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.