and rebirth, and the European elite’s promise of fulfilling these paradise dreams.
Though the 2007 Berlin declaration officially stated that the dream of earlier generations (a peaceful, prosperous, and unified Europe) had become a reality, today, notwithstanding official celebrations of (alleged) triumphs, the European political elite are seen by many as the “mother of our problems” rather than actors performing the functions of the loving and nurturing mater familias. The European Union’s failure to fire people’s dreams is a self-evident proposition. The collective imaginary is tied to nationalisms and local roots; the European imaginary is weak to reawaken passions for a different, supranational project. Yet EU institutions have not given up the hope of challenging the grip that nationalism continues to hold on the modern imagination. They still aim to take possession of Europeans’ fantasies, invent a European culture, promote a new sense of Europeanness that would transcend parochial and nationalistic loyalties, and guarantee a higher level of consciousness based on (unconditional) loyalty to federal Europe. Several questions arise spontaneously: Is it still possible to resurrect the paradise myth? How to appeal to European citizens’ emotions? How to make people believe in and feel thrilled about their European family and about the construction of their new European house? How to turn the EU into an intimate space offering a home-feeling? How to transform the nightmare of “a corpse whose hair and nails, wealth, and cumulative knowledge are still growing, but the rest is dead” (Heller 1988: 154) into the paradise dream of a magic land of peace, prosperity, and pleasure?
As George Soros states, “we need to do whatever we can to … preserve the European Union as the fantastic object that it used to be,” because the future of Europe depends on the revitalization of the dream (2012). For Heller, a true metamorphosis requires a “cultural backing, a brand-new cultural mythology” (1988: 148).
One of the results of Jose Manuel Barroso’s two-term presidency of the European Commission has been the turning of the “United States of Europe (USE),” “democratic federation of states,” “European family,” “house of the European family,” and “irreversible euro” into “symbolic taboos.” From Ian Manners’s perspective, “symbolic taboos” include those phrases and sayings that are instantly recognizable as the central discourse around which EU politics and policies revolve; they provide a series of inviolable and sacrosanct understandings about what the EU is and what it does (2006). The USE, already a heartfelt desire of many intellectuals and policy-makers in the twentieth century and which was a vision that had been triumphant at the level of political imagination but had always failed to become institutionalized, has reemerged as a powerful state of expectation. The United States of Europe is portrayed as a political utopia with strong mythical connotations. Its advocates are driven by the (omnipotent) fantasy of constructing an idyllic community and by the desire to return to the (fantasized) golden age. Their plans are disguised cosmogonic projects: Eurofederalists strive to repeat the moment of creation by transforming Chaos into Cosmos and also to be recognized as founding fathers of a new European democracy. The word crisis comes from a Latin word cerno that means “to separate.” Following the 2008 crisis (that caused the fragmentation of the European family into several separate pieces), the European Commission set out to create a “new faith” in order to help renew the principles of political life, form a European identity and (re)create Europe’s fantastic family. The supranational elite’s utopia turned into the official soteriology—a federation of nation-states came to be represented as the only salvation, the only way for Europeans to transcend the chaos provoked by the crisis and reconquer the lost idyll. If Europe is to avoid collapse and triumph over those forces that seek to bring back the past, says the mantra of the new political religion, it has no choice but to continue on the path of ever-closer union. The United States of Europe has become the sacred dogma that is to guide Europe’s new visionary leaders in their heroic trials toward redemption and assist citizens in leaving behind today’s overwhelming conditions. Turning the dream into reality has become a holy mission and a moral duty. The supranational elite have constructed a new symbolic world (made of myths, symbols, and rituals), giving the idea of the European community an awe-inspiring aura. European citizens are expected to cherish new dogmas: all need to participate in the single currency’s sanctification as the holy icon of the reborn European family, and all need to internalize the myth of a new, idyllic, federal Europe. The sacred truth of the rebirth and reunification of the intimate community cannot be questioned; the spirit of the cosmogony project cannot be broken.
To help the prophets of the federalist doctrine of salvation spread the creed and enlarge their community of believers, to build brand loyalty and transform united Europe into a legend, an idol, an object of adoration, and a cult obsession, the Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2012 awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. The EU was sanctified for its triumph in the struggle for reconciliation, democracy, and human rights, and for helping to “transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,” thereby representing a “fraternity between nations” (Nobel Prize 2012). In his speech, Commission president José Manuel Barroso expressed pride for those “European values” that “the EU promotes in order to make the world a better place for all” and for which “people all over the world aspire,” but in particular for the organization’s soft power that allowed for the reunification of most parts of the European continent (Barroso 2012c). The implicit message of the celebrations was that the EU, through its transformative power, had accomplished the European dream by reunifying the members of the European family (who were feeling more and more separated as a result of a series of traumas and disillusionments). The same power eliminated the remnants of the dark era of war, destruction, poverty, and fragmentation, allowing for the metamorphosis of the continent, and again turned Europe into the paradisiacal land of Cockaigne.
The European Commission has also done its part in the intimization, emotionalization, dramatization, and sacralization of European politics. Following the nineteenth-century model of nation-state building, it set out in the 1970s to invent new symbols for family membership and homecoming. In the following decades, it revisited its symbol repertoire, reformulated the concept of citizenship, and changed its communication strategies with the hope of solving the organization’s legitimacy crisis. In the mission of top-down identity manufacturing, the common currency came to play the role of the protagonist. The journey toward a federal Europe, based on a common monetary policy, became symbolic of an imminent individual and collective rebirth—Frenchmen’s, Greeks’, Danes’, and Germans’ transformation into en-lightened (and enlightening) “Europeans” and the Eurozone’s metamorphosis into a secure and cozy home. Yet the journey back to Europa’s maternal womb turned out to be much longer than expected. In an effort to expedite the process, European commissioner for communications, Margot Wallström, decided to change course. A new strategy was proposed to make the European home more intimate and attractive. A “fundamentally new approach” was adopted to make the “inhabitants of Planet Brussels more human” and easier to love (Wallström 2007). Wallström was resolute that the superficial American method—“Make up a slogan, double the advertising budget and come up with a nice campaign”—should be abandoned as a point of reference, opting instead for “a more difficult path of actually changing structures” (2007). She recognized that the lack of a European story lies at the heart of the EU’s problem of “emotional deficit.” Although understanding that the previous generations’ popular narrative of the peace argument was not sufficient anymore to fire Europeans’ imagination, the European commissioner for communications was not poetic enough to invent a new story for the “Erasmus generation.” A different route was proposed, but no compass was offered as a guide to the destination.
Europeans had to wait until Mario Draghi assumed the role of the superhero with determination to triumph where others had failed. For the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the construction of the house of the European family, he launched what he called a “new product”—the Europa series of euro banknotes—and propelled an advertising campaign to sell it to “Europeans.” Portraying the euro through the verbal and visual metaphor of the newborn child of the European family in 2002 was meant to help citizens give meaning to something difficult to grasp and attribute affects to something difficult to
