[spectre] <nettime> Transeuropean Picnic

[Inke Arns]

From:           	Felix Stalder <felix at openflows.org>
Subject:        	<nettime> Transeuropean Picnic
Date sent:      	Mon, 3 May 2004 16:12:47 +0200


Transeuropean Picnic

Historic events are odd things, mostly disappointing. They feel 
either like empty routines of calendarial arbitrariness (200 years 
French Revolution, the millennium) or utterly imposed (9/11, war in 
Iraq). Either way, they usually render one passive, through boredom 
or powerlessness. History, it seems, is always made by others. The EU
enlargement, somehow, doesn't really fit this pattern, eventhough it
had plenty of both in it.

Yet, it is also, or perhaps primarily, an unfinished event, one whose
actual meaning goes far beyond the "overcoming the divisions of the
cold war" or any other of the standard themes trotted out by
celebratory speakers on market squares across the continent. Its
meaning, really, will only slowly emerge, through the accumulation of
everyday practice. The EU, after all, famously lacks a vision.

How could such a practice look like from the point-of-view of open
media cultures? To think about this, kuda.org, together with v2,
issued an invitation to gather in Novi Sad, Serbia for a 
transeuropean pic-nic on the weekend of the enlargement [1].

Of course, being in Serbia, one cannot help but be reminded that this
great process of unification is also a process of creating new
boundaries, of establishing new visa regimes, border controls and
barriers to mobilities (which my spell checker insists to render as
'nobilities'). Yet, bringing together a hundred people from some 20
countries between the Netherland and Georgia on a shoe-string budget
and have them picnic on the porch of Tito's hunting cabin in the 
midst of a pristine national park, one felt equally that new 
possibilities were opening up, in the cracks of the major narrative.

This, as became more clear to me during the discussions, has to do
with the particular character of this thing, the EU, that is growing
before our eyes. Most importantly, the EU is not a state. It doesn't
raise taxes, doesn't have a military or a police force, doesn't 
create laws (only directives to be made into laws at the national 
level), or issue passports. It doesn't even have a sports team. Yet, 
it is also not a meaningless exercise of an out-of-control 
bureaucracy issuing 'symbols' and creating well-intentioned but 
freefloating 'discourses'. Rather, the best way to think of the EU, 
it seems to me, is as a gigantic coordination mechanism. It has a 
relatively small hub ('Brussels'), trying to get others nodes in a 
network -- some bigger, others smaller than itself -- to behave in a 
way that things can flow between them more easily. The enlargement 
just added a lot of nodes to this network. The coordinating hub's 
main function is to issue pointers that help to direct these massive 
material and immaterial flows.

The strange thing about these pointers is their consistency. They are
hard and soft at the same time. By directing flows, they create new
pools of opportunities, while draining others off their resources. 
For example, many educational institutions in Europe are going 
through painfull restructuring processes at the moment, not just 
because of funding problems, but because of attempts to reorient 
themselves according to EU pointers ('Bologna reform') hoping to then 
profit from the new opportunities created by the flows of people, 
projects and money being pumped through a somewhat more standardized 
European educational landscape. Of course, no institution is forced 
to do that -- that's the soft part. However, not doing it will amount 
to a self-marginalization virtually nobody is willing to accept -- 
that's the hard part.

The EU, then, is a myriad of such circulation systems whose main 
power rests on its ability to include or exclude nodes. The main 
difference between inside and outside of a network is that 
opportunities are created exclusively inside the network (through the 
circulation of flows of all kinds) whereas outside, marginality is 
structurally re-enforced all the time (by being bypassed).

The important thing is that the EU is not one but a myriad of
circulation systems. Many overlap and reinforce one another -- the
enlargement is also a process of accelerating such consolidation --
but the degree of overlap is much smaller than in a traditional 
nation state (say, the US). And this, it seems to me, is where 
independent cultural practices come in. They can contribute that this
consolidation of the patterns of inclusion / exclusion do not become
absolute. They can extend the networks to include nodes other than 
the officially sanctioned ones, thus making sure that not only
opportunities flows beyond the borders (if there is one aspect of the
EU that is state-like, then it's the Schengen Treaty), but that new
opportunities are created precisely because the cultural
micro-networks are different from the official ones.

This is not an 'Anti-EU' strategy, which was made clear by many is
picnickers is luxury that only those who inside the EU can afford.
Rather, it's a question of creatively redirecting flows, something 
one can only do if one is connected to them. The definition of what 
Europe is up for grabs, like it hasn't been in a long time. This 
strikes me as the true meaning of the EU enlargement. And if this 
'new Europe' continues to include picnics in the villas of former 
autocrats or plutocrats, there's definitively something to look 
forward to.



[1] http://www.transeuropicnic.org/index.htm



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