Green is the new black: the European Union’s green agenda, its narratives, and the fantasies that animate them

In the face of cascading environmental disasters, a green agenda has become an ideological backbone of the European Union’s governance. However, within the wider green discourse in the EU, critical research describes the EU’s agenda and its dominant narratives as contradictory and infeasible at large. For example, the latest climate neutrality narrative is presented by the European Commission as transformational but seems to be perpetuating the already established principles of ecological modernisation. Despite the presence of other narratives, what mechanisms legitimize climate neutrality and, by extension, the EU’s green agenda? This article argues that the persistence of dominant narratives within the green agenda is legitimized by their affective dimension. This article describes the dominant narratives within the green agenda, puts them in the context of the wider green discourse in Europe, and uses the conceptual toolkit of Critical Fantasy Studies to identify and interpret the major fantasies that legitimize the climate neutrality narrative. An analysis of the European Commission’s public communication, specifically social media content, revealed five major fantasies: a fantasy of competency and preparedness, a fantasy of a scientific fix, a fantasy of green European citizenship, a fantasy of Europe's nature, and a fantasy of the EU as a global green leader. It is argued that these fantasies provide two major anchor points for affective investment: they satisfy the public demand for a transformative change in the context of the so-called climate anxiety through shaping a new climate-centred narrative but continue offering familiar technological and economic solutions. In contrast to techno-managerial analysis of the EU’s green policies and towards a holistic approach that incorporates discourse-oriented research, this article suggests that thinking about policy agendas ‘fantasmatically’ is useful to understand why problematic policies persist.