Introduction: A European Tale in the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony

Since the beginning of the Greek crisis in 2009, the capacity of the European Union to confront economic turmoil and political crisis has been viewed with general pessimism. With Brexit, ‘reality’ has taken hold, or so we are told, and the symbols of the Union are dissolving into the material and ideal interests of the Member States. It is often argued that the Euro was never a rational project, but a simple mistake, if not a mere political artefact. Germany rules, not the Council, not the Commission, even less so the European Parliament, all lost in their meaningless bureaucracies. The Union is just two steps away from relapsing into chaos.Reference Giddens ¹ For many, it is either a ‘federalist leap’ or nothing. For others, the dissolution of the European project has already started.

This essay takes a different tack. This may indeed be too cynical and fearful times for advancing towards a federalist project, especially one that mirrors the American example. But is chaos coming to Europe, unless Europe becomes a liberal state? The credibility of grand narratives has already been damaged for a long time in the Old Continent. The errors and massacres of the West’s morality tales, painfully suffered in Europe along its whole history, have prevented the type of collective commitments fashioned during centuries. Nonetheless, the EU has grown stronger, at least up to this point.

Should we see the lack of statist collective commitment towards Europe in a negative light? Or rather, as the very essence of Europe? Highly ephemeral commitments can and have to coexist with extremely personal and defining responsibilities: this is the central common message of Existentialism, and the necessary condition for a more active and lively search of common values, more rooted into everyday experience, aware of death, and thus less prone to bring the symbolic and material annihilation of individuals.

In fact, the European Union, as a cultural framework, and as a political project, has always aimed at re-appropriating and using this very Western project, so beloved in Sartre’s France, Beckett’s Ireland, Nietzsche’s Germany, Ortega’s Spain, Kierkegaard’s Denmark and elsewhere, and yet so politically perverted and misunderstood throughout history. Ultimately in tune with British liberalism, it is also more radical in its humanistic conception of the individual, the free spirit or the knight of faith, for it gives them the right to be, vis-à-vis technology. The opportunity has then presented itself to go deeper into the democratic essence of this project.

On Monday 10 December 2012, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize in an Oslo city hall populated by heads of state. In the very midst of the huge economic and political problems of the Union, the award, not without loud and perhaps fair criticism, aimed at re-opening, for narrative construction, the EU actual cultural foundation – not a mere market for coal and steel, but the massive suffering of the twentieth Century.

The leaders of the EU took the challenge on board. Even though the moment has been largely overlooked, it provides a window into the current underlying dispute for the meaning of the EU.

The speech had a puzzling title: ‘From War to Peace: A European Tale’. A ‘tale’? A ‘tale’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a ‘fictitious or true narrative or story, especially one that is imaginatively recounted’. It is also, according to the OED, ‘a lie’. Why choose such an ambiguous term, in such difficult times? Why not call it ‘a European triumph’, ‘victory’, ‘achievement’, even ‘The European History’? Why was the EU asking us to trust a tale, when it had the opportunity to speak the truth to the world? The narrative had to be validated, and more importantly, had to ring true to the current cultural heart of the institution.

‘A European Tale’ combines intense with delicate moments in its two speeches, the first one delivered by Mr. Van Rompuy, President of the Council, the second by Mr. Barroso, President of the Commission. Not surprisingly, the common background consists of the building blocks of the Judeo-Christian imaginary: love and sacrifice as the origin of political sovereignty, law and redemption, the ultimate meaning of suffering.

But there is indeed something puzzling for the modern sensibility in Van Rompuy’s talk. For he treats the EU as if it were... a mere stage! A ‘perpetual peace congress’, as the media quickly picked up, made up almost entirely of symbolic moments. He speaks of the Union as the holder of a ‘secret weapon’: ‘an unrivalled way’ Van Rompuy says, ‘of binding our interests so tightly that war becomes materially impossible’. Here, the Union is depicted as a sort of very expensive meta-narrative with the purpose of giving meaning to the suffering of the twentieth century: a way of turning peace into ‘a lasting peace, not a frosty cease-fire’.

In contrast, Barroso’s tone is much graver: Christian mythology is fused with the language of human rights, of justice, freedom, honesty, universality. Disavowing from the very beginning the connection of law with the sovereign nation, the EU, Barroso tells us, is ‘a new legal order, which is not based on the balance of power between nations but on the free consent of states to share sovereignty.’ In this case, the EU is depicted as a liberal institution given by the citizen to himself by way of the sovereign state. The massive sacrifice of the twentieth century appears as the act of foundation of an EU beyond the nation-states, the birth of a law that is irrelevant to sovereignty, in need of no other sacrifice than the sacrifice of identity itself.

Despite its differences, the two speeches of ‘A European Tale’ share one central aspect: the EU is an institutional purgatory. Without a written constitution, the EU has nonetheless at its core a project of Constitutional Redemption:Reference Balkin ² the political faith that the idea of Europe contains in itself the unfulfilled dream of the founding fathers – the possibility of breaking with a logic of vengeance and self-interest that dominates European affairs.

The two speeches, however, differ in another fundamental aspect: the openness of the codes of representation, the way that they let the audience enter and play with their meaning. Van Rompuy’s speech bets on an open code, self-consciously presenting the EU as a language game that is growing deeper roots than the ones it actually has. The condition: the possibility for European people to ‘share and shape a continent’, to develop a European identity, to be able to feel European law as their law.

Barroso’s speech rapidly closes the code, proposing a complete order of meanings beyond identity, otherness and sovereignty, which will eventually render all sacrifice into senseless violence, all suffering into senseless pain, impossible to read outside the codes of cosmopolitan law that compel, according to Barroso, intervention in Syria. As the narrative of the Enlightenment goes, all that falls outside this code is irrational, unreal, an ‘enemy of mankind’, a direct contradiction to our global times and the possibility of managing them. In global times, we need to renew our political contract. That is the meaning of the EU in the second speech.

The Foundation of the European Union as a Technological Tale

The suffering of the twentieth century opened a hope for a united Europe, but at the same time it dramatically weakened the popular trust invested in its constitutive traditions. If identity politics was marked with eternal suspicion, the Great Narrative of Progress was permanently attached to the nuclear bomb. This is the ancestral democratic deficit of the Europe, its core conflict of representation. Trapped into this cultural conflict, Europe’s political vitality is limited by its intuitive rejection of closed codes, and its rational distrust of open ones.

Yet, Europe has never been short of individuals who are beyond its cultural decadence. To them, we owe that, while there is indeed no viable alternative to Judeo-Christian love, ‘The Sickness unto Death’ and ‘The Gay Science’ seem now to be sharing co-official status with the categorical imperative. This is at least what the Nobel Peace Prize discourse appears to signal, and what the European Union’s technological tale reveals with even greater clarity.

Europe’s narrative trajectory around technology transcends every single foundational moment of the EU. Writing immediately after the end of Second World War, Martin Heidegger captured the technological consciousness that emerged from the most absolute devastation so far experienced by humanity. Technology can no longer be seen as a mere means to an end. Its instrumental conception is buried in the ashes of the rational political project it itself embodied. Nor is it a mere humanistic activity. There is no beauty in devastation: when meaningful violence (sacrifice) is empowered by technology, the result is plain nothingness. Technology, Heidegger tells us, is now a mode of revealing, an order of representation, it comes to presence only when truth happens, making this truth consolidate and proliferate as part of the ontological securities of the West.Reference Heidegger ³

‘A European Tale’ is well aware of this. If technology is the revelation of war, war is the revelation of Europe,Reference Van Middelaar ⁴ a suspicion that is aired from the very beginning: ‘War is as old as Europe. Our continent bears the scars of spears and swords, cannons and guns, trenches and tanks, and more.’

It is only after the Second World War, when the essence of Europe is finally revealed by technology, that the technological proliferation of truth gives Europe entry into an order of representation that was outside of her reach. The earth, as Heidegger investigates, is revealed as a coal mining district; agriculture becomes the mechanized food industry: the body and the soul are framed as a supply of patients for a clinic.

Yet, this is not the Truth of the Great Narrative of Progress anymore. This is a truth that seems to be self-conscious of its arbitrary moral textures.

Since the Second World War, the technological proliferation of truth has a well-known dangerous essence, for what it can ultimately reveal is nothingness, not material nothingness, but cultural nothingness, the total lack of meaning of the human enterprise, of the state, of sacrifice.Reference Kahn ⁵

Yet, the proliferation of technological truth bears in itself the possibility of salvation, of the Durkheimian sacred, which is not to master technology as an instrument, but to permanently watch over its meaning, safekeeping the collective trust in its collective truth.

Such salvation is what founders such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak had in mind when they manoeuvred to set up the Coal and Steel Community, the embryo of the EU.

The idea was not simply to intertwine the economic interests of the European states, to attempt forging a liberal contract, but to give a new meaning to two central resources of modern technology, so that the truths they would eventually reveal would not be the truths of massive violent sacrifice, but the truths of massive rational sacrifice, which is to say, the sacrifice of unbounded imagination – to make them boring.

To articulate such a project, it was of major importance to invest with narrative power people who would not be representing the modern state, a political entity that indeed defines itself as the monopolist of the legitimate use of physical force, but that is defined in larger terms as the ‘wannabe’ monopolist of the meaning of technology.

Once these post-state technological theologians (the European Commission) were reborn in institutional form, they would be in a position to watch over the new truths of technological development, to fine-tune the sacred and the profane codesReference Durkheim ⁶ that affect technological consciousness, to open or close the code of representation, so that the EU could progressively scale up its political, economic and cultural infrastructure without the cyclical setbacks that had desolated the continent.

The idea indeed worked, but the price was a limited foundation in terms of the modern mechanisms of political creation. The technological mass-violence of the Second World War was so brutal that the dangers to base the foundation of the EU directly in its suffering and sacrifices were too extreme. Despite the attempts of Monnet to extrapolate the political mechanisms behind the Coal and Steel Treaty to set up a European defence community, the founding fathers of the EU knew that they had already taken a pragmatic decision: they were most probably aware that no post-revolutionary Philadelphia moment was waiting on the horizon, that no European army was ever to be built upon such foundation, that their posterity was that of the history books and not that of popular imagination.

What they won in return was a position to narrate technology beyond the sovereign state, so that the emotional and material violence it could reveal could no longer be read, at least not so easily, in sacred terms.

European Technologies of Energy

During the Cold War the state dominates the technological discourse in the US and the USSR. The two superpowers are joined together by the very last credible rationalist meta-discourse of the Western world: military technology is to reveal technological progress, technological progress is to reveal a longer, safer and more egalitarian social life, and a better social life will ultimately reveal a more human form of communication, one that might even bring our existence to outer space. Through this tale, sacrifice is secured as the ultimate foundation of sovereignty; the state as the ultimate founder of progress.

Europe soon starts to follow this narrative with interest, and starts projecting itself as the protagonist of its own parallel tale.

On 25 March 1957, the treaty establishing a European Atomic Energy Community is signed, together with the Economic Community Treaty, by the original six member states. At the Capitol in Rome they agreed to ‘associate other countries with their work and to cooperate with international organizations concerned with the peaceful development of atomic energy’.

Even if little was explicitly heard about nuclear cooperation, to be part of the Community from then on has included accepting the truth of its technological tale. Since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the Community that appears as a mundane economic supervisor concerned with quotas, taxes, tariffs and prices, has in fact also been a post-state technological storyteller. When it started caring for ‘safety standards’ and ‘consumer welfare’, the Community was patiently building its own post-sacrifice linguistic order. When it started accumulating scientific budgets, the Community was patiently driving technology towards new forms of revelation.

Indeed, every time that a new revealing technology has entered the stage, Europe has invariably felt the need to renew its language, keeping the cultural codes of technological representation closed while facilitating lighter institutional forms of ratification and expansion.

This is the master political trick of the Union, designed from its very inception. While the underlying cultural mechanisms were becoming heavier and heavier, the institutional mechanisms were becoming lighter and lighter, from unanimity to majority, which ultimately allowed the gradual accumulation of more technology-targeted narrative and economic power in relation to the sovereign state.

The result: a massive trend towards natural and technological uniformity in the context of a persistent social diversity.

The technologies of energy that propelled Western modes of revealing became, through the narrative alignment of the political theologians of the Community and the environmental movements of the twentieth century, a revelation not only of a mundane market, but of the chemical and radioactive pollution of rivers, oceans, the air, the groundwater; the depletion of the ozone layer; a drastic decrease in the number of animal and plant species; land desertification and deforestation.

To be part of the Redemptive Community, the Western Sovereign State was now being forced to confess its role in the annihilation of perfectly sound ecological and spiritual cultures. The original sin of the Enlightenment´s reason was finally exposed,Reference Feyerabend ⁷ and from this catharsis a new technological tale was born in juxtaposition with the dominant Western narrative of sacred violence.

The new political dynamic that emerged from this contrast of narratives clarified and accelerated during the Arab-Israeli war that broke out in 1973, the Yom Kippur War – one of the many oil-related wars of modernity. Europe remained silent while the United States and the Soviet Union initiated a material and narrative escalation, ready to sacrifice people and resources for the World’s stability. That we still see this episode as a European failure, as a failure to act, is in fact the product not of some sort of essentialist reality, but reflects the cultural structures of the still dominant version of the global Western civil sphere.Reference Alexander ⁸

In fact, the Community emerged from the subsequent oil embargo and economic crisis as much less vulnerable to such cultural typification. This is the birth of the institutionalized cultural authority of the EU: a rather autonomous political voice, perhaps not identifiable in a single person, but explicitly present in the world’s stage, was now ready to take the floor and defend its own technological tale. Since then, the so-called dominant world powers have been forced to ignore the EU and, to advance their interests, strategically appeal to the personal ambitions of the few remaining European prophets of sacred, sovereign violence.

European Information Technologies

Already in the Information Age, the pattern continues: every time there is a new technological revelation, there is an urge for a new treaty, a new strategy, a new founding moment, a new language that ties technology to the growing EU world-tech-view.

Here it is a famous line of the Lisbon Strategy, signed in 2000: the EU sets itself the goal to become by 2010, ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’.

Now, there is no need to go into great analytical depth to see that the credibility of the discourse was carried away by the metaphysical exaltation stimulated by the novelty of the internet, and by the economic interests of a cunning private sector that sees the EU through the ethics of safari hunting. The inauthenticity of the statement is also the result of the very difficult position in which Europe was placed since it claimed for itself a unique political voice, without having a strong democratic mandate, at least a democratic mandate in the liberal terms that the sovereign state claimed for itself. In such a situation, to achieve narrative depth within a closed code of representation is simply heroic, for it requires fitting a strange balance of ideologies, identities and epistemological standpoints into a single discourse, generally spoken only in English. Few voices in the EU have actually succeeded in (emotionally) moving the European audience.

This discursive patchwork, though, has always had a major functional advantage for the Union: it doesn’t really matter if it fails, because the specific message never gets up citizen’s expectations: the message is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There are well intentioned objectives being set for the sake of accountability, but this accountability is carried out by the internal sphere of the Union, not by the citizen. There might be accountability but there is no clear responsibility yet in the EU. The credibility of the underlying technological tale of the Union was thus only partially damaged, waiting for the more interesting decades that were to come. In fact, that technological tale was already old.

The Lisbon Strategy was driven by a much more self-conscious will to intercept a technological tale: to make information and communication technology reveal sustainability and social justice, and not war.

In the 1930s, the modern computer started renewing the meaning of bureaucracies; of the administrative state. What the computer revealed was an empowered reason, now capable of automating and speeding up all sorts of complex logical tasks. All connections to the language of subjectivity, so damaging to the values of the Enlightenment, were finally dismissed with the second coming of the decentralized expert. With a Europe busy trying to control the meaning of the technologies of energy, the technologies of information revealed, without major opposition, the technologies of life, the technologies of the economy and the technologies of society: now the sovereign state was in a position to reveal, with the help of its own decentralized technocrats, the individual as an ever-evolving genetic code, the economy as an econometric model, and the world as a balance of power. The expansionist sovereign state, incapable of, or uninterested in, stimulating either social equality or social mobility, was redefined in the second half of the twentieth century as the entity capable of shifting the trends of informational determinism.

To this end, the electronic digital computer was soon encouraged to reveal another major truth: that technology could reveal itself; that the computer could talk to itself.Reference Castells ⁹ The early crucial overlaps between the internet and the United States Department of Defense seemed to indicate another smooth cultural coupling between the technological tale and the sovereign state. The internet was to be a new revelation of the industrialization of war, of salvation by military means. Deeply influenced by the symbolic significance of ‘national security’ concerns, it would have simply reinforced the quintessential modern narrative from which the notions of ‘expertise’ and ‘official secret’ are borne out. The coding of ‘piracy as the end of culture’ would have been firmly inscribed in the technology: a ‘good’ internet would have been a rationally ordered internet.

A Tale of Openness

And it still can be. However, the internet tale was told, as it has been recounted many times, with a language that did not synchronize well with modern policy cultures, thus creating multiple transitional tensions that are still being negotiated. What is perhaps more distinctive about the internet is that the discursive struggle about what the internet means has retained a level of autonomy from the narratives of rationalized institutions, a narrative that has even started to change the closed codes of the Community’s technological tale.

‘Openness’ is the affective force of the internet – not its real reality, but the emotional reality of the internet, the cultural lenses with which the majority of us still see and love the technology, even if we are not fully aware of it. The real reality of the internet is very different, and without it the cultural structure of ‘openness’ wouldn’t exist. But without the cultural structure of openness, the real reality of the internet would be meaningless, and most probably useless and unused as well. Until a new cultural structure emerged, the internet would not be capable of revealing anything of our social life, which is what technology does.

How ‘openness’ got to be associated with the internet is a story about the social movements of the 1960s, the technological innovators of the 1970s, the virtual communities of the 1980s, the entrepreneurs of the 1990s, and the academics of the 2000s, some of them directly behind the ideas of the Lisbon Strategy. ‘Openness’ was their tale, a tale with which institutions of all sorts, private and public, hungry to harvest the supposed economic benefits of communication technologies, are currently toying.

Yet, is ‘openness’ Popper’s tale? Is the internet ‘openness’ a mere continuation of the culture of modernity, of the belief in reason as the solution to war, poverty, inequality? A short incursion into the ordinary meanings of the term ‘open’ will hopefully make the question marks more persuasive. When we say that a person has ‘an open mind’ or is ‘open-minded’, we normally mean that he or she is ready to entertain new ideas beyond utilitarian or expert modes of activity. The individual is ready to leap into the unknown, prepared to embrace novel experiences with an uncertain result: he is called upon to display an attitude of ‘faith’ in the trustworthiness of new input from ‘the others’.

But there is another ordinary usage of the term ‘open’ that bears an even stronger connection with the subjective impulses of the personality, so suspiciously regarded by modernity. ‘Being open’ or ‘being an open person’ are everyday expressions that normally refer to the willingness or the capacity that a person has of communicating what ‘she really is’. However, this morality of authenticity includes an implicit expectation about the ‘negative’: a person is said to be like an ‘open book’ when she discloses not only the information that will benefit her, but also that which has the potential of harming her. ‘Openness’ in this ordinary sense presupposes awareness, tacit or explicit, of possible negative results. It can incorporate certain rational calculations, but the attitude of ‘being open’ always involves a significant amount of ‘hope’ or ‘faith’ that the group will value and purify the ‘authenticity’ of one’s motives when confessing the ‘bad’ in a more or less ritualistic fashion. The uncertain effect of whatever ‘negative’ information one is disclosing for external consideration is one of the most intrinsic characteristics of complex secular societies. However, this has not annihilated the impulse to seek ‘absolution’ or some sense of holistic connection brought by full external disclosure. It seems just possible to affirm that the ordinary language of openness (Oxford English Dictionary: accessible or access, exposed without cover, revealed, vulnerable, candid or ingenious, public or in public notice), so intimately connected to the internet culture, encourages the expression of such sentiment in a secular codified way.

In fact, the modern notion of an ‘open society’ articulated by Karl Popper in the 1940s, the notion that the sovereign, liberal state could rationally shape the physical and political settings of the natural trajectory of the social world, was not the first tale of openness authored by a European. Henri Bergson , another Nobel Prize winner, was the first to use and popularize the term already in the 1930s. ‘The closed society,’ Bergson wrote, ‘is that whose members hold together, caring nothing for the rest of humanity, on the alert for attack or defense, bound, in fact, to a perpetual readiness for battle’. On the contrary, the source of an open society for Bergson is what he calls ‘creative emotions’; an imperative, intuitive and irrational demand for creation and expression: ‘the open society is a society which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity. A dream dreamt, now and again, by chosen souls, it embodies on every occasion something of itself in creations, each of which, through a more or less far-reaching transformation of man, conquers difficulties hitherto unconquerable’ (Ref. Reference Bergson10, p. 255).

The United States of Openness?

Unconquerable difficulties will be conquered: civic engagement will be boosted, democracy will be consolidated, productivity will never decrease, information will be free for all. The wish-fulfilling rhetoric of Bergson’s prose is in fact highly reminiscent of the most utopian discourses surrounding the early days of the internet, a vehicle that was supposed to ‘transcend’ social, geographic and cultural boundaries. It is under the spell of a postmodern open society that the internet reveals the consumer, the user, and the citizen as the creative, intuitive forces behind a brand new world, no longer in need to be in a rational and ‘perpetual readiness for battle’; no longer in need to hide what’s ‘bad’, to sacrifice the energy awakened by its sense of national identity for the sake of the sovereign state. The internet freedom is freedom of thought: real freedom of thought, which is freedom from the objective realities of the state and the market.

The story of the revelations so far brought by the internet is the story of the political negotiation around the symbol of openness. The United States took the narrative lead to define the internet by both intercepting and aligning with openness, a symbol embedded not so much in its Constitution, but in its subsequent acts, in the Amendments of its Constitution. Without the amount of social support for free speech, cultural diversity, government accountability and privacy of the American society, much less fearful of open codes of representation than the rest of the Western world, it is impossible to understand the energy of the United States contributions to the openness of the Net. Yet, without the United States commitment to sacred violence as the foundation of the state it is equally impossible to properly understand the aggressiveness with which public and private American institutions have been trying to re-code the internet as a rational, and not an expressive, mode of revelation.

Due to this ambivalence, and the position of the US as a key holder of the means of symbolic production of the internet, the Net is now in an interesting cultural limbo, where it could in fact be losing its initial structure of meaning. ‘Sharing’ can easily become a massive lawsuit of copyright laws that are being enforced. Facebook ‘friends’ are starting to be perceived as a vanity fair of acquaintances. The ‘user’ is being used for big data gathering. Free knowledge appears now to be an excuse for targeted advertisements. YouTube aspires to be the next Netflix. The promise of an efficient welfare state gets mired in the frustration over a non-functional or over-complicated password. Massive post-modern jokes such as Angry Birds are used by states to activate personal webcams. The democratic revelation of the cultural prosumer has given rise to characters such as Justin Bieber, and it is through him that we now have to see Anna Frank revived in public consciousness. Networked activists have been massacred. Arab Springs have turned into Civil Wars. Online love competes with massive porn consumption, and the autonomous construction of the body with all sorts of sexual deviations. Collective intelligence seems now to be an excuse for gathering free labour. The citizen is violated by mass-surveillance programmes. Obama’s social media strategy credibility is ruined by the NSA. Open Government proves impossible to institutionalize beyond the institutionalization of leaks and massive leaks. The exercise of openness is tied to encryption skills: e-inclusion, to the fear of surveillance.

The Popular Legitimacy of the European Union

Where is the European Union technological tale in all this? In a very interesting position, I think. For what is this situation actually revealing? The sacred or the profane of the internet culture? Did the nation-state and big internet and media companies finally kill the dream of openness, or have they revealed themselves instead? Is this a closed or an open code of representation? Is this the return of the political, or the consolidation of the post-political? Is this 1984, or the Ministry of Silly Walks? Certainly, the image of a control room filled with UK Public Officials watching 1.8 million citizens engaged in sexual activities in front of their computer screens does not invoke hopes for the empowering role of states, but neither does it invoke an image of fear, nor excitement for the forthcoming revelations of the truths of Big Data. And if it doesn’t invoke these images it is because of the technological tale of the EU.

The European Union has been patiently developing the science and the rhetoric of the Digital Single Market since the inception of the internet. This is the central information society policy of the EU, which attracts enormous budgets and creative energy. Yet the Post-Lisbon Digital Single Market is not simply an instrument for growth and jobs, but an end in itself, the continuation of the European technological tale initiated by the beginning of the coal and steel market. The DSM and its associated economic and legal language (the fight of the profane fragmentation of ‘tax regimes, skills gap, state-aid, venture capital financing for companies, intellectual property regimes, privacy’) express the willingness of the EU to keep the cultural codes of the internet under control, so that the social and legal realities that the internet reveals are not reasons for war and cyber-war but expressions of peace and cyber-peace. But of course, many things have changed since the first interception of technology of the EU, which was the interception of modernity.

The EU can no longer be sold as a simple rational contract between the nation-states: a network-state, a utilitarian reaction to globalization. If the discourse of ‘shared sovereignty’ is now losing traction it is not because the idea of the EU is in crisis. Quite the opposite: the EU is now a well-established experiment of law beyond sovereignty, law beyond violent sacrifice.Reference Kahn ⁵ The meta-narrative of the current European Union is a discourse of rights. Rights that, ultimately, have to be enforced beyond the mechanisms derived from the member states.

The EU has now at hand sanctions, economic and legal sanctions, but also other types of symbolic sanctions, with a strong rhetorical charge. The EU can now produce visible reports denouncing the apocalyptic fragmentation of everything, press-declarations and files threatening Google itself, the God of Big Data, daily news speculating about the Commission’s opinion about the latest national sin, official country ranks establishing who shall inherit the Earth, and who shall urgently visit purgatory.

How is this cultural-legal systemReference Fornas ¹¹ actually legitimated? What gives the communication of the EU popular credibility, trust? Why are we all starting to feel the EU law as our law, as the law that is ultimately going to protect us from the return of the political state? Is it through reason, objectivity, a widespread cosmopolitan identity, a belief in the military enforcement of human rights? It doesn’t seem so, according to virtually all opinion polls available. A strong sense of post-national identity was necessary to set up the administrative machine of the political theologians of the Union, but that sense never went beyond the administrative and economic elite.

Openness is what is behind the contemporary legitimacy of the EU: not Popper’s openness, not Marx’s openness. Bergson’s openness, existential disclosure. The openness of self-expression, of creativity, of intuition, of subjectivity. The current EU is indeed a Greek tragedy, but a very different one from the story that persuades the so-called populist critics. The EU is vulnerable to cultural typifications as being too technocratic, an institution with no soul, as being weak when it is time to act beyond the law to protect citizens, and yet with an arrogant sense of moral superiority. But this type of narrative is not new. In fact, this is as old as Saint Paul, this is the Biblical tale of the contradiction between law and love. A rhetorical contradiction that penetrates the neo-Christian imaginary of Max Weber, of Franz Kafka, so central to Western culture as well, and so many times used also by the nation-state in its coded criticism of its own institutional child, which turned out to be quite faithful to a new type of law, and quite difficult to control at the same time.

The Olympian forces of the EU are not throwing their bureaucratic lightning bolts to Josef K., at least not yet. They are throwing them to the agents of rationalization: the nation-state, big private companies, even perhaps to universities, more and more attached to the narratives associated with the research budget of the EU. The meta-narrative of Europe exists through the state, and in coordination with the nation-state. It was created forcing a coded political confession: ‘we have used the revelations of modern technology for war, and not for peace, as we said we would do’. Yet, after the nation-state assumed its role in the dark side of modernity, emotive reason turned against instrumental reason. There is a Trial above the Trial going on now, and the fact that Josef K. isn’t paying much attention to this doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel and appreciate the effort in creating a secure space for his subjectivity to emerge. Maybe this is precisely why he is not paying much attention. He might be ‘indignado’ and ‘unemployed’, but also quite busy enjoying the gradual unbounding of his subjectivity and love for ‘selfies’.

European Communication Technologies

The current process of popular legitimation of EU law is not caused by internet openness, it is part of the same tale, which is not the reality of the internet, but its affective force.Reference Mansell ¹² The popular legitimacy of the EU is not just a rational-liberal contract, based on the realities of globalization and the internet: it is increasingly an emotional democratic contract with openness. It is indeed about the dis-fragmentation of everything, including closed markets, closed legislations and closed codes, so a new type of citizen-centric, user-centric, consumer-centric European unity can be revealed.

This emotional commitment to the subjectivity of the European Citizen is the new ritual of entry to the EU: having acknowledged its guilt in the revelation of mass-sacrifice of people and the Earth through modern technology, the European sovereign state has now an even more arduous job in dealing with the tough, rhetorical questions being posed to its internal, rationally closed technological narrative: are any of these reforms working? Is the mass-surveillance of the citizen’s body solving security issues? Is more informational bureaucracy addressing inequality? Is more informational privatization addressing inequality? Is more national copyright stimulating cultural production? Are more computerized borders solving human trafficking, the dramas of economic emigration, the realities of post-national intimacy? Is more investment in the modern system of science solving cancer or mental health issues? Is more broadband solving territorial exclusion? Is putting computers in classrooms solving the massive resignation of students?

These are not the revelations of the internet, the European technological tale goes: these are the real scandals of reason’s reality. The real revelation of the internet is really You, not the surveilled you, not the flattered you, not the Time’s Person of the Year You, not the empowered you of the commercials of telecommunications and internet companies, but you, You, the subjective you, you and your consciousness, you and your subconscious, you and your strengths and your weaknesses, your hopes and fears, your rights and duties, your personal identity and your national identity, you and your joy, but most of all you and your suffering.

The EU needs of course to offer some tangible and rational solutions to the very real post-military suffering. It has to if it wants to actually survive as a credible institution. Yet, to connect with the immediate experience of Europeans, what the current idea of Europe is gradually representing is a new tale that gives meaning to collective and individual suffering beyond military and religious cosmologies, even beyond the EU itself. This is indeed the romantic tale of open markets, open government, open data, open science, open source, open borders, open earth and open posterity. This is also the daily tale being told in the ritual exchange of euro notes and coins, where the EU keeps for itself the symbolic representation of technology and engineering, but opens-up the other side of the coin to the sharing of national heroes and mythologies. The openness tale is a tale that indeed has no meaning at all, except a renewed ultimate meaning for the Western world, which is not the meaning of those who own the truth of sovereignty and heaven, but those who freely chose to believe in the meaning of subjectivity and tolerance.

Conclusion: An Ongoing European Technological Tale

Will the very European imaginative realm of subjectivity be betrayed again, or will it join forces with a rather fragile technological tale to finally re-create the narrative basis of a new collective existence? This is what is at stake in the future relationship that the institutions of the European Union will establish with technology. The EU can choose to join forces with scientists and poets, and try to persuade our inner instinctsReference Latour ¹³ to trust a visible tale, where our own suffering, the suffering of the other, and the suffering of the earth are joined through a story made out of subjective expressions and cultural pluralism.Reference Rorty ¹⁴ The EU can also choose to join forces with scientists and poets, and try again to move our outward impulses with a patchwork narrative of salvation through the wonders of truth and technology, through the language of experts and prophets that are not blended with ‘the people’.

But whatever decision it takes, there is a question that Europe will have to address sooner or later, and which remains deeply rooted as its central collective fear: can the imagination of Europe be unbounded again? Are citizens ready to shape Europe, ready for free expression and free thought, ready to attach subjective meaning to an intrinsically meaningless collective tale without falling into cynicism and despair? Are state institutions ready to propose their own technological story, to shape technology in accordance with their cultural diversity, without falling into war and oppression? Is a tale of openness still a Faustian tale?