The main train station in Krakow, Poland exits directly into the Galeria Krakow, a large, relatively high-end shopping mall. On the second floor, there are two enormous maps of Europe, one above the entrance to a Carrefour grocery store and one on the facing wall. Below each is written the repeating slogan "Find your place in Europe."
Political maps generally reinforce the idea of nation states. By drawing borders, they create the visual impression that any two points within the same border, no matter how disparate in real space, are connected more to each other than they are to the outside world. (Russia might be the exception that proves the rule here; at the same time the map insists that Moscow and Vladivostok are both "Russian," the enormous distance between them on the paper quietly questions the notion of Russia as a unified country.) Political maps clarify borders, creating clean and fixed boundaries between states. As Ken Alder points out in The Measure of All Things, his history of the creation of the metric system, the very act of measuring and charting space is tied up in the creation of nation states as unified, centrally governed blocks of space; the act of creating a national map undermines older traditions of local autonomy.
The map in Galeria Krakow works in the opposite direction, undermining nation states in favour of a purely cosmopolitan and pan-European sense of space. In so doing, it nicely clarifies a vision of European union with which so many populist and localist voters have recently expressed distain.
First, and most obviously, the Krakow map eliminates any overt reference to nations. National names and national borders are removed, and are present only implicitly in the names of national capital cities. That implication, though, is thin. Given the immediate context (a shopping mall), the sense is that these cities have been selected more for their commercial importance than for their political ones. The elimination of nations is reinforced by the slogan underneath: One's place is in Europe, not in France or Croatia.
Second, the map establishes the city as the sole physical presence in a map of Europe. In a traditional map, the closed shape of national borders implies a kind of presence to the empty space within them, in the same way that by drawing a circle on a blank sheet of paper, you give a kind of mass to the space within the circle. Thus the empty space between, say, Paris and Lyon looks "French" because it is enclosed in the border of France, even if that space is literally blank on the map.
Here, the effect is much different. The non-city space is rendered as pure absence. There is no difference between the space of rural France and the space of the North Sea; both are equally absent and irrelevant to this vision of Europe. Thus rural Europe is not just de-emphasized (a perhaps justifiable decision in a map of economic or population centres), but erased. One must find one's place in this transnational Europe in a city; nowhere else exists.
Third, the language of this borderless, rural-less Europe is English. The city names on the map are in Polish (Praga is Prague, Warszawa is Warsaw, etc.). However, the imperative slogan is in English: Find Your Place in Europe. Just as, spatially, everything about the nation except its cosmopolitan cities is erased, so too are its national languages. The very command to find yourself within this transnational capitalist space is rendered in the default language of transnational capitalism.
Here, then, is encapsulated something of the worldview Brexit and its populist cousins reject, a Europe in which the rural and the national are erased in favour of a network of interchangeable commercial nodes.
