The Maastricht Treaty that sanctioned the birth of the European Union did not assign to the new community “that power of symbolic crystallization which only a political act of foundation can give” (Habermas 2001: 6). Yet the desired political goal of the reunification of the European family requires some kind of symbolic legitimation that in the national settings emerged from religious, quasi-religious, or mythopoetic factors. For Europe the only religious option, asserts Richard Roberts, is Neo-Paganism, “a paganism of the shamanic type,” which would treat nature as bearer of an imminent sacred and provide people a sense of the immanent sacred (2006: 159). The supranational elite have proposed another way to reinforce the religious dimension of its legitimation. A transcendent quality has been attributed to the project of federalism and to the new euro: around the cult of the United States of Europe an official soteriology has been developed; Europa, and not Gaia, has been identified as the deity that Europeans should adore.
The transitional period of disorder and uncertainty has strengthened people’s quest for transcendence. Today, more than in the past, the EU needs awe-inspiring capacity in order to shift citizens’ loyalty from the states to the organization as a source of identity and existential security. As a response to the 2008 crisis and to citizens’ deepening sense of alienation and quest for transformation, Eurofederalism has asserted itself as a political soteriology, appropriating from religion the function of myths, symbols, and rituals, thereby seeking to intensify the sacral aura of supranational Europe. Political religions, says Emilio Gentile, “reproduce the typical structure of traditional religions, … and propose to bring about … a ‘metanoia’ of human nature out of which shall come forth a regenerated ‘new man’, totally integrated into the community” (1993: 309). The prophets of Eurofederalism have launched new symbols and rituals, an iconography and a semiotic discourse though which they promise their community of believers an encounter with the sacred, spatial and temporal transcendence, and feelings of individual and collective rebirth. Conscious (or not) of their immense influence, federalists use myths more and more often as a political tool for constructing and strengthening a European collective identity, legitimizing the EU, creating loyalty and a sense of belonging, and for strengthening the affective dimension of Europe’s “fantastic family.” The crisis the EU suffers from is frightening, disorientating, paralyzing, and therefore unacceptable. But once it acquires a sacred meaning, a mythological dimension, the symbolic reintegration into the primordial chaos may also signify a chance to regain paradisiacal conditions and to discover the (European) Land of Cockaigne.
Political communities are inconceivable without myths. Myths are common and accompany normal political life; however, when they become overflourishing and overpowerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of social neurosis or psychosis. In transitional periods (as we have today), myths proliferate. In times of uncertainty and continuous flux, myths revive people’s hopes—they seem to provide the possibility of eluding present difficulties, finding refuge in an imaginary glorious past or future, expecting resolution of problems from idealized leaders, fostering the illusion of creating order in the universe, and returning to paradise by putting together the fragmented pieces of the broken whole. Some of the paradise myths are explicit, others implicit; some are evident, others veiled; some are generated consciously, others unconsciously.
The European Union, similarly to nation-states, requires narratives to create a basis for legitimate political authority, to foster an intimate community feeling, and to strengthen members’ allegiance. Yet in Europe, shared memories are missing, and therefore the affective element, the feeling of belonging to a European family, is absent or weak. There is no passionate identification by individual citizens with the EU, only feeble allegiance based on economic and political calculations. It is because nations have navels, genuine or fabricated (Gellner 1997), and these navels and the myths and symbols, memories, and traditions they represent have such a strong value for the people that so far we haven’t seen the shift of allegiance from nation-states to supranational Europe. Federalists believe that to transcend European citizens’ attachment to the nation-family, to create and reinforce identification with the European Union, an umbilical cord has to be invented linking Europeans to the polity. Similarly to attempts seeking to tell the story of the nation, the narratives of Europe hark back to a golden age (ancient Greece, the Renaissance, or the era of Enlightenment), to traumas suffered (World War I, World War II, or communism), and to exceptionalism and a civilizing mission—a sui generis organization, a model for others to emulate (della Sala 2010: 6). The vision of the United States of Europe, the New Narrative for Europe: The Mind and the Body of Europe (a manifesto written in 2014 as a response to European Commission president José Manuel Barroso’s call), with the symbolic representation of Europe as an epic phoenix, and the story of mythological princess Europa (narrated by the European Central Bank) are different versions of the same ancient paradise myth. The custodians of these collective dreams are national and supranational policy-makers, intellectuals, artists, and (some) citizens.
While myths perform several functions, this part of the book chapter explores the role they play in provoking moments of transcendence, the perception of a return to the pristine idyll. Suzette Heald and Ariane Deluz, in a collection of essays, explore the interface between the psychoanalysis and anthropology through the interpretation of culture with a particular emphasis on the symbolic process and the nature of subjectivity (1999). Insights from psychoanalysis and anthropology will offer us the opportunity to give more depth to explanations of the proliferation and the growing role of myths in Europe and to reveal people’s intrinsic quest for paradise and the political elite’s endeavors to sacralize politics.
Psychoanalysts understand paradise as representing the happy period of our life when we could enjoy ourselves without anxiety or compulsion: the idyllic infanthood, the era of omnipotence, the joyful period previous to the trauma, the ontogenetic and phylogenetic paradise of the primal sea-mother Thalassa (Ferenczi), the pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic imaginary realm (Lacan), the period when mother and infant constituted a unit (Winnicott). Longing for the golden era previous to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is part of the universal quest for happiness. Adults, as well as children, need to experience those special moments of perfect harmony, wholeness, and pleasure. As Géza Róheim points out:
In growing up we substitute active for passive object love. We find substitutes for the love objects of infancy, but under the veneer of giving love we always retain the desire to receive love, and the loves and triumphs of adult life are really ‘Paradise Regained’, the refolding of the infancy situation on another level. (1942: 164)
For Christopher Bollas, a renowned writer and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, throughout the whole of life there is a search for “transformational objects,” which provoke the metamorphosis of the self and the conversion of emptiness, agony, and rage into fullness and contentedness. Transformational object-seeking in adulthood is an endless memorial pursuit of transcendental experiences. The object is sought not because of its characteristics but for the magic experience it may deliver. What Bollas calls “aesthetic moments” are liminal moments that provoke the metamorphosis of the self, something that can allow for the reexperiencing of the golden era of early infanthood when, feeling protected and loved by the mother, the infant was filled with a sense of joy. This British psychoanalyst asserts that moments provoked by the encounter with “transformational objects” constitute an intimate relationship between subject and object and provide the person with a generative illusion of fitting with an object, evoking an existential memory: “the aesthetic induces an existential recollection of the time when communicating took place solely through the illusion of deep rapport of subject and object” (1978: 386).
Bollas’s thoughts have great relevance for political and social studies. Often we assign to the political elite the ability (and/or the duty) to transform our total environment and to (re)establish today those paradisiacal conditions that characterized our (real or imaginary) infanthood. Time and again we yearn for a strong and intimate relationship with an object that could provoke the experience of metamorphosis. Though neither culture nor politics can possibly fulfill our needs and desires as our (imaginary)