Conceptual Framework and Integrative Sources #1
1. Cognitive Corridors
Cultural and symbolic structures that limit what can be thought and said. Cognitive corridors are implicit circuits that define what is sayable and thinkable in a given historical moment. Example: during the pandemic, only certain narratives were acceptable on talk shows and in public documents. This is a cognitive corridor.
2. Flow
A continuous and often cross-border movement of material and immaterial resources, governed by visible or invisible infrastructures.
3. Node
A point of concentration and intermediation of flows (capital, data, energy, goods) that determines strategic power regardless of territory.
4. Crisis of Recognition
A political phenomenon in which the citizen no longer feels seen or represented by institutions, even if formally included in the system. The concept refers to the misalignment between citizen and institutional structure: not only are votes missing, but mutual recognition is eroded.
Sources: European Parliament (2019), ISPI (2023), Censis (2022)
5. Multilevel Governance
An institutional structure in which multiple levels of government share decision-making responsibilities (e.g., EU, state, local authorities).
A small step to begin, a map to “decode” reality…
The first article of the theory is coming soon!
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Crisis of Categories #2
“Fracture and Breach: beyond federalism and differentiation, toward a geopolitics of flows”
Introduction – Europe in fracture: Federalism, Differentiation and the rise of Flows
The European Union stands at a critical juncture – not only due to the accumulation of systemic crises, but because of the growing inadequacy of the analytical categories used to interpret them. While public debate continues to swing between the federalist utopia and the tactical practice of differentiation, geopolitical reality seems to run on entirely different tracks: those of flows.
The EU crisis, already exposed during the great recession of 2008 and exacerbated by events such as pandemic management and recent geopolitical tensions, has shown that the resilience of the European project is no longer played out solely in the balance among Member States, but rather in its ability to embed itself in – and compete within – the new global corridors: infrastructural, energy-related, digital, logistical, and regulatory.
This is the central thesis: federalism and differentiation are symptoms of a static system trying to adapt to a fluid world. The real key is not to decide who governs, but to understand how flows move and intersect.
Today, Europe is traversed – and often bypassed – by alternative corridors such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasian Middle Corridor, south–north energy routes through the Mediterranean, and global regulatory platforms (e.g. AI, ESG).
The current debate: A sterile confrontation
The debate on the reform of the European Union has historically revolved around two dominant theoretical models: federalism, which aims for deeper political union, and differentiation, which accepts and manages the reality of multi-speed integration. Both visions respond to institutional logics, but tend to overlook external transformations that redefine power in functional rather than territorial terms.
Federalism, though supported by historical figures like Altiero Spinelli and revived in critical phases, encounters obstacles linked to the resistance of Member States and internal fragmentation. Differentiation, on the other hand, presents itself as an adaptive strategy, visible in special regimes such as Schengen or the Eurozone, but with the risk of undermining overall cohesion.
Both options, when viewed in the current global context, appear as tools designed for an architecture of power that no longer exists. insufficient to explain and manage the new forms of transnational power that move along networks, corridors, and standards.
The logic of Flows: A paradigm “Shift”
In today’s context, power no longer concentrates solely in institutional centers but is distributed along flows – both material and immaterial – that cross borders and institutions. Flows of energy, data, goods, norms, and human capital now define the real trajectories of geopolitics.
Control over logistical corridors, digital infrastructures, energy nodes, and cognitive circuits has become a crucial dimension. For the EU to maintain centrality, it must conceive of itself not as a vertical union of States, but as a horizontal network of strategic connections to be strengthened and protected.
From this stems the proposal for a new interpretive paradigm: the geopolitics of flows.
The geopolitics of Flows: A new “Map of Power”
Power is now exercised through the ability to direct, regulate, or divert flows. Emerging actors – digital platforms, global cities, regulatory networks – occupy central decision-making spaces without necessarily passing through States. The EU already has tools to influence: just consider the GDPR, the Green Deal, the AI Act. But vision and strategic coherence are needed.
This new map of power privileges nodes (ports, data hubs, industrial zones), networks (transit routes, standardization platforms), and breaches (critical physical or regulatory passages). The challenge is to govern these elements in a coordinated and systemic way.
Proposals: Toward a European Networked Governance
1. Overcome the center-periphery logic: promote distributed poles, hub cities, and multilevel networks.
2. Invest in flows: resilient logistical, digital, energy, and cognitive infrastructures.
3. Build transnational alliances: based on connectivity, not just geographic proximity.
4. Integrate flows into policy design: adopt an adaptive, interconnected logic grounded in flow analysis.
The geopolitics of flows is not an abstract theory, but an operational lens to understand the world and act within it.
(All contents of this article are protected by copyright and reflect original elaboration. Reproduction, even partial, without the author’s permission is prohibited)
Adaptive Governance ? #3
“A new systemic approach: The ‘Node’ and the ‘Collapse’ – Where power concentrates, when traditional geography no longer holds”
Introduction – The Silent Collapse
In official narratives, the European Union appears as a space in crisis but still solid: shaken by geopolitical tensions, internal inequalities, and social unrest, yet equipped with institutions, treaties, cohesion plans, and formal democratic legitimacy. And yet, beneath this surface, something deeper is unfolding: a crisis of representation, preceding the crisis of legitimacy.
Power – in its operational form – no longer concentrates where we look for it. Not in Parliaments. Not within national borders. Not in traditional redistribution mechanisms. It has shifted into flows: of capital, data, energy, people, goods. And it organizes itself in nodes (Castells, 1996; OECD, 2022).
Institutional politics, however, continues to rely on a a static conceptual map built for a different century. , built upon twentieth-century categories: territory, sovereignty, law, belonging. This is where collapse emerges – not due to external enemies, but because the very lens through which we interpret power has fallen behind its real morphology (European Commission, 2020; ForumDD, 2022).
Flows as the new field of Power
European democracies were built on a territorial logic: those who control a territory administer it; those who represent its citizens regulate its resources; those who govern space exercise sovereignty.
But today, space alone no longer explains power. The world is crossed by flows – of data, energy, capital, bodies, and material and symbolic goods – that do not move according to administrative maps, but along invisible or privatized infrastructures (Easterling, 2014; ECFR, 2021).
Those who govern these flows do not need to engage in politics. It is enough to control a node (World Bank, 2021; Global Infrastructure Hub, 2020).
A strategic port (like Piraeus), a segment of undersea cable, an energy hub in North Africa, a logistics algorithm, a cloud computing backbone hosted by a tech company.
These are the new command centers, even if they do not appear in public law textbooks. China has understood this well with the Belt and Road Initiative: its expansion is not about annexing borders, but about securing nodes. The United States does so through digital platforms and the ability to block or redirect global information flows. Even NATO, in its most recent documents, highlights the vulnerability of interconnected civilian infrastructures.
The European Union, by contrast, continues to see itself as a normative space, but does not act as an infrastructural subject of flows. It loses ground because it fails to recognize the battlefield – and when it does, it is often too late or too slow.
What are “Nodes” (and why no one governs them)
A node is a point where flows concentrate, are filtered, or transformed. It is not a physical place in the traditional sense, but a geopolitical function: an interface that allows data, energy, capital, or goods to pass through, to be monitored, encounter friction, or flow freely.
Concrete examples:
• The Port of Piraeus (Greece), now 67% controlled by Chinese company COSCO, is a strategic Euro-Asian logistics node (UNCTAD Port Performance 2023).
• Submarine data cables, like BlueMed or Meta’s 2Africa, carry 98% of global internet traffic (OECD, 2022).
• Energy hubs in Tunisia, Algeria, and Mozambique are under strategic scrutiny by ENI and the EU for post-Russian gas supply security (European Commission, REPowerEU, 2023).
• European data centers, often owned by U.S. or Chinese companies, manage sensitive public and private data without full legal sovereignty (EPRS, European Parliament, 2022).
The paradox is that these places determine access and power but escape public governance radar. They are often:
• privatized,
• transnational,
• or managed by opaque actors (joint ventures, sovereign funds, Big Tech).
Moreover, taxation is minimal or nonexistent. Those who intermediate high-value flows are not subject to taxation proportional to the power they exercise. And those who should regulate these nodes – States, the European Union, multilateral agencies – have not yet built adequate tools to do so.
Current governance, born to protect territories and citizens, is not equipped to regulate what is constantly in motion.
Democratic crisis as a result of disconnection
In the last ten years, European democracies have faced an evolution of political unease that goes beyond electoral instability or abstentionism: it is a systemic disconnection between citizens and power structures.
The data confirms it:
• 2019 European elections: 50.6% turnout, with strong territorial disparities (European Parliament).
• France, legislative elections 2022: over 53% abstention in the first round (Ministère de l’Intérieur).
• Italy, general elections 2022: 63.9% turnout, historical low (Italian Ministry of the Interior).
At the same time, the political forces gaining the most support are those that simplify flows: they block, filter, select. Fluid right-wing movements do not offer a territorial project: they offer emotional interfaces to citizens already immersed in a fluid reality they do not understand.
Citizenship does not disappear: it is reformulated. It becomes intermittent, selective behavior, reactive to flows. But the State continues to see it as a fixed, resident, representable subject. The result is a crisis not of participation, but of structural recognition.
The “Node Theory” as an “alternative Map”
If power is no longer distributed by territory, and citizenship is no longer organized in stable classes or affiliations, then governance must also change its map.
The Node Theory arises from this observation: the node is the new political unit of the present.
Governing through nodes means:
1. Mapping and classifying critical nodes
TEN-T, EU cybersecurity, digital sovereignty: these are partial attempts, but there is no integrated governance model.
2. Taxing and redistributing intermediation
Taxation must target those who intermediate flows, as in the OECD models of minimum taxation for global corporate groups.
3. Reconnecting citizens to local nodes
Ports, data centers, and energy communities must become democratic nodes, not just functional structures.
The Node Theory is not a technocratic utopia. It is a concrete political proposal for a new democratic pact within intermediate economies. It is an operational framework to read crises and design new forms of adaptive citizenship.
Conclusion: “If Not Now, When?”
The EU still has time to adapt. But a change of coordinates is needed. The Node Theory does not call for revolution, but for attention. It is a lens to read the present – and a proposal for those who wish to or those who wish not only to understand the present, but to inhabit it with justice and vision.
What about your voice?
(All contents of this article are protected by copyright and reflect original elaboration. Reproduction, even partial, without the author’s permission is prohibited)
Rossana G. (Gala & Syn)
Eudemonia© 