Indeed, when the European Commission launched EYID by asking 27,000 EU citizens what they thought the phrase meant, by far the most common response (36%) was total puzzlement.
[1] However, a forum organised by the Council of Europe in November 2006 suggested the following: Other definitions or usages have been closer to concepts such as inter-religious dialogue[3] and often to active citizenship learning.
Activities such as the promotion of educational and training exchanges[16] enable young people and academics/teachers/trainers to move around the European Union and require them to operate in cultures and living circumstances different from those they know best.
Recent Years have concentrated more on raising the profile of the issue concerned, less on funding projects through dedicated budgets; they have rather sought to make their issue a funding priority in existing programmes (such as the Lifelong Learning programme cited above, whose Call for projects[17] includes this priority at different points: see for example sections 1.1.3 and 4.2.4).
This system avoids the need to dedicate specific budgets to the European year, or enables them to be spent on projects with higher visibility.
When Marija Šerifović appeared to lend her support to the Serbian Radical Party, which favours closer cooperation with Russia rather than the EU, the Commission threatened to remove her from the unpaid ambassadorial post.
[24] The threat has not been carried out, perhaps because the Commission listened to its spokesman and decided that Serbian elections are indeed "a matter for the people of Serbia".