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Another Colonialism: Africa in the History of E uropean Integration
Author(s) -
Hansen Peo,
Jonsson Stefan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/johs.12055
Subject(s) - colonialism , relation (database) , political science , political economy , history , sociology , law , computer science , database
Today's E uropean U nion was founded in a 1950s marked by its member states' involvement in numerous colonial conflicts and with the colonial question firmly entrenched on the E uropean and international agenda. This notwithstanding, there is hardly any scholarly investigations to date that have examined colonialism's bearing on the historical project and process of E uropean integration. In tackling this puzzle, the present article proceeds in two steps. First, it corroborates the claim that E uropean integration not only is related to the history of colonialism but to no little extent determined by it. Second, it introduces a set of factors that explain why the relation between the EU and colonialism has been systematically neglected. Here the article seeks to identify the operations of a colonial epistemology that has facilitated a misrecognition of what postwar E uropean integration was about. As the article argues, this epistemology has enabled colonialism's historical relation to the E uropean integration project to remain undetected and has thus also reproduced within the present EU precisely those colonial or neo‐colonial preconceptions that the E uropean partner states, in official discourse and policy, falsely claim that they have abandoned.