“The European Union is facing a geopolitical crisis that is difficult to reverse. In response, it has developed a wide-ranging propaganda apparatus to promote narratives favourable to its institutions and policies. This system operates through funding directed towards NGOs, newspapers, news agencies, and think tanks that produce narratives and analyses broadly aligned with the EU’s policy framework”.
This is the view of Thomas Fazi, an Italian journalist, writer and political commentator. He is the author of several books that critically examine the economic and political structure of the European Union. His latest essay, recently published in Italy, is titled The European Propaganda Machine. The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities, in which he analyses the system of funding and relationships through which EU institutions support NGOs, media, and universities in order to build consensus around their policies.
“The goal is to influence public opinion in member states, particularly in those where elected governments are more critical of the EU,” he says in an interview with Brussels Signal.
Fazi has been working on this topic for many years. Born in 1981 and culturally shaped within radical left-wing circles, he shifted his perspective following the 2008 economic and financial crisis, leading him to describe the EU as an anti-democratic, elitist, and oligarchic project due to the geopolitical context in which it was conceived and developed—not as a positive initiative later derailed, but as fundamentally flawed from its inception.
“From its very beginnings in the 1950s, the European integration process was shaped by U.S. strategic interests aimed at building a unified Western bloc in an anti-Soviet context. Continental policy centralisation served this objective. For this reason, he argues, the first European federalist committees were funded by the CIA.”
According to Fazi, the progressive abandonment of national sovereignty in favour of shifting decision-making to the supranational level has weakened democratic accountability. He points to the EU’s institutional structure, from the central role of the unelected European Commission to the limited powers of the European Parliament, as evidence of what he sees as a system designed to constrain direct democratic influence.
In his view, democracy still depends on national communities that can express themselves within the framework of the sovereign nation-state, within which a common national interest can be developed. The conditions for a truly democratic supranational system in Europe are not yet in place. “First of all,” he says, “there are too often no common interests: the Union has expanded to include states with deeply divergent geopolitical interests—from Italy, historically inclined toward pragmatic relations with Russia, to the Baltic states, which for historical reasons strongly oppose Russia.”
Fazi argues that this problem is not reversible and that the European project cannot be reformed due to its embeddedness in the Atlantic geopolitical sphere and what he considers a mediocre European ruling class.
“We saw this with the election of Trump. When the United States attempts a different diplomatic posture—for example by trying to end the war with Russia, which severely harms Europe—European leaders are said to respond by accusing him of undermining European interests, rather than reassessing their own strategic direction.” For this reason, he does not see the possibility of correcting course and considers the European project to be intrinsically in crisis.
It is here that, according to Fazi, propaganda becomes a response to this crisis, a process he examines in detail in his latest book. He describes an ideological and cultural operation aimed at promoting a pro-European narrative which, rather than acknowledging certain failures, rules out any alternative political future at the continental level and reinforces the idea that a return to nation-states is no longer possible. “It is a broad and sophisticated operation that has been ongoing for a long time.”
In his book, he focuses on the instruments and financial flows through which the EU channels resources toward this agenda, reconstructing a vast system of programmes, funding schemes, and projects through which “hundreds of millions of euros are allocated annually” to various actors within so-called civil society—universities, newspapers, think tanks, news agencies, and NGOs—which contribute to reinforcing the legitimacy of European policies. “These are public programmes that can be traced online.”
This process dates back to the early 2000s and has since escalated. It initially involved funding NGOs to promote the importance of European integration, but over the past decade it has significantly expanded to include media and academia, as a response to the EU’s growing legitimacy crisis and the rise of eurosceptic political parties across the continent. At the heart of this operation is a series of programmes centred on “European values,” including Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV), a 2021–2027 EU funding programme managed by the European Commission, which has become a key instrument for financing NGOs.
In his book, Fazi lists a number of media outlets that have received such funding in cases where it was not always clearly disclosed that the content was financed by the EU.
Other projects use more neutral language, formally aimed at promoting media pluralism. However, according to Fazi’s research, the vast majority of funds intended to promote pluralism end up in countries whose governments are critical of the EU. Countries such as Poland and Hungary are often cited as major recipients of NGO funding, where millions of euros support NGOs, media organisations, and other actors that are strongly critical of national governments.
“Since the European Commission is not directly elected by national electorates, this amounts to an attempt to use foreign funding to pressure or weaken democratically elected governments.”
This, Fazi argues, resembles in some respects what USAID has done for decades, where formally independent organisations often pursue political agendas aligned with the interests of their funders. From this perspective, the issue is not simply the promotion of European integration, but the use of public funds to influence domestic political processes and public debate within member states. “From this perspective, the objective is not neutrality but influence over public opinion, particularly in countries with strong eurosceptic political forces”.
