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Abstract
This article examines the EU Birthday Logo Competition, which was launched jointly by the major European Union (EU) institutions to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2007. As the first public communication initiative by the European Commission's newly restructured Directorate General for Communication, the logo competition is a particularly rich micro-textual “site” for a critical investigation of the recontextualization of corporate communication discourses and practices into institutional approaches to the communication of EU identity. Through an analysis of policy documents, on-site observations, textual artifacts, and in-depth interviews with policy-makers and design professionals I argue that the tensions and challenges that characterized the EU Birthday Logo Competition and related EU communication policy as a site of recontextualization may have led to the communication of a much more stylized, rather than complex and nuanced, version of European identity. In particular, I argue that the dialectic between the “professional/corporate” and “institutional/political” cultures that interacted in the selection, production and implementation of the anniversary logo may have contributed to obscuring key principles of corporate branding at work in the design, and may have in fact worked to produce a highly generic, decontextualized and ultimately also bland, although certainly problematic, “vision” of EU diversity.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, the author would like to thank the interviewees, who gave their valuable time and effort to answer her questions, and allowed their opinions, ideas and names to be included in this study as per pre-approved informed consent procedures. This research was made possible by generous funding from the University of Washington Simpson Center for the Humanities, Graduate School, and Department of Communication. The author thanks Isacco Turina and David Hesmondhalgh for their helpful comments. The author is also grateful to Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski for their expert advice on this work.
Notes
1. The European Commission is the main “laboratory” in which European integration is imagined and planned across a wide array of spheres of political intervention (ranging from enterprise and industry to education and culture). While both the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament are in charge of decision-making and passing legislation, the European Commission is in charge of defining political objectives and is the main source of the proposals and directives that shape the Council and Parliament's actions.
2. In this regard, the 2005 communication starts with the observation that the most recent Eurobarometer survey showed a steady decline in public approval of the EU. While membership of the European Union was still supported by 54% of EU citizens, the image of the EU had steadily worsened in citizens’ eyes with only 47% of respondents giving a positive response. Trust in the EU had dropped from 50% of citizens trusting the EU in autumn 2004 to 44% in spring 2005. In other words, post-Constitution vote figures demonstrated that the “European project” per se did not lack the support of the majority of European citizens, but that the EU's image and its citizens’ trust had been decreasing.
3. In their work on the strategic appropriation of the homosexual “closet” metaphor by the atheist movement, for example, they point out that “the (re)framing of the closet metaphor by atheists may unintentionally end up reinscribing those discriminatory discourses which intentionally obscure the material consequences of homophobia” (Anspach, Coe, and Thurlow Citation2007, 114). This is partly because, in the process of transferring the metaphor from its original domain, the atheist movement also “privileges a particular interpretation of homosexuals’ experience: that ‘coming out of the closet’ is easy and successful, on the one hand, and that homosexuals are no longer a marginalized group on the other” (Anspach, Coe, and Thurlow Citation2007, 113).
4. This model, Hedlund added, is significantly different from the approach to communication that has been prevalent in the European Commission until recently: “It has been so scattered before; it has not been the Commission's voice”. Hedlund explained that this is because different DGs have traditionally relied on their own communication units to release information on issues of public interest, in ways that were, however, limited to their own areas of competency and thus also isolated from overlapping interests in other DGs. In addition, before its reorganization, the DG Press and Communication used to work mainly as a channel for institutional relations with the media, and especially the elite press, rather than as an instrument for communicating the European project as a whole directly to European citizens.
5. Hedlund's observation about the lack of communication professionalism across EU institutions was reinforced by Roudié, who added that the year 2007 also marked the first time that the EU set out to hire a number of professionals in the field of communication and information, through an “institutional competition, arising from the Commission's desire to improve its communication policy”, which was also “the first one ever organised in the field of communication” (Directorate General Communication 2007).
6. Paye started working for the European Parliament in 1978 and until 1989 she was a press attaché for the Parliament's Service de Presse. That year, Paye was moved to Publications and Public Events to work specifically on the Parliament's visual identity: “As soon as I started working for the Parliament as a press attaché, I noticed the absence of image”, she stated. However, Paye mostly worked on her own until much later – she alone was, in fact, the Parliament's Cellule Image. Paye said that it took her 16 years to get the European Parliament to adopt its own distinctive logo, an EU flag surmounted by a stylized hemicycle representing the typical physical appearance of a parliament's hall.
7. In addition to different takes on the kinds of criteria that the winning logo should fulfill, there was conflict in relation to the way in which the competition had been organized. This conflict revolved around issues ranging from the timing of the competition to complaints about the fallacious approach to intellectual property purported by the competition's call for proposals, stating that all submitted work would automatically become property of the European Commission, which therefore would also become “the owner of the work and of the distribution and reproduction rights” (Rules for the Competition Citationn.d., article 5, para. 1). Instead, from a legal standpoint, the intellectual property of a creative product can only be owned by its author(s). Another member of the jury, Erik Spiekermann, was especially indignant about this error and, in general, the way in which the competition was managed by Media Consulta for the DG Communication: “I have enough projects, I don't need the EU, so I was perhaps the loudest voice”, he said. “Whenever I work on public projects, usually the people working in public bodies are clueless about communication; they usually have bad people advising them”, he then added.
8. In relation to this last point, Shohat and Stam (Citation1994, 46–47) point out that, in the discourse of Eurocentric liberal pluralism, diversity is most often displayed in ways that tame and sanitize rather than truly express and honor the multiple voices, tensions and inequalities that are at the heart of diversity; for example, by means of “uncontroversial” – yet highly ideological – metaphors such as “gorgeous mosaic” and “smorgasbord experience”.
9. Most of the visual concepts that were placed among the first 10 in the EU Birthday Logo Competition actively exploited multiplicity in their visual imagery – despite the fact that, explicitly, designers were only required to visually render the EU's achievements over the past 50 years and hopes for the future (cf. Europa Press Releases Citation2006). In addition, the pre-selection done by Pinto and Media Consulta on behalf of the DG Communication was also ridden with imagery of the same kind. For example, the logo that was placed second in the competition uses a combination of five main colors for the phrase “EU 50”, and the one that was placed third uses a combination of different representational resources – namely, phonetic markers from across European languages rendered in different colors and placed on the different letters (portrayed in grey) that make up the phrase “European Union”. In the statements accompanying their submissions, the authors of these logos themselves highlighted diversity as a key trait of their design ideas. For example, Tore Rosbo, the creator of the logo design that came in second, stated: “The multitude of colors symbolizes diversity and the overlapping color combinations created by the transparency represent the strength of cooperation and unity” (emphasis added). Along the same lines, Jenny Lundgren, whose logo design was placed third, explained that “[t]he accents (diacritic marks) symbolize the diversity of languages, pronunciations and expressions that exist in the union” and that “[t]ogether the accents form a colourful confetti to celebrate the EU's 50th birthday” (emphasis added). In their submissions, both young designers programmatically visualized the semiotic resources at work to convey such idea of diversity: a chart explaining the linguistic and national provenance of the diacritic signs adorning the phrase “European Union 50” or, more simply, a palette of solid colors neatly laid out in squares on a column in opposition to overlapping transparent colors conveying an idea of “unity”.