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22   Signe Rehling Larsen collectively if they united. This again would allow them to transcend interstate rivalries and provide them with the foundations for a European Union. If the European states gave up on sovereign authority vis-à-vis one another, they could keep exercising sovereign authority in a collective capacity over the remaining colonies. In this way, European integration and the collective exploitation of Africa were inherently linked to one another.

After World War II, the Eurafrican project was again debated as an important part of the reconstitution of Europe. At the 1948 Congress of Europe, the Union of European Federalists presented a Draft of a Federal Pact, where they argued that:

"Europe as an entity will be viable only if the links which unite it with countries and dependent territories … are taken into account. The era of national ownership of colonial territories is past … From now onwards a common European policy of development for certain regions of Africa should be taken in hand."

The development of Africa also made an appearance in the 1950 Schuman Declaration that led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, where Schuman stressed that ‘with increased resources Europe will be able to pursue the achievement of one of its essential tasks, namely, the development of the African continent’.

From the interwar period to the 1950s, the idea of Eurafrica as a third geopolitical sphere in the Cold War was highly influential among European elites. Africa was still exclusively under European control, and with its raw materials and vast spaces it held a powerful sway on the European imagination as a means to economic stability and energy self-sufficiency through joint colonial exploitation. As demonstrated by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, the view was that this would provide Europe with geopolitical leverage. Crucially, it could provide Europe with the material basis to reassert power against colonial uprisings as well as other challenges from the Global South such as the emerging non-aligned movement of former colonies not to mention projects for Pan-Africanism. In the eyes of European leaders such as the Dutch Foreign Minister and later NATO Secretary-General, Joseph Luns, the EEC would ‘assure the conditions of an increasing prosperity to our old continent and permit the continuation of her grand and global civilizing mission’. African leaders, however, saw this differently. Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, for example, looked upon the EEC as nothing ‘but the economic and financial arm of neo-colonialism and the bastion of European economic