Scale, Community and ‘Eurafrica’: A Response to Hansen and Jonsson

Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (hereafter H-J) have written a thought-provoking response to my JCMS article (Marks, 2012), highlighting the importance of ‘Eurafrique’ on which Hansen and Jonsson have written several articles and now a book (Hansen and Jonsson, forthcoming). However, they do not come to terms with my argument, and while they assemble some interesting quotations, their account overestimates the imperial ambitions of the founders of the European Union (EU). The first part of H-J’s response reveals that one of the founders of the EU, Paul-Henri Spaak, expounded the benefits of jurisdictional scale in Eurafrica, the project to tie African colonies to Europe. If we take this at face value, there were two projects to reap scale in the early stages of European integration: the creation of a European common market, and the extension of that market to Africa. Histories of European integration regard the first as vastly more important than the second, but both are consistent with the notion that the benefits of scale in the provision of pure public goods motivate the creation of very large jurisdictions. But what of community? Eurafrica failed to get off the ground because it encompassed subject communities that were mobilizing behind the idea of independent statehood. European sea empires were founded on sail and gunpowder which allowed European powers to coerce distant, less technologically advanced peoples. But after World War II even diehard imperialists realized that the game had changed. As Félix HouphouetBoigny, prime minister of Ivory Coast, wrote in a 1957 Foreign Affairs article: ‘Today, no nation, however powerful, can pretend to impose its absolute will on another for long’ (Houphouet-Boigny, 1957, p. 597). British attempts to mollify indigenous elites with participation in local government simply ratcheted up demands for national autonomy. French efforts to sustain empire by a double-edged policy of suppression and assimilation – giving elites ‘a new political status inside the French community’ – worked no better in post-war North Africa than in Italy under Napoleonic rule. By the end of 1960, European empires had crumbled in negotiated independence and bloody revolt, and the rhetoric of Eurafrique was derelict. Resistance on the part of previously subjugated communities raised the costs of empire and reduced its benefits. This is consistent with the core arguments of ‘Europe and Its Empires’. Large polities or empires provide pure public goods more cheaply by virtue of