Imperial Origins of European Integration and the Case of Eurafrica: A Reply to Gary Marks’‘Europe and Its Empires’*

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS , entitled ‘Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union’. Although it sympathizes with Marks’ invocation of empire as a key theoretical concept and historical category in the study of European integration, it fundamentally disagrees with his ‘continentalist’ operationalization. Marks chooses to discuss the nexus of empire and European integration exclusively with reference to historical processes of imperial expansion and community formation occurring on the western European land mass. Since this methodology leaves out Europe's maritime colonial empires, it cannot account for the mutually conditioning relations between the intra‐ and extra‐European imperial processes. Consequently, Marks also fails to register colonialism's decisive bearing on post‐war European integration, and thus the fact that the scale of the original EEC was not delimited by the European land mass, but corresponded to the geopolitical constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica.