EU Open Day 2017

At EU Open Day on 6 May 2017, the visitors to the EUISS stand had an opportunity to participate in a game designed to check the public’s attitude towards the EU’s foreign policy spending. Each player was given €100 – the approximate amount that each European citizen spends on ‘Global Europe’ over an eight-year period – and a chance to directly decide on the distribution of EU spending towards four main policy areas: development and humanitarian aid, climate change, defence and security, public diplomacy or other issues. 

Receiving 28% of the ‘investments’ and selected as the top priority by one third of the participants, development and humanitarian aid was the clear winner. Climate change and defence and security were nearly tied, with 26% and 25% of the ‘earnings’ respectively and with each selected as the top priority by a little more than one quarter of the total participants. Although public diplomacy was most often chosen as a much lower priority, it still received 13% of our imitated ‘Global Europe’ budget.

To learn more about how the EU ‘Global Europe’ budget is spent in the current budgetary period, see the Policies and Institutions section of the EUISS Yearbook of European Security 2016.