ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss the project of European integration. In reconceiving historical European integration as a colonial project, they also discuss the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of European integration. Challenging received ideas in scholarship, the authors suggest a new point of departure for the analysis of the relation between Europe and Africa in the interwar and postwar eras. The interconnection between the history of colonialism and the history of European integration is best exposed by a compelling geopolitical figure once known as Eurafrica. In this post-catastrophic atmosphere of anxiety and pessimism, where nationalist hubris was defeated and imperial Europe was perceived as being in decline, the grand geopolitical narrative of European integration took shape. The most influential of the proposals for European integration was presented by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1923 pamphlet, Paneuropa. European integration thus found its real support only after the spiritual shock, economic collapse and political destruction inflicted by the Great War.
