Magali Gravier

THE NEXT EUROPEAN EMPIRE

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to use the concept of empire for the analysis the European integration process. From a methodological point of view, this concept is an invitation to reintroduce in EU studies the comparative approach as well as long-term history. This paper also leads to a detailed reflection on the concept of empire itself and proposes a modernized definition of it. The use of this concept enables to shed a new light on the EU and some of its policies. If the EU cannot be considered an empire, it can nonetheless be said that it is undergoing a process of imperialization. This raises the question of the transformation of the European project and to the consequences of this transformation.

The 2004 Enlargement Staff Policy of the European Commission: The Case for Representative Bureaucracy

This article tests the theory of representative bureaucracy on the Commissions 2004 enlargement staff policy. It concludes that this policy matches the criteria of bureaucratic representativeness, which opens a reflection both on the political legitimacy and on the instruments of representation in the EU.

Empire vs federation: which path for Europe?

The article discusses the concepts of federation and empire in the context of the European Union (EU). Even if these two concepts are not usually contrasted to one another, the article shows that they refer to related type of polities. Furthermore, they can be used at a time because they shed light on different and complementary aspects of the European integration process. The article concludes that the EU is at the crossroads between federation and empire and may remain an ‘imperial federation’ for several decades. This could mean that the EU is on the verge of transforming itself to another type of project from the one which led to its creation.

Imperial Governance: Governing Inwards or Outwards?

This article presents an analysis of the European Union and of the integration process using the concept of empire. It also offers a critical reflexion on the use of the concept of empire to analyse contemporary polities. It argues that many scholars of politics have a biased understanding of this concept, which is ‘tailored’ to analyse only one type of empire, the colonial empire, and to disregard the existence of another type of empire. To escape this trap, the article suggests the use of two concepts, ‘inwards imperial governance’ and ‘outwards imperial governance’. These concepts make it possible to account for different types of empire in the past as well as contemporary polities. They also help shed a different light on the EU’s empirehood and its evolution over time. In its concluding remarks, the article suggests the potential usefulness of these concepts for the analysis of other contemporary cases.

Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America

Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America Empires seem never to disappear. When the last self-proclaimed empires dissolved in the wake of decolonization, the USSR seemed to be the last remaining empire. But when it dissolved in the early 1990s, it did not take long to proclaim that the US was an empire. A few years later, the European Union (EU) started to be referred to as another empire. Individual empires come and go, but empire as a political form dies hard in the mind of observers, who seem able to discover new empires as soon as old ones collapse. The fact that we continue to use the notion of ‘empire’ to describe very different polities and political orders explains most certainly the difficulty which scholars of empire – or what we may call ‘empirologists’ – face when trying to define the concept of empire. The world of empirologists is indeed populated with very different political realities not only over time, but also across space. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hintze (1962 [1907]) already contrasted ‘old type empires’ with ‘new types of empires’: in other words, ancient empires such as the Roman Empire which had contiguous territories (also called ‘empires by land’) and modern empires, created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which were ‘empires by sea’ or ‘colonial empires’. Thus, it was already evident at that time that empires differed from one another; but Hintze was still dealing with empires that looked like empires, or at least called themselves empires. A century later, even if big polities do not really accept this label anymore, scholars continue to use it as a category in order to analyse them. The concept may even have experienced a revival in the literature during the past 15 years. However, while there are four contemporary contenders for the signifier empire (Russia, China, the US and the EU), at first the revival of the recent literature on empire concentrated on the US, with the result that there emerged a singular tacit understanding of empire. However, when empirologists started to focus on Europe and the EU, it became clear that a different, more nuanced, understanding of empire was called for. Explicit discussion of an American ‘empire’, which stems from William Appleman Williams’ impact on the revisionist school of American historical diplomacy from the 1970s (Lafeber 1994, Williams 2007 [1980]), has long been a dissident, or minority, component in the American foreign-policy analysis. Aside from this, the concept of empire has had a shadowy presence in debates on the US’s strategic position. Usually used to re-enforce a critique, it is found in expressions such as ‘imperial temptation’ (Joffe 2006) or ‘imperial wars’ (Bachevich 2008). Explicit accounts of the US’s strategic position as an ‘empire’ are predominantly damning and/or pessimistic about the US’s prospects (Bacevich and Mallaby 2002, Mann Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 331–336

Stable Core, Shifting Periphery? The European Union as an Emerging Inwards-Outwards Governing Empire

The paper discusses the usefulness of the concept of empire in the study of the European Union, the integration process and the development EU’s external relations. In order to do so, it reflects critically on the use of this concept in the broader context of contemporary polities and selected European empires of the past. The paper argues that colonial empires are just one type of empires and that another type should be given more scholarly attention. In order to account for the diversity of imperial patterns observed, the paper suggests using two concepts, inwards imperial governance and outwards imperial governance. Using these two concepts instead of one undifferentiated concept of empire makes it possible to shed a different light on the EU’s alleged empirehood and its evolution over time. It also offers an analytical tool that can account for differences between different empires of the past as well as between contemporary candidates for empirehood and past empires.