Another Colonialism : Africa in the History of European Integration

• Today’s European Union was founded in a 1950s marked by its memberstates’ involvement in numerous colonial conflicts and with the colonial questionfirmly entrenched on the European and international agenda. This notwithstanding,there is hardly any scholarly investigations to date that have examined colonialism’sbearing on the historical project and process of European integration. In tacklingthis puzzle, the present article proceeds in two steps. First, it corroborates the claimthat European integration not only is related to the history of colonialism but to nolittle extent determined by it. Second, it introduces a set of factors that explain whythe relation between the EU and colonialism has been systematically neglected. Herethe article seeks to identify the operations of a colonial epistemology that hasfacilitated a misrecognition of what postwar European integration was about. As thearticle argues, this epistemology has enabled colonialism’s historical relation to theEuropean integration project to remain undetected and has thus also reproducedwithin the present EU precisely those colonial or neo-colonial preconceptions thatthe European partner states, in official discourse and policy, falsely claim that theyhave abandoned.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Globaliseringsstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Globalisation Studies (hsv//eng)

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