Comparison Between Böröcz’s And Zielonka’s Visions Of The EU As Empire József Böröcz, “Empire and Coloniality in the ‘Eastern Enlargement’ of the European

Comparison Between Böröcz’s And Zielonka’s Visions Of The EU As Empire József Böröcz, “Empire and Coloniality in the ‘Eastern Enlargement’ of the European Union”, in: József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács (eds), Empire’s New Clothes. Unveiling EU Enlargement (Central Europe Review, 2001).

Jan Zielonka, “Europe as a Global Actor: Empire by Example?”, International Affairs, 84, 3 (2008).

Length of essay – 4-5 standard pages (1 standard page = 1800 characters).

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Times New Roman 12pt Central Europe Review
Empire’s New Clothes
Unveiling EU Enlargement
Edited by József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács
József Böröcz
Katalin Dancsi
Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
Peter Kabachnik
Melinda Kovács
Anna Sher
______________________________________________________________________________________
All Rights Reserved.
 2001
May Not Be Copied or Distributed
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Central Europe Review (http://www.ce-review.org/)
Central Europe Review
Published by Central Europe Review Ltd., UK 2001
Copyright © 2001
All rights reserved
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,
hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover,
electronic or print, other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. “The Fox and the Raven” by József Böröcz was
reproduced here by kind permission from the Cambridge University Press, publisher of the journal
Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Central Europe Review Ltd.,
Holly Cottage,
Ellerdine Heath, Telford,
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ISBN: 1-84287-009-2
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Central Europe Review
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Empire and Coloniality in the “Eastern Enlargement” of the European Union,
by József Böröcz ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
The Fox and the Raven:
The European Union and Hungary renegotiate the margins of Europe,
by József Böröcz ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 51
The enduring national state:
NATO-EU relations, EU-enlargement and the reapportionment of the Balkans,
by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro…………………………………………………………………………….. 111
Shedding light on the quantitative other:
The EU’s discourse in the Commission Opinions of 1997,
by Melinda Kovács and Peter Kabachnik…………………………………………………………….. 147
Putting down and putting off:
The EU’s discursive strategies in the 1998 and 1999 follow-up Reports,
by Melinda Kovács …………………………………………………………………………………………… 196
A Di-vision of Europe:
The European Union Enlarged,
by Anna Sher……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 235
The Austrian Freedom Party’s Colonial Discourse in the Context of EU-Enlargement,
by Katalin Dancsi…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 273
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Introduction: Empire and Coloniality in the “Eastern Enlargement” of the
European Union1, by József Böröcz
The issue, of course, is not to erase the West as though to restore to its others
some ancient pre-colonial unity, as though, indeed, the West were erasable. The
issue, it seems to me, is rather to establish a reflexively marked practice of
dialogical exchange that might enable the postcolonial intellectual to speak to
postcolonials elsewhere (subalterns, but intellectuals too) through those sharedbut-different histories and shared-but-different identities. The issue [ . . . ] is to
reconstitute the map so as to engage in a tacking between postcolonial spaces, a
recursive movement of figure and ground in which that West—so much the
sovereign legend of the colonial imagination—is at once interrogated and
displaced, interrupted and critiqued (Scott, 1999a).
If we read, as I prefer, David Scott’s above outline of the task of postcolonial
scholarship as an invitation, this essay registers a modest RSVP from the right-hand half
of the map of Europe. Clearly, the sender’s address on my envelope might strike some as
surprising. Others will feel comfortable with the sender’s address but some might be
taken aback by the destination of my missive.2 I wish to seize on, and work with, that
double surprise; this Introduction, and indeed the very volume it introduces, asks what we
can learn from it.
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On the one hand, what I propose in this Introduction is the most conventional
operation in the social sciences: examining the relevance of two consequential and
contested theoretical concepts—empire and coloniality—to an empirical phenomenon—
the “eastern enlargement” of the European Union (EU). Yet I do also mean to disturb the
all-too-convenient normalcy of the “normal” science of conventional scholarly analysis,
especially as it applies itself to various parts of Europe.
The absence of any theoretical absorption of the notions of empire and coloniality
(and indeed basically any reference to those societies’ connectedness to the rest of the
world or to the structural conditions or theoretical implications arising therefrom) in the
mainstream historical sociology of west European state making and statehood—logically
a possible source of conceptual tools for the study of the European Union today—is one
aspect of this normalcy I seek to unsettle.3 With a handful of refreshing exceptions (e.g.,
Bornschier 1995, 1997, Schmidt 1999 and the studies in this volume), the vast majority
of the literature addressing the question of what the European Union is today (an
international organization with a grandiose PR? a confederacy? a federal state in the
making? a set of policy realms with an imperfect geographical overlap?) also proceeds
from an entirely internal perspective, hence, by default, it remains oblivious to
implications of empire and coloniality. It is this disconnect that makes it possible to
address the external relations of the EU—as it is done customarily—as something that is
added, always as if an afterthought, to an otherwise entirely internally focused
perspective, just as the comparative-historical sociology of west European statehood is so
conveniently apart from any consideration of International Relations. That omission of
course also occludes the ways in which the experiences of western Europe and, by
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implication, its current supranational project, the EU, have been a constitutive focus and
center of dependence for important social, cultural, economic and political processes at
places outside of western Europe. If we intend to maintain an interest in this traffic
between the internal and the external with respect to the European Union, the current
experiences of the EU’s nearest and most recently affected outside—commonly referred
to as Central and Eastern Europe—should be of interest.
Even the official term that denotes the process—eastern enlargement—is
suggestive. Enlargement implies a process of simple augmentation, reducing a daunting
amount of social, cultural, moral and administrative complexity, involving concerted,
sustained action by some very powerful European states aiming to redraw the continent’s
geopolitical order, to a quasi-technical operation. Given that in such idiomatic
expressions as Eastern Europe, the term Eastern means either inferior or non-Europe, it
is quite plausible to consider, furthermore, the possibility that the name “eastern
enlargement” ends up as an orientalizing tool when applied as the marker of the current
re-division of Europe.4 Of course, no previous enlargement has been called “eastern’ in
spite of the fact that the last one, resulting in the inclusion of Sweden, Finland and
Austria, or the preceding one, appending former East Germany to the Federal Republic,
involved, technically, the EU’s expansion to the east.5
Let us take our departure from the frequent, easy reference to the historical
subjectivity of the colonial perpetrator (or, alternatively, the supposed historic telos of
human progress) as “Europe.” Far from a nominalist preoccupation, my protest against
this shorthand notes that the placement of “Europe” in the heart of this scheme blurs
things inexcusably on two important counts: it is both falsely inclusive and falsely
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exclusive. At the risk of sounding pedantic, obvious, or both, I insist that the unqualified
“Europe” invoked as the core protagonist of coloniality contains societies whose
experiences in the realm of colonial practices have been vastly varied—indeed quite
contradictory. Some have been modern colonial metropoles, some have not. Some have
been centers and/or peripheries of empires of various kinds, some have not. The
complexity of the cross-European experience with empire and coloniality is daunting. In
addition, any quick reference to “Europe” as the colonial perpetrator also implicitly
absolves large and important bodies of social experience—e.g., the US—whose history
features imperial practices that are quite identical with those denoted as “European.” If
we imagine the continent for a moment as the landmass stretching from the northeastern
littoral of the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, one purpose
of my brief Introduction is reconsidering some of the ways in which the notions of
empire and coloniality are relevant to this Europe.
In this sense, our project resonates deeply, and in rather farcical ways, with some
aspects of “Euro-speak” (Diez 1999)—a peculiar identity discourse promoted by the
European Union. When the Green Foreign Minister of the most powerful member state
announces, in an interview with an established liberal weekly of his country, no less than
having discovered a remedy to nearly all the world’s ills—”The Answer to Almost All
Questions in Europe”6—he is only echoing the un-self-conscious and, frankly, rather
crass combination of an imperial-colonial teleology and a vague sense of naive good
intentions7 rampant in western Europe today. Fischer’s example suggests that this Eurospeak is constructed by way of a complete, acquired-assertive obliviousness to the world
outside of the EU, coupled with an intense penchant for claims of European
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universality—a cognitive posture that has been, as students of colonial history will
remember, a clear defining feature of European-based, modern, Christian empires.8 To
some extent, the confused and hypocritical political context of “eastern enlargement” is
responsible, if not for the creation, surely for the survival and spread of this selfuniversalization and other-exclusion that becomes, viewed from where most members of
humankind are located—outside the EU—nothing but a blunt exercise in the “ways in
which differentials of power come already embedded in culture” (Yanagisako and
Delaney 1995): a tool in naturalizing power.
Our volume tackles a mighty object indeed: the wholesale re-division of the
European geopolitical map. Myriad smaller and bigger clues suggest the lurking
presence of empire and coloniality in that process. One of those at hand is the fact that,
in much of the discourse that weaves politics throughout the continent today, the signifier
“Europe” appears to be latched, ever more tightly, on the signified European Union. Put
differently, we see another project of manipulating boundaries; this time not through false
universalization (where ‘Europe’ is a solution to the world, as in the Fischer example
above) but in a synecdoché representation (where the part stands for the whole,
conveniently ignoring, hence excluding and occluding, the rest). Much of public
parlance—incidentally, all over Europe, not just within the EU—makes, and indeed
revels in, this slip. Mass-produced advertising merchandise offers a good example.
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Figure 1 depicts the pen with which the future of Europe is written. Here we see a
dark blue plastic object distributed as a cheap giveaway item in the EU Headquarters in
Brussels. Of particular attention is the pen’s clasp: the twelve golden stars, set against the
background of the pen evoke the official symbol of the European Union; the
grammatically unlinked, hence emphasized, words “Europe Europa” hammer the message
of the synecdoché representation: the continent is conveniently equated with (reduced to)
the European Union, elegantly excluding the “rest”—a good 250 to 300 million
geographical Europeans outside and, indeed—at least since the implementation of the
EU’s common immigration policy called the Schengen Borders—by and large kept out
of, the European Union. Hence the diversity and multiculturality stressed by the
plurilingual label “Europe Europa” is strictly internal to the EU.
Examples of this kind abound: pouring the EU into the vessel of “Europe” is
likely the most common trope of identity speech in Europe today. It is difficult to see in
this synecdoché anything but a major clue (Ginzburg 1989[1986]), intimating global
power at work. This joint operation of universality and synecdoché modeling rhymes
perfectly with Anthony Pagden’s
formula for empire as
“simultaneous singularity and
exclusivity” (1995, p. 24). One
source of the energy that fueled
the research for our volume was
an interest in deciphering,
questioning and destabilizing the
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imprecision and tendentious symbolic violence contained in that synecdochic trope.
Using empire and coloniality as conceptual vehicles by which to address the
contemporary process of geopolitical re-division should surely contribute to heeding
David Scott’s call for “reconstituting the map”—in our project, the map of the European
continent, the one that is being redrawn as we speak. When we consider the relevance of
the notions of empire and coloniality for “eastern enlargement” today, I pose this
question, rereading Scott for the other (non-western) Europes: What are the “shared-butdifferent histories” of empire and “shared-but-different identities” through coloniality that
reconstitute the map of Europe today?
This Introduction offers but a few, very tentative preliminary signposts. I raise
questions and do not answer them in any systematic fashion. My double purpose is to
provoke new thinking and to make explicit some of the theoretical threads that link the
empirical studies in this volume. First I make a “strong,” historical case for the relevancy
of empire and coloniality for European politics today; then I sketch some ideas for a
historical sociology of the contemporary relevance of empire and coloniality in a
globalizing Europe. (Formal definitions of the two key concepts will be offered there.)
Throughout, I stress implications for the “eastern enlargement” of the EU. Because of the
discursive focus of the papers in this volume, my Introduction also emphasizes questions
of othering.
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I. Empire State Building in “Europe”?
The states that have recently “shared and pooled” their sovereignty (e.g., Patten
2001) to create the European Union are of course sharply implicated in modern empire
and coloniality in the strong, historically continuous sense of the word: the list of the
European Union’s member states reads as a catalogue of the major colonial powers of the
period of world capitalism. It is indeed one of the basic tropes of economic history that
the very emergence of capitalism as a global system during the long sixteenth century
(e.g., Wallerstein 1974, esp. ch. 2) has been effected, and thus marked quite indelibly,
by a process of global social change that originated in Europe and produced the sociocultural experiences and institutional legacies of the colonial empires established and
administered from western Europe. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the
expansion, intensification and previously unimaginable integration of those imperial
structures (e.g., Hobsbawm 1987, esp. ch. 3) into a truly global system of industrial
capitalism. It will be useful to remember that, as a result, as recently as two generations
ago, nine of the fifteen states that constitute the European Union today directly controlled
31 percent to 46 percent of the land surface of the world outside of Europe and
Antarctica. Those possessions comprised almost 75 percent of all territorial holdings in
the world both in 1913 and 1933, an increase of about 15 percent from 1878.
(See Table 1)
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Table 1. Territorial Possessions of the Member States of the European Union (as of 2001)
in 1878, 1913-14, 1933 and 1939, Area [103 km2], Percent [%] of Total
Inhabitable Landmass of the Globe without Europe, and Percent of World
Territorial Holdings [%]
Land area of colonial
possessions by states that are
current EU members
[103 km2]
Land area of colonial
possessions by predecessors of
current EU member states as
% of inhabited surface of the
globe outside of Europe11
Land area held by
predecessors of today’s EU
states as % of world total
territorial holdings12
18789
19139
191410
19339
193910
38627
57196
55392
57533
36206
31.1%
46.1%
44.6%
46.32%
29.2%
57.8%
73.4%
73.6%
My purpose in citing these widely known facts is not, of course, to stake a novel
empirical finding. I only quote them to thematize two, closely tied points that are of
significance for our object: the sustained centrality of western Europe in the international
system known as the colonial order of imperialism, and its obverse, the lasting, pivotal
significance of the experience of colonial empire in the histories of those societies which,
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today, constitute the European Union.13 A glance at the list of states that were the world’s
major colonial powers only two or three generations ago, included in the data presented
in Table 1—Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain
and the United Kingdom—should suffice to support the proposition that colonial history
is a crucial component of the social imaginaries of those societies. Coloniality made the
home states of the colonial empires different, even in their dealings that were strictly
internal to their European constituencies in Europe, let alone their relationship to the
world outside of western Europe. It is this difference at which Ann Stoler and Frederick
Cooper point by remarking that “nineteenth-century Great Britain or Holland was not
Switzerland” (1997, p. 22). (Of course, Switzerland is not an EU-member; the point is
variation in the histories of European statehood in terms of colonial empires.) Those nine
former-colonial powers have not only made their indelible mark on the history of global
capitalism; they are also the most powerful members, and represent about 90 percent of
the population,14 of the European Union, a polity constructed as it is suggested repeatedly
in European public parlance, by the “sharing and pooling of the sovereignty” of its
member states. To the extent that its practices represent the “sharing and pooling” of the
former-colonial powers of world capitalism, the European Union carries with it a
distinctly colonial past. (It also carries an imperial past of a different kind—more about
that later.)
This also suggests another implication regarding the existence of a high degree of
internal variation within the EU with respect to coloniality. Some current EU-member
states have never had any colonies. Some of the former-colonial member states achieved
their colonial successes through geographical discoveries and conquest in the first phase
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of modern European empire building. The second wave of European empires was
ushered in by the first wave of colonizers’ defeat in the Americas and involved “the
history of the European occupation of Asia, of Africa and of the Pacific” so that “the
more indeterminate legacies of these empires—the British Commonwealth, the informal
French tutelage over parts of Africa—remain a significant feature of the relationship
between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds” (Pagden 199…
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