In this conversation piece, Peo Hansen, Stefan Jonsson, and

FRAUD examine the extractivist model known as Eurafrica, upon which the

European Economic Community (EEC) was founded. Drawing on archival

research into the intergovernmental negotiations that culminated in the

Treaty of Rome, they challenge the dominant narrative of Europe as a union

for peace, democracy, and freedom. By institutionalizing the colonies’ role

as purveyors of raw materials, Eurafrica embedded a system in which the

EEC coordinated the exploitation of African resources. This model underscores

the infrastructural and economic continuity between formal colonialism

and the post-independence phase of neo-colonial globalization.

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.

Today both researchers and policymakers agree that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving countries. As is often claimed, there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the fis-cal sustainability of the welfare state. This contribution argues that the consen-sual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine. By shifting perspective to examine migra-tion through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, the article demonstrates sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a real-istic footing. Such a realistic approach perceives of refugees not as fiscal burdens but as the real resources they are. Empirically, the article attends to the case of Sweden, the country that, proportionally speaking, has received the most refugees in the EU over the years while also having one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the EU.

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.