The Center for International Relations, a Warsaw based think-tank is conducting ‘The Balkans – between History and the European Union’ project – co-financed by the European Commission – which aims to share Poland’s pre-accession experiences, working with media professionals from the Western Balkans on ‘communicating the EU’. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of Poland’s accession we feel that although the memory of the painstaking yet rewarding process is still fresh, enough time has elapsed for the people who were engaged in preparing and reporting EU accession to be able to share their experiences, discussing both the positives and the negatives, the successes and mistakes.

The project focuses on the quality, quantity, and access to information about the EU and the enlargement process. In the pre-accession period we learnt that the media needs to develop and deliver detailed messages suited to particular national, regional, local or sectoral settings. This project is addressed to media professionals: (journalists as well as decision-makers-editors-in-chief, editors of the foreign/European affairs departments)  from the five potential candidate countries.

Two main, specific, objectives of the project are knowledge transfer and capacity building. The first one is to be done in groups of media professionals from five Western Balkan countries and the work will be conducted towards finding and developing strategies and techniques of communicating the European Union to a broad public without putting ratings in jeopardy. The capacity building aspect will focus more closely on sources of information as well as tools and techniques in order to strengthen the professionalism of the participants in informing about the EU in a user-friendly language and form accessible to the general public or specific audiences.

The project is based on four main activities which combined will strongly contribute to the fulfillment of the overall objective - generating an informed debate concerning EU issues among Western Balkan societies. These activities are:

1.Warsaw Workshop for media executives, supplemented by meetings with decision-makers and figures important for the integration processes from Central-East European states.
1)The five local workshops which will consist of several lectures. They will target journalists from the media outlets involved in the project but will be open to other media from a given country.
2)Study visit to Brussels and a summing up conference in the European Parliament for the participants of the project.
3)In parallel to the actions mentioned above, an internet site will be created. It will consist of information about the UE, the project and articles which should approach political integration ideas.

As the Center for International Relations, we believe that broad public support for the EU integration process can be achieved only by providing the citizens of the candidate and potential candidate countries coherent and credible communication.