While the Treaty of Lisbon (approved in 2007 and implemented in 2009) consecrated the EU’s active role in the realm of culture, “drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” and promising to “respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity,” “ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced,” and “promote culture and heritage conservation” (European Council 2007), “communicating Europe to people” has nonetheless remained an unsolved problem. European federalists’ enhanced efforts have been unsuccessful. Far from being powerful storytellers, they have failed to make the myth of a new Europe relevant, to make citizens internalize the sacred dogma of the United States of Europe as the promised land waiting at the end of the (linear) process of European integration. Barroso recognized that the myths, if left only to institutional actors to tell, would further alienate citizens, and on 23 April 2013 he made a call to artists, scientists, and intellectuals to write a “new narrative for Europe.” Aware of the fact that the old dogma of peace, prosperity, and unity no longer provoked in EU citizens a sacred gaze, he made an appeal to European intellectuals to write a new “book” narrating in a different way Europe’s present, past, and future. His nondeclared hope was that a new story of European palingenesis would enroll citizens (in particular the new generations) in the holy mission against populists, nationalists, and even Euroskeptics, who with their “pessimistic and destructive agenda” “threaten to destroy the dream made real.” He prompted them to endorse the federalist soteriology by putting an end to the “aberration of dealing with European issues at the national level” (Barroso 2013).
To make sure that the new storytellers would triumph in selling the federalist paradise dream, in enlarging the community of believers of the new doctrine of salvation, Barroso reverberates in his call the idea that culture represents the missing link in the realization of the cosmogony project. From his perspective, culture is supposed to make Europe’s founding fathers’ dream come true by giving birth to “a human enterprise which will promote peace and mark a major step forward for civilization.” To make the EU easier to imagine and to love, he discards the idea of Europe being technocratic or bureaucratic and instead attributes to it human characteristics: “Europe has a soul, and that soul is its civilization.” In his appeal, Barroso seems to demand that the new narrative be ceremonial and romanticized enough to raise awareness of the glorious nature of the EU, to “ensure that our citizens are inspired by the great achievements of European culture” (Barroso 2013).
The instructions were far too detailed and the encoded message was far too explicit for a true authentic debate (which in theory he was meant to encourage) to take place. “A New Narrative for Europe: The Mind and Body of Europe,” a manifesto written by a group of artists, writers, and scientists, seems to represent an enthusiastic endorsement of Barroso’s call (Cultural Committee 2014). Supranational policy-makers endorsed enthusiastically the new tale and, driven by their well-known frenzy, transformed the catchy four-page essay into an illegible 249-page book (European Commission 2015a). The plot of the story is the same offered by the institutional narrative—Europe’s rebirth. “A New Narrative for Europe: The Mind and Body of Europe” is also informed by a mythical understanding of the European Union and inspired by a cosmogony myth, but it is written in a different (more effective) style. The content of the European narrative has remained substantially the same; it still emphasizes the magic ability of Europe to transform chaos into order. The difference lies in its form (and arguably in its impact on people): while the old myth emphasizes more the traditional, the political, and the economic benefits Europeans can gain from the integration process, the new story has at its core the cultural and spiritual dimension; it makes the implicit mythological nature of the supranational project explicit.
Unlike Barroso, Europe’s new storytellers have pathos, logos, and ethos. To appeal to (young) Europeans’ hearts, thoughts, and fantasies, and to transport their readers in a new and special world, they use several (ancient) tools of persuasion—personification, a different punctuation of time, and rhetorical devices such as metaphors and tropes. In line with Barroso’s thinking, the European Union is represented with human attributes: it is endowed with a mind and a body; it can suffer, die, and even resurrect. As the narrative goes, in 1914 “Europe lost its soul”; in the era of Fascism and Nazism “it damned itself”; and after World War II, thanks to European values, ideals, and modus operandi, it gained “redemption”; “Europe’s soul was restored” (Cultural Committee 2014). The metaphor of the body politic is perhaps used as a means to prompt citizens to sacrifice their body and soul for the cause of the new political religion.
The European integration project, as the authors reveal, “was born like a phoenix out of the ashes of World War I and World War II” (Cultural Committee 2014). In 2014, a hundred years after the primal trauma, what Europe needs in order to leave behind the painful consequences of the shock (2008 crisis) is “nothing short of a ‘New Renaissance.’” As in bureaucrats’ rhetoric, the frequent use of religious and mythological idioms serves to add a mystic, spiritual dimension to the political projects. To similar ends, the authors sacralise time by restructuring the official EU calendar. Until recently, European history has always been told by the European elite in a teleological fashion as the story of the European family’s linear march, starting in 1950 and advancing gradually but without interruptions toward complete union. Today, however, Europe’s (chosen) intellectuals give a cyclic vision of time; they describe the story of Europe following the mythic structure of trauma and triumph, death and rebirth. Portrayed as the mythological phoenix, the European community is cherished for its ability to resurrect time and time again and arise from the ashes of its predecessor to return to the mythical age.
In both narratives crisis appears as something not just natural, frequent in the history of European integration, but also as something necessary—as a “great regenerating experience.” In both cases the sacralization of politics suggests that in order to resurrect one has to die; for Europe to restore its golden age, it must first undergo the painful destruction of the crisis. The symbolism of death and resurrection, the commitment to Europe, the mysticism of trauma and triumph, blood and sacrifice, the cult of Europe’s heroes and martyrs, the “communion” of citizens are all meant to contribute to the spreading of the myth of palingenesis, to the reinforcing of the belief that membership in a new united Europe would renew all forms of existence.
THE TALE OF SEDUCTIVE EUROPA
As the “White Paper on a European Communication Policy” demands, European institutions all need to have a “human face,” not just to demonstrate that they possess a “clear public identity” but also to strike a chord with citizens and to make sure that they are perceived as personally relevant. In 2012 Europa became the “new face of the euro.” The portrait of the mythological princess was incorporated into some of the security features of the new series of euro banknotes, a series that, not surprisingly, was baptized as the “Europa series.” At first sight this choice could appear to be a response to the Commission’s continuously repeated call that invited every EU institution to cease to be faceless. But is that all? Is it just one of the profane political measures serving simple “community goals?”
The ECB seems ready to attribute the characteristics of an animate being to an inanimate object, to personify the euro, to symbolize it, to make sure that the currency has both a public and a private function. Personification is part of the rich legacy of ancient Greece—a “strange disposition of Greek thought to turn concepts into gods and gods into concepts” (Gombrich