How can a real cultural and political integration be effective without a parallel integration of the information system? How can a socio-economic union be even conceivable if it’s not based on a media infrastructure that shares its logics and fields of action?

Let’s think about it: when talking about the EU, we almost always speak about an economic, an administrative or a political union, rarely going beyond the technicalities tied to these bureaucratic perspectives. At most, especially in the last few years, we’ve started talking about a "European soul", a "shared citizenship" which are unlikely to be understood if not connected to the concrete afore-mentioned constraints.

Nonetheless, if we want Europe to get an objective impact, tying these two macro-themes is more and more necessary. Yet to do so, a critical step is missing: the creation of a media system that can actually be said to be Pan-European.

The provocative statement by the director of digital strategies of the Guardian, Wolfgang Blau, makes thus sense: the absence of an information system equally “shared” by all State-Members is definitely and simply absurd, if not insane. More generally, when reasoning on a European dimension, communication itself finds it hard to get out of the pure instrumentality of an individual campaign or of a specific program or project promoting any Directorate-General.

In order to move forward, a change of perspective is needed in an almost physical sense of the term: we must learn to "look at the whole" that, despite political diversities, was a primary feature of the ancient Europe. In short, we must recover that sense of "unity in diversity" that dates back to the ancient Greece and its idea of polis, but probably even more to the idea of piazza, typical of the Roman age, meant as a place where diversities could be combined and shared, without losing one’s own specificities.

The idea of piazza is probably the model that should inspire Pan-European journalism, more than the abused “web” and the intriguing metaphor of the cloud: an open forum of ideas and visions, for a Europe united in information as well.