Images from Paradise. Eszter Salgó
centered on people’s longing for home. Popular attachment to the EU will be seen as a relationship that evokes the mother-child dyad in order to highlight the importance of the emotional dimension of political allegiance versus its rational, interest-based counterpart. Events, celebrations, and rituals will be analyzed as novel pillars of the EU’s politics of transcendence in relation to 1) their function of provoking liminal moments: short periods of collective effervescence during which the EU may turn into a true fantastic family, a communitas, based on authentic interpersonal relationships; and 2) their function of evoking the atmosphere of a carnival-like performative democracy. The 2014 Eurovision Song Contest and the 2014 European Parliament elections will be analyzed as possible liminal sources of a new European democracy. The ritual of the direct election of the members of the European Parliament had been introduced in 1979 with the hope of contributing to the creation of a European demos and a European public space, thereby enhancing the organization’s democratic credentials. The 2014 elections were portrayed by the prophets of the federalist soteriology not just as a tool to reinforce the affective dimension of European citizenship but also as a sacred rite of passage—an opportunity for citizens to swear allegiance to the holy mission of the United States of Europe, enact citizenship, and become actively involved in the federal project of palingenesis. I will explore the information campaign and the various video ads that aimed to awaken unenthusiastic EU citizens and carry them in a purifying carnival that would renew all. Readers will discover how these tools are revealing of the authoritarian nature of the federalist ideology and why the plan that foresees the purging of evil (the fight against “populists” and “nationalists”), the merging with mother Europa, and collective rebirth could end in a painful fiasco. Based on the belief that music, more than other tools, can enhance a sense of individual and collective purification and rebirth, the unofficial prophets of European federalism have entrusted the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) with bringing forward the art of European unification. It is as if the organizers of the festival, the performers, and even the viewers were all invited to participate in a European carnival and make the fantastic European family resurrect and become whole and home again. I will suggest that Conchita Wurst’s song “Rise Like a Phoenix,” winner of the 2014 edition, embodies today’s zeitgest (longing for rebirth) and the federalist ethos—“nothing is impossible.” The part will bring evidence to claim that the Austrian singer’s performance offers a powerful musical and visual interpretation, a suggestive ritualization of the supranational cosmogony myth, and that therefore it may be recognized as the sacred anthem that supranational policy-makers have been long searching for.
In my concluding remarks, I will invite readers to consider Eric Voegelin’s political theory when reflecting on the reasons why federalists have not succeeded (and will not succeed) in persuasively playing the role of the magic bridge-builders, why their cosmogony project has failed and is still doomed to failure. I will argue that the politics of artificial intimacy, Barroso’s authoritarian family model, must be transcended, and that Donald Winnicott’s concept of “transitional space” should inform the European elite’s parenting technique for strengthening citizens’ home-feeling. The EU should not be seen as a “community of interest” or as a “community of identity” where there are no limits to what can be achieved. A playful European public space is closer to being a precondition of a democratic polity. Mario Draghi is not a superhero, but the EU needs no heroes to become a cosmion, or a true communitas. One of the greatest endowments of the Europa fable is that the story (just like the meaning of European family) can be narrated, interpreted, and re-presented in innumerable ways depending on time, space, the cultural priorities, necessities, and imaginaries of various peoples and epochs. The “destiny” of the myth can be considered analogous to the destiny of the Freudian drive (Passerini 2002b: 157) and the destiny of European identity—none of these can be determined a priori; they are elastic with respect to their scope and can assume very different and unexpected physiques. The most important legacy of the Athenian democracy (what is seen as the cradle of European democracy) is not (just) the pan-Hellenic identity construction but diversity-management, the ability to go along together (Ober 2005). In this vein, I will contend that a democratic political order must leave room for the Dionysian dimension.
PART I
NUMINOUS STORIES ABOUT EUROPE’S REBIRTH
NEED FOR A PARADISE DREAM
In his essay Leviathan: A Myth, Michael Oakeshott asserts that the substance of civilization itself is myth, a collective dream:
We are apt to think of a civilization as something solid and external, but at bottom it is a collective dream. … What a people dreams in this earthly sleep is its civilization. And the substance of this dream is a myth, an imaginative interpretation of human existence, the perception (not the solution) of the mystery of human life. (Oakeshott 1947/1975: 160–61)
Oakeshott admired poets’ and writers’ capacity to dream more profoundly—to preserve, rather than to break the dream, “to recall it, to recreate it in each generation, and even to make more articulate the dream-powers of a people” (1947/1975: 161). He believed that literature’s gift consisted in offering us imagination and, as a result, the expansion of our faculty for dreaming. Seen from this light, even a book of philosophy may aspire to evoke the common dream that binds the generations together and makes the mysterious narrative more comprehensible. For Oakeshott, the myth that Thomas Hobbes inherited and that gave coherence to the collective dream was the myth of the Garden of Eden: as a result of an original sin, mankind was banished from the garden, from the ambient of peace and happiness, but, despite humans’ disappointing conduct, divine grace promised an ultimate redemption, the restoration of the pristine order.
The notion of the broken unity and its renewal has been a central strand in the whole of Western thought (Berlin 1990); the return to a state likened to the golden age had already been envisaged as early as Virgil (Eclogue IV). The belief that the reign of Saturn during the early days of humanity signified a golden period of virtue and justice was a vulgate mythological notion and commonplace in ancient poetry. The association of Saturnia tempora with the idyllic era occurs in classic ancient mythology after which the god Saturn, probably originally the protector of the harvest, became identified with the Greek Kronos, king of Crete. Since the primary trauma, provoked by the expulsion from paradise and by the splintering of the pristine unity, man’s primary desire has been to put the fragments in order, to restore serenity, so reestablishing the perfect state that had been lost. Nostalgia for paradise runs through European thought from its earliest beginnings; it underlies all the old utopias and has deeply influenced Western metaphysics and moral and political ideas (Berlin 1990: 23–24).
As Oakeshott asserts, a civilized life is created out of the desires, fears, and other inner drives intrinsic in human nature, the anxiety provoked by expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the longing for a definitive return. Many contribute to the construction of the paradise myth; theologians, poets, and artists may become the true custodians of the dream.
The fantasy of returning to the idyllic land has an immense political significance if we consider that every political agenda contains a reference to paradise. All political projects promise and seek to foster the illusion of the reappearance of the lost state of harmony, unity, and fullness; what differentiates them from each other is their image of the sublime Garden of Eden and how their members fantasize about bringing back the “fantastic family.” The European Union is no exception; at the core of the integration process has always been a (paradise) dream. According to Joseph Weiler, for example, the legitimacy of the organization is rooted in the “politically messianic”: the justification for its actions is “the vision offered, the dream dreamt”; its motivating engine derives “from the ideal pursued, the destiny to be achieved, the ‘Promised Land’ waiting at the end of the road” (2011: 7). European integration may be seen as a “political messianic venture par excellence,” with the messianic representing a key component of its political culture, manifest both in its rhetoric and in its policy decisions. On the one