than a project of reasserting Europe’s geopolitical interest, the story of European integration is for the most part told with few, if any, references to the legacy of imperialism. The relevant actors, or even competitors, are understood to be European institutions and nation-states, and the EU is rarely studied in comparison with the composite polities to which it bears striking resemblances, namely empires and federations. The official narrative about European integration has, furthermore, allowed its Member States to tell a comforting story about themselves that leaves out their tainted histories of colonialism and empire. As Kalypso Nicolaïdis puts it, Europe ‘exorcized the demons of its Member States by helping to purge their past and its own present of signs that empires had mattered for many of its Member States, as well as all of them collectively, right up to the foundation of the EC and during its first few years.’[1] As scholars on European integration and EU law, however, we have a duty to question the founding myth of our discipline.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank a number of my colleagues at Oxford for reading and commenting on this article: Nick Barber, Damian Cueni, Tarun Khaitan, Yasser Kureshi, Jan Petrov, Raja Karthikeya, Pedro Arcain Riccetto and Ewan Smith. I would also like to thank Hjalte Lokdam and Jo Murkens, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and critique. All mistakes are mine entirely.
- ↑ Nicolaïdis, ‘Southern Barbarians?’ 287.
Cite this article: Larsen SR (2022). European public law after empires. European Law Open 1, 6–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/elo.2021.8
