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CHAPTER 1

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 hand, the ceremonial and sermonical language is rich in pathos (and in bathos); on the other, the persuasive vision that has inspired generations of European idealists of the “ever closer union among the people of Europe” as the only route back to paradise is indicative of the mythical dimension of the European art of unification (Weiler 2011: 8).

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) mother did, they may occasionally offer moments for recollections of intense ego memories and for self-transformation.

Lacan is pessimistic about man’s longing for reencountering the mother of idyllic infanthood. He used the term “imaginary solutions” to describe people’s attempts to replace unmanageable reality with wish-fulfilling fantasy by constructing all kinds of self-defeating solutions. His thinking again recalls Freud, who in “Totem and Taboo” defined fantasy as “tak[ing] flight from an unsatisfying reality,” which implies also one’s withdrawal from the community of man (Freud 1913: 74). Immersion in fantasy represents for Lacan not the denial of difficult inner and outer realities, but perhaps the only way to accept them and find a symbolic resolution. The fact that nothing in the Symbolic can fulfill our desire to transform our division into completeness drives us to bring something in from another realm—the quasi-imaginary objet petit a, from the field of fantasy, in the hope of being able to leave behind our frustrating state.

Lacan argues that a residue of the “primal union” with the maternal body survives the infant’s entry into the symbolic order. After its ban by the Symbolic, the “fundamental phantasy” is attached to the remnant of the Real in the form of the little nugget of originary enjoyment, which Lacan called the objet petit a. He used the term jouissance to capture the satisfaction provoked by the use of the desired object. The subject’s only object of complete satisfaction, the mother, is forbidden; the subject will search for substitutes, but these desire-provoking objects will never fulfill the dream of complete joy. Jouissance is something total but impossible; it is what desire can never reach, the void that can never be filled. Jouissance is an excessive pleasure and pain, something extra that turns pleasure into a fascinating, even unbearable intensity; it represents the “excess beyond the given, measurable, rational, and useful … for the stake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counterproductive, or even wrong” (Dean 2006: 4). Unlike the pleasure principle, jouissance provokes a rise (rather than a drop) in tension.

One consequence of the subject’s dependence on ego-gratifying fantasies is that they mislead him to seek self-fulfillment through the objet petit a—the objectified cause of desire that the subject believes will return to him the precious sense of wholeness that has been lost. The objet petit a represents the desired integrity or wholeness; it does not refer to a specific need, but to the wish to become complete again, to be fully loved by the other, which is both impossible (since the self, created only after the separation, has no access to the primal union) and prohibited (through the action of language and Law). The object petit a is a compelling marker that pushes the subject toward substitutes that hold the potential illusion of fulfilling the constitutive lack, only to be reminded again and again that this lack is not fulfilled. It makes all substitute objects inadequate, deferring and differing pleasure, always in search of something else or more or elsewhere. This objet petit a is the inner secret or the kernel of the subject, creating a ceaseless and descriptive pressure to return to the “primal union,” which at the same time gives rise to an awesome, obscene enjoyment. As the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek asserts, the objet petit a is “a gap in the centre of the symbolic order—the lack, the void of the Real setting in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a pure semblance of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted” (1992: 8). Phantasy is a construction that stimulates desire exactly because it promises to cover over the lack in the Other, the lack created by the loss of jouissance:

It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. (Stavrakakis 1999: 46)

In a nutshell, fantasy is a longing for reconciliation and fullness, an attempt to compensate lack, to heal the wound caused by the primary trauma. The objet petit a and the “transformational object” do not refer to a specific need but to the wish to become again complete, to be fully loved by the other, in a way that would fill the lack. They both function as metaphors for the lost paradise: a paradise where we can enter for a limited period of time (Bollas), a paradise that will remain for us forever unreachable (Lacan).

Fantasy is not a strictly individual entity. From Freud’s standpoint, fantasy has always been present at the societal level in all civilizations in the form of legends, fairy-tales, and myths. Lacanian thinkers also believe that fantasy belongs to the social world because it is a construction whose primary function is to cover over the lack in the Other.

People’s shared dreams manifest themselves in myths. Myths constitute the common illusory experience that holds communities together. On the one hand they express populations’ striving for a return to idyllic infanthood and for ideal parental figures; on the other, they mirror politicians’ attempts to create the illusion of a pristine family and of regained order, harmony, stability, and happiness. Like dreams, myths surface as expressions of the mental state of societies. They disclose people’s shared needs, desires, fears, and traumas suffered. The tendency to explore wish fulfillment rules not only nocturnal dreams but daydreams as well, not only individual but also collective fancies. Myths are like the concealed fulfillment of a repressed wish. Societies in their fancies attain just that which is painfully missing; they may escape from a real or imagined danger or obtain the extinction of real or imagined enemies. Myths reflect man’s longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, a yearning that received various symbolic representation.

According to Jung, in ancient times man expressed his creativity by narrating and re-narrating myths; the realm of myths was the “world of fantasies,” the result of the activity of a highly artistic mind, where rather than seeking to gain an objective understanding of the real world, the goal was to adapt it aesthetically to collective fantasies and expectations (1979: 20–21). In this sense, the world represented in ancient myths had little to do with the external reality and reflected instead man’s inner reality. The Swiss psychoanalyst compared this psychic reality to children’s way of thinking. Just like imaginative children who attribute to their dolls and toys the qualities of animate things, ancient Greeks with their myths created and became inhabitants of a world of marvels. An expression of the indissoluble link that binds us to the men of antiquity is “fantasy-thinking,” which corresponds to the archaic ways of thinking and feeling and which “re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies” (Jung 1979: 28).

Myth for Lacan is a mixture of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; its main functions consist in “papering over the impossible, real kernel” around which the myth is constructed and for which it was originally formulated (Grigg 2006: 55). Žižek’s extensive study of the role of fantasy and myths in contemporary social and political life finds that ideology is an imaginary domain that is reproduced though the fantasy identifications of human subjects. In line with Lacan, he argues that the purpose of ideology is to fill in or cover over the lack caused by the loss of jouissance. Its function is “not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the special reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (1989: 45). The French-Greek psychoanalyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, inspired by Freud, arrived at a similar conclusion. According to Castoriadis, people have difficulties in accepting the chaos, the abyss, and the groundlessness from which humanity has emerged. Many refuse to recognize the death dwelling within every life; thus, “myth is essentially a way for society to vest with meaning both the world and its own life within the world—a world and a life that, otherwise, are obviously meaningless” (1997a: 11). Myths, which are expressions of the negation of the chaos, allow for circumscribing the abyss, for covering over the groundlessness.

Žižek contends that politics has become the “politics of jouissance,” concerned with “ways of soliciting or controlling and regulating jouissance” (2006: 307): “all politics relies upon, and even manipulates, a certain economy of enjoyment” (Žižek & Daly 2004: 114). A nation exists “only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths or fantasies that secure these practices” (1993: 202), and a community may fall into pieces if the belief in a shared enjoyment, connected to an idealized past or future, evaporated. What really binds a community together, argues Žižek, is not their knowing what laws to follow “but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law’s suspension” (1994: 55). Myths unveil that the enjoyment of the in-group members is jeopardized by the out-group members who are determined to steal it or to devastate the community by infecting it with its own (obscene) jouissance. For these reasons, in order to understand the real nature of political forces, one has to confront their underlying phantasy, “the nonrational nugget, the fantastic stand-in for enjoyment, that can be what we desire but can never achieve” (Dean 2006: 47).

According to Bernhard Giesen the “return of religion” is a fundamental trait of the project of modernity: political ideologies and social movements have emerged as secularized versions of the religious revival where a religious devotion is justified by reasons and convictions (2009). Harald Wydra believes that transcendence can also be a political force: individuals’ attachment to a political community may derive not from rational principles but from structures of thought “derived from religious practice, such as conversion experiences, rituals, cults of hero worship, and messianic expectations” (2011b: 266). The sacred, he asserts, has shifted from the symbolism of the king’s two bodies to social forces, cultural practices, and ethical imperatives (2015a). The “politics of enchantment” implies the nonrational and the sacred, which have become “pillars for the reconstitution of legitimacy in the reordering of people’s entire meaningful worlds” (Verdery 1999: 25). Sacralization of politics is often a symptom of disenchantment and crisis. Today’s transitional period provides a fruitful ground for exploring people’s overwhelming desire to reexperience the paradisiacal conditions of the golden age and the elite’s response—the endeavor to attribute sacred and mystical elements to secular institutions. According to Harald Wydra, sacred spaces and practices often originate in violence and death, in times of extraordinary politics, “in feeble moments of the social and political flux, when people’s yearning for ontological security becomes stronger and stronger” (2015b: 2, 3). Relying on Alessandro Pizzorno’s notion of absolute politics (1987) and Eric Voegelin’s political anthropology, he claims that in liminal situations the dissolutions of order and the disillusionment with traditional models entail a void of markers of certainty that may give orientation and meaning to the collective community, a void that may be filled with emotional excitement, crowd action, and collective ecstasy (Wydra 2011b: 268).

In the transitional era provoked by the trauma of the euro crisis, feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and alienation seem to prevail. The drama of 2008 has created an out-of-the-ordinary, incomprehensive, incommunicable situation where political reality has been shattered and markers of certainty have evaporated. The roots of the collective trauma lie in the loss of an illusion, the broken promise of the EU as the Land of Cockaigne. The profane circumstances felt to be unbearable have triggered in people a longing for the transcendental feelings of unity, order, and completeness. Perhaps, more than in the past, people require a sacred compass in order to orient themselves and overcome uncertainty. A quest for the transformative power of the Sacred, promising to compensate for feelings of fragility and existential insecurity, has resulted in the supranational elite’s attempt to make redress for the disenchantment. This recompense comes in the form of what is commonly perceived as a bureaucratic and technocratic organization, the application of eschatological visions to politics, the linking of transcendental symbols to the questions of power and legitimacy, and the binding of citizens to the Sacred. The hope is to shift allegiance from nation-states to Europe through the ritualistic form of equating federal Europe with salvation, thereby providing through the transcendental an extra sense of legitimation to the EU.

The federalist notion of the United States of Europe (USE) represents the contemporary manifestation of the ancient paradise myth. This political utopia has acquired a sacred dimension and is presented as the holy canopy, the only compass that can redeem the community. The supranational elite perform on the stage of European politics as authentic masters of ceremonies, whose goal is to give an end to our turbulent era and inaugurate the return of the golden age. The utopia of the United States of Europe is not only meant to fire Europeans’ imaginations and kindle their fantasies, but also to enchant them with a sense of completeness, homecoming, and rebirth. Similar to nineteenth-century intellectuals who called for some type of humanistic “civil religion,” a new “spiritual power,” a “religion of humanity” to foster human progress and to counteract the power of egoism and greed (Nussbaum 2011: 7), supranational policy-makers seem to draw on Auguste Comte to articulate their vision of the European Union and of the new civil religion. According to Comte, the new civil religion, like traditional religion, must have an object of worship and it must include a multitude of carefully planned ceremonies, rituals, and festivals that give meaning to time (1865/1957). The 2008 crisis prompted supranational policy-makers to recognize the central role civic emotions play in politics and turn Eurofederalism into a political religion. Today they are convinced that their sacred mission consists of giving birth to a new (idyllic) Europe by combating tendencies toward the pursuit of national interests, putting “European values” on the altar, strengthening citizens’ awareness of their “shared past” and “common destiny,” and encouraging them to extend sympathy and love to the whole European community. Supranational policy-makers see themselves as those who possess the right (the only) answer for today’s crisis, as the only ones legitimized to play the role Comte assigned to the council of philosophers—a new spiritual authority. In the European soteriology, the object of devotion is the “ever-closer Europe,” which, to be imagined and addressed as a deity, has received a singular name: the United States of Europe. Central in the EU’s communication strategy is the image of a united Europe threatened by the destabilizing forces of populist, nationalist, and Euroskeptic movements. Another fundamental feature of Comte’s religion, the spirit of control and homogeneity, also seems to resurface in the EU; to turn the dream of the USE into reality, supranational policy-makers demand a submissive reverence to their authority and offer no (or very restricted) room for opposing views.

The dreams of today’s federalists may also recall Julien Benda’s vision of Europe sketched in An Address to the European Nation in 1933. The Europe this French thinker envisaged was spiritual, moral, and intellectual. He encouraged intellectuals to follow clerkly values (i.e., dedicate their lives to the pursuit of universal truths) and to save people from power-driven passions for race, nation, or class. Return to paradise (i.e., to pristine universalism) could be achieved by giving birth to a new, spiritual Europe where the passion of reason would reign (1933/1993). According to Benda, endeavors to create a united Europe had ended with fiasco because Europeans did not want to be unified. He believed that to convince people about the need to transcend the existence of nation-states and create a new Europe, to make them love the idea of Europe, steps had to be taken to shift people’s political passions from the nation-states to the “European nation.” To realize this project of rebirth, intellectuals, once they converted to true intellectuals, were entrusted with the task of fostering people’s moral and spiritual metamorphosis by making new gods, inventing a new religion. Today’s Euro-bureaucrats champion themselves as an enlightened order of priests possessing spiritual power and representing the real source of moral authority in Europe. They seem ready to accomplish the task Benda attributed to clercs: vanquish nationalist passion with another passion, replace old idols with new idols, old myths with new myths, old mystique with new mystique.

Roger Griffin’s concept of “palingenetic ultranationalism” (1996) may help us better understand the underlying fantasy of the European federalist agenda. Palingenetic refers to the myth of regeneration; it is driven by the vision of the triumph of a new life over decadence and decay, by the expectation of an imminent rebirth following literal or figurative death, by the desire to leave behind what is perceived as an intolerable present to be born anew. Eurofederalism seems to be dominated by Euro-nationalistic connotations in which the problems of the old European nationalisms reverberate on a new level. Applying Griffin’s theory we could portray “palingenetic ultra-Europeanism” as an ideology driven by the mythical force of a regenerated European Union that emerges when ultrafederalism combines with the myth of a radical crusade against populism and nationalism and considers the utopian project of the United States of Europe as its symbolic manifestation par excellence. For the prophets of this soteriology, the realization of Europe’s mystic rebirth is hindered by the invasive presence of the nation-state. According to this view, the European Union requires not simply the erosion of national barriers to facilitate the free circulation of trade, capital, and persons, but the complete elimination of all state borders, seen as rocks in the sea journey toward federal Europe. Thus, collective renewal, the construction of a new Europe (the USE), must be preceded by the dismantling of the nation-state and its associated ideologies of nationalism.

Similar to “palingenetic ultra-nationalism,” the federalist soteriology is born of a human need for a sense of transcendence. It offers to its followers the prospect of returning to the golden age; it resorts to the sacralization and dramatization of discourse as a means to conjure up a spiritual and mythical atmosphere that may facilitate the emergence of new order, a new faith, a new transcendental community. Through the persistent use of myths, symbols, and rituals, it seeks to convince citizens that they belong to a supranatural reality, to replace the primacy of affective attachment to the nation. “Palingenetic myth” itself is the belief in the imminent transformation of the old world into a new one. As in rites of passage, the new status (“European citizens”) represents a new beginning, the possibility of entering a new, more mature phase of life. In this sense, the progress toward the United States of Europe becomes the journey toward a rebirth and the dawn of a new era.

The federalist discourse portrays the robust reaction against the “populist,” “nationalist,” and “Euroskeptic forces” as a soul-saving cru­sade against the evil, as an intent to destroy those who threaten the paradise dream from coming true. It aims to purify from the community of “true Europeans” any “anti-European” myths and influences, to destroy the virulent social disease menacing European democracy, and to restore and disseminate the cult of federal Europe. The European federalist agenda has strong Romantic components; its vision is inherently unattainable. Just like romantic nationalism, it is a kind of chiliastic doctrine seeking perfection on earth. It preaches an ethic of brotherly love, the purification of the elect, the destruction of barriers, and the abolition of this corrupt world for a new dispensation of absolute love and justice on earth. The federalist agenda doesn’t take into account the real world of the European Union in which there is imperfect organization and dividing lines among members are growing in number and becoming deeper, all the while the willingness to unite weakens more and more.

According to Stefan Auer, like the Great Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, the European Union is “never satisfied, always wanting more; insanely rich, yet unable to pay their bills” (2013). Like Gatsby, Europeans grew accustomed to living in a fantasy world in which everything must be possible. The European elite became so infatuated with the vision of “an ever-closer union” that they chose to disregard real-life obstacles to their plan (Auer 2013: 2). To reinvent himself, Gatsby is ready to remake not only his own history but also Daisy’s past (to wipe out her husband forever, she must deny that she ever loved him). In a similar vein, the supranational elite, in order to reinvent themselves and their object of love (Europe), are not just ready to recreate through new narratives Europe’s past, but they seem to be committed to deny unacceptable factors (present and past moments and periods of distrust and conflicts between nations). All those who embrace the religion of European federalism need act as if cleavages did not exist, as if unconditional love characterized the relationship among the members of the European family.

Federalists perform on the stage Žižek’s “politics of jouissance.” The fantasy that supports their political agenda and what is supposed to bind together the members of the European family is the shared enjoyment of the mother imago. Identity entrepreneurs appear on the political stage resolute (and desperate) in their willingness to liberate European citizens from the suffocating feeling of castration, to create a new order free from the burden of the Law of the Father. This particular jouissance is transmitted though verbal and visual (mythical) discourses and reinforced by rituals. The revival of the fantasy of the USE exemplifies the willingness to deny the loss and to celebrate the everlasting mother-child union. For the new European family to resurrect, the phantoms of the past need to be entombed. The construction of a new European order cannot be accomplished without seizing the “cathartic moments” of the fiscal and debt crisis as they allow for purification, for experiencing a miracle, for transformation.

Perhaps supranational architects’ plans for a federal Europe and the populist movements’ (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Five Star MoVement in Italy, and so on) projects of direct democracy and “liquid politics” in reality represent different versions of the same phantastic object, different versions of the same paradise dream. Palingenetic ultra-Europeanism and “populist movements” (re)appeared on the political scene for the same purpose—to interrupt the painful reality of chaos provoked by the economic (and identity) crisis with a utopian topos of sacred serenity. Both supranational identity entrepreneurs and Euroskeptic populists are driven by the (omnipotent) fantasy of constructing an idyllic community. Both models have mythical connotations: they are disguised cosmogony projects in which the goal is to initiate a new era in European politics. Alexis Tsipras, Beppe Grillo, Pablo Iglesias Turrión, and Nigel Farage on the one hand and José Manuel Barroso, Herman von Rompuy, Vivian Reding and Mario Draghi on the other present their own plans as the last occasion, the last opportunity of a Greece/Italy/Spain/Great Britain and Europe dangerously sliding toward the edge of the abyss. Their catastrophic discourse exemplifies a black-and-white thinking. In case regeneration does not happen, the phantoms of the past will return: skies will collapse on us, the crisis, the enemies (both inner and external) will destroy our lives, deprive us of our pleasures, and prevent us from recovering for a long time to come. However, if we are successful in our struggle, then we can again be the first. Failure of the mission would entail the demise of Europe, while victory would allow her to become an archetype, a model to emulate.

While both supranational architects and populist leaders seem to be active in building a new democratic European home with a new European demos, they both conduct utopian, antidemocratic politics. They function according to an exclusionary logic. In their utopian politics they need an anti-figure, a stigmatized scapegoat, an archenemy. While constructing the fantasy of an idyllic community they produce its reverse and call for its elimination. Supporters of a united Europe and “populists” have become each other’s archenemy: each group is present in the other’s fantasies as the evil that threatens the accomplishment of the in-group members’ dream. Both perceive themselves as the moderate defenders of democracy and the other as representing irrational, radical forces. Both construct a Manichean view of society, leaving no place for authentic playful discussion and for the emergence of divergent positions. Both seek to create a civil religion and release “collective effervescence.”