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Rh imperialism in Africa’; a form of collective European colonialism ‘which will be stronger and more dangerous than the old evils we are striving to liquidate’.

The association agreement created with Part IV of the Treaty of Rome did not, for the most part, integrate the colonial territories into to the EEC but rather established association with them. Nevertheless, as a department of France, Algeria was almost fully integrated into the EEC. Hence, when the Treaty of Rome came into effect with its promise of peace and prosperity, a violent war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives was raging inside the Community. In one sense, Algerian Independence after the War in 1962 led to the end of the Eurafrican dream. Yet the OCT regime outlived the Algerian War of Independence and Europe continued to exercise power over the former colonies through the Yaoundé Conventions (1964–75); the Lomé Conventions (1975–2000) and the ACP–EU Cotonou Partnership Agreement (2000–20), which have continued to secure European economic interests in Africa.

For some scholars, however, the lasting impact of Eurafrica as constituted by EEC-African association agreements is the part it played, as one actor among many, in foiling projects of establishing a genuine African Federation that held out the hope of preventing a Balkanisation of Africa. That Africa emerged as a continent of sovereign nation-states from the 1960s, rather than as an African Federal Union, was not predestined. Yet the emergence of nominally sovereign African nation-states, rather than an African Federation, made it easier for the large Western trading blocs of the post-World War II era, including the EEC, to continue to exercise power over the Global South. For some scholars, therefore, the very idea of state sovereignty, born, at least in part, out of the colonial encounter and a constitutive part of the old world of Droit Public de l’Europe, remains a poisoned chalice.