
Europe has rarely been just about Europe,
said Mark Mazower. [1]
At the same time, the idea of integrating the old Continent did not affect just the North-Shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Recently, an interesting UK scholarship (e.g. Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsonn [2]; Kalipso Nicolaidis [3]) has stressed that European Integration in the 50s “cannot be separated from the perceived necessity to preserve and prolong the colonial system”. At the heart of this perception was a peculiar discourse on “Eurafrica” which had a longer history. It proposes that a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonisation of Africa that would have ended the claim for decolonisation, granting to West Germany a new colonial influence and fixing a renewed hierarchy among European citizens and African subjects.
This was a neo-colonial discourse which, birthed in 1929 with Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, was destined to pass into the same Eurofascist lexicon as espoused by Asvero Gravelli, Georges Valois and Oswald Mosley before its acceptance in the institutional argumentation of liberal and democratic characters such as Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, and Hendrik Brugmans [4]. According to this discourse Europe was the superior civilisation that could provide Africa with morality, technology, culture and progress. Only the Old Continent was the depositary of modernity, the land which could drive Africa – who was represented as a “primitive” reality – towards “modernity” and, a term which became always more relevant in the Fifties, “development” (but already Coudenhove Kalergi, 1923 and 1929, insisted on that) [5].
1. Eurafrica as colonial project after WWII
For all these reasons, Europe was described as the dominant part of the partnership with Africa, a solution that had been also defined as “Great Europe” (e.g. du Jonchay, 1953) [6]. A project which would be able to face and win the challenge represented by the two new blocs arose after the Second World War: the American and the Soviet. From such an Eurocentric standpoint, Eurafrica, especially in France, was also seen as a project destined to restore the hegemony of Europe in the world. The horizon defined by this Eurafrican discourse, from 1929 to 1960, was the one of a triumphant autarchy, which would join the European expertise with the enormous African mineral and natural resources, creating new markets and exploiting the industrialization of the African continent.
It is not by chance that Frantz Fanon declared that the purpose of the Eurafrica project was to transform Africa from "France's hunting territory" into the "hunting territory of Europe" [7]. In fact, the southern shore of the Mediterranean became, inside this narration, the natural appendix of Europe, its ideal completion and its future. In a world which was becoming a globe, a context in which the word decolonization appeared (1932), Eurafrica seemed to be an answer to several fascist and liberal authors which, from Italy, Germany or France, observed with anxiety the rise of extra-European powers [8].
With the begin of the European integration process, new narratives of Europe’s mission in relation to its former colonial territories were fuelled, namely African countries which, according to the Schuman Declaration (1950) itself , were to be the object of one of Europe’s essential tasks, i.e. ‘the development of the African continent’. By signing the Rome Treaties on March 1957, the European political elites gave birth to the European Economic Community (EEC), leaving behind the old and historic rivalries and bringing about peace and stability according to a mainstream narrative which describes the EEC as an enlightened political and economic project with no shadows.
In doing so, they were also rebuilding a post-colonial identity for Europe as a superior Self, engaged in a crusading mission to civilize others [9]. Following this narration, after the achievement of national independence, the majority of African States decided to associate themselves with the new European Economic Community. The result – defined in the Yaoundé (1962), Lomé Conventions (1975) and Cotonù Agreement (2000) – was a neo-colonial tie among this countries and the EEC, which, based on agricultural control over Africa by Europe, hindered any industrial development of the former colonial countries. Thus, in this case it is possible to speak of a neo-colonial Eurafrican discourse, which also entailed consequences on the neo-colonial path: a system that involved several African countries after national independence.