Biomic Politics: A Transformative Biodiverse Vision of Europe

Marcia Allison is one of the ten 2017 Milton Wolf Emerging Scholar Fellows, an accomplished group of law, doctoral and advanced MA candidates selected to attend the 2017 Milton Wolf Seminar. Their posts highlight the critical themes and on-going debates raised during the 2017 Seminar discussions.

From Biome to Biomic Politics 

The 1947 Marshall Plan brought peace to a divided and broken Europe after WWII. It was a policy of hope that rebuilt European nations under the narrative of an economically viable and united continent. Moreover, I posit that the Marshall Plan founded a transnational European identity, continued with the development of the European Union (EU). As Dr Hans Petschar posited during this 2017 Milton Wolf Seminar, the Marshall Plan kept Western Europe afloat in a mood of hope and optimism whilst the U.S. found itself embroiled in a Cold War.

Reflecting on grand transformative visions for Europe, especially against the backdrop of the Cold War, European policy and globalisation during the Seminar provided an enlightening opportunity for deliberation on my own scholarship in environmental communication through a media and diplomacy lens. My work examines the reformation of Europe after the Cold War through the lens of European climate policy and EU climate mitigation strategies, and the resulting biopolitical governance of people and land within the different biogeographical regions in Europe.

My specific case study is the European Green Belt (EGB): the pan-European biodiversity project built out of the former Iron Curtain. Over the 40 years that the Iron Curtain physically and ideologically divided Eastern and Western Europe from the Barents to the Baltic Sea, novel ecologies of flora, fauna, and animal species – many thought to be extinct in Europe – returned and regrew in the border’s negative space inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Discoveries of these ecosystems began in the 1970s and nature conservation efforts began in the late 1980s. This included preservation of the Iron Curtain relics – abandoned border defences and military facilities – as the Soviet Union collapsed. In 2003, regional conservation initiatives finally merged into a single Pan-European effort with the creation of the “European Green Belt” Initiative.

Today, the EGB is managed as a coherent biome over 12,500 kilometres/7,800 miles long but also split into four biogeographical regions: the FennoScandic, the Baltic, the Central European and the Balkan. All 24 countries through which the Iron Curtain existed now participate, providing a unified scheme for conservation, social reformation, improved diplomatic relations and economic prosperity via trans-boundary cooperation. From its origins as the Iron Curtain, this ecological corridor has transformed from a biome into a site of biomic politics – where biopolitical processes (Foucault, 2003) govern a state’s people and environmental policies. The EGB Initiative is also now framed under the EU’s 2020 biodiversity initiative, which aims for increasing biodiversity levels in EU member states in the next three years (European Commission, 2016). Biodiversity preservation is one of the integral aspects in the fight against climate change.

The various panels during the Milton Wolf Seminar afforded a vast opportunity for reflection on a Europe and European Union (EU) in flux as Brexit, the Syrian refugee crisis, networked globalism, political shifts to the right and the increasing threat of international climate inaction interconnect. As the former Iron Curtain border finds itself being rebuilt between Bulgaria and Turkey under the guise of European immigration concerns, this comes to the detriment of social progress and nature conservation. Thus, environmental policies cannot be untwined from diplomatic and cultural relations.

Trans-National Identity as Public Memory

Hans Peter Manz argued for the European Union as still the most successful example of peace building and conflict free time in the region. Manz posited that Europeans do not share a common story – a history, but not a narrative, as history is just a narrative invention to create nationhood. However, I argue that the EGB Initiative creates a narrative of European cooperation to overcome historical atrocities via this trans-boundary cooperation for biodiversity conservation. A European identity may not be built on a common language or ethnicity, but through this narrative of coming together despite historical adversity. The EGB is thus not only an environmental grand vision of Europe but also a humanitarian one.

The now transformed Iron Curtain has become a public memory project as the EGB. The preserved human relics of the Iron Curtain have been converted into interactive, communicative memorials to history whilst telling a narrative of a united European future. Watchtowers become birdwatching towers for a sustainable eco-friendly tourist activity; East German passport offices become museums to the GDR; and old Iron Curtain border fences become outdoor monuments to the Cold War itself – to that which was once divisive but now unifies in a communal European narrative. Families can even cycle approximately half of the border as the Iron Curtain Trail, as part of the EU’s EuroVelo long distance cycling network in a promotion of EU ecotourism (Iron Curtain Trail, n.d.).

As a model Green Infrastructure project for the EU (European Commission, 2013), the EGB solidifies the EU’s commitment to sustainable development by securing against biodiversity loss whilst cultivating ecotourism opportunities. The EU deploys the EGB nature symbolically and literally as a living gambit that transcended the divisiveness of European history. This creates a European public memory and identity of cohesiveness: where communism was overcome and diplomacy prevailed through trans-boundary cooperation. Ben O’Loughlin’s panel discussion on new narratives across geography, sovereignty and global information flows posited the weaponisation of narratives, information and the public sphere becoming synonymous with contemporary life. Does the EGB weaponise nature in the quest for a particular narrative of prevailing Western European democracy and EU biopolitical, biomic, power? Interestingly, during the seminar Ivan Kurilla critiqued this prevailing Western belief in democracy, and we can posit how communism versus democracy are conflated oppositions. Thus, we can see the EGB as a politicised topographical space, where the EU works with the EGB N/GOs as a supra-national biopolitical force for environmental, land and social reform as well as preservation.

Transforming the Physically Experienced Networked Society 

Nature has become a commoditised diplomatic resource for the EU, creating a narrative of sustainable development alongside this public memory project. Nature is used both by the EU and the EGB Initiative as a symbol for the flourishing trans-national relations between the 24 countries in their conservation efforts to preserve these novel ecologies. As the EGB hybridises cold war memories and natural ecologies, this former border is a rhetorical construction with several communicative, multimodal dimensions. This is the social semiotic, where multiscalar levels of information – from the visual, to linguistic, to environmental – are processed by individuals who are in turn influenced by cultural and societal discourses (Hodge, 2017). Information through semiosis at the EGB biome is thus abundant.

The abundance of information, and how news and information is distributed in this post-truth, networked global 21st century society was a key topic throughout the Seminar. Michael Freund asked how new technologies affects borders, and for information flow in the network society, borders become transcended with ease. Digital communication technologies have created what many scholars deem the information society, despite Manuel Castell’s (2000) critique that humans have never not lived in such an age. In the face of new communication technologies, Shawn Powers posited the need to consider an equivalent to the Marshall Plan in the face of a contemporary digital online world, artificial life and social bots that tweet autonomous messages. Considering the EGB Initiative as literally terraforming European borders under the legacy of the Marshall Plan, where does the role of the digital network society come in?

The EGB presents as a site to be physically experienced rather than consumed online in the digital sphere. Although it has an online presence, this is sparse compared to the multitudes of contemporary society. Rather than an informational project online, the EGB’s informational efforts have focused on the communicative resources and materials at biome itself – the monuments, informational plaques, QR codes, signs, museums, relics and nature. One asks if its social media presence should be expanded – the Initiative suffers from a lack of recognition despite the enormity and scale of the project. The project does not present itself on the global stage of climate mitigation strategies. And yet, the importance of affect (Pile, 2010) in physically experiencing the environment beyond the mediated digital world has been endorsed by cognitive scientists, environmentalists (Næss, 2010) and climate change scholars. Thus, although an improved social media presence would improve public knowledge of the EGB Initiative, there is also evidence that it needs to be physically experienced to truly communicate its biodiversity conservation message.

Biomic Power: The Intersection of Politics, Culture and Nature at the EGB

In order to experience this physical environment, we must acknowledge the biopolitical processes that create this site of Green Infrastructure. Transformative visions such as the Marshall Plan or the EGB both physically and ideologically terraform borders and nation states, as borders become deconstructed, nations become politically friendlier and in this era of the network society, more willing to share information. For the EGB, cooperation between countries, and newly defined nation states, was a necessity in order to conserve the former Iron Curtain border as a novel ecological space. But such cooperation also begets biopolitical processes over this biome into the realm of biomic politics.

The EGB narrative aims for panellist William Burke White’s multi-hub system: where no single state has the ability to lead, power is diffuse and moves from the global to the regional with the decline of the global hegemon. However, the EGB Initiative instead displays imbalances as Western EU powers from the Central European region biopolitically manage the former Eastern-Bloc countries in the Balkan region as well as the Baltic. Western European powers organise state and local actors and reterritorialise their land in an act of neo-liberal nature conservation, thus preventing economic development whilst preserving traces of violence with the Iron Curtain ruins and a transformed, but still people-less, border. The transformative vision of the EGB cannot help but invoke hierarchies of power, where transactional systems of politics still exist.

The Urgency of Transformative Environmental Policy 

The locus of new visions such as the EGB often challenge the status quo. For the EGB this was a divided Eastern and Western Europe, as it afforded trans-boundary cooperation over conservation strategies, which later merged into a larger scale EU biodiversity scheme for climate mitigation. This reimagining of a united, economically sustainable Europe rethinks the ideologies and diplomatic relations of the Marshall Plan. Yet, as Bobo Lo cautions, we should be mindful that such historical parallels do not entail too much ideological and normative baggage.

Lo posited that the West needs a new grand vision in the face of disinformation and “information warfare”, whilst Ivan Kurilla noted that context and timing are essential for such transformative visualisations. However, whilst U.S. propaganda was important for the Marshall Plan’s success, what was perhaps more significant was the exhaustion of Europe after the WWII. Whilst Petschar lamented the lack of European urgency in our contemporary continent’s climate, perhaps we can see the greatest resurgence of urgency needed in Europe for climate change action, whose exigence is more pressing than ever (Klein, 2015). Through a stronger digital, international presence, the EGB could call for greater insight into the importance for biodiversity conservation in regards to climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, the EGB Initiative would gain the recognition it deserves as the grand transformative vision for physically reforming Europe after the Cold War through transboundary cooperation and diplomatic natural relations.

References

Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume 1. Malden: Blackwell. Second Edition.

European Commission. (2013, May 5). Green Infrastructure (GI) – Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital. European Commission. 

European Commission. (2016). Biodiversity Strategy. European Commission. 

Foucault, M., Bertani, M., Fontana, A., Ewald, F., & Macey, D. (2003). Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (1st Picador pbk. ed). New York: Picador.

Hodge, B. (2017). Social Semiotics for a Complex World: Analysing Language and Social Meaning. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Iron Curtain Trail. (n.d.). The Iron Curtain Trail – Experiencing the History of Europe’s Division. Iron Curtain Trial. 

Klein, N. (2015). This changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Næss, A., Drengson, A. R., & Devall, B. (2010). Ecology of wisdom: writings by Arne Naess. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint: Distributed by Publishers Group West.

Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 35(1), 5–20.

About the Author

Marcia Allison is a British PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Her research intersects cognition, semiotics and social phenomenon in STS, feminist and environmental communication throughout the U.S. and Europe. Marcia’s PhD dissertation examines the reformation of Europe after the Cold War through the lens of European climate mitigation strategies, and the resulting bio-political governance of people and land within the different biogeographical regions in Europe. Her case study focuses on the human-nature relations of the European Green Belt: the pan-European biodiversity project built out of the former Iron Curtain. Marcia is currently a 2017 COMPASS fellow in environmental policy, a research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University, Denmark and a research assistant to G. T. Goodnight. She was also a researcher at USC Annenberg’s Earth Sciences Climate Initiative until the end of its tenure in 2016. Email: Marcia [dot] Allison [at] gmail [dot] com.