Gurminder Bhambra's Annual Lecture points the way to aparadigm shift in how the social sciences should approachthe nation-state,both historically and in our own times.That is to say, perceiving of Britain historically as a nation-stateor as an imperial state will make all the difference;and, as Bhambra demonstrates, it is precisely the failureto grasp the imperial fact that prevents us from grasping‘the shared histories that have configured our present’.This article reflects on the crucial imperial fact outlined byBhambra, and it applies its radical consequences for ourapproach to the broader Western European scene andthe world at large in the postwar period. Our contemporarynation-statesystem, it is argued, is not the inventionof Westphalia and European objectives, but rather theproduct of decolonization and thus a reaction and alternativeto the European designs for the modern world order,in general, and the postwar order, in particular. In relationto this, the article also explains how Bhambra's work helpsestablish a historically informed critique of methodologicalnationalism, as opposed to the many misconceptionsperpetuated by our current theoretical consensus of what‘methodological nationalism’ entails.

Alors que l’Europe, jadis triomphante, se trouve ravagée, appauvrie et divisée au sortir de la Première Guerre mondiale, un concept prometteur se diffuse dans les milieux dirigeants et intellectuels du Vieux Continent : l’Eurafrique !Faire du continent africain le ferment de l’unité européenne : tel est le projet de Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, chantre du mouvement paneuropéen, et de nombre de ses contemporains dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Le salut de l’Europe, affirment-ils, repose sur sa capacité à exploiter en commun les richesses des colonies africaines. Rivalisant avec la puissance montante des continents américain et asiatique, l’Eurafrique deviendra ainsi le pôle dominant de la géopolitique mondiale.Le projet eurafricain, un temps caressé par les régimes fascistes, renaît de ses cendres après 1945 et inspire les « fondateurs » de l’Europe : Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Paul Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer. La France, principale puissance coloniale d’Europe continentale, joue alors un rôle essentiel. Malmené en Indochine puis en Algérie, Paris s’accroche à ses possessions africaines et fait de leur inclusion dans le marché commun européen une condition sine qua nonà sa participation à la construction européenne.C’est ce dossier qu’ouvrent Peo Hansen et Stefan Jonsson. Proposant une analyse inédite des négociations qui aboutiront à la signature du traité de Rome en 1957, ils dévoilent un pan méconnu de l’histoire de l’Union européenne : ses origines coloniales.

Alors que la France assure la présidence du Conseil de l’Union européenne, Emmanuel Macron veut « proposer une nouvelle alliance au continent africain ». Le sommet UE-UA qui se tient à Bruxelles les 17 et 18 février doit donc servir à « jeter les bases d’un partenariat renouvelé » entre les deux entités. Au-delà des enjeux contemporains, cette volonté de « lier le destin » des deux rives de la Méditerranée n’est pas nouvelle : elle répond à un projet vieux de soixante ans, qui avait pour nom l’Eurafrique et pour ambition la préservation de la puissance européenne et du système colonial. 

Today both researchers and policy-makers agree that refugees and low-skilled migrants admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. Whereas researchers draw this conclusion from a seemingly neutral accounting exercise – refugees contribute less in taxes than they receive in welfare assistance – politicians eagerly use this economics to justify increasingly restrictive asylum policies. The welfare state, they claim, simply cannot afford to absorb refugees. To be sure, politicians and researchers may judge low-earning and low-skilled labour migrants to be both useful and affordable, but only on the condition that their access to welfare provisions is restricted. Researchers conceive of this as the inherent trade-off between migration and the welfare state, also expressed as the "numbers versus rights trade-off".1 Put simply, a country either has high levels of immigration or it has a sustainable welfare state, but it cannot have both. Or, in a different scenario, it either admits many migrants whose access to the welfare state is restricted, or it admits very few migrants who all receive equal treatment in terms of welfare state access. Of course, given the household budget accounting involved, if a country admits many high-skilled, high-earning migrants, these will, in contrast, impact positively on the public purse.

In this article I will show that this consensual cost-perspective on migration builds on a flawed economic conception. Much of it is due to the heavy imprint of the orthodox "sound finance" doctrine on migration research and policy – the assumption that central governments face a budget constraint and solvency requirement much in same way as households, municipalities or businesses. As economists Huixin Bi and Eric Leeper establish, "like the household, the government must satisfy a budget constraint each period."2 In the Oxford Dictionary of Economics, moreover, the "budget constraint" is described as "[t]he limit to expenditure. For any economic agent, whether an individual, a firm, or a government, expenditure must stay within limits set by the ability to finance it".3 By shifting perspective to instead examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the article will not only demonstrate sound finance's detrimental impact on migration policy and research, including the doctrine's instrumental role in stoking the toxic debate on migration in the EU. It will also show why MMT offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing.

Empirically, I bring these tools to bear on the case of Sweden, the country that, proportionally speaking, has received the most refugees in the EU. The specific focus is placed on the consequences of the large increase in government spending following the refuge reception in 2015. From the perspective of policy-makers' certainty about the fiscal unsustainability of large numbers of refugees and scholarship's assurances concerning refugees' negative fiscal impact, the Swedish situation in 2015 should provide the ultimate worst-case scenario. Sweden, one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the EU, admitted 163,000 asylum seekers in one year, the majority of whom were given permission to stay, which meant that they were incorporated into what orthodox economics already takes to be a bloated welfare state. In other words, all the conditions for a perfect storm were in place. By the same token, so were all the conditions for a perfect natural experiment to test the literature's assertions about fiscal burdens and trade-offs.

The widely accepted narrative that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a fiscal burden is based on a seemingly neutral accounting exercise, in which migrants contribute less in tax than they receive in welfare assistance. A “fact” that justifies increasingly restrictive asylum policies.

In this book Peo Hansen shows that this consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine prevalent in migration research and policy. By shifting perspective to examinemigration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, Hansen is able to demonstrate sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research, including its role in stoking the toxic debate on migration in the EU. Most importantly, Hansen’s undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing.

In addition to a searing analysis of EU migration policy and politics, Hansen also investigates the case of Sweden, the country that has received the most refugees in the EU in proportion to population. Hansen demonstrates how Sweden’s increased refugee spending in 2015–2017 proved to be fiscally risk-free and how the injection of funds to cash-strapped and depopulating municipalities, which received refugees, boosted economic growth and investment in welfare. Spending on refugees became a way of rediscovering the viability of welfare for all. Given that the Swedish approach to the 2015 refugee crisis has since been discarded and deemed fiscally unsustainable, Hansen’s aim is to reveal its positive effects and its applicability as a model for the EU as a whole.

Die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG), die Vorläufer organisation der Europäischen Union, wurde im selben Jahr gegründet, in dem Ghana seine Unabhängigkeit verkündete – als erster zuvor kolonisierter Staat in Afrika südlich der Sahara. Beide Ereignisse fanden sogar im selben Monat statt, im März 1957. In der offiziellen und halboffiziellen Geschichte der EU werden sie gerne in Zusammenhang gebracht. Gemäß der gängigen Erzählung waren beide Ereignisse Manifestationen der neuen Weltordnung, wie sie sich in den Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entwickelte: Dem zufolge hätten die westeuropäischen Staaten ihre Ansprüche auf imperiale Dominanz aus freien Stücken begraben. Sie hätten nach innerkontinentaler Kooperation gesucht und ihre nationalen Rivalitäten beigelegt, welche in zwei Weltkriege gemündet waren, um ihre nach dem Krieg am Boden liegenden Gesellschaften und Volkswirtschaften wieder aufzubauen. Dazu hätten sie ihre nationalen Ressourcen miteinander koordiniert und die Mobilität von Waren, Geld und Arbeit innerhalb der Gemeinschaft gesteigert.

Die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG), die Vorläufer organisation der Europäischen Union, wurde im selben Jahr gegründet, in dem Ghana seine Unabhängigkeit verkündete – als erster zuvor kolonisierter Staat in Afrika südlich der Sahara. Beide Ereignisse fanden sogar im selben Monat statt, im März 1957. In der offiziellen und halboffiziellen Geschichte der EU werden sie gerne in Zusammenhang gebracht. Gemäß der gängigen Erzählung waren beide Ereignisse Manifestationen der neuen Weltordnung, wie sie sich in den Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entwickelte: Dem zufolge hätten die westeuropäischen Staaten ihre Ansprüche auf imperiale Dominanz aus freien Stücken begraben. Sie hätten nach innerkontinentaler Kooperation gesucht und ihre nationalen Rivalitäten beigelegt, welche in zwei Weltkriege gemündet waren, um ihre nach dem Krieg am Boden liegenden Gesellschaften und Volkswirtschaften wieder aufzubauen. Dazu hätten sie ihre nationalen Ressourcen miteinander koordiniert und die Mobilität von Waren, Geld und Arbeit innerhalb der Gemeinschaft gesteigert.

Die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG), die Vorläufer organisation der Europäischen Union, wurde im selben Jahr gegründet, in dem Ghana seine Unabhängigkeit verkündete – als erster zuvor kolonisierter Staat in Afrika südlich der Sahara. Beide Ereignisse fanden sogar im selben Monat statt, im März 1957. In der offiziellen und halboffiziellen Geschichte der EU werden sie gerne in Zusammenhang gebracht. Gemäß der gängigen Erzählung waren beide Ereignisse Manifestationen der neuen Weltordnung, wie sie sich in den Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entwickelte: Dem zufolge hätten die westeuropäischen Staaten ihre Ansprüche auf imperiale Dominanz aus freien Stücken begraben. Sie hätten nach innerkontinentaler Kooperation gesucht und ihre nationalen Rivalitäten beigelegt, welche in zwei Weltkriege gemündet waren, um ihre nach dem Krieg am Boden liegenden Gesellschaften und Volkswirtschaften wieder aufzubauen. Dazu hätten sie ihre nationalen Ressourcen miteinander koordiniert und die Mobilität von Waren, Geld und Arbeit innerhalb der Gemeinschaft gesteigert.

The relationship between the history of European integration and the history of colonialism is best understood through a compelling geopolitical entity once known as Eurafrica. As we have shown in a recent book by that title, most efforts to unify Europe from 1920 to 1960 systematically coincided with efforts to develop and stabilize the colonial system in Africa. Eurafrica was also the name of the “compromise” of decolonization. It was the mediating institutional formation through which Africa and Europe exited the colonial era and entered a new world order where, just as the founders of the EEC had intended, their unequal relationship essentially remained unchanged. Today, even as the Eurafrican project is largely forgotten, the content of current EU policymaking towards its African “partner” demonstrates that its influence persists under the surface. The only way to comprehend the deep structures of current EU–African relations is to bring this history to life again, or at least bring it into the history books.

For a long time, studies of colonialism and imperialism focused primarily on once colonised societies where the traces and consequences of colonialism lay immediately open to anyone’s experience. In recent decades, and much due to postcolonial scholarship, which has disclosed that colonising societies were just as much influenced by colonialism as the colonised ones, there has also emerged an impressive body of research that traces colonialism’s influence on the national cultures and histories of a number of European states, and not just those that had explicit colonial ambitions. This research testifies to the fact that colonialism lingers on as a touchy and salient issue in national imaginaries and cultural identities, as well as in national high politics. Meanwhile, the urgency of a series of contemporary developments and projects should challenge research also to go beyond the methodological nationalism or, better, methodological colonial statism often inherent in such studies.In this chapter we attend to the ‘the European project’, or more specifically the project of European integration. Challenging received ideas in scholarship, we suggest a new point of departure for the analysis of the relation between Europe and Africa in the interwar and postwar eras. By demonstrating that the early European integration that culminated in the Treaty of Rome in 1957 in fact was a colonial enterprise that incorporated all the member states’ colonies within its institutional framework, we also point to the crucial implications that this has had for postcolonial relations between what is today the European Union and the former colonies in Africa.In reconceiving historical European integration as a colonial project, we also discuss the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of European integration. Provided that European integration in the postwar period to a large extent revolved around matters of trade, the EEC being a ‘customs union’, our intuition should tell us that such a project ought to have been deeply concerned with colonial affairs, particularly because the future of the French empire and its trading bloc seemed to hinge on France’s ability to preserve and consolidate its colonial economy. It should be equally safe to assume that the general political and geopolitical situation of the latter part of the 1940s and the 1950s, so profoundly marked by colonial crises and colonial wars, should have left a strong imprint on the various initiatives to bolster postwar Western European cooperation. To imagine that these circumstances did not affect European integration would be as counterintuitive as to imagine European integration to have been unaffected by the Cold War. Yet, this is how things are portrayed in just about all of today’s standard histories of European integration (see further Hansen and Jonsson 2014a). As a third and final task, then, the chapter seeks to clarify this puzzle and lacuna, focusing, inter alia, on the need to rethink the concepts and remodel the interpretive frames within which the history of European integration traditionally has been understood and explained.

This paper is part of the joint project between the Directorate General for Migration and Home Affairs of the European Commission and the OECD’s Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs on “Review of Labour Migration Policy in Europe”.

This document has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

Grant: HOME/2013/EIFX/CA/002 / 30-CE-0615920/00-38 (DI130895)

A previous version of this paper (DELSA/ELSA/MI(2015)2) was presented and discussed at the OECD Working Party on Migration in June 2015.

This paper presents an overview and analysis of the policy development at the EU level regarding external labour migration (ELM). It reviews the shift in ELM policy at the EU level by examining documents and debates. It looks at the treatment of ELM, setting out from the Amsterdam Treaty and then follows the development up to the present, paying close attention to the evolving rational for increasing ELM. The difference between the horizontal approach and the sectoral approach is explained. The major ELM Directives under the sectoral approach are presented and discussed in terms of how they were negotiated and how they fit into the overall ELM policy strategy. The document concludes by identifying current political challenges for expanding the EU approach beyond its present form.

How does our colonial past echo through today's global politics? How have former empire-builders sought vindication or atonement, and formerly colonized states reversal or retribution? This groundbreaking book presents a panoramic view of attitudes to empires past and present, seen not only through the hard politics of international power structures but also through the nuances of memory, historiography and national and minority cultural identities.

Bringing together leading historians, political scientists and international relations scholars from across the globe, Echoes of Empire emphasizes Europe's colonial legacy while also highlighting the importance of non-European power centres – Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Japanese – in shaping world politics, then and now. Echoes of Empire bridges the divide between disciplines to trace the global routes travelled by objects, ideas and people, and forms a radically different notion of the term 'empire' itself. This will be an essential companion to courses on international relations and imperial history as well as a fascinating read for anyone interested in Western

The chapter analyzes current EU–African migration policy, but argues that it must be understood in its historical context. Whereas migration today is to be managed in the framework of a EU–African partnership model built on equality and mutual ‘win–win’ dynamics, a closer look at the history of EU–African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. From the 1920s onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis–à–vis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channeled migration to its own benefit. It is thus argued that unless scholars start to attend to European integration’s crucial colonial history, current power asymmetries between the ‘partners’ will not only remain obscure, we will also fail to recognize the continued currency of colonial ideology in the EU’s African relations.

EU presenteras ofta som ett fredsprojekt. Men bakom fasaden döljer sig en helt annan historia.

För politiker, opinionsbildare och organisationer som från mellankrigstiden och framåt arbetade för europeisk integration stod Afrika i centrum för intresset. Exploateringen av kolonierna krävde samarbete och gemensamma investeringar. Målet var ett tredje block - Eurafrika - som skulle säkra Europas geopolitiska ställning mot de bägge supermakterna.Europas enande skulle alltså börja i Afrika.

Eurafrika är en bok som redan väckt internationell uppmärksamhet. Den gör upp med myten om EU som fredsprojekt och konstaterar att dagens EU knappast hade existerat om det inte från början utformats som en eurafrikansk gemenskap.

This essay describes the history of the Eurafrican project as it evolved from the Pan-European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. By way of conclusion, the article also discusses how this history affects current relations between Africa and the EU. As shown in the article practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. European integration, it is argued, was thus inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the geopolitical discourse on Eurafrica that became politically operative in the aftermath of World War II, a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. Indeed, there is strong evidence to support that these ideas were instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and political constitution of the EU, or of Europe as a political subject. As the article shows, the history of Eurafrica, which is largely ignored in scholarship on the EU as well as in colonial studies, cannot be understood within a “continentalist” framework, but prompts a reconceptualization of the historical relation Africa and Europe.

The EU’s declared need for third country labour migrants is not just any type of need. According to most estimates put forward by the EU (but also by the UN and other organizations) the figures range in the tens of millions for the coming five decades. In its 2005 ‘Policy Plan on Legal Migration’, the European Commission (2005a: 4) warns that unless the EU manages to increase labour immigration the EU’s working age population is expected to contract by some 52 million by 2050. Furthermore, as is underscored in the Commission’s ‘2012 Ageing Report’, looking only to 2020 the EU would need a net migration of 25 million in order to keep the working - age population stable at current level. This means that the Union would have to net an additional 11 million migrants to the already projected 14 million (EC [European Commission] 2012a: 51 – 6). This provided, economic growth and migration growth have become two sides of the same coin in the EU’s economic and political ambition s. This was made clear already in the Lisbon Strategy (2000 - 2010) and now constitutes one of the cornerstones of ‘Europe 2020’, the EU’s current ten - year plan for growth (EC 2010a: 18; EC 2011a: 4). From the perspective of the Commission, a large - scale increase in labour migration has become so urgent that the then Home Affairs Commissioner referred to it as a matter of ‘our economic survival’ (Malmström 2010).

The ways in which Brussels goes about this urgent under taking is the topic of this paper. It focuses on the Commission’s current approach to external labour migration (ELM), its overarching rationale, core objectives and the practical ways and means by which Brussels seeks to build common EU policy in the area, often against the wishes of intransigent governments in the Council. Consequently, a substantial part of this paper will be devoted to the EU directives relating to ELM that have been adopted so far, accounting for their content as well as analysing how they correspond to the Commission’s objectives.  

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.

Enligt EU, OECD, FN och andras skattningar räknas behovet till tiotals miljoner nya invandrare under det närmaste halvseklet. Tillväxt och invandring har blivit två sidor av samma mynt i EU:s ekonomiska och politiska strävan, något som framgår tydligt i unionens tillväxtstrategi "Europa 2020". Budskapet hörs även från EU:s regeringar; men av flera orsaker, däribland dagens djupgående lågkonjunktur, har många regeringar också tystnat i frågan, medan andra börjat vända sig mot en ökad arbetskraftsinvandring.

Cirkulär migration är ledordet när EU antar uppgiften att styra den globala migrations- och arbetsmarknaden till sin egen fördel. Eller, som Peo Hansen och Stefan Jonsson skriver i sin analys av den lika dagsaktuella som historiska eurafrikanska traditionen att låta Syd lösa Nords problem: "Eu vill ha Afrikas arbetskraft, men inte afrikanerna".

Hansen and Jonsson investigate a topic of central importance to the history of European integration that has been virtually erased from scholarship. The topic once went by the name of Eurafrica and it entailed a shared European management of colonial Africa. Launched by Pan-European movements as a geopolitical idea and vision after World War I, Eurafrica gained political momentum after World War II. With the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, Eurafrica was implemented through the association to the EEC of the colonial domains of the six founding European states, as stipulated in the Treaty of Rome. On the basis of archival and other documentation from 1920 to the 1960s, the authors show that all major movements and institutions working towards European integration placed Africa’s geopolitical and economic incorporation into the European enterprise as a key objective. A final chapter discusses how Africa’s association to the EEC impacted on the process of decolonization and shaped postcolonial Africa, and how the ‘Eurafrican legacy’ still affects the EU’s foreign relations. The authors also explain why the link between European integration and colonialism is neglected in EU studies and histories of colonialism, and they develop new theoretical perspectives on European integration in the context of global history. Signalling a paradigm shift in debates and research on the EU, Africa and colonialism, Eurafrica presents an entire vista of both new questions that need to be answered and old answers to be questioned.

In response to a widespread idea of the European Union as a “peace project,” an idea disseminated especially after the EU received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, this essay retrieves some of the historical causes of the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. The essay emphasizes specific geopolitical and colonial incentives that had lain behind the European integration project ever since the pan-European blueprints the interwar period and which became critical with the Suez crisis and decolonization movements of the 1950s. As the essay demonstrates, practically all of the visions, movements, and concrete institutional arrangements working toward European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As much of the scholarly, political, and journalistic accounts at the time testify, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political, and institutional discourse on Eurafrica, a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. Strong evidence suggests that these ideas were instrumental in the actual diplomatic and political constitution of the EEC, or of Europe as a political subject, in 1957. The essay discusses why the EU’s colonial origins have been consigned to oblivion in mainstream research and why this history is of continued concern to the world.

Any consideration of global migration in relation to work and citizenship must necessarily be situated in the context of the Great Recession. A whole historical chapter - that of neoliberalism - has now closed and the future can only be deemed uncertain. Migrant workers were key players during this phase of the global system, supplying cheap and flexible labour inputs when required in the rich countries. Now, with the further sustainability of the neoliberal political and economic world order in question, what will be the role of migration in terms of work patterns and what modalities of political citizenship will develop? While informalization of the relations of production and the precarization of work were once assumed to be the exception, that is no longer the case. As for citizenship this book posits a parallel development of precarious citizenship for migrants, made increasingly vulnerable by the global economic crisis. But we are also in an era of profound social transformation, in the context of which social counter-movements emerge, which may halt the disembedding of the market from social control and its corrosive impact. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

EU:s sammanhållning är satt på sitt hittills svåraste prov. I den ekonomiska krisens spår ser vissa medlemsländer arbetslösheten stiga dramatiskt och tvingas till kraftiga neddragningarna i välfärden. I andra medlemsländer går krisen relativt obemärkt förbi. Otryggheten och skillnaderna på Europas arbetsmarknad utgör grogrund för nationalism och främlingsfientlighet. Krav hörs på en mer restriktiv migrationspolitik. Samtidigt står Europa, med sin åldrande befolkning, inför en allvarlig demografisk och välfärdspolitisk utmaning. Många hävdar därför att EU:s konkurrenskraft och tillväxt på sikt måste bygga på en kraftigt ökad arbetskraftsinvandring.

Den här boken behandlar dynamiken mellan arbetslöshet, migrationspolitik och nationalism som en avgörande framtidsfråga för EU. Vilka konsekvenser har den stigande arbetslösheten och de växande nationalistiska strömningarna för migrationspolitiken i Europa? Klarar EU att hantera de motsättningar som följer av att vissa medlemsländer trappar upp sin argumentation för nationella särlösningar? Kommer den fria rörligheten och EU:s gemensamma arbetsmarknad att kunna upprätthållas? Räcker tilliten mellan EU-länderna för att enas om ett gemensamt regelverk kring arbetskraftsinvandringen, som på en gång tillvaratar migranternas rättigheter och löser unionens långsiktiga demografiska problem?

Detta är den femtonde årgången av Europaperspektiv.  Boken är tvärvetenskaplig och innehåller nio kapitel skrivna av forskare inom juridik, statskunskap och ekonomiska ämnen, som ur olika perspektiv diskuterar EU:s nya migrations- och arbetsmarknadspolitiska utmaningar i en tid präglad av en ekonomisk kris som sätter sammanhållningen på stora prov.

This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS, entitled ‘Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union’. Although it sympathizes with Marks’ invocation of empire as a key theoretical concept and historical category in the study of European integration, it fundamentally disagrees with his ‘continentalist’ operationalization. Marks chooses to discuss the nexus of empire and European integration exclusively with reference to historical processes of imperial expansion and community formation occurring on the western European landmass. Since this methodology leaves out Europe’s maritime colonial empires, it cannot account for the mutually conditioning relations between the intra- and extra-European imperial processes. Consequently, Marks also fails to register colonialism’s decisive bearing on postwar European integration, and thus the fact that the scale of the original EEC was not delimited by the European landmass, but corresponded to the geopolitical constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica

As the European Union faces the ongoing challenges of legitimacy, identity, and social cohesion, an understanding of the social purpose and direction of EU citizenship becomes increasingly vital.

This article examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan-European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (EEC) (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. As shown in the article practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As so much of the scholarly, political and journalistic accounts at the time testify to, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political and institutional discourse on Eurafrica – or the fate of Europe’s colonial enterprise – a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. Indeed, there is strong evidence to support that these ideas were instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and political constitution of the EEC, or of Europe as a political subject. The article discusses the conspicuous absence of these matters from scholarship on European integration and its historical origins and trajectory. It also notes that it is equally neglected in postcolonial studies, which should be able to provide the theoretical and historical tools to engage with the complex and instructive issues with which the Eurafrican project and its intimate links to the history of European integration confront today’s scholars.

In this article we analyse the current trajectory of EU-African migration policy. Unlike many other scholars, we suggest it must be understood in its historical context. Migration between Europe and Africa has been a European concern at least since the 1920s. At that time, issues of migration were seen in the context of a co-European colonial effort in Africa. Today, migration issues are to be resolved in the framework of a EU-African partnership model built on equality, interdependence and mutual ‘win-win’ dynamics. However, a closer look at the history of Euro-African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. Throughout the period from the 1920s and onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Presumed demographic ‘imbalances’ (i.e. population surplus or deficit) have been used to justify vastly different migrant regimes. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis-à-vis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channelled migration to its own benefit. We argue that as long as scholars and intellectuals persist in imitating policy-makers’ disregard of European integration’s colonial history, current structural power asymmetries between the EU and Africa will not only remain obscure; we will also fail to recognize the continued, or even increasing, currency of colonial ideology in the EU’s African relations.

As the European Union faces the ongoing challenges of legitimacy, identity, and social cohesion, an understanding of the social purpose and direction of EU citizenship becomes increasingly vital. This book is the first of its kind to map the development of EU citizenship and its relation to various localities of EU governance. From a critical political economy perspective, the authors argue for an integrated analysis of EU citizenship, one that considers the interrelated processes of migration, economic transformation, and social change and the challenges they present.