the-community-and-its-world.pdf

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• Eurafrique hoped it would simplify the negotiations about European integration: according to this line of thought the shared objective of developing Africa would facilitate the process of balancing interests within Europe and increase the global weight of the Old World in political and economic terms

• rom the 1920s Eurafrique became a touchstone in the debate about Europe’s place in the world.51 In 1923 Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi emphasised that his Pan- Europe would also include the colonial possessions of the continental European states

• In France especially, it was hoped that Europe might serve as a means of saving the colonies under a concept known as ‘Eurafrique

• Schuman’s May 1950 Declaration: ‘economic uni- fication’ would, the French foreign minister said

• Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote, had been gravely weak- ened by the Great War. The United States and the Soviet Union were becoming global powers to rival the British Empire. Europe’s only chance to survive was to integrate, including its colonie

• he saw Europe exploiting Africa’s economic resources and sending its purported population surplus there

• Altogether European integration was not simply an internal process but driven in a meaningful sense by the perception of global develop- ments and a fear of cultural and economic decline

• Eurafrique idea

• from the 1940s it gained in significance and acquired clearer contours as the European power base in Asia crumbled and Eurafrique appeared to offer a realistic fallback for waning global influence

• Consolidating the Old World as an independent factor in the emerging Cold War: that is what Eurafrique meant in the new global constellation after 1945

• development,

• to stabilise the colonies politically and socially – and to relegitimise European rule in an era of growing anti-colonialism after the founding of the United Nations boosted the idea of national self-determination.

• universal human rights existed from the outset within a tight territorial corset based on racism

• although communism despised liberty, it promised to defend equal- ity and condemned racist discrimination.