Mapping European Empire

Tabulae imperii Europaei

Russell Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317593065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Empire and maps are mutually reliant phenomena and traceable to the dawn of civilisation. Furthermore, maps retain a supremely authoritative status as unquestioned reflections of reality. In today's image-saturated world, their influence is more powerful now than at any other time in history.

This book argues that in the 21st century we are seeing an imperial renaissance in the European Union (EU), a political organisation which defies categorisation, but whose power and influence grows by the year. It examines the past, present, and future of the EU to demonstrate that empire is not a category of state but rather a collective imagination which reshapes history and appropriates an artificial past to validate the policies of the present and the ambitions of the future. In doing so, this book illuminates the imperial discourse that permeates the mass maps of the modern EU.

This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of political science, EU Studies, Human Geography, European political history, cartography and visual methodologies and international relations.

1
The non-imperial empire

Introduction

EUROPE manageth all Arts and Sciences with such dexterity, that for the invention of manie things shee may truely be called a Mother, and for the conservation of many rare things, to beare the title of a Nurturing Mother of humane wisdome: shee hath in her most excellent Academies, for all manner of learning, whereas other Countries are all of them, overspread with Barbarisme.

Gerardus Mercator
Atlas, 1595 (English edition 1606: xxiv)

Sometimes I like to compare the European Union, as a creation, to the organisation of empires. Empires! Because we have the dimensions of empires. But there is a great difference. The empires were usually made through force, with a centre that was imposing a diktat, a will, on the others. And now we have what some authors call the first ‘non-imperial empire’.

José Barroso
President of the European Commission
10 July 2007

At a press conference in Brussels in July 2007, José Barroso, President of the European Commission, answered a reporter’s question on the nature of the European Union with a comparison to empire. Within minutes his words had been transcribed, and video footage of his speech uploaded, onto that limitless repository of instant-access, one-click information – the World Wide Web (YouTube 2007). Yet aside from a few predictably peeved pundits in Britain’s eternally Eurosceptic broadsheets the next morning (Telegraph 2007), remarkably little attention seems to have been paid to his words. This is surprising. For not only is ‘empire’ a dirty word in today’s political arenas, a term from which politicians go to great effort to distance themselves (Beck and Grande 2007: 60–62), but even more significantly Barroso equates the European Union with what appears to be a logical paradox: a ‘non-imperial empire’. This frames our initial research question: what is empire to begin with, and how could empire exist in the form of the European Union?

Together, these are the principal questions which this thesis seeks to answer. ‘Empire’ is one of the most contested terms in contemporary international relations and political geography: not merely a word which refers to the archaic hegemons of the ‘marble and sepia pasts’ (Cox 2003) but a word whose subtleties and nuances are argued over at great length. It is a word which is deployed loosely, even lazily, to castigate policies and polities which individual writers simply do not like (Foster 2009). It is in this context that discussion of the European Union as empire has emerged. Barroso’s comment in 2007 was not the first mention of the EU as empire, neither has it been the last (Russia Today, 2013). The image of an EU empire has been created, and it requires investigation.

Background of the project

Studying the European Union as empire is germane for two reasons. The first is that the Union is a political structure which evades neat classification. It is what Jacques Delors calls an ‘unidentified political object’ (Zielonka 2006: 7) which stubbornly refuses to be pigeonholed into one of our neat, Western, post-Westphalian political categories. Even Barroso’s comment – a ‘non-imperial empire’ – sheds light on the inability to catalogue the Union using modern concepts. This warrants critical and sustained investigation, particularly as the Union does not exist in static isolation. It does not stand still but is expanding, racing to gobble up the remnants of its fallen Soviet rival, rushing towards the horizon, yet at the same time drawing a line and stating that this is where ‘Europe’ ends. Neither does the European Union exist in isolation – it serves as the standard to which other regional organisations, especially its African counterpart, earnestly measure themselves (Makinda and Okumu 2008: 3–7).

The second reason for studying an EU empire is more immediate. When this research project began, the Union was a proud and unassailable fortress: the standard of civilisation by which non-Union European states were measured, the progressive political project petitioned by polities desirous of gaining membership in what appeared to be ‘EU-topia’ (Gross and Benavot 2007). Yet since the project began, the severe weakening of the Union’s financial foundation has left the European Union, as of the time of writing, facing not only economic collapse but also the potential withdrawal of members. We can but hope that this organisation, which has created (or coincided with) the longest period of peace in Europe’s hostile history, weathers the storm. But the Union’s prestige is apparently unaffected. Even if it succumbs and the European Union vanishes into the history books, its legacy will resonate through Europe far into the future. For if the study of Europe teaches us anything, it is that the continent has always spawned movements to unify Europeans into a single community (Heater 1992). The European Union emerged from the European Community, and before that the European Coal and Steel Community, emerging from the ashes of a world war fought to defeat the previous, ghastly attempt at European unification. That prior attempt was the partial result of an earlier world war wrought in part by the aggrandising aggressions of Victorian vainglory and Bismarckian braggadocio – and these movements, too, were shaped and formed by the past, emerging from the centuries of struggle between Europe’s self-anointed sovereigns distantly descended from those peoples, lost in the mists of time, who scavenged over the carcass of Caesar’s Rome. And, as the epigraph with which this book begins illustrates, Europeans have invariably believed themselves to be superior to all other inhabitants of the Earth.

This is putting it simplistically, but the idea of a historical chain linking all efforts at European integration – past, present, and future – is well commented upon. Like all attempts at unifying Europe – violent and peaceful, long-lived and fleeting – the European Union is part of a historical chain: one more link connecting the disparate peoples of the continent with their imagined pasts and their unrealised futures. The drive to unify Europe has endured for millennia and it continues today, and we can confidently presume that it will continue to be maintained or sought under Europeans who are as far distant in time from the bureaucrats and legislators currently quibbling in the glittering glass conference halls of Brussels as we are from the praetors and proconsuls who ambled amidst the marble monuments of Rome. And like all efforts to create a single community, the legacy of the Union will endure far longer than the polity itself. It is for these reasons that this study has been written. This book is a response to the contemporary curiosity of just what the European Union is, and how its nature is conveyed to its populace.

The title of the book reflects the nature of empire by using the ultimately untranslatable word imperium.¹ As we shall see in the next chapter, although this Roman word is the root of the noun ‘empire’ in modern English and its equivalents in all contemporary Romance and Baltic languages, imperium cannot be neatly distilled into a dictionary definition. As L. G. Price (1969: 42) comments, ‘We cannot help speaking Latin and using Roman terms’, when our current languages lack an equivalent. Yet what allows us to unfold one particular set of assumptions about imperium and not another? We may look to the original language to elucidate meaning, but we cannot simply use imperium as the Romans did. We must first acknowledge our historiographical position.

If history is what we know about the societies which formed us, historiography is how we know this. And as a result of us looking back through modern eyes, historiography has inherent problems. As historian E. H. Carr writes:

We can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present. The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the conditions of human existence. The very words which he uses – words like democracy, empire, war, revolution – have current connotations from which he cannot divorce them.

(Carr 1961: 25)

Carr does concede that there is a way around this: using original terminology. But this solution carries its own pitfalls:

Ancient historians have taken to using words like polis and plebs in the original, just in order to show that they have not fallen into this trap. This does not help them. They, too, live in the present, and cannot cheat themselves into the past by using unfamiliar or obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their lectures in a chlamys or toga.

(Carr 1961: 25)

This leaves us at an apparent impasse. We cannot use empire, as it is too wrapped up in modern associations – size, power, oppression, territory. Equally we cannot use imperium, as we are reading a Roman word through modern eyes. Perhaps we can avoid this modern gaze by reading primary sources to elucidate the meaning of imperium? This seems on the surface to be a suitable method, but it also has its own problems. In the words of Boyd Hill:

Even when the sources tell us why the king did something, we would be foolish to take the statement at face value. Perhaps the chronicler had an axe to grind. Maybe he was simply currying favour. Or perhaps (worst of all) the king himself did not really understand his own motives any more than we can always understand our own.

(Hill 1972: 17)

We are still at the impasse. Previous scholars, seeking to understand the past in order to validate efforts at uniting Europe, have seen a vision of history which was ‘distorted by rose-tinted spectacles’ (Heater 1992: 111), seeing what they wanted to see rather than what actually existed. We cannot be sure what exactly the Romans meant, and neither could other scholars before us. Equally, we cannot simply read primary sources and declare that we have peered into the minds of the dead, when they themselves were undoubtedly just as confused about their own understandings of words as we are today. However, there is a potential solution to our problem.

While we cannot truly appreciate what earlier scholars meant by empire, nor explicitly why they used the word, we can see how they used it. It is these uses which lead us to the meaning of imperium. Not as it was intended by the Romans but as it has been interpreted since. Through document analysis we can see in what context the word was deployed, which may reflect various meanings ascribed to it. This establishes our historiographical position. We are not arbitrarily connecting the European Union to the Roman Empire according to cherry-picked characteristics, nor are we lazily using modern concepts to examine the past, nor are we claiming to understand the intricate and ultimately unknowable meanings of concepts held by people two millennia in their graves. We are instead tracing the perception of empire since the Romans, analysing how the use, rather than the meaning, of ‘empire’ has determined our understanding of the word. This research is thus located in the Nietzschean–Foucauldian tradition of political genealogy (Foucault 1980; Nietzsche 1989), arguing that the present can only be understood by reference to the past from which it emerged. The consequence is that empire is not a static and unchanging category but an idea whose meaning shifts in different times and different places. This places the European Union in a situation analogous to the Early Middle Ages, when, as Julia Smith (2005: 275) argues, ‘empire and emperors were often in the eye of the beholder’.

Structure of the book

Europe is no stranger to empire. Throughout our continent’s history has run a trend of rulers and governments seeking to legitimise their ambitions and their very existence by referring back to the Roman state (Erskine 2010: 4–5). This phenomenon has spent much of its history as a popular one, and while the image of imperium has shifted in the last two centuries – uneasily balanced between, on the one hand, the exemplar of order and a model for progressive states to emulate and, on the other, the epitome of violence, discrimination, and atrocity – the spectre of empire has remained prevalent in the imagination.

This is examined at length in our first substantial section. In Chapter 2, a review of literature on the subject is critically interrogated, examining how various political scientists comprehend European empire. The consensus reached is that there is no consensus and that ‘empire’ has become a term signifying almost anything the scholar wishes. The chapter subsequently argues that conceiving of empire as a category of state is insufficient. The investigation seeks to understand empire by returning to its linguistic roots in republican Rome, using textual analysis to trace its etymological evolution into a word signifying legitimacy, sovereignty, duty, destiny, and superiority. This concept became the subject of an intense struggle for prestige between the powerful monarchs of early medieval Europe. In the subsequent political squabble, the term ‘empire’ emerged as a title signifying civilisation, sovereignty, legitimacy, duty, and destiny. The chapter then examines how this discourse is expressed and spread in symbols and concludes that this is how we should interpret empire – not as a reflection of what a state is but a representation of what it should be, a discourse of superiority professed by those who deem themselves the guardians of civilisation. This latest manifestation of empire is the European Union.

In Chapter 3 the focus turns to our second object of study – maps. As in Chapter 2, a spectrum of literature is drawn upon to establish an understanding, allowing us to reject the simplistic understanding of maps as tools which reflect the world. Like empire, maps do not reflect the world but represent our perceptions of it, and maps have an authority which is almost never questioned, enabling even the subtlest political messages within them – even if they are not intended – to be accepted as truths. It is argued that maps’ greatest power comes not from the specific visual language of their component parts but from such phenomena as where maps are placed, what politics they are visually associated with, what purpose they serve, and who their intended audiences are. Contrary to traditional studies of cartography, which focus on the symbols of maps, our examination will focus more on maps’ broader context and material nature, including such considerations as where EU maps are located, what other forms of visual language accompany and intersect them, and who sees the maps. As such, this chapter argues that EU maps promote an imperial imagination through the novel phenomenon of cartoimperialism – the selective use of cartographic elements and styles to produce new territorialities and political imaginations wherein space and place become fused into a single concept defining what it means to be ‘European’, defined by an imagination of legitimacy, superiority, and destiny (Foster 2013).

Chapter 4 is the first analytical chapter, analysing a selection of maps produced by EU institutions in order to identify how such maps contain the imperial discourse of legitimacy, superiority, sovereignty, duty, and destiny. We examine European Union visual icons, including the flag, as maps in their own right, before examining more conventional cartographies. The chapter examines how the Union’s maps appeal to an artificial imagination – an ‘imagined community’ – and employs techniques of ‘banal nationalism’ to propagate a discourse through its visual iconography. Importantly, it is argued that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The non-imperial empire
• 2 All roads lead to Rome
• 3 Through the looking-glass
• 4 First among equals
• 5 Render unto Caesar
• 6 A new race of pilgrims
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates