Brussels 17.09.2025 A bombshell MCC Brussels (@MCC_Brussels) new report reveals that the European Union’s Jean Monnet Programme, ostensibly an academic initiative, is in fact a taxpayer-funded, global propaganda network designed to embed pro-EU narratives, quash dissent, and shape public opinion far beyond the classroom. This program, part of Erasmus+, funnels an estimated €25 million of public money every year into universities worldwide, transforming academic institutions into “vehicles of institutional propaganda”.

Read the latest instalment of my EU funds investigation — this time looking into how the EU embeds propaganda in academia through the Jean Monnet Programme. https://t.co/mw2T27F3cj

— Thomas Fazi (@battleforeurope) September 17, 2025

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Professor Emeritus Frank Furedi, executive director of MCC Brussels, said of the release of the report: “The comprehensive analysis, drawing heavily on the EU’s own stated objectives and program descriptions, directly refutes the narrative that this is merely a benign effort to study the EU, promote academic excellence, or foster European solidarity. Far from promoting neutral scholarship, its activities are explicitly political projects designed to enlist academic institutions in the service of European integration.”

You can read the full report here-

Click to access 20480c8777067660c2f21230e2b3081ec5f46f1e.pdf

Key Findings: AN EXPLICITLY POLITICAL PROJECT – BEYOND ACADEMIC STUDY
While proponents often frame the Jean Monnet Programme as fostering excellence, our report demonstrates that its core purpose, as “openly acknowledged” by the European Commission itself, is not merely to study European integration but to “promote” it. The EU’s own directives require Jean Monnet Centres of Excellence and Designated Institutions to maintain “continuous and frequent alignment” of their teaching and research with EU policy priorities and to promote European identity. This goes far beyond neutral academic inquiry.

ENORMOUS REACH AND FUNDING FOR POLITICAL INFLUENCE
The Programme channels around €25 million per year to universities and research institutes globally and reaches around 500,000 students annually across more than 70 countries.

This is not for open-ended research; it’s an investment explicitly designed to influence academic curricula, align educational content with the EU’s political agenda and promote Brussels’s legitimacy. As former Jean Monnet Chair Joseph H. H. Weiler candidly admitted, “Part of our mission as [a] Jean Monnet Professor is to disseminate the values of European integration. The EU Commission ‘think of us openly as intellectual ambassadors of the Union and its values’”. This directly challenges any claim of impartial academic freedom.

EXPLICITLY PRO-EU AGENDA
Direct quotes from funded projects reveal the ideological mission of supporting EU institutions: Funded projects openly aim to “promote EU integration,” “foster European identity,” “enforce EU values,” and “challenge the rise of euroscepticism and of populist, extreme right parties”. They are also designed to “counter anti-EU disinformation and propaganda” and “reverse de-Europeanisation dynamics”.

TRANSFORMING ACADEMICS INTO ACTIVISTS
Recipients of Jean Monnet funding are not just expected to produce EU-aligned research, but to act as “outreach agents”, organizing public events, engaging with media and NGOs, and disseminating EU-approved narratives to the public. This creates a “self-reinforcing feedback loop” where EU-funded research legitimizes EU policies.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM UNDER THREAT
The funding structure incentivises conformity with EU priorities, discourages critical perspectives, and promotes research with predetermined political outcomes”. This “undermines the Humboldtian principles of academic autonomy” and transforms students into “subjects to be moulded into ‘right-thinking’ citizens”.

NARRATIVE CONTROL
While the EU claims to combat “disinformation,” our report demonstrates that this is often a strategy to curtail dissenting views, narrow the spectrum of public debate and consolidate institutional control over the flow of information. Projects explicitly target “eurosceptic framing of EU activities” and what are labelled as “denialisms and conspiracy theories” related to EU policy positions on issues like climate change and COVID-19. We highlight how this provides academic justification to the EU’s increasingly pervasive online censorship framework, exemplified by the bloc’s adoption, in 2022, of the Digital Services Act (DSA)”, which aims at secretly controlling the online narrative.

Thomas Fazi, author of the report, said:
“The report concludes that the Jean Monnet Programme is explicitly structured, at all levels, as an academic tool aimed at projecting and promoting the EU’s policy preferences. It is a stark example of how the EU’s politicisation of higher education represents not just a distortion of scholarly priorities, but a direct challenge to academic freedom itself. This is not education; it is indoctrination.”

PROFESSORS OF PROPAGANDA
The report shows how the “Jean Monnet Chairs” use their positions to act as explicit mouthpieces for the EU, intervening in public debate to push EU propagands
Professor Joseph H. H. Weiler, Jean Monnet Chair (NYU; former EUI President), explicitly states that his “mission as [a] Jean Monnet Professor is to disseminate the values of European integration… [The Commission] think of us openly as intellectual ambassadors of the Union and its values… Most of us become Jean Monnet professors because… we believe in European integration.”

Alberto Alemanno , Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law (HEC Paris Business School) uses his extensive public platform to wage an incessant campaign in favour of radical EU supranationalism, encouraing politicians to go “beyond the nation state”.

R. Daniel Kelemen, former Jean Monnet Chair in EU Politics at Rutgers University (United States) Kelemen, who has since moved to Georgetown University, has written frequently about the need for the EU to respond more aggressively to the rise of ‘autocratic member state governments’ – in other words, eurosceptic governments in countries like Hungary and (formerly) Poland – while praising ‘the European Union’s status as a regulatory superpower’.On X, he frequently posts against the Orbán government.

Further findings:
Targeting Dissent and “Illiberalism”: Projects actively frame public dissent and political contestation as “obstacles to be overcome”. Examples include initiatives to use law “to put a break on illiberal tendencies in Europe” and to counter “the presence of extreme eurosceptic framing of EU activities by the majority of media outlets”.

Global Geopolitical Tool: The program extends far beyond EU borders, operating in over 70 countries as a “tool of public diplomacy” to promote the EU’s geopolitical interests and narratives. In Ukraine, hundreds of projects explicitly aim at “furthering Ukraine’s integration into the EU and the Euro-Atlantic bloc” and “integrating Ukrainian society into the European axiological framework”.

Recommendation: To safeguard academic integrity, the report urges an immediate end to politically driven funding mechanisms, the restoration of institutional independence, and a reaffirmation of the Humboldtian model as the cornerstone of higher education.

EU professors of propaganda https://t.co/McUkQrcMou

— Anna van Densky (@AnnaVanDensky) September 17, 2025

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This scandalous misuse of public funds demands urgent scrutiny and action. Taxpayers deserve to know their money is supporting genuine academic inquiry, not a stealthy, multi-million-euro propaganda campaign for the EU insitutions.