Lena Ebner (CivBE)

INTEGR

Lena Ebner

Introduced in Rising Tide
Titles	Chief Designer "Justice of the World"
Civilization	INTEGR
Preferred victory
Language	German
Voice actor/actress	Christina Puciata

Lena Ebner is the leader of INTEGR.

Civilopedia entry[]

Early Life[]

Born in Berlin to a German diplomat and a Polish teacher, Lena was raised as a “child of the world.” Over the course of 15 years, she lived on four continents and learned to speak eight languages. She received an international education from prestigious academies in Moscow, Bogotá, the Franciscan Archipelago, and Vilnius. It was during this time that she fostered an interest in the arts, technology, and biology. As a young woman, she combined her interests and pursued a Law degree at the famed Ruprecht-Karls-Einstein-Universität Heidelberg with a specific focus on ecology, biodiversity and humanitarian tech.

Humanitarian[]

Upon graduating, Lena spent years volunteering in disaster stricken and war-torn areas. She learned about global climate change accommodation from the North Sea Alliance, and saw first-hand the crises facing middle-eastern governments isolated by the Great Mistake. When she finally returned to Germany, it was to effect the change she wanted to see, beginning at home. After helping renegotiate failing contracts between hard-hit administrations and insulated European countries, Lena fought fearlessly for refugee rights throughout central and eastern Europe. Her early work at the Braungart-Wissel Foundation for Environmental Law garnered her acclaim, and she was soon seen as an emerging leader of sustainability and the environmental policymaking. The Balkan Resettlement Commission was her landmark case, wherein she fought for and won the right for European refugees displaced by global warming to emigrate throughout Europe despite strong opposition from Franco-Iberian lawyers. For Lena’s tireless dedication, she was the first recipient of both the Malala Merit Award and the Mandela Peace Prize.

INTEGR[]

When Lena was visiting relatives in Warsaw, she had a chance encounter with leading members of the minority European party, INTEGR, who instantly fell in love with Lena’s forward-thinking humanism. Lena was recruited to be at the forefront of their operations in Frankfurt. Her involvement in the political movement grew quickly, as Lena bridged the gap between technocrat, activist, and environmentalist. In fact, it was Lena herself who suggested the Party restructure their organization under those three verticals, a measure which was adopted shortly after review.

Transmodernism[]

As she became a prominent lawyer-activist in post-Mistake Europe, Lena was an increasingly easy target for Franco-Iberian politicians. Painted as a desperate anarchist, Lena’s non-traditional lifestyle and worldview was frequently highlighted in order to polarize moderates. This—however—only served to strengthen the minority voice, as Lena was forced into clarifying and defending her platform. It was Lena’s suggestions for radical measures in everything from economic and environmental policy to urban planning and foreign affairs that underlined the difference between the “old fashioned imperials” of Franco-Iberia and the new techno-green ideology of INTEGR.

It wasn’t until Lena’s most vocal and harshest critic (and cousin), Élodie, began her campaign for the Seeding that Lena’s vision for a Transmodern society crystallized. A public feud with Élodie was a much publicized affair, coming to a head when Lena took out an hour of talk-show hologramming channel The West to decry what she called the “bad faith politics” of the “aristocratic spirit of seriousness.” Transmodern meant xenophily, globalism, and a place for both tradition and modernity. The INTEGR party would not shirk its responsibility to Earth for the sake of the future.

In the next elections, Lena became leader of INTEGR by a landslide. She immediately formed a Seeding exploratory panel and established an exoscience committee. Espousing the ideals of sustainability, innovation, and diversity that comprise INTEGR’s motto, Lena would ensure the irresponsible and extravagant excesses of human history remained in the past, while remaining accountable to its legacy. She would lead INTEGR’s Seeding mission in the biggest relocation of her life.

Loading Screen Quotes[]

...

Civilopedia Quotes[]

Source	Quote
Quantum Politics	"Are we such poor, simple creatures? Give it a large enough glossary and even a rude gridtap can move us around like so many chessmen." -Lena Ebner, A People's Confession of Earth

Official teaser[]

From Release Info.

The New Continental Philosopher

In case you missed it, last night’s media event by INTEGR’s rising political star, Lena Ebner, represents a watershed moment in the history of post-Mistake Europe. An event of this magnitude occurs only once a generation. Billed as “a response to the new imperialism,” what actually streamed was nothing less than a cogent new political philosophy, neither right nor left, dominionist nor green. You owe it to yourself to watch the whole thing, but let me attempt to set the stage.

You are, I am going to assume, familiar with Elodie and the Bloc Franco-Iberia. You’ve been to parties and played Canonical/Non-Canonical with friends. If you are fortunate to work in the arts and entertainment field, you may even have gone so far as to have participated in a Canon Committee. . (Full disclosure: I have works in the Canon, and made nominations which have been rejected. I consider myself a Canon fan, even if Elodie’s defense of it causes me to roll my eyes from time to time). The Franco-Iberian Seeding campaign is unique in that it bills itself as a sociological experiment first and foremost, with “Earth’s best ideas” as the underpinning.

I must confess that what transpired was Ebner undermining, sapping, and then exploding the Franco-Iberian project, and doing so, in retrospect seems head-smackingly obvious. INTEGR put forward a new vision of humanism, declaring that the old models (particularly the Canon model) represent nothing more than clinging to pre-Mistake thinking. The “aristocratic spirit of seriousness” and “Ancien Regime of Western rationalistic technocracy” have motivated the politics of this age, with the agents of the state and entertainment serving as gatekeepers for what is “good” and what is “bad” for “the people.” If this seems obvious on its face, what is not obvious was the way Ebner revealed the subtle intertwining of political authority, consumer culture, and economic power.

Ebner did not just haul out hoary old sociopolitical experiments from the early Reconstruction, she constructed an agenda designed to correct the system. What she articulated was a three-strand skein: Effective and transparent governance, political activism on behalf of the disenfranchised, and environmental resilience. Before you snort and deride this as ancient Franco-Leftism, I’d point out that INTEGR also revealed that they have pulled this off, at least regionally.

Ebner laid out how INTEGR’s program has turned around the Rhine basin with some compelling data that I had not seen before, and I suspect was not public prior to the presentation. This same region, the area that Franco-Iberian commentators have been deriding as under the control of delusional hippies and starry-eyed anarchists, made a credible case for being Europe’s greatest post-Mistake success story. This is one I think the FI’s cheerleaders will have a hard time dismissing. They have tried dismissing Ebner before as an trivial clown (albeit one with legal credentials), swooping in to make celebrity appearances at disaster sites before fluttering off to the next crisis, but it seems Ebner may be more like the spider than the butterfly, tying her centers of activism with thin, silky strands of political philosophy.

I suspect Ebner has managed to pull off something like the People’s African Union – creating oases of transparency and effectiveness staffed by people of a like mind. But instead of mining tungsten and uranium, she has attracted bioengineering startups and produced lawyers intent on gaming the Confederation’s court system to the benefit of refugees from Asia and the Americas. Certainly Franco-Iberia has some lovely cities in Nice and Barcelona, but the container-housing and maker-fabriks of Cologne may represent a more democratic alternative.

If nothing else, Ebner has caused me to take a sidelong glance at my own views of the FI Seeding’s motivations. I had bought into the line that a colony founded on good cultural and political principles would make a more successful humanity on a new world, but now I find that idea rings a bit false. Have I instead been endorsing the latest form of European imperialism, one which siphons resources off this planet to go pillage a new one? Have I been too fast to dismiss INTEGR as a utopian phantasm, and might they not be on to the better model? The question vexes me, because I remember saying once, with complete seriousness: “I understand that a Bangladeshi laborer is going to die this year from environmental factors, but a Parisian poet is going offworld to determine the future of our species.” If this is not imperialism, then what can imperialism be?

We ignore Ebner and INTEGR at our own peril. I suspect they’re out to remake the world in their own image, and will construct their society with our without our participation.