Ringvorlesung: Europavorstellungen von der frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart

The lecture explores colonialism’s decisive bearing on the founding of the European Union in the 1950s. As will be shown, the scale of the original EU was not delimited by the European land mass, but corresponded to the geopolitical and colonial constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica. Practically all of the visions and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration in the postwar period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. The lecture also discusses and tries to explain the conspicuous absence of these matters from the contemporary debates and scholarship on European integration and its historical origins and trajectory.

Email: peo.hansen@liu.se