Political analysts often refer to the EU as a “peace project” that was created to counter nationalism, wars and political turbulence. Peo Hansen argues that while this view continues to shape perceptions today, it overlooks the role that geopolitical issues have always played in the integration process, EUROPP reports.
The EU is gradually becoming a geopolitical player. It wants to be “sovereign”, “strategically autonomous”, a “balancer of power” and a projector of “hard power”. As the “geopolitical commission” of Josep Borrell and Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly explained, “the era of conciliatory, if not naive, Europe has arrived. Virtuous ‘soft power’ is no longer enough in today’s world. We must supplement it with a ‘hard power’ dimension.” The war in Ukraine, as Borrell has just stated, “has made us a geopolitical power, not just an economic one.”
It is not known what political measures this will entail. However, what is clear is that the EU’s geopolitical turnaround is a radically new and unprecedented event. In the opinion of many analysts, this is where its enormous significance lies.
The geopolitical pivot marks a departure from the EU’s unique, as they say, “soft-power” approach to world affairs. However, by openly embracing ‘hard power’, Brussels is also breaking the continuity between current rhetoric and its own carefully crafted historical narrative of the original EU as an anti-geopolitical pioneer and peace project, for which the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. In receiving the prize, then Commission President José Manuel Barroso spoke of how “the experience of extreme nationalism, wars and the absolute evil of the Shoah” had convinced the EU to embrace a “cosmopolitan order” and abandon the logic of the “balance of power”, EUROPP reports.
A large body of scholarship on the EU also helps to perpetuate this image of the EU’s genesis in the 1950s, arguing, for example, that ‘the EU emerged after, not before, the resolution of major geopolitical problems’ and that the Treaty of Rome was negotiated ‘with the realisation that geopolitical issues were no longer at stake’.
However, this underlying story of an innocent origin, supposedly unaffected by geopolitical issues, does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Today’s broad discussion of the EU’s geopolitical pivot ignores the fact that at the time of its creation in 1957, the EU was a vast imperial power that annexed or “associated” the African colonies of France and Belgium and fully incorporated French Algeria.
The founders of the EU emphasised the community’s vast extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence, which was designated as “Eurafrica” and enshrined in the colonial association regime of the Treaty of Rome. By including much of Africa’s natural resources within the Western European sphere of influence, the European Economic Community sought to become a “third force” in world geopolitics, capable of balancing the Soviet Union and the United States, according to EUROPP.
In December 1956, the intergovernmental Special Group on Overseas Territories, charged with preparing the colonial association regime of the Treaty of Rome, presented its final report to the negotiators:
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.
“The proposed enterprise”, the report concluded, “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.”
Thus, European integration in the 1950s had a direct impact on geopolitical stratagems, and the rest should strike us as completely illogical. Remember the obvious significance of the huge African empires of France and Belgium, and all the colonial wars fought mainly by France during the formative years of European integration, according to EUROPP.
However, this fact has never interfered with the historical view of the EU as a non-geopolitical peace project. Since the Treaty of Rome incorporated France’s Algerian departments into the EEC, it meant that one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars of the post-war era was fought within the EU. It was a war that the European ‘peace project’ thus helped to legitimise by recognising that Algeria was indeed an integral part of France.
The amnesia that makes us fail to recognise the EU’s colonial origins explains why today’s geopolitical turn is perceived as entirely new and polarly different from the way the EU approached geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a departure from the past is in fact a reconnection with it, in the sense that the current EU leaders’ overt embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of its founders, EUROPP reports.
This is important because Brussels, as in the 1950s, describes its geopolitical turn as resting on a close “alliance” with Africa. Although many momentous events for Europe have happened since 1957, the EU’s quest for political influence and the exploitation of Africa’s vast resources has not changed. This explains why Brussels wants a “strategic alliance” with Africa, not just a partnership.
According to Brussels, such a strategic alliance “will be crucial in a multipolar world where collective action is essential”. Brussels notes that “together, Africa and Europe form the largest bloc in the UN” and that this joint strength should be utilised to advance common global goals. In his opening remarks at the EU-AC summit last year, European Council President Charles Michel re-emphasised the priority of EU-Africa security interdependence.
The EU’s desire to forge a strategic alliance with the African Union is surprising, especially if the EU frames its desire as helping Europe increase its geopolitical endurance and navigate the turbulent waters of a “multipolar world”. The EU recognises that its position in Africa is being challenged by other powers with reference to the ‘multipolar world’, a challenge often framed in ‘zero-sum’ terms:
“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.”
This has common features with the Eurasian rationale for the colonial association regime of the Rome Treaty of the 1950s. As the newspaper Le Monde wrote 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.”
As competition for Africa’s resources and markets grows, different geopolitical interests will increasingly compete in and over Africa. So far, the EU has been successful in dealing with this, with the bloc taking a more aggressive stance towards its competitors in Africa, most notably China. Borrell’s advisor at the EU External Relations Service, Bruno Dupre, emphasises 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.”
This may cause further escalation of geopolitical tensions in Africa, as such a sphere of influence may not be to the liking of African countries, which, like the EU, want to choose their interdependence rather than be a victim of it. It may also further stimulate and revitalise “Eurafrica 2.0”. This is why today’s developments should encourage us to engage more actively with the EU’s colonial past. Such a dialogue between the present and the past will help us better understand the EU’s current plans for the African sphere of influence.
