Images from Paradise: The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

Eszter Salgó teaches at the Department of Political Science and International Affairs, at John Cabot University, in Rome. Her previous work includes Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in Mothers’ Hands (Routledge, 2014).