Today’s European Union was founded in a 1950s marked by its member
states’ involvement in numerous colonial conflicts and with the colonial question
firmly entrenched on the European 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 European integration. In tackling
this puzzle, the present article proceeds in two steps. First, it corroborates the claim
that European 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 European integration was about. As the
article argues, this epistemology has enabled colonialism’s historical relation to the
European integration project to remain undetected and has thus also reproduced
within the present EU precisely those colonial or neo-colonial preconceptions that
the European partner states, in official discourse and policy, falsely claim that they
have abandoned.
John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Vol. 27, nr 3, s. 442-461