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Eurafrica: the untold history of European integration and colonialism By Hansen Peo and Jonsson Stefan . London : Bloomsbury Academic , 2014. Pp. xxii+316. Hardback £50.00, ISBN 978-1-7809-3000-8 .
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In this book, Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson draw attention to the relationship between European cooperation and colonialism. Their focus is on a particular expression of this very important relationship, namely Eurafrican projects. The book synthesizes most of the available scholarship on Eurafrica and thus promotes it beyond specialists working in the field. As the authors demonstrate, Eurafrican projects have come in many guises from the early twentieth century onwards. The basic idea of Eurafrica is that Europe and Africa are interdependent and complementary continents, and can therefore only reach their full potential through cooperation. The authors argue that Eurafrica was 'constitutive both of the European integration project ... and of the foundation of postcolonial Africa' (p. 8). They state that there is a profound continuity in Europe-Africa relations, and stress 'the necessity of perceiving Europe and Africa from the perspective of a theory of globality and international relations unconstrained by national, continental and Eurocentric categories' (p. 10). In the introduction they develop these themes further, drawing on their backgrounds in critical cultural theory and EU studies.
Chapter 2 describes Eurafrican initiatives in the interwar period, when the impact of the First World War had put plans for European cooperation on the agenda. The authors draw on Charles-Robert Ageron's seminal article on Eurafrica1and, perhaps more surprisingly, on the work of Walter Lipgens, the doyen of European integration history. While justly criticizing Lipgens, they nonetheless follow his overly optimistic appraisal of the influence of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Paneuropean Union. The statement that 'for a brief period, then, Eurafrica became an...