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24   Signe Rehling Larsen

8. Conclusion

This article is an attempt to remedy a fundamental flaw in the debate about European integration and EU law: the almost complete absence of a reckoning with the legacy of empire and imperialism. The project of European integration was agreed among three rapidly declining maritime empires – the French, the Dutch and the Belgian – and two failed fascist empires, the German and the Italian. The decline of the European empires is one of the most profound changes that shaped the twentieth century and it led to a fundamental transformation of the European states and the public law order that underpinned them. Nevertheless, the debate about European integration and EU law, for the most part, proceeds as if empire never existed.

This article demonstrates that European integration was an integral part of a broader transformation of the global order after the collapse of European imperialism. The European empires were underpinned by the public law order of Droit Public de l’Europe or Jus Publicum Europaeum, which regulated the relationship between the ‘civilised’, and hence sovereign, European states, as well as their colonial encounter with the ‘uncivilised’ world where political communities could not be considered sovereign. With the decline and eventual collapse of European imperialism after World War Two, ‘European’ international law gave way to ‘universal’ international law. For the first time in history, more or less all political communities on a global scale were recognised as sovereign states.

Yet, decolonisation in the imperial periphery was not the only way in which the public law order was transformed as a product of imperial decline. The end of empire instigated a fundamental transformation of the public law order of the European metropoles as well. This article demonstrates that if decolonisation was the product of imperial decline in the former colonies, European integration was part of the response to imperial decline in the metropoles. The article shows that European integration was integral not merely to attempts to manage imperial decline but eventually also to replace the public law order of European empires. Post-World War Two European public law, of which European integration is part, has three central tenets. First, a new type of anti-totalitarian domestic constitutional law which aimed to constrain sovereign powers internally by insulating certain aspects of political decision-making from ordinary politics. Second, a new European legal order founded on the limitation of sovereign power, which set intra-European relations apart from ‘normal’ international law. Third, the reconstitution of Europe’s relationship to its (former) colonies, importantly through the realisation of the interwar project of ‘Eurafrica’. European integration was central to all three tenets of this new European public law order.

The article demonstrates that precisely at the moment in history where sovereignty was extended to non-European political communities, Europe turned away from this old master principle both with regard to domestic constitutional law and intra-European relations. Yet the turn away from sovereignty and the nation-state was not merely a response to a fear of nationalism, as the literature often maintains, but also an attempt to reassert European interests and geopolitical autonomy in a world where Europe no longer was the centre of gravity. When the European metropoles were no longer capable of asserting their domination as individual empires, European integration allowed them to assert their interest collectively vis-à-vis the new ‘developing world’. By carving out a new space for Europe in the world in tandem with decolonisation, European integration emerged as part of the European solution to the ‘humiliation’ suffered by the end of empire. It is therefore not a coincidence that European integration was perceived as a neo-colonial project by many post-World War Two African leaders.

In contrast, the legacy of empire for the project of European integration is largely ignored or forgotten in Europe. This applies to public and scholarly debate as well as the official narrative of European integration. It is rarely mentioned that the backdrop to the project of European integration was not merely the decline of the maritime empires but also the attempt to reassert the old imperial privilege of Europe, importantly through a revival of the idea of ‘Eurafrica’. Rather