The ‘choice for Europe’, Moravcsik maintains, was about ‘commercial interest’ rather than ‘glory’.[1] In this way, Moravcsik (indirectly) perpetuates the old and widely discredited idea that somehow empire was not about the ‘economy’ or ‘commercial interest’.[2] As has been demonstrated by countless historians and social scientists, a central motivation fuelling imperialism was access to larger internal markets,[3] natural resources, cheap/slave labour and soldiers,[4] and a safety-valve for European overpopulation and land-hunger.[5] 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’.[6]
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:[7] 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.[8] 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
- ↑ Ibid 2, see also 103–4, 107ff.
- ↑ The classical argument about an inherent contradiction between capitalism and empire was put forward by Joseph A Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (Basil Blackwell 1951).
- ↑ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (Abacus 1994) 66.
- ↑ The British war effort in World War One and World War Two would not have been possible had it not been for the British empire. In World War One, roughly half of the British forces, approximately five million people, came from the colonies and the dominions, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press 2010) 407. For a discussion of the extent to which the European powers relied on men and materials from empire during World War One, see ibid 375–6.
- ↑ David K Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (Macmillan Press 1982) 5, 24–6; Michael Doyle, Empires (Cornell University Press 1986) 111ff; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Verso 2018).
- ↑ Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 65. Because of the multi-layered and interconnected nature of empire, however, it is not always straightforward to ‘calculate’ the gains of empire. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History 447, express this succinctly when they write: ‘American silver paid for many of Europe’s empire wars and fostered its financial service business; it allowed Europeans to purchase commodities they sought in Asia. Slaves bought in Africa produced sugar on plantations in the Caribbean that fed people in Europe, including by the eighteenth century workers who were making England’s industrial revolution and providing goods that people around the world wanted to buy’.
- ↑ This mythical story was sustained by professional European historians after the war. For a discussion, see Jan Ifversen, ‘Myth and History in European Post-War History Writing’ in Michael J Wintle and M Spiering (eds), European identity and the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
- ↑ For an overview of legal theories of European integration, see Joseph Weiler and Marlene Wind, European Constitutionalism beyond the State (Cambridge University Press 2003); Gráinne de Búrca and Joseph Weiler, The Worlds of European Constitutionalism (Cambridge University Press 2012); Matej Avbelj and Jan Komárek, Constitutional Pluralism in the European Union and Beyond (Hart Publishing 2012). For an introduction to theories of European integration within political science, see Ben Rosamond, Theories of European Integration (Macmillan 2000). For a more recent discussion, see Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, ‘Grand Theories of European Integration in the Twenty-First Century’ 26 (2019) Journal of European Public Policy 1113.
