European Colonial Pasts and the EU’s Democracy-promoting Present: Silences and Continuities

ABSTRACT

How is EU democracy promotion made compatible with European colonial powers’ recent history of quashing democratic and human rights? A discourse analysis of general programmatic EU statements and texts related to selected salient historic junctures – the Algerian Hirak, the 2018 Democratic Republic of Congo elections and the Arab Uprisings – reveals that EU policy-makers reconcile the colonial past and the democracy-promoting present mostly through a silencing of colonialism. The consequence is that colonial-time hierarchical discourses are left undisturbed. Moreover, the projection of peace, democracy and the rule of law becomes not only the oft-noted break with the past, but also a continuity with colonial discourses of Europeans as ‘democratic’, ‘humanitarian’ and ‘civilised’.

KEYWORDS:

• democracy promotion
• postcolonialism
• European Union
• Algeria
• Arab Uprisings
• Democratic Republic of Congo

Acknowledgments

The author would like to sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive comments and the editors for a smooth production process. Warm thanks also to the participants of the EISA PEC 2021 Section 37 - The International Politics of Memory, including not least the discussant Valentina Feklyunina and the convener Karl Gustafsson. At a much earlier stage, this article benefited from engaged feedback during the conference “From Huntington to Trump: 25 years of the ‘Clash of Civilisations’” held at the Dialogue of Civilisations (DoC) Research Institute, Berlin, 2018 to which Jeffrey Haynes kindly invited the author. As usual, all caveats apply.

Notes

1 Nicolaïdis sees elements of both in her broad sweep of EU development policy over the decades: interestingly, she views democracy promotion after 1992 as a reversal from earlier development paradigms, which, according to her, bore some marks of atonement. This article aims to build further on such arguments.

2 Democracy aid/assistance (used interchangeably) denotes foreign aid programming with the strengthening of democratic and human rights norms, institutions and behaviour as its main aim.

3 For exceptions, see Guilhot (2005) and Jahn (2007a; 2007b).

4 This approach has been applied to Eastern European enlargement processes, the association and free trade agreements, conditionality (Behr and Stivachtis 2015), the European Neighbourhood Policy (Horký-Hlucháň and Kratochvíl 2014; Del Sarto 2020), relations to Overseas Countries and Territories (Adler-Nissen and Gad 2013) and migration (Kinnvall 2016).

5 Rachel Kleinfeld and Kalypso Nicolaïdis’s (2009) book chapter is a partial exception. In it, they discuss how and what aspects of the rule of law the EU can export in a sensitive manner given its colonial legacy, concluding that “at a minimum, the EU must be self-aware of its post-colonial legacy in choosing both the objects of reform and the strategies it uses” (142). This interesting chapter is a ‘how-to’ guide, which, again, does not explore the wider consequences of colonialism on the present-day democracy promotion agenda.

6 https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/eu_action_plan_on_human_rights_and_democracy_2020-2024.pdf; https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/30003/web_en__actionplanhumanrights.pdf.

7 https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2016/02/15/fac-un-human-rights-fora/; https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5689-2017-INIT/en/pdf; https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6346-2018-INIT/en/pdf; https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6339-2019-INIT/en/pdf; https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5982-2020-INIT/en/pdf; https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/48557/st06326-en21.pdf; https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5277-2022-INIT/en/pdf.

8 https://eeas.europa.eu/topics/human-rights-democracy/8437/eu-annual-reports-human-rights-and-democracy_en.

9 A series of such guidelines for various aspects and categories of human rights exist. The perhaps most relevant is the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Dialogues with Non-EU Countries (https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-16526-2008-INIT/en/pdf).

10 https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/8437/eu-annual-reports-human-rights-and-democracy_en.

11 https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/symbols/europe-day_en.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Khakee

Anna Khakee is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Malta, Msida, Malta.