“By highlighting in this book the relationship between the European Union and the decolonization of Africa, we have detected a historical causality common to the two phenomena”, write the Swedish researchers Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, at the risk of surprising us. .
“What seemed to be a discontinuity turns out in fact to be a continuity”, they explain: the dawn of Eurafrica would be born from “the night of colonialism”.
Their audacious essay, translated from English by Claire Habart, bears precisely the name of this neologism which expresses the union of the two continents. The French philosopher Étienne Balibar signs the preface.
After the First World War, the idea of a Eurafrique circulated among visionaries such as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972), an Austro-Hungarian essayist by his father and Japanese by his mother, who dreamed of unifying beyond the ethnic rivalries a torn Europe.
The audacious essay of the authors bears precisely the name of this neologism which expresses the union of the two continents. The French philosopher Étienne Balibar signs the preface.
Coudenhove-Kalergi published in 1923 the manifesto Pan Europa to promote European unification. His movement receives, among others, the prestigious support of the scientist Albert Einstein, the writer brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, as well as the politicians Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer and Aristide Briand.
European racism
Taken over from 1945 to 1954 by the “founders” of the European Union – the Frenchman Jean Monnet, the Luxembourger Robert Schuman, the Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak, the German Konrad Adenauer – , the dream of a Eurafrique aims to counterbalance the rise of the Americas and Asia to better balance global geopolitics. In this project, “no European country has played a more important role than France”, say Hansen and Jonsson.
But Eurafrique suffered from the European racism – German, especially – which was rampant at the time.
The two researchers point out the “horror” caused by “the presence of colonial troops, made up of 20,000 to 45,000 soldiers from Madagascar, West Africa, Morocco and Algeria, and deployed by France to occupy the Rhineland after the defeat of Germany at the end of the First World War”. The French essayist Pierre Nord still speculates in 1955 the “last chance” of Eurafrique. But the conflict between white Europe and colored Africa persists.
In 1957, the creation of the European Economic Community would have made it possible, according to Monnet, a French international banker, to take up the challenges launched by Algerian and Egyptian anti-colonialism to the Euro-African ideal. The nationalization, in 1956, by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the Suez Canal, Franco-British property, in particular, had already sounded the end of this dream.
The “postcolonial” evolution of Eurafrique that Hansen and Jonsson foresee remains too hypothetical, too obscure to dissipate the mournful sound of this death knell.