Page:ELO 1(1), 6–25. European public law after empires.pdf/2

Rh The ‘choice for Europe’, Moravcsik maintains, was about ‘commercial interest’ rather than ‘glory’. In this way, Moravcsik (indirectly) perpetuates the old and widely discredited idea that somehow empire was not about the ‘economy’ or ‘commercial interest’. As has been demonstrated by countless historians and social scientists, a central motivation fuelling imperialism was access to larger internal markets, natural resources, cheap/slave labour and soldiers, and a safety-valve for European overpopulation and land-hunger. As Eric Hobsbawm put it: ‘Whatever the official rhetoric, the function of colonies and informal dependencies was to complement metropolitan economies and not to compete with them’.

Most scholarship on European integration, however, does not even consider empire. Instead, the academic study of European integration and EU law, as well as the official narrative put forward by EU institutions, overwhelmingly starts with a mythical story of European history that goes something like this: for centuries, the European nation-states were in more or less constant war with each other. This culminated in the greatest nationalist war of all times where atrocities yet unheard of in history were committed. After the war, this led the European nation-states to come together in one of the greatest peace projects of all time, namely the project of European integration. A new and unique legal and political community was created that, over the years, emerged as a rival centre of governmental authority to the nation-states.

At this point, the story diverges in two directions, depending on whether scholars give priority to the European institutions or to the Member States, which more often than not are seen as competitors in a zero-sum game. This leads respectively to the theories, on the one hand, of functionalism, neofunctionalism, cosmopolitanism and constitutionalism beyond the state, and, on the other hand, theories of (liberal) intergovernmentalism, realism and the EU as administrative or international law. Whereas the former tend to look on the EU with admiration and excitement as a unique project that has finally managed to transcend the horrors of the nation-state, the latter for the most part maintain that, notwithstanding the significance of the