Europe and the colonial legacy: Continuity in a history to be told

The considerations of this essay refer to the age of the ‘Second European Empires’ and are intended to address the colonial legacy in the construction of Europe. This colonial legacy will be analysed on three levels: ideological, political, and economic. The essay is divided into two parts. The first part analyzes the relationship between international law and colonial law in French colonialism, highlighting the ideology of assimilation contained in colonial law. The ideology of assimilation - through which the will to affirm the superiority of the colonizer is expressed - persists in the reality of contemporary France and represents the continuity of the ideology of colonial rule in the current reality of a previous colonial power. Toward the close of the 19th century the vastness of the colonial empire dictated the need of introducing the political idea of association which meant the relation of cooperation but between a ‘superior’ and an ‘inferior’. We can find this doctrine of association in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which provided for the association of the overseas countries and territories with the nascent European Economic Community. Moreover from an economic point of view the theory of the ‘stages of development’ was at the origin of the representation of the backwardness of the ‘savage’ in relation to the condition of development of the ‘advanced’ European countries. On this basis, the complementarity relationship between the African colonies and the colonial powers was defined’ The second part of the essay analyses the doctrine of ‘Eurafrica” which enunciated the complementary relationship between Africa and Europe and was the basis for the creation of the EEC. The essay also develops the analysis of the decolonization process by assuming a non-Eurocentric perspective and underlines the need for a multi-level analysis to examine the complexity of the issues that were at the origin of the construction of Europe after the Second World War.