Europe’s Long Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies and the Geopolitics of European Unity, Present and Past

This lecture takes its point of departure in the EU’s current geopolitical turn: the allegedly existential push to have the EU embrace power politics and develop a ‘strategic autonomy’, both vis-à-vis other global powers and with respect to its own ‘neighbourhood’ or sphere of influence. For many commentators, this turn is highly significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the post-cold war EU’s uniquely liberal and soft-power approach to world affairs. Equally important, by openly embracing ‘hard power’ Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its founding narrative about the EU as an anti-geopolitical peace project. But as will be shown, what appears to be a break with the past is, in fact, a reunion with the past. The current debate is thus not new but echoes earlier calls for a geopolitics of European unity that commenced already in the pre-World War I period. Today’s geopolitical affirmation thus follows in the very footsteps of the EU’s founders. Few contemporary scholars and policy makers know that the EU, when it was established in 1957, constituted a vast imperial polity that annexed France’s and Belgium’s African colonies and fully incorporated French Algeria. The founders stressed the community’s huge extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence, which was designated as ‘Eurafrica’. By bringing present and past into dialogue, the lecture explains why the EU’s turn to geopolitics – its attempt stem Europe’s declining global power – remains stuck in what has proven to be a very long twentieth century.