The Vast Funding Machinery of the European Union - SPIEGEL ONLINE

EU money flows from Brussels into thousands of projects and ideas. Why does nobody notice?... some of the worst storytellers happen to be located in Brussels ... majorities in society and the media believe that the European Union belongs in the dustbin of history... eternal Brussels congresses where elitist Eurocrats engage in nothing but myopic navel-gazing...
hardly anyone makes the connection between the wind farm in Suffolk and the European Commission, between ... the hospital and EIB loans... its successes remain invisible, while ... a bright spotlight is shone on every failure...
Spend half an hour on the European Commission's website searching for funding opportunities, and you'll end up feeling thoroughly confused...
We no longer need a top-down but a bottom-up Europe... concentrate less on spreading money around Europe and more on sending people around the continent... Europe is when Germans and British install wind turbines together, when Italians, Dutch and Poles get together and think about dairy cows, ... when that happens, the European narrative is a positive one.