The colorful whistle in the baby’s mouth on the cover might evoke in readers the celebrations that took place in twelve European countries and help them reexperience the atmosphere of the collective revelry. The date 1 January 2002, when the virtual currency turned into reality (removing the uncertainty for those who had doubts about its very existence), assumed for many a cosmic dimension: this special moment was seen as the well-deserved proceeding of Europe’s most frenetic Christmas, providing the right motive to transform traditional New Year’s parties into special gatherings celebrating the birth of a special child. Many perceived the event as a European carnival (in a Bakhtinian sense) that was giving birth to a European public space, replacing the dominant culture of a bureaucratic and elitist organization with a democratic atmosphere marked by freedom, equality, abundance, and playfulness. This (supposedly) provoked in more than 300 million European citizens an intense feeling of wholeness, unity, metamorphosis, and rebirth, and renewed their sensation of being part of a collective body. Through these moments of transcendence, the golden age was experienced in thought, on the emotional level, and enacted by the body. The prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl (the announcement that had been made in Maastricht at the end of a great historical cycle of European integration) was fulfilled in solemn tones; Saturnia reappeared on earth with the advent of a puer aeternus.
Similar to the Virgilian puer, the European Central Bank’s puer was of course not a real human being but a (real) political function: it represented (and still represents) the regenerating dream of an all-powerful Europe. As we can learn from the various reportage sources, bureaucrats persevered and managed to win the “psychological battle of the first day” (Solbes 2001/2002: 17); the European Central Bank (ECB) accomplished “the most ambitious experiment in the history of money,” the greatest shift in European identity (Coman 2001). As a result of a heroic struggle, Europeans could both discover a “new way of being in Europe” and experience a feeling of being “at home throughout Europe” (Duisenberg 2001). As European Commission president Romani Prodi observed, EU citizens realized that the euro notes and coins in their pockets were a “concrete sign of the great political undertaking of building a united Europe” and were becoming a key element in their “sense of shared European identity and common destiny” (2002). Federalists transfigured the 2002 launching of the euro into an act of redemption that had brought about a metastasis: the “old” world was thus “over”; life had only now become truly real.
Yet no fireworks were launched for the “child’s” tenth birthday. In 2012, the E-day seemed to evoke the V-day of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement—the mild voices celebrating European federalism were overshadowed by populist and nationalist forces shouting vaffanculo and promising vendetta. By now, the euro has come to be seen as a huge betrayal: the Eurozone is associated with recession and stagnation rather than with prosperity, with the imminent possibility of painful disintegration rather than joyful unity, with death rather than with birth, with mourning (the loss of a dream) rather than with the jubilation of resurrection. As a result of the unfulfilled expectations of perfect unity and pleasure, the ecstasy has gradually faded; the euro has failed to conjure up in citizens a strong affective attachment. The loss of eschatological dreams has triggered Europeans’ disenchantment with the new home and reinforced their nostalgia for their old homes (the cozy environment of nation-state families with all their indispensable components, including the national currency).
ECB president Mario Draghi had to intervene to end what came to be seen by many as Europe’s “psychological crisis,” to heal the wounds provoked by the trauma of the lost illusion. He recognized that in order to create warm feelings toward the European currency, the time had come to replace the euro’s sterile and neutral design with fertile and evocative imagery to prove, also, through visual representation that the euro’s bridges lead somewhere and its windows open onto the horizon of a new day. He arrived at the conclusion that a new European icon and a fascinating fable about Europe must take the place of national icons and romantic narratives about the nations’ birth and evolution. In 2012 the moment was ripe, he felt, to reaffirm the euro as the “holy icon” of the united and prosperous “European family,” to replicate the transcendental moment of creation of 2002, and to make European citizens reexperience the magic feeling of transformation, rebirth, and reunification. Since the euro’s launch, transcendental attributes have been assigned to the common currency. Described in mystical terms and represented through awe-inspiring images, the euro was seen as a sacred link connecting Europeans to each other and to paradise.
Citizens’ belief in the euro’s transformative and resurrective power, however, has gradually diminished, prompting Mario Draghi to endorse (discreetly) the recommendation made by a committee of experts of the European Community in 1993: “Mother Europe must protect her children” (De Clercq 1993: 24). Super Mario seems to have recognized the need to complement the celebration of Europe’s pater familias with a fest for the organization’s “founding mother.” The ECB president adopted a new communication policy proffering a different way of ingraining the meaning (and the promise) of the European Union in people’s minds. To reach out to people’s hearts and fantasies, the much-celebrated hero of the euro crisis came out with a (seemingly) new cosmogony project. In November 2012, the European Central Bank announced that the watermark and hologram would display a portrait of Europa in a blinding array of blue-purple-green on one side of each banknote of the new Europa series. The representation of Europa’s fascinating but almost forgotten tale became the special gift to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the euro. It is the seductive face of the mythological princess, the sacred gaze of Europe’s mother goddess that we encounter when tilting the banknote to the sunshine.
The ECB could have chosen from thousands of artistic representations of the Europa myth. In the end, an image adorning an approximately two-thousand-year-old vase found in southern Italy, and exhibited today in the Louvre, was selected. Why did Mario Draghi decide to ornament the new euro series with the portrait of Europa? Why did he borrow an image from a Greek krater? Why doesn’t Dionysus adorn the imagery of the banknotes too (if the god of wine appears on the reverse of the vase)? What goals of the ECB are sealed in this mysterious image and in its evocative representations?
The scarce consideration of the federalist vision of the European Union, as a special space where the promised land of paradise will soon materialize, reveals academics’ and policy-makers’ disregard of the key role that imagination and fantasy, sacred and profane, play in the top-down construction of the (utopian) idea of Europe. At the heart of this book is not the attempt to solve a mystery but to invent (another) mysterious story. The initial inspiration came not from a “fantastic binomio,” as in my previous book (Salgó 2014), but from an image. Nevertheless, my goal has remained the same: I am still keen on following Gianni Rodari’s advice (1973/2010) to enter reality from the window. I will ask my readers to engage with the European Union’s institutional visual narratives (expressed though banknote iconography and official videos) in the realm of imagination, to participate in a play, and to give birth to new stories about Europe.
Based on the conviction that we perceive reality through imagination and unconscious fantasy and that political communities are tied together by emotional bonds (including both conscious and unconscious elements), this book examines the European Union as a “fantasy community” (a state of mind rather than an objective, external reality, visionary and real at the same time) and Eurofederalism as a project of palingenesis, a political “doctrine of salvation” driven by the eschatological dream of creating a new, idyllic Europe through the transformation of the United States of Europe from dream into fact. Inspired by the interpretative and reflexive traditions and methodologies of the social sciences, it draws upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, esthetics, and cinema studies to present a new way of looking at the “art of European unification,” to highlight the mythical sources of the federalist project, and to reflect on the role played by official visual narratives in the elite-driven creation of the “European family.”
This book