Signe Rehling Larsen

“ The age of extremes spelled the economic, political and constitutional collapse of the European states, which left them incapable of securing their most basic aims of territorial defence, repression of civil war and the aversion of hunger. The most prominent example is the Weimar Republic, which never managed to realise a stable form of government. This resulted in the widespread use of emergency decrees that ultimately brought the Nazis to power with the project of turning Eastern Europe into the colonial territory of the Third Reich. ”

“ The decline of the European empires is one of the most profound changes that shaped the twentieth century and it led to a fundamental transformation of the European states and the public law order that underpinned them. Nevertheless, the debate about European integration and EU law, for the most part, proceeds as if empire never existed. ”

“ In contrast to nation-states, empires are composite legal and political entities that combine or transcend aspects of domestic and international law and politics. [20] What this means is that composite legal and political entities are the historical default, not unitary, sovereign nation-states. If we take into account that political modernity has been overwhelmingly shaped by the political form of the empire, the notion that Europe is today governed by a legal and political system that does not conform to the model of the sovereign nation-state already appears less unique. ”

“ Within this new vision of European public law, the internal aspects of state sovereignty, above all else popular sovereignty, were seen as something dangerous, which, if not properly constrained, would lead to the destruction of the European constitutional regimes and possibly a new European civil war. The post-World War II European constitutional imagination was founded on a fundamental ‘fear of the people’. [87] Legal and political stability in the form of ‘moderate government’ could only be achieved if the will of the people was constrained. ”

“ This project linked European integration, and a turn away from sovereignty within Europe, to the collective assertation of European interests abroad as well as the realisation of Europe’s ‘civilising mission’ in Africa.
The idea of Eurafrica first emerged as a central part of the justification of imperialism and the ‘civilising mission’ in nineteenth-century colonial thought. [120] Eurafrica portrays the fate of Europe and Africa as inherently linked to one another. For both Europe and Africa to prosper, they must unite into a Eurafrican union, a commonwealth. ”

“ The interstate character of ‘European’ international law can be understood only if the spatial order that underpinned it is acknowledged. The Old World of Europe, where states recognised each other as sovereign equals, relied on its differentiation from the New World where, for most of political modernity, no communities were recognised as sovereign and where the law of ‘civilisation’ did not apply. ”

“ In the decades after World War II, ‘Europe’ became the core project that the transnational Christian Democratic elites rallied around. [102] Of crucial importance was the common European market, which provided the material conditions for rebuilding the European states, and thereby stabilising them. [103] ‘Economic security’ was seen as essential not just in providing the material foundations of military defence against a communist invasion but perhaps more significantly to win ‘the battle for reconstruction’ against communism. ”

“ In the new European public law order, the most important aspects of political life were no longer understood as being within the scope of what could legitimately be decided by the people or their representatives. ”

“ If the European states gave up on sovereign authority vis-à-vis one another, they could keep exercising sovereign authority in a collective capacity over the remaining colonies. In this way, European integration and the collective exploitation of Africa were inherently linked to one another. ”

“ Since the non-European world in the eyes of Europeans did not live up to the European standard of ‘civilisation’ they did not exert sovereign authority over their lands. For that reason, in the eyes of Europeans, and European jurists, [43] the world beyond Europe could be legally and legitimately subjected to the imperial control of the sovereign European states by a variety of different means ranging from conquest to cession. ”

“ Whereas the former tend to look on the EU with admiration and excitement as a unique project that has finally managed to transcend the horrors of the nation-state, the latter for the most part maintain that, notwithstanding the significance of the project of European integration and globalisation more broadly, the nation-state remains the most important political unit. ”

“ Most scholarship on European integration, however, does not even consider empire. Instead, the academic study of European integration and EU law, as well as the official narrative put forward by EU institutions, overwhelmingly starts with a mythical story of European history that goes something like this: [9] for centuries, the European nation-states were in more or less constant war with each other. This culminated in the greatest nationalist war of all times where atrocities yet unheard of in history were committed. ”

“ The racial violence of colonialism, including slavery and genocide, that previously had taken place territorially outside the ‘civilised’ world in the colonies was thus for the first time in history forced upon Europeans by Europeans on European soil. ”

“ In interwar writings on Eurafrica, Europe and Africa are portrayed as interdependent but in a highly asymmetrical way: whereas Europe needs Africa’s raw materials and vast spaces, Africa is in need of Europe’s technology and capital. ”

“ What the Europeans shared with each other, which in their own eyes distinguished them from everyone else and made them capable of ‘discovering’ and ‘civilising’ the rest of the world, was a distinctive kind of consciousness or conscience. ”

“ The ‘universal’ international law that the EU is contrasted with, where the default option is that political communities on a global scale are recognised as sovereign states, only came into existence as a consequence of the collapse of the global legal order of European empires. Moreover, as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have demonstrated, the adoption of the nation-state as the alternative to empire was by no means a foregone conclusion. ”

“ The relevant actors, or even competitors, are understood to be European institutions and nation-states, and the EU is rarely studied in comparison with the composite polities to which it bears striking resemblances, namely empires and federations. The official narrative about European integration has, furthermore, allowed its Member States to tell a comforting story about themselves that leaves out their tainted histories of colonialism and empire. ”

“ The end of empire and decolonisation are among the most significant legal and political developments of the twentieth century, yet lawyers, political scientists as well as historians who study EU law and European integration have paid surprisingly little attention to the question of the end of empire and the broader transformation of the European states that followed. ”

“ After the war, this led the European nation-states to come together in one of the greatest peace projects of all time, namely the project of European integration. A new and unique legal and political community was created that, over the years, emerged as a rival centre of governmental authority to the nation-states. ”

“ The development of Africa also made an appearance in the 1950 Schuman Declaration that led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, where Schuman stressed that ‘with increased resources Europe will be able to pursue the achievement of one of its essential tasks, namely, the development of the African continent’. ”

“ The government of money could not be left in the hands of elected politicians because this threatened to create hyperinflation, which again would lead to the erosion of the ethical foundations of society. ”

“ Nevertheless, as a department of France, Algeria was almost fully integrated into the EEC. [137] Hence, when the Treaty of Rome came into effect with its promise of peace and prosperity, a violent war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was raging inside the Community. In one sense, Algerian Independence after the War in 1962 led to the end of the Eurafrican dream. [138] Yet the OCT regime outlived the Algerian War of Independence and Europe continued to exercise power over the former colonies through the Yaoundé Conventions (1964–75) ”

“ For a long durée history of European maritime empires, see David B Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (Yale University Press 2000) . See also Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires. ↑ Unlike federations, Michael Doyle, Empires 36 writes, empires ‘are not organized on the basis of political equality among societies or individuals. The domain of empire is a people subject to unequal rule. One nation’s government determines who rules another society’s political life’. ”

“ Humanity 429. ↑ ‘Even after the end of the Second World War, the European nations that had not lost the conflict clung tightly to their colonial possessions, which they considered an extension of the metropole, a central component of their prestige and national identity, and vital economic “living space,” not to mention a strategic reserve of cheap labour’, see Garavini, After Empires 8. See also Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact ”

“ Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations 127ff; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth 147–8. ↑ Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law 100. ↑ As Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law 99 put it: ‘Positivists focused on sovereignty, but at least with respect to the European–non-European distinction, the powerful and defining idea that sovereignty was the exclusive preserve of Europe was enabled by an elaboration of the concept of “society”. Law properly prevailed only among the members of society. ”

“ A Post-Colonial Critique of EUniversalism’ in Gabrielle Maas, Berny Sebe and Kalypso Nicolaïdis (eds) , Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies (IB Tauris 2014) ; Guy Martin, ‘Africa and the Ideology of Eurafrica: Neo-Colonialism or Pan-Africanism?’ 20 (1982) The Journal of Modern African Studies 221, 230–1. ↑ As demonstrated by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, the project of European integration and Eurafrica were intimately connected from the interwar period until the late 1950s. ”