A new EU colonial offensive against Africa is in full swing. As the EU, we are nothing without control over Africa and the use of its raw materials! Africa therefore has no right to sovereignty.
- Wolfgang Lieberknecht
- 6. Juni
- 30 Min. Lesezeit
Aktualisiert: 7. Juni
Today I’m talking to two colleagues from Europe and Africa. I’ve got with me Peo Hansen a professor of Political Science at Sweden’s Linköping University, and Aghogho Akpome, a Associate Professor of Literature and English at South Africa’s University of Zululand. Both of of them have worked on the issue of European Colonialism in Africa and Peo recently published another great article entitled “The Return of the Repressed: The Colonial History of the Eu’s Geopolitical Turn”. This unfinished business of Europe’s colonial mindset is what we want to discuss today. Links: Peo Hansen’s Work: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1... https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eurafri... https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/e... https://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-moder...
EU’s “Geopolitical Turn”
Currently, Hansen’s research focuses on the present EU’s “geopolitical turn”, tracing its historical antecedents to the pre-World War I, interwar and postwar debates on the geopolitics of “European unity”. These debates all grappled with various integration strategies, many of them colonial, to stem Europe’s declining global power in the face of rising competitors and adversaries to the east and the west.
As Hansen’s research aims to show, the EU’s current geopolitical turn – its quest for “strategic autonomy” and its attempts to balance China, Russia and the U.S. – points to the fact that “Europe” remains stuck in what has proven to be a very long twentieth century.
Eurafrica
Hansen’s research expertise also includes a strong focus on European geopolitics and the significance of colonialism for the birth of postwar European integration. As he has revealed in his research together with Stefan Jonsson and their book Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, the scale of the original EU in the 1950s was not delimited by the European land mass but corresponded to the geopolitical and colonial constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica.
As they annexed France’s and Belgium’s African colonies into the Rome Treaty’s colonial association regime, the EU’s founders stressed the community’s huge extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence. In their work, Hansen and Jonsson show that practically all the visions and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration in the first two postwar decades placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. Peo Hansen - Linköping University
The Return of the Repressed: The Colonial History of the EU's Geopolitical Turn
First published: 12 May 2025
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Abstract
This article examines the EU's current geopolitical turn: the push to have the EU embrace power politics and develop a ‘strategic autonomy’, both vis-à-vis global powers and its own ‘neighbourhood’. This turn is significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the post-cold war EU's liberal approach to world affairs. 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. In the first part, I argue that whilst the geopolitical turn has introduced a different rhetoric, this should not confuse analysts into believing that the post-cold war EU was short of a geopolitical agenda. In the second part, I discuss the EU's current geopolitical turn in the context of the colonial policy it pursued in the 1950s, when large parts of colonial Africa were annexed to the European Economic Community (EEC). Here, I argue that the obliviousness that impedes the knowledge of the EU's colonial origins helps explain why the geopolitical turn today is seen as novel and poles apart from the EU's approach to geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a break with the past, then, is in fact a reunion with the past, in the sense that the current EU leaders' open embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of the EU founders. In the conclusion, I relate this to a theoretical discussion concerning the EU's quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, which, arguably, constitutes the most defining aspect of the geopolitical turn.
Introduction
This article takes its point of departure in the European Union's (EU's) current geopolitical turn. For many scholars and commentators, this turn – which started in earnest with Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 – is significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the EU's uniquely liberal approach to world affairs, as developed in the post-cold war period. Not only that, by openly embracing ‘hard power’, Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its own carefully crafted historical narrative about the EU as an anti-geopolitical pioneer and peace project.
Below, I will start out by examining the post-cold war story, arguing that whilst the geopolitical turn has introduced a markedly different rhetoric from the one cultivated in the post-cold war era, this should not confuse analysts into believing that the EU that preceded the geopolitical turn was short of a geopolitical agenda. A fleeting look at EU policy towards many African countries is enough to make this apparent.
In the second part of the article, I develop further on the EU–African relationship. The reason for this is that Brussels describes its geopolitical turn as pivoting on a close ‘alliance’ with Africa. Many think tanks and much news media commentary have endorsed this position, or as one think tank voice put it: ‘Indeed, the Mediterranean and the African continent represent a unique opportunity for the EU's strategic ambitions, in a context of mounting geopolitical confrontation’ (Pirozzi, 2022). Here, though, I will not limit my scrutiny to the EU's current Africa policy. Instead, I will connect the present with the past and discuss the EU's current policy in the context of the colonial policy it pursued at its founding in the 1950s. Few scholars and policy-makers today are aware of the fact that the EU, when it was founded in 1957, constituted a vast colonial polity that annexed or ‘associated’ France's and Belgium's African colonies and fully incorporated French Algeria. The EU's founders stressed the community's huge extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence, which was designated as ‘Eurafrica’ and codified in the Rome Treaty's colonial association regime.1
By bringing present and past into such a dialogue, I am offering a new way of reading the EU's current turn to geopolitics. As Bouris et al. (2025) point to in the introduction to this issue, this ‘novelty’ is directly related to the ‘lacunas’ in the study of the EU's foreign relations. Since EU scholarship has largely failed to interrogate post-war European integration's mission to preserve and rekindle colonialism in Africa, it has also missed out on the importance assigned to geopolitical and geo-economic objectives in the EU's founding process. Some scholars have also explicitly tried to deny this. Moravcsik (1998, pp. 121, 34), for instance, argues that ‘geopolitical concerns’ only ‘played modest roles’ and that ‘[c]olonial considerations decline quickly in the 1950s and 1960s’. And although critical scholarship has successfully introduced postcolonial and decolonial approaches into EU studies, the lacuna as regards the EU's colonial history remains unfilled. It cannot be stressed enough: the EU was founded as a colonial polity, its founding treaty, as Carol Ann Cosgrove (1969, p. 77) put it, being ‘drafted at a time when rapid decolonization was discounted by the European metropoles, with the result that no reference was made to the possible attainment of sovereign independence by the associate’. In applying a historicising methodology to the current debate over the EU's geopolitical turn, I thus hope to stimulate EU studies to engage more with the rich, yet largely unexplored, source materials that will expand the empirical body of insights into the EU's colonial history.
Below, I will argue that the obliviousness that impedes the knowledge of the EU's colonial origins helps explain why the geopolitical turn today is seen as so utterly novel and poles apart from how the EU approached geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a break with the past, then, is in fact a reunion with the past, in the sense that the current EU leaders' open embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of the EU founders. In the conclusion, I will also relate this to a theoretical discussion concerning the EU's quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, which, in my view, constitutes the most defining aspect of the geopolitical turn.
I A Geopolitical EU
‘My Commission will be a geopolitical Commission’ (European Commission, 2019). This was how Ursula von der Leyen put it when presenting her new Commission in September 2019. Shortly thereafter, she was seconded by French President Emmanuel Macron, who sounded the alarm, saying: ‘if we don't wake up, face up to the situation and decide to do something about it, there's a considerable risk that in the long run we will disappear geopolitically.’ It was high time for Europe to start to ‘think of itself as a global power’ (quoted in The Economist, 2019). von der Leyen has also called for an abrogation of the national foreign policy veto, claiming that the fast-moving geopolitical situation gives the EU little choice but to equip itself with a decision-making process able to respond to urgent situations (Politico, 2022). This message has garnered a great deal of support. The British scholar Timothy Garton Ash (2023), for instance, not only argues that the EU, to stand up to Russia, ‘must’ ‘take on some of the characteristics of an empire’. He also asserts that for such an empire to be feasible, the member state veto must be scrapped in favour of ‘central authority’.
The world is changing, and long before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the view in Brussels has been clear about pro-active adaptation as the only way forward. As the EU's then High Representative Josep Borrell (2019, p. 6) put it, ‘the European Union has to learn to use the language of power’ (Borrell, 2021, p. 32). Borrell (2020a) thus guarded against ‘nostalgia for a world that will not return’:
The era of a conciliatory, if not naïve, Europe has come of age. Virtuous ‘soft power’ is no longer enough in today's world. We need to complement it with a ‘hard power’ dimension, and not just in terms of military power and the badly needed Europe of defence. (Borrell and Breton, 2020)
Not long ago, such a self-characterisation of the EU project would have been unthinkable. When the EU received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, Commission President Manuel Barroso (2012, pp. 6, 7) made sure to mark out the uniqueness of the EU on the world stage. The EU, he asserted, ‘is a new legal order, which is not based on balance of power between nations’; it ‘attests to the quest for a cosmopolitan order’. Barroso's lecture neatly summarised what continues to be the EU's founding historical raison d'être, its values and commitment to peace, democracy and human rights. Here, as already intimated, the geopolitical turn may prove awkward. For how will the EU square its current embrace of hard power and balance of power with its own claim that the EU is founded on the horrific lessons of precisely the geopolitical practices of hard power and balance of power? The ‘changing geopolitical reality’, Morillas (2021, p. 5) notes, ‘clashes with the fact that the EU was conceived as an actor escaping the logics of global power competition.’ (see also Guzzini, 2012, p. 62).
To be sure, Brussels continues to speak of soft power as still having a role to play as a complement to hard power. Yet, the emphasis is squarely on the latter. As is often emphasised in Commission statements, the EU, from now on, must look out for its own interests, to the point where one policy brief cautions Brussels ‘to ensure that unilateral action designed for strengthening its strategic autonomy does not get in the way of strengthening partnerships’, especially in Africa. The EU, the brief goes on, must ‘avoid appearing too unilateral’ (Teevan, 2020, pp. 3, 8).
At first sight, the change is momentous. Adding to its significance is the widespread support the EU's geopolitical turn has received from scholars, think tanks and news media pundits – including many voices who previously served as staunch advocates of soft-power Europe – much of it underscoring that the turn has been unavoidable. Given the behaviour of the world's major powers, the EU's post-cold war policy is simply not realistic anymore (e.g., Leonard and Shapiro, 2019).
II How Soft Was It Really?
But if geopolitics has been so utterly alien to the EU until, say, Russia's annexation of Crimea, how are we to conceive of the EU's support for numerous authoritarian regimes prior to the geopolitical turn? This included support for Gaddafi's Libya, Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt, the Gulf kingdoms and King Mohammed VI's Morocco, the latter receiving the EU's praise for his ‘clear commitment to democracy and respect for human rights’ (European Commission, 2011).
The EU's courtship of Gaddafi officially began in the early 2000s. As The Guardian (2004) reported at the time: ‘The Europeans are eager to invest in Libya's substantial oil reserves and obtain its cooperation in stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into Europe.’ In 2004, the EU lifted its arms embargo on Libya to give Gaddafi better tools to prevent migrants and refugees from reaching the EU (Council of the European Union, 2004; The Guardian, 2004). The courtship ended abruptly in 2011, however, when many EU countries joined the NATO war that overthrew Gaddafi. But as late as October 2010, EU Commissioners Malmström and Fuele were in Tripoli to close a new ‘border management’ deal with Libya, trading aid for Libya's promise to block migrants and asylum seekers from coming to Europe (BBC, 2010). Ten months later, Malmström (2011) wrote on her blog that she was ‘following the developments in Libya with great interest’: ‘At the moment, it is not yet clear if Gaddafi, one of the cruellest dictators in the world, has been overthrown […]. Gaddafi and his government must now be held accountable for what he has done to his own people during the 42 years his terror regime has held on to the power.’ The EU's geopolitical calculus had changed. In less than a year, Gaddafi had gone from being a ‘partner’ to being ‘one of the cruellest dictators in the world’. Yet, for years, the EU had used Gaddafi's ‘terror regime’ and its gruesome camps as an expedient holding pen for the EU's unwanted asylum seekers and migrants (e.g., Human Rights Watch, 2008).
Another elucidating example is to be found in the EU's staunch support for Chad's now-deceased dictator Idriss Déby – whose funeral in 2021 was attended by President Macron. At the time, Déby's regime stood out as one of the world's most atrocious (Human Rights Watch, 2010). In 2008, the EU launched a military intervention in Chad – conducted by the European Union Force – abetting France's interest of propping up Déby's regime against a rebel challenge (Yates, 2012). Announcing its expansion of development aid to Chad for the period 2014–2020, the EU's Commissioner for Development stated: ‘The EU wishes to act as a real partner for Chad […]. We are promoting stability in the country and a strengthening of the rule of law within a context of democracy and inclusive growth’ (European Commission, 2013).
‘Human rights take a back seat at the EU-Central Asia talks’, an EUobserver headline ran in 2008. To align the ‘repressive regimes’ of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with EU interests, it was reported, ‘the problem of grave human rights abuses in the region’ had to be ‘pushed down the agenda’. One EU official was quoted, saying: ‘It's unrealistic to expect these countries to become like Europe. None of our [energy] competitors in the region – Russia, China, America – make co-operation conditional on human rights’ (quoted in EUobserver, 2008). Subsequently, Barroso welcomed the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov to Brussels, thus helping to rehabilitate one of the most blood-stained dictators at the time. Again, geopolitics proved to be no stranger to the EU. Brussels sought co-operation on energy and security, and, in exchange, Karimov was handed ‘a geopolitical counterweight when managing relations with Russia’ (Financial Times, 2011).
In his research on the EU's European Neighbourhood and Eastern Partnership policies, Browning (2018, p. 107) systematically reveals why the description of the EU's post-cold war foreign policy as idealistic does not stand up to scrutiny. To be sure, Brussels did not devise its neighbourhood policy in terms of military incursions to occupy foreign land. Nonetheless, it was ‘impregnated with geopolitical visions’ and a zero-sum logic vis-à-vis Russia. Equally important, it was equipped with very concrete instruments ‘aimed at ordering the space beyond [EU] borders’ and to ‘influence the partners' sense of geographical affiliation and belongingness’.
Browning's perspective connects with Del Sarto's (2016) equally powerful argument concerning the EU's approach to its periphery, an argument that has its empirical base in the EU's tackling of the ‘Arab Spring’. Whilst Del Sarto does not discuss EU conduct in terms of geopolitics, her conception of the EU as an ‘empire of sorts’ does the same work. Like empires, Del Sarto demonstrates, the EU exploits core–periphery relationships to its own advantage. Crucially, however, this is aided by a strong normative component, akin to past empires' civilising missions, something that prompts the conceptualisation of the EU as a ‘normative empire’. In focusing on the norms contained in the EU's export of rules and practices relating to borders, administrative practices and economic governance, Del Sarto's perspective contrasts sharply with the ‘normative power Europe’ perspective (Manners, 2002) and its emphasis on ‘the EU's quasi-benevolent export of broader norms, such as democracy and human rights’ (Del Sarto, 2016, p. 227). This approach also renders untenable the assumption inherent to the ‘normative power Europe’ framework that norms and self-interest stand in a contradictory relationship. On the contrary, Del Sarto shows, in real life, norms and instrumental self-interest – or geopolitical objectives, we could add – get along just fine; indeed, ‘norm-driven behaviour’ may very well be ‘a utility-maximizing strategy in itself’ (Del Sarto, 2016, p. 217).
‘Normative empire Europe’, Del Sarto (2016, p. 228) argues, thus ‘helps to explain EU policies toward the immediate vicinity that may seem contradictory, such as the rhetorical commitment to human rights while advancing trade relations with authoritarian regimes’. As shown above, Brussels' policy towards Gaddafi's Libya illustrates this point well, Gaddafi going from being an EU partner in October to ‘one of the cruellest dictators in the world’ in August – and all the whilst Brussels' firm commitment to human rights remained constant.
Above, we have seen how Brussels urges the EU to become a geopolitical actor in the world. But as shown here, the EU was already a geopolitical player during the very era that today's EU leadership discards as the heyday of Brussels' ‘naïve’, soft-power foreign policy. Below, I will develop this theme further by showing that the EU's geopolitical enterprise formed an integral part of the project's genesis in the post-war period.
III Eurafrica 2.0
In 2018, then Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker launched the new ‘Africa-Europe Alliance for Sustainable Investment and Jobs’ (European Commission, 2018a). ‘Africa does not need charity’, Juncker insisted; ‘it needs true and fair partnership.’ (European Commission, 2018b) Prior to that, the Commission and the High Representative (2017, p. 7) had issued a communication, stating: ‘Never before have EU security interests been so intertwined with Africa. The direct connection between Libya and the Sahel, between the Horn of Africa and the Gulf, call for a more strategic approach going beyond established formats.’
The Commission that took office in 2019 followed suit and pledged to make the African partnership not only much more strategic but also the EU's number one global priority. Before von der Leyen's first hundred days in office had come to an end, she had visited the African Union's headquarters in Addis Ababa twice (Herszenhorn, 2020), and she had also presented a new ‘Comprehensive Strategy with Africa’ (European Commission and High Representative, 2020). As Borrell emphasised when presenting the new strategy: ‘A part of Europe's future is at stake in Africa. To face our common challenges, we need a strong Africa, and Africa needs a strong Europe’ (quoted in Herszenhorn, 2020).
Subsequently, the Council of the EU (2020) stated that ‘Africa and Europe are natural partners bound by history, geography and culture. The EU and the African Union (AU) enjoy a unique partnership […]. A prosperous, peaceful and resilient Africa is an essential EU foreign policy objective’. European Council President Charles Michel (2020) soon took this to the next level by declaring that ‘[w]e need more than a partnership with Africa. We need a new alliance with this continent’. He went on: ‘Today our two continents are more interdependent than ever. And there is enormous potential for even greater cooperation.’ In his opening statement at the EU–AU summit in 2022, Michel (2022) reiterated the primacy of interdependence:
At the start of the next century half of the world's population will live in Africa. We have a vital, shared interest in educating young people in Africa, and in training them for the professions of the future. Similarly, we have a common interest in managing people's mobility well […]. Africa and Europe are also interdependent in terms of security.
What needs to be remembered though is that the notion of EU–African interdependence was also instrumentalised to validate the Rome Treaty's colonial annexation in 1957. By incorporating a large part of Africa's natural resources into a western European sphere of influence, the European Economic Community (EEC) aspired to emerge as a ‘third force’ in world geopolitics, able to balance the United States and the Soviet Union.2 In December 1956, the intergovernmental Ad-Hoc Overseas Territories Group, which was tasked to prepare the Rome Treaty's colonial association regime, presented its final report to the negotiating parties:
Economically speaking, the European member states of the common market have an essential need for the cooperation and support that the overseas territories – particularly the African ones – are able to offer in order to establish long-term balance of the European economy. The sources of raw material, variegated and abundant, which the overseas territories dispose of are likely to ensure for the entirety of the European economy of the common market the indispensable foundation for an expanding economy and present the additional advantage of being situated in countries whose orientation may be influenced by the European countries themselves. [HAEU (Historical Archives of the European Union), 1956]3
The report compared this project to the Marshall Plan, insisting that the colonial association should be undertaken in a similar spirit. The report's preamble concluded: ‘The proposed enterprise entails consequences of major importance for the future of Europe. […] In aiding Africa and supporting itself on her, the community of the Six is able to furnish Europe with its equilibrium and a new youth’ (HAEU, 1956).
Shortly after the report had been released, in January 1957, France's Socialist Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, addressed the UN General Assembly:
France is negotiating at this time with her European partners for the organization of a vast common market, to which the Overseas Territories will be associated: All of Europe will be called upon to help in the development of Africa, and tomorrow Eurafrica may become one of the principal factors in world politics. Isolated nations can no longer keep pace with the world. What would Algeria amount to by itself? On the other hand, what future might it not have, as one of the foundations of the Eurafrican community now taking shape? […] interdependence among nations is becoming the rule. (HAEU, 1957)
At the same time, France's foreign minister, Christian Pineau, spoke of ‘the so-called right to independence’ and of ‘the right of peoples to self-determination’ as ‘a sort of mystic aim of the international organization’ that ‘would end in multiplying the number of states at a time when, on the contrary, the peoples should be brought together in a common action’ (quoted in The New York Times, 1957a). For Pineau and France, therefore, the best solution would be to ‘enable the nations to become something other than states’. ‘On the day’, Pineau asserted,
When a large common market – in which the overseas territories will be associated – has been created, she [France] would like to promote the formation of a Eurafrican whole. Europe in its entirety, bringing to Africa its capital and its techniques, should enable the immense African continent to become an essential factor in world politics.
In conclusion, Pineau reiterated that ‘most nations can no longer keep pace with the world. They must enter into partnership, cooperate with each other, or give themselves up to the worst forms of ideological or economic bondage’ (quoted in The New York Times, 1957a). Also in 1957, Felix Houphouët-Boigny – a West African cabinet member and future president of Ivory Coast – argued vehemently in favour of the EEC's Eurafrican association regime in the UN, stating: ‘The nations, even the largest, the most powerful, can no longer enjoy the deceptive luxury of isolation’ (quoted in The New York Times, 1961).
Some six decades later, a European Policy Centre paper, advising the EU on how to realise its strategic autonomy, echoes the 1950s:
In a highly interdependent world, no power, no matter how mighty, is an island. No one country is in the position to accomplish its goals independently from all others. A pivotal international actor, however, should be able to define those goals […] This is arguably the deepest meaning of Europe's strategic autonomy: Not acting alone […] but expressing a sense of purpose in the world […] and developing a stronger power base to work with others. (Grevi, 2020, p. 24)
Now as then, the business of interdependence permeates every aspect of the EU–Africa relation, and in both cases, it is an interdependence that the EU has chosen – it tells Africa that we are interdependent.
Competition Over Africa: Now and Then
Recent research commissioned by the EU shows that people in Africa today place greater value on their relationships with China and the United States than on those they have with the EU (Ighobor, 2022). Hence, here is an interdependence at odds with EU interest. As noted by Ighobor (2022), this has ‘triggered a major PR campaign to showcase the EU's activities in Africa to Africans’. In propagating the EU's ‘strategic autonomy’, moreover, Josep Borrell (2020b) warned that whilst China's global clout is growing, ‘the weight of Europe in the world is shrinking’. Unless the EU's strategic autonomy is taken seriously and conceived of as ‘a process of political survival’, Borrell went on, ‘we will become irrelevant.’
At the 2022 EU–Africa summit, it was precisely ‘China's rising influence in Africa’ that constituted ‘the implicit backdrop’ for the EU's concerns (Ighobor, 2022). The EU has thus launched (in 2021) a competitor to China's Belt and Road programme, called the Global Gateway, which aims to invest €300 billion in infrastructure and development in the global south during the next 6 years. When visiting China in October 2023, Borrell let it be known that ‘[t]he war in Ukraine has converted us into a geopolitical power, not just an economic one’, and according to the Financial Times (2023a), Borrell also demanded that China should recognise the EU as a ‘“geopolitical power” in its own right’.
The EU's current apprehensions concerning the competition over Africa's resources are of course not new. The objectives of hedging against potential adversaries in Africa were at the heart of the efforts of European integration in the 1950s. As the Rome Treaty negotiations over colonial association reached their final stage, Félix Houphouët-Boigny spoke for the French government at the heads of the negotiation delegation meeting in Brussels in January 1957. The French ambassador in Belgium, Raymond Bousquet, submitted this report to the French government:
He [Houphouët-Boigny] put emphasis on the danger to the French–Belgian ensemble represented by the attraction of the powers of Bandung (Afro-Asians). It will result from this that, if the Six do not associate the overseas territories to their exchanges and investments, the Afro-Asian bloc, ‘spearhead of communism’, will implant itself on these territories. If the Europe of the Six, through a truly efficient financial and investment policy, succeeds in making the black populations feel that the Eurafrican Association is capable of producing practical results, the French–Belgian territories of this part of the continent will not just reject the attempt of the Bandung group and the communists, but the French–Belgian territories will also constitute a symbol of prosperity to its neighbouring colonies. (HAEU, 1957)
Whilst this and the other statements by the French government quoted above point to the propaganda war over the future of colonialism in the 1950s, we must also remember all the real colonial wars launched by governments that founded the EU: for example, the wars in Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Indochina, Indonesia and Madagascar. Yet, this fact has never been allowed to complicate the historical image of the EU as a non-geopolitical peace project. When the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman pleaded for ‘World peace’ in the Schuman Declaration in May 1950, Schuman also oversaw a colonial war in Indochina, killing as many as half a million Vietnamese. ‘The war and truce in Indochina’, wrote West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1955, p. 21) in 1955, ‘were not a French concern alone. The soldiers who sacrificed their lives in Indochina did so not for France alone, but for the cause of freedom throughout the world’.
Given that the Rome Treaty incorporated France's Algerian departments into the EEC, this also meant that one of the bloodiest wars in the post-war era was fought inside the EEC (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014). It was a war that the European ‘peace project’ helped legitimise, or as Megan Brown's (2022, p. 105) detailed account of Algeria's career in the EEC reveals: ‘the [Rome] treaty afforded French administrators the chance to showcase the fact that other European states agreed that Algeria was a constitutive part of France, undercutting the Algerian nationalists' claims.’ Nevertheless, scholars today continue to refer to the 1950s EU as a ‘peace project’. In outlining European integration's three post-war eras, for instance, Richard Youngs (2024, p. 3) defines the EU during the first post-war era as ‘essentially a peace project in which war became unthinkable’.
A Political Alliance
Although much has changed since 1957, the EU's quest to control Africa and harness its vast resources has not. This explains why, as Charles Michel emphasises above, the ‘partnership should now also translate into a strong political alliance’. Such an EU–African alliance is said to be ‘crucial in a multipolar world where collective action is sorely needed’ (European Commission and High Representative, 2020, p. 2). Brussels points out that ‘[t]ogether Africa and Europe form the largest voting bloc in the UN’ and that this joint force should be used to push for common causes (European Commission and High Representative, 2020, p. 15). The EU–AU summit in 2022 and its ‘Joint Vision for 2030’ reiterated the alliance's UN strength: ‘Together, the European Union and the African Union account for 42% of the UN countries; 55+27 out of 193’ (European Council, 2023).
Again, by invoking a ‘multipolar world’, the strategy acknowledges that the EU's strong position in Africa is being challenged by other powers. Borrell (2020c) made this clear in his address to the European Parliament's foreign policy debate in 2020. In pointing to the problems in the EU's ‘Southern neighbourhood’, Borrell sounded the alarm over Russia's and Turkey's inroads into Libya. In direct relation to this, Borrell (2020c) went on to say: ‘Africa. Let us talk a lot about Africa. A continent of both promises and challenges.’ Borrell did indeed talk a lot about Africa. In the three-page speech concerning the EU's foreign policy in general, Africa was mentioned no less than nine times. China was only mentioned once in passing, and the United States was not mentioned at all.
The EU's bid to form a political alliance with the African Union is a striking development, especially when explicitly framed as helping Europe regain her geopolitical stamina and navigate the stormy waters of a ‘multipolar world’. Not long before the EU's Strategy with Africa was presented, Angela Merkel contributed to the discussion on the EU's ‘strategic autonomy’, saying that ‘Europe should also develop its own military capability. There may be regions outside Nato's primary focus where Europe must, if necessary, be prepared to get involved. I see Africa as one example’ (Financial Times, 2020). Prior to this, the German government had pledged to launch a ‘Marshall Plan with Africa’ (Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2017).
This is not the first time that Germans have proposed a Marshall Plan for Africa. During the negotiations for the Treaty of Rome in 1957, West Germany's foreign minister, Heinrich von Brentano, proposed a Marshall Plan for France's African colonies as part of the EEC framework (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014, p. 222). In February 1957, Adenauer explained the great advantages of the EEC's colonial association regime to his cabinet. ‘The Chancellor’, the cabinet protocols relate, ‘is of the opinion that in the long-term France offers much better economic prospects than Britain. France possesses a latent wealth, just think of the Sahara with its oil and uranium deposits. Equatorial Africa also constitutes a significant reserve.’ (Kabinettsprotokolle, 1957, p. 144) On 26 March 1957 – the day after the Rome Treaty's signing ceremony – a New York Times (1957b) headline ran: ‘Germans Go to Africa: Bonn Mission to Study Ways to Develop Resources.’ As reported, a German delegation was heading for ‘France's African colonies to survey the joint development of industrial raw materials required by West Europe’. It was also reported that this formed part of the EEC accord, ‘signed today in Rome’, and its objective to secure ‘the joint financing of the economic development of France's African colonies.’
A few months later, another New York Times (1957c) headline stated: ‘Europe May Get New Oil Source: Common Economic Market Could Mean Shift From Mideast to Africa’. In as little time as 5 or 6 years, the article informed, the EEC could very well, thanks to the recently discovered oil reserves in Algeria, ‘bring about a most important and perhaps permanent change in the European oil picture’.
Today, in the EU's 2020 ‘Comprehensive Strategy with Africa’, Brussels puts ‘energy access’ as the number one objective, the document mentioning ‘energy’ no less than 26 times. Given the dramatically changing energy relations between the EU and Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine, EU access to Africa's oil, gas and renewables has become all the more crucial, with headlines similar to those in 1957 appearing regularly. Here is one example: ‘Eni calls for energy “axis” between Europe and Africa to solve Russian crisis.’ The Italian oil and gas giant Eni wants the EU to establish a ‘“south-north axis” connecting’ Africa's huge energy reserves ‘with the energy hungry markets of Europe’. The Financial Times quoted the CEO of Eni, Claudio Descalzi, saying: ‘We don't have energy, they have energy. We have a big industry, they have to develop it […] There is a strong complementary.’ The transition has been swift, with, Algeria, ironically enough, having agreed to double its gas exports to the EU (Financial Times, 2023b).
It should also be mentioned that prior to Russia's attack on Ukraine, the EU's policy had been to demand that African countries reduce oil and gas production and investment, as part of the green transition pushed by the EU. But once the EU wanted to wean off its fossil dependency on Russia and impose sanctions, EU members demanded that African countries reverse the EU-imposed policy and raise production to serve EU interests (Aggad and Davies, 2022; Carbone, 2023).
By ‘aligning’ with Africa, the current EU sees itself much better equipped to deal with China, Russia, Turkey and other contenders in Africa. The EU's alliance with Africa – ‘the largest voting bloc in the UN’ – invokes an image of an emergent geopolitical force located between the east and west, running from north to south – and with oil, gas and other natural resources running from south to north. But the competition for Africa, Borrell (2021, p. 229) emphasises, will be stiff, and as such, it is often framed as a zero-sum game: ‘As Africa's neighbour and its main partner, we are directly concerned by the conditions in which the rise of this young and dynamic continent takes place. If we do not give this matter sufficient attention, others will – and probably at our expense.’ Again, this echoes the 1950's Eurafrican rationale. As stated in Le Monde (1957) in February 1957: ‘The Six are also aware that the political fate of Europe is more or less linked to that of Africa, and that if other influences were to supplant ours in these territories, serious risks would appear on the horizon.’ Today, scholars also promote this zero-sum approach to Africa, arguing, for instance, that ‘acting in Libya’ has become necessary ‘because we have seen that unless Europeans do so, others – Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates – will instead, in a manner that will certainly not be conducive to European interests’ (Tocci, 2021, p. 222).
From the EU's perspective, moreover, Africa is the only place where Europeans are relatively unconstrained by US interest. This is ironic since this is not the case in Europe itself, as starkly illustrated by the war in Ukraine. The same irony was, of course, even more starkly present in the post-war period, when the superpowers divided the European continent and with the EU founders also pointing to Africa as a remedy for a lack of domestic European autonomy. Africa thus fits very well with the current EU's goal of strategic autonomy. As put by Borrell (2020b): ‘Europe is today confronted on its periphery with a certain number of conflicts or tensions in the Sahel, in Libya and in Eastern Mediterranean. In these three cases Europe must act even more, and alone, because these problems do not primarily concern the United States.’ This unilateral position also has a backing within the policy-advisory community. With American geopolitical priorities retreating from ‘the Mediterranean, Africa and possibly also the Middle East’, a German Institute for International and Security Affairs paper argues, the EU has to make its presence felt and ‘must be in a position not only to set its own political and economic priorities but to address crises and stabilisation tasks on its own’ (Lippert et al., 2019, p, 32).
Conclusion
As I have argued throughout, the historical oblivion concerning the EU's colonial origins informs and structures the current articulation and reception of the EU's geopolitical turn. It makes Brussels' undisguised embrace of hard power seem altogether new, when, if fact, it constitutes a reassertion of the old – a tribute to the founders of sorts. In the post-cold war period, the EU's foreign policy rhetoric was, of course, much different from both the 1950s and today. But as explained above, the policy was nonetheless replete with geopolitical objectives and practices. Today's policy debate, though, plays off the rhetorical differences and can thus explain the geopolitical turn as a necessary and self-preserving adjustment that was forced on the EU by the increasingly foul play by Russia, China and others. ‘The mode of exercising power which the Union has employed over the last two decades’, one scholar claims, ‘is no longer available […] as the world around us changes systemically. This ought to shake Europeans out of their comfort zone’ (Tocci, 2021, p. 222). Hence, whilst the EU's values- and rules-based policy was well intended, to stay the course would have been both naïve and irresponsible. This narrative, though, fails to account for the type of values, rules and comfort zone that have guided EU policy in, say, Chad, Libya or Uzbekistan during the last few decades.
As I noted above, the fact that the EU is more explicit about its geopolitical ambitions in Africa has not altogether muted the rhetorical emphasis on human rights, multilateralism and so on. In this context, the EU thus exploits its historical anti-geopolitical capital to distinguish its current geopolitical turn from its contenders. The EU can thus have the cake and eat it too, or as one commentator advocating the EU's geopolitical turn felt urged to rhetorically acknowledge: ‘Are geopolitics really in the DNA of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize laureate?’ (Blockmans, 2020).
In 1962, the Secretary of the Council of Europe's Economic Committee, Uwe Kitzinger (1962, p. 98), commented on the Rome Treaty's colonial association provisions, saying: ‘They were based on a largely static conception of the political relations between the African countries and the metropolitan Member States. In the past three years that relationship has evolved beyond all expectations.’
Sixty years after the formal decolonisation of the EEC's African annex, many of the EU's conceptions about its relations with African countries have a ‘static’ feel to them. Investment and resource extraction certainly have such a feel. But as seen, the transformations taking place over the past decades have also ‘evolved beyond all expectations’. The EU now has competitors, foremost China (Haastrup et al., 2021). The static feel thus also concerns the dread and disdain with which the EU approaches this challenge. On the African side, however, the transformation has more of a dynamic feel to it. Although the scores of problems concerning the growing competition over Africa's riches are well known, it has also brought more options and leverage to African governments (e.g., Carbone, 2023). And this is a bitter pill to swallow for the EU (Haastrup, 2022). ‘We are good at financing roads’, von der Leyen laments: ‘But it does not make sense for Europe to build a perfect road between a Chinese-owned copper mine and a Chinese-owned harbour’ (quoted in Financial Times, 2021). And this is exactly my point; no, the perfect road may not make sense for the EU, but it may make perfect sense for an African government.
Again, this reflects the EU's continued difficulties in accepting that African countries may have interests entirely at odds with those of the EU. This explains why ‘Europe’ does not need permission to intervene in ‘Africa’, why a German government, as noted above, can announce that ‘Europe must, if necessary, be prepared to get involved’ militarily in Africa. And this sentiment is widely shared. As Financial Times' David Pilling (2022) stated after many African countries failed to kowtow to the wishes of the EU on the UN resolution on ‘Aggression against Ukraine’: ‘This is no time for neutrality in Africa on Ukraine.’ ‘The most telling aspect of the aftermath of 2 March [2002] vote’, Kifukwe and Lebovich (2022) noted, ‘is not African countries' decisions but the EU's expectations of them’.
Some six decades ago, in his writings on the conclusion of European colonialism, Raymond Aron (1960, p. 155) made the following observation: ‘By losing their military positions around the world, Europeans lose, in a way, their autonomy.’ To recover this autonomy, Aron insisted, a geopolitics of European unity had become necessary. Aron – as so many other I.R. theorists at the time – thus saw the EEC as the means through which Western Europe could re-establish the great power status that the members could not attain individually:
[I]t is the will to transmute this community, now under domination [by the superpowers] into an autonomous community of action which is at the root of the European plan. The nations of the old continent are living one and the same historical experience. Will they insist on answering the challenge of their abasement individually? Or will they unite in order to find an answer in common? (Aron, 1960, p. 163; my emphasis)
As illustrated here, this 20th century message is being repeated incessantly today, as it constitutes much of the defining core of the EU's geopolitical turn. In essence, this is the meaning of ‘strategic autonomy’. Such an autonomy does not reside in a space of reciprocal independence; rather, it materialises through the external projection of power and the encroachment on the sovereign independence of others. Strategic autonomy is thus not synonymous with the textbooks' minding-one's-own-business sovereignty that stops at the border. On the contrary, strategic autonomy is more akin to a transgressive sovereignty of the Hobbesian kind (see Hansen, 2022), whereby the commonwealth's sovereignty depends on its autonomy of external action. For Hobbes, sovereignty was never complete until it also included the ability to project power onto external lands. The reason why ‘[t]he Athenians, and Romans were free; that is, free [or autonomous] commonwealths’, Hobbes wrote (Hobbes, 1996 [1651], p. 143), was precisely because ‘their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade other people’.
As the competition for Africa's resources and markets stiffens, global geopolitical interests will also increasingly come to clash in and over Africa. With African countries being equipped with more leverage in its foreign relations, the EU may also have to deal with more of that which it finds difficult to acknowledge: namely, sovereignty and autonomy on the African side. So far, the EU is handling this by turning to a more aggressive rhetoric towards its competitors that forebodes more aggressive action. As Borrell (2020b) asserted in 2020, ‘we are in a situation where economic interdependence is becoming politically very conflictual.’ His then advisor at the EU's External Action Service, Bruno Dupré (2022), defined the EU's task as follows:
There can be no sovereignty for Europe without the creation, beyond the neighbourhood, of an arc of countries that share and defend the same values. Strategic autonomy is not synonymous with independence or autarky but rather with interdependence that is chosen rather than suffered.
Again, strategic autonomy cannot thrive under a regime of mutually acknowledged independence and equality. Not only does it presuppose an external sphere of influence; in equating strategic autonomy with an ‘interdependence that is chosen rather than suffered’, Dupré also returns the concept to how it was first applied in the post-war period. However, since such a sphere of influence may not appeal to African countries that, just like the EU, want to choose their interdependencies – rather than being their victims – this may escalate geopolitical tensions in Africa even further.
In a speech addressing the Russia–Ukraine situation roughly a week prior to Russia's attack, Ursula von der Leyen (2022) emphasised that ‘[t]he idea of spheres of influence are ghosts of the last century.’ Indeed, Europe's 20th century refuses to stand down. The newly founded Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, or BIG, which is sponsored by the Dutch, French and German governments, has as its mission to teach Europe ‘to act and think in terms of power’ and to help it craft a ‘novel orientation towards geography and history’. These conceptions are taken straight from the classical geopolitical playbook of the early to mid-20th century. ‘Europe’, BIG declares, has ‘to act as a power among powers’ (Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, n.d.).
Seeing many of today's EU leaders, scholars and think tanks embrace the prescriptive attitudes of the geopolitical thinking of the interwar and post-war periods should be a strong incentive for scholarship to engage with the EU's colonial history. Unless this is done, the crucial historical impact on the EU's current geopolitical manoeuvring will continue to go unnoticed. Such an engagement will also help us better grasp, and critique, the current EU's plans for its African sphere of influence.
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to the editors of this special issue: Dimitris Bouris, Nora Fisher-Onar and Daniela Huber. I would also like to thank the other contributors for helpful comments and advice on previous drafts of this article.
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