The Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the elder has well illustrated the lack of interest of people for a historic event that takes place under their very eyes. In a painting of 1564, entitled "The Procession to Calvary", he has depicted the Messiah as a small figure sinking down under the cross on his way up the Golgotha. No one in the crowd of Roman soldiers and ordinary people around Him pays any attention to His Martyrdom. They are all looking at a couple of peasants quarrelling with three soldiers in the forefront of the picture. This everyday brawl is the centre of attention of the crowd and not the event that has changed the course of history. We can hardly blame these people who, at the time of the Crucifixion, were going about their everyday affairs and were attracted by a thrilling albeit ordinary happening. As demonstrated by Brueguel, they had not the perception that we now have of the importance of the event that they were witnessing.

Likewise, the majority of contemporary Europeans have no notion that they are witnessing an experience that will most probably change again the history of mankind. This history is marked by wars and bloody fights between ethnic, religious and other groups, fights for power, for land, for ideals (real or supposed) or just for the survival of a nation or a group attacked by other nations or groups. The extraordinary event that takes place under our eyes is the fifty-year old experience of peaceful and voluntary unification of different and formerly conflicting nations. The European experience is unique by virtue of its objective of establishing the basis for an increasingly closer union between formerly hostile nations. It is also unique because of its institutions, which have no equal in other international organisations. Lastly, it is unique on account of its achievements: never in human history have different nations cooperated so closely with one another, implemented so many common policies or, in such a short space of time, harmonised ways of life and economic situations which differed so greatly at the outset.

Yet this exceptional event is hardly exciting. It is hidden behind tedious negotiations by complicated institutions ending in legal texts written in a language incomprehensible to ordinary citizens. Contemporary Europeans are not to blame - any more than the spectators in Brueguel's painting - for going about their business, for being worried about the myriad problems of their everyday lives and for showing more interest in the petty events taking place in their vicinity rather than in the big event that may be a milestone for mankind. The problem is that citizens take for granted the benefits that they enjoy and the many rights that they have acquired thanks to European integration, particularly the right to a peaceful, liberal and legally secured existence. For most Europeans, the peaceful coexistence and emulation of different European nations is self-evident and not to be attributed to unfamiliar Treaties, policies or common legislation [see section 9.2].

Uninterested citizens tend to forget the tariffs and other barriers hindering trade and therefore limiting their choice of goods and services from other European countries, in the pre-integration years. They do not recall the erstwhile controls at borders, the restrictions on movement, establishment and work in neighbouring countries, the limited amounts at their disposal when travelling abroad, the general restrictions on capital movements, the snags of dealing in several currencies, etc. Young Europeans tend even to disregard the bloody wars [World war I and World war II] fought by their forefathers with nations that they themselves now consider friendly and allied with their own nation.

Many explanations have been advanced for the negative vote of the French and Dutch citizens at the referendums of 29 May and 1 June 2005 on the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty [see section 2.5]: national rather than European concerns, social protection versus free competition, fear of actual and future enlargements of the Union, etc. [see section 1.5]. They all have their grain of truth; but to our mind, the main cause of the negative stance of two nations that were among the original builders of the European edifice is the incomprehension of large segments of the populations of the objectives and the achievements of European integration to date.

Curiously enough it is not the lack but the abundance of information that clouds the European horizon. Information about the work of European institutions is abundant and freely available to citizens for the asking, particularly in electronic form [see section 10.1.1]. The problem is that the great majority of citizens do not and never will go asking for information about an experiment that they consider as extremely complex and distant from their everyday problems and interests. On their part, many European mass media report on a daily basis new European policies, laws, programmes and internal and external disputes. Yet, these media accounts are for most citizens like the leaves of a tree, which hide the forest that is stretching out behind. Leaves, like the daily news are ephemeral and unexciting, not worthy of particular attention. On the other hand, the dense forest of European institutions, policies and laws, which produces the political and economic oxygen necessary for the blossoming of small and medium European nations, is obscure and terrifying, if there is no roadmap showing the way through it.

Access to European Union and hence Europedia, which is based on it, aim to provide a roadmap of the European Union, a pathway through the maze of the European construction. The emphasis of the book and of the Europedia portal is placed on the common policies developed by the EC/EU. Indeed, an approach to multinational integration is advanced, based on the setting up and development of common policies by the participating states [see section 1.1.2]. This approach is based on the empirical evidence of the European Union, but may also be applied mutatis mutandis to other multinational integration schemes elsewhere in the world. In fact, European integration cannot be properly approached with the particular methods and tools of political science, international relations, economics or law [see section 1.1.1]. Access to European Union and Europedia follow, therefore, an interdisciplinary, pragmatic approach, which is somewhat distinct from the precise precepts of the disciplines that compose it. This approach, however, is neither dogmatic nor purely theoretical. The empirical or pragmatic approach endeavours to present objectively what European policies and legislative acts are meant to achieve, with a minimum of value judgments as to their performance to date, as they are constantly modified and adjusted to ever-changing technical, economic and political conditions.

To help the reader find easily the details of any policy or measure he or she is interested in and/or deduce in an unprejudiced way whether a certain policy is good or bad or whether it has achieved the objectives assigned to it, facts are presented in a precise manner and legislative acts can be downloaded with a click on their reference number. In addition to their documentary purpose, the links to the EUR-Lex database of the European Commission also help researchers download an act and its most recent amendment or often a version consolidating the original act and its many subsequent amendments.

While the book Access to European Union offers an overall picture of the policies of the EU and an easier reading for pedagogic purposes, Europedia is split in a lot of titles and subtitles, which makes its continuous reading less convenient, but offers other advantages, such as:

·         via its detailed contents to easily find and understand a specific policy or activity of the Union one is interested in;

·         by typing in its search box the number or name of a legislative act or program of the Union to find it highlighted in the policy framework in which it is included with a brief summary of its objectives;

·         the possibility, with a click on  the hyperlink, to download the authentic text of an act or document;

·         and the possibility, by typing an acronym, to find the full name and to immediately enter the web page of an organ or organism of the EU or of another international organism that is interacting with it on a particular subject.