with each passing crisis.

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Notes and further reading

Our definition of a narrative and distinction between messaging and narrative, as well as the role of a narrative in persuasion, draws on academic work across psychology, sociology, political communication, and cognitive linguistics, as well as the more practice-based and popular literature on narratives and public persuasion.

The contemporary origins of the study of narratives in relation to the public sphere are marked by the works of scholars such as Walter Fisher and Jerome Bruner, who offer initial definitions and bring to light the power of narratives in shaping belief and action.

Fisher, in his Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (1987), reconceives humankind as homo narrans and argues that all forms of human communication are best understood as stories: symbolic interpretations of the world shaped by history, culture, and character. He introduces the concept of narrative rationality and argues that human communication is tested against the principles of narrative coherence (does the story hold together?) and narrative fidelity (does it resonate with what people already know to be true?). He also argued that value-laden "good reasons" are how people actually decide what to believe and how to act, and narrative logic is a capacity all humans naturally employ.

Bruner, in his "The Narrative Construction of Reality" (1991), argues that narratives are culturally transmitted and are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed not by empirical verification but by whether it feels self-evident (narrative necessity) and socially well known (convention). These mechanisms help with restricted interpretation of a narrative, except when ‘the hearer is made suspicious of the ‘facts’ of the story or the ulterior motives of the narrator’. Relevant for our essay is also what he calls intentional state entailment: narratives are about people acting in a setting, and what happens must be connected to the beliefs, desires, and intentions of characters with the capacity to act.

More recent works of scholars such as Mark K. McBeth, Melanie C. Green & Timothy C. Brock offer frameworks for empirical research and evidence of the role of narratives for public persuasion and policy change.

Michael D. Jones & Mark K. McBeth, in their "A Narrative Policy Framework: Clear Enough to Be Wrong?" (2010), define policy narratives as requiring four components: a setting, a plot, characters, and a moral where a solution is implied. They also identify narrative congruence and narrator trust as core mechanisms of narrative persuasion. Therefore, communication that has no actors, resolution, is incongruent and comes from a source that is not trusted, fails structurally, not just stylistically.

Melanie C. Green & Timothy C. Brock focus on one of the key mechanisms of narrative persuasion: narrative transportation. In their "The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives" (2000), they define transportation as absorption into a narrative world when the transported reader ‘gets lost’ in a story and returns persuaded by it - less likely to counterargue its conclusions. Narratives are therefore more persuasive than analytical arguments as they are more likely to transport readers, as evidenced by numerous other studies.

The discussion of open vigilance, meaning the continuous, often unconscious, monitoring of who is speaking, on whose behalf, and to what end, draws on Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday (2020). Mercier’s central point is that people are not credulous and passive recipients of information: they are highly sensitive to the source and motivation behind any claim. Therefore, trust in the teller is prior to uptake of the message.

The analysis of slogans and frames draws on the body of work of George Lakoff across cognitive linguistics and political communication, which argues that language doesn't just describe reality but actively shapes what feels obvious, natural or possible. Lakoff argues that language carries moral frames within it and highlights, in particular, the power of metaphors in relation to ideology and partisan affiliation in the US. See in particular Don't Think of an Elephant (2004) and The Little Blue Book (2012).

The "baby spider-plants" argument on how organisations in the same funding and legitimacy environment converge in language and imagination draws on Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited" (1983). Their account of institutional isomorphism explains why this convergence happens not through deliberate choice but through the accumulated pressure of belonging to the same professional world: organisations come to look, sound, and think alike because doing so signals legitimacy and eligibility.

Finally, Will Storr’s works are an accessible on-ramp for readers who want to start somewhere less academic. The Science of Storytelling (2019) and A Story is a Deal (2026) give a great overview of what stories do and why they stick.