8 Signe Rehling Larsen
project of European integration and globalisation more broadly, the nation-state remains the most important political unit.
There are, therefore, significant differences between these two clusters of theories and narratives, most importantly whether the nation-state is ‘withering away’ (and whether that is something to be celebrated or not). Nevertheless, these theories all share the same underlying account of European history centred on the nation-state as the dominant, if not the only, form of political association. We must reject this story; not least because it ignores the significance of empire in European history.
The argument set out in this article is that European integration and EU law must be understood against the backdrop of the decline of the European empires and the transformation of the European public law order that underpinned them: Droit Public de l’Europe or Jus Publicum Europaeum. With the demise of the public law order of the European empires, European integration emerged as an integral part of a new European public law order in tandem with decolonisation. The post-World War II European public law order contained a new vision for domestic public law based on human dignity; a new form of European interstate relations based on the limitation of sovereignty; as well as a new relationship between Europe and the (former) colonial world importantly through the realisation of the project of ‘Eurafrica’. In this way, European integration emerged as part of the solution to the problem of ‘Europe’ in a world where Europe had been irrevocably deprived of its status as the only place of ‘civilisation’, and hence, sovereignty. European public law, both domestic constitutional law and the international law regulating interstate conduct between European states, has always been shaped by the ‘colonial encounter’ with societies outside Europe. If we are to understand the nature and significance of European integration and EU law, we must start thinking about the legacy of empire in the history of European public law.
2. The legacy of empire
The mainstream narrative about the origins of European integration takes its point of departure in a flawed, or at least incomplete, diagnosis of World War II as a purely ‘nationalist’ war. By focusing on the ‘excesses’ of (German) nationalism, it is obscured that the territorial expansion of Nazi Germany into Eastern Europe in a quest for Lebensraum was an imperialist project and the techniques employed were honed from colonial practices previously employed outside Europe.[1] The Third Reich was arguably the last ‘grand’ attempt to preserve the old world of European empires that sought to substitute oversees colonies by imperial expansion within Europe itself and thereby ‘make the great spaces of Eastern Europe into Germany’s equivalent of the [British] Raj’.[2]
The misrepresentation of World War Two is symptomatic of a broader tendency to ignore the legacy of empire and focus exclusively on the nation-state as the relevant unit of analysis. Notwithstanding the turn towards transnational history starting in the 1990s, the dominant European historical narratives, at least outside history departments, remain anchored in national history (eg, French, German and British history).[3] Yet from a historical perspective, the dominant
- ↑ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books 2010); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Inc 1994). The imperial aspects of Nazism are discussed further below. That World War II, at least in part, was an imperial war does not mean that it did not have distinct characteristics that sets it apart from other imperial wars, see Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History 370.
- ↑ Murray Forsyth, Union of States: The Theory and Practice of Confederations (Leicester University Press 1981) 175. See also Felix Lange, ‘The Dream of a Völkisch Colonial Empire: International Law and Colonial Law during the National Socialist Era’ 5 (2017) London Review of International Law 343.
- ↑ For important contributions to transnational European history of the twentieth century see, for example, Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Vintage Books 2005); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Penguin 1999); Snyder, Bloodlands. For transnational histories of European integration, see Wolfram Kaiser and Peter Starie, Transnational European Union: Towards a Common Political Space (Taylor & Francis Group 2005); Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Michael Gehler, Transnational Networks in Regional Integration: Governing Europe 1945–83 (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).
