Final Activity Report Summary - DISILLUSIONMENT (Eastern European Disillusionment and EU Enlargement)
The Central and Eastern European accession to the European Union (EU) has been a much contested process marked by great expectations as well as fears on both sides of the negotiation. The iron curtain seems like a long forgotten dream already as the rhetoric of today speaks mainly of reform, new enlargements, a new constitution or treaty, and, for the most part, a relatively smooth integration of 10 new Eastern European countries into the EU. Europe dreams big again, and Eastern Europe in particular. But are these big dreams warranted and will this process be as smooth as it seems? The project findings suggested that pessimistic sentiments in the EU were on the rise and were directly related to a series of important contradictions in the way in which the EU was perceived as well as in the way in which it sought to portray itself.
This project aimed to examine the nature of this pessimism or disillusionment within the EU, particularly within the new EU accession states, both empirically as well as theoretically, seeking to:
1. provide some useful case studies and empirical data
2. come up with a new theoretical framework for understanding disillusionment and
3. provide some suggestions as to how problems related to this disillusionment could be tackled.
The findings of the project rejected initial expectations that disillusionment could mainly be examined as a rhetorical or verbal act and suggested instead that signs of disillusionment were non-rhetorical and non-verbal in nature and could thus be most efficiently examined through material, emotional and visual responses. This shifted the locus of the analysis from recorded speeches and newspaper articles to unexpected sites, such as ruined industrial towns throughout Central and Eastern Europe, booming capital cities covered in posters and commercials that recorded, analysed and portrayed the EU in an overly positive fashion, the newly launched website of EU tube, shopping malls that signalled increasing fragmentation in the social fabric of these transitioning economies, EU Constitution campaign cartoons in France mocking Polish plumbers and, last but not least, Roma camps in Italy.
The examination of each of these sites provided interesting case studies that underlined the essential need for an aesthetic approach to disillusionment. Aesthetic theory, the work of Walter Benjamin in particular, thus became the theoretical framework for examining and understanding disillusionment. Unlike institutionalist or psychoanalytical theories, aesthetic theory unveiled disillusionment as directly connected to todays visual economy, stressing that expectations, and the illusions related to them, were often based not on what we heard but rather on what we saw. The malleability of images and sight in particular was thus both good and bad news; the same image could be construed to incite fear and delight as we saw in the French vote-no to the EU Constitution, which relied almost entirely on a xenophobic fear of immigrants from the East, particularly Poland, and the Polish humorous visual response to the campaign through a number of tourist adds portraying hunky Polish plumbers and nurses that chose to stay home.
The case studies led to the following, numerous, important conclusions:
1. the EU needed to pay more attention to the way in which it portrayed itself, as well as in the way in which its image was appropriated by the different member states.
2. the EU needed to acknowledge its negative images of xenophobia, gypsyphobia, fragmentation and disunity, and allow for creative new forums of discussion such as EU tube and online government to become, much more than marketing tools, rather essential ways of inciting more in-depth communication.
3. disillusionment with the EU was not a unique phenomenon to the accession states and should not be examined as such and, finally,
4. capitalism and todays visual economy played an essential role in determining both how we thought of the EU and what we wanted it to become.
This project aimed to examine the nature of this pessimism or disillusionment within the EU, particularly within the new EU accession states, both empirically as well as theoretically, seeking to:
1. provide some useful case studies and empirical data
2. come up with a new theoretical framework for understanding disillusionment and
3. provide some suggestions as to how problems related to this disillusionment could be tackled.
The findings of the project rejected initial expectations that disillusionment could mainly be examined as a rhetorical or verbal act and suggested instead that signs of disillusionment were non-rhetorical and non-verbal in nature and could thus be most efficiently examined through material, emotional and visual responses. This shifted the locus of the analysis from recorded speeches and newspaper articles to unexpected sites, such as ruined industrial towns throughout Central and Eastern Europe, booming capital cities covered in posters and commercials that recorded, analysed and portrayed the EU in an overly positive fashion, the newly launched website of EU tube, shopping malls that signalled increasing fragmentation in the social fabric of these transitioning economies, EU Constitution campaign cartoons in France mocking Polish plumbers and, last but not least, Roma camps in Italy.
The examination of each of these sites provided interesting case studies that underlined the essential need for an aesthetic approach to disillusionment. Aesthetic theory, the work of Walter Benjamin in particular, thus became the theoretical framework for examining and understanding disillusionment. Unlike institutionalist or psychoanalytical theories, aesthetic theory unveiled disillusionment as directly connected to todays visual economy, stressing that expectations, and the illusions related to them, were often based not on what we heard but rather on what we saw. The malleability of images and sight in particular was thus both good and bad news; the same image could be construed to incite fear and delight as we saw in the French vote-no to the EU Constitution, which relied almost entirely on a xenophobic fear of immigrants from the East, particularly Poland, and the Polish humorous visual response to the campaign through a number of tourist adds portraying hunky Polish plumbers and nurses that chose to stay home.
The case studies led to the following, numerous, important conclusions:
1. the EU needed to pay more attention to the way in which it portrayed itself, as well as in the way in which its image was appropriated by the different member states.
2. the EU needed to acknowledge its negative images of xenophobia, gypsyphobia, fragmentation and disunity, and allow for creative new forums of discussion such as EU tube and online government to become, much more than marketing tools, rather essential ways of inciting more in-depth communication.
3. disillusionment with the EU was not a unique phenomenon to the accession states and should not be examined as such and, finally,
4. capitalism and todays visual economy played an essential role in determining both how we thought of the EU and what we wanted it to become.