In this conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Hanna Eklund discusses her recent article, “Peoples, Inhabitants and Workers: Colonialism in the Treaty of Rome”, published in the European Journal of International Law. She talks about the “coded language” of colonialism in the Treaty of Rome, explains the approach of the Treaty drafters to the African independence movements, and reflects on the colonial legacies of contemporary EU law.
Hanna Eklund is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Copenhagen. She publishes within the field of European Union law, particularly in its political and socio-economic context. She is the editor of the forthcoming book Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Kasia Krzyżanowska: The narrative of European integration usually starts with the prospect of establishing eternal peace in Europe after 1945. But there is a recent line of research that uncovers another important layer of these beginnings: how colonialism and its ideology were reflected in European Economic Community institutions and procedures. In your recent contribution, you study how EEC legal categories were shaped by colonial politics. Would you like to shed some light on the extant research on the colonial, whether ideological or directly political, beginnings of the EEC and the new perspective your paper aims to develop?
Hanna Eklund: First of all, it’s important to remember that similar inquiries have been made in international law for several decades. Within the context of TWAIL –Third World Approaches to International Law – generations of scholars have been looking at how concepts and institutions of international law have been shaped by colonialism. And that is something in dialogue with what is happening in European integration studies.
Within European integration history studies, it is important to mention Kiran Klaus Patel and Giuliano Garavini, who have been looking at how colonialism shaped early European integration. There is a book on the concept of Eurofrica by Stefan Jonsson and Pio Hansen. Véronique Dimier, a political scientist, has written about how actors who were trained in colonial administrations went into EU institutions and shaped their procedures. That is an important piece of scholarship, too. Also, there is a group of North America-based French historians who’ve written about the intersection between the end of French Empire and early European integration. Take Megan Brown, who’s written about Algeria, and Frederick Cooper, Emmanuel Saada, and Emily Marker, who’ve written about citizenship and cultural policies. It’s a multidisciplinary field, and I’m not mentioning all the authors.
What I have done, which is novel, is to look at how the legal drafting of the Treaty of Rome of 1957 was shaped by the colonial politics of the time. The goal is not to replace but to recalibrate the classic narrative of why and how European integration started.
In addition to the classic European peace idea, there were ways in which the Treaty of Rome functioned to handle colonialism, to handle the people who were colonized and who were implicated in European integration in a certain way.
What kind of “coded colonial language” did the drafters of the Treaty of Rome use, would you say? How did their language, full of euphemisms, deprive people assigned to certain categories of their rights? And what might have been some of the other functions of this coded language and how did those affect the construction of certain principles of EU law?
The main one is the simple one: the colonies were called Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT),and that became an OCT law. That term was not new, it had been used in French colonial administration for at least a decade. Many people have written about how colonialism changed its language to development, trusteeship, funds to new institutions in this period. The EEC sits within that broad trend of changing or updating its language.
But what did it do to the development of EU law, the fact that you had that euphemistic language? I would say that it allowed the OCT law to live on through various treaty iterations to this day. The exact same language that was there in 1957 is in the Treaty of Rome. What does that mean?
It means that there is no way of exiting once you’re in. If you’re associated by virtue of being a colony, you cannot exit from that status. There was no contemplation of the independence of those territories.
Also, the word “inhabitants” is used to describe the people who lived in colonized countries and territories, not the word “peoples”. Using peoples, of course, at that time had legal stakes. It was the word that indicated the right to self-determination. As I show in my article, that was deliberately not used. Instead, you had the term “inhabitants” that is still used. In some way, the longevity of the OCT and its nature were not challenged. At least in part, it’s explainable by the fact that we have bought into this coded language.
It seems that the European drafters did not take seriously the independence of their former colonies. How did the decolonisation process in Africa influence the drafting process of the first European treaty? How did EC leaders react to the independence movement?
In one way, it did not at all, at least within the Treaty negotiations. That was one of the things that fascinated me the most when I started to read the archival material from the Intergovernmental Conference of 1956-1957, which is the official name of the Treaty of Rome negotiations.
There is no reference at all to any of the ongoing processes of decolonization and the wars of independence. I use different sources to make the same point. The Treaty of Rome regulated colonialism in the midst of decolonization. How do we view that? What was that? How could that happen? One way of framing it is to refer to a mindset. It’s not a question of not knowing or not being involved in those debates.
Let’s take the example of Paul Henri Spaak, often cited as the father of the common market, who contributed to the journal Foreign Affairs in response to the Suez crisis. He was writing something along the lines of, “Where are the men of clear mind and resolute will that the West needs desperately to save its precious inheritance?” He defended the existence of colonies. The actors involved in the drafting were also arguing against decolonization at the time. If you read the negotiations, it’s as if decolonization was not happening at all.
I also look at the report of a UN committee from the early 1960s, a committee that was put together to look at how European integration effected African economies. The committee was almost bewildered. They’re like, ‘this Treaty of Rome, it’s very detail-oriented and has very careful regulation”, but it has not at all contemplated the independence of any of the colonies. At least they must have known that Cameroon would be independent within a few years. The authors of the report were bewildered. How could this have happened? While it was so meticulously, carefully regulated, it just overlooked that possibility.
As you mentioned, it was a matter of the mindset of the drafters. But was there ever a moment when a change in that mindset occurred? When I was at the Museum for Central Africa in Brussels, I discovered that they discussed the colonization process in a very particular way. They mentioned that the speech by Lumumba in which he called for independence was “controversial” – it’s 2024 and we still use this particular language.
There are two things. Maybe we want to view the end of colonialism as something very clear-cut. That has clearly not happened and many people show in different ways how it continues.
At the same time, generations of Europeans have been able to live with that. You can see different manifestations of how we have lived with and accommodated that history without really exploring what it has meant for us in Europe. For our laws, for the way knowledge is presented at universities, for how the artifacts in museums are presented.
I’m sure that we think about it differently from the people of the 1950s, but there is no clear moment when sharp reckoning took place. Though I would like to think that as generations go by, we can mature into a position where we are better at recognizing that history.
Let us talk about how the peoples of Europe were envisioned. In the context of your analysis, the following words uttered by Jean Monnet sound particularly ironic: “Equality is essential in the relationship between peoples. Peace cannot be sustainable if it is based on discrimination”. Why did Treaty drafters focus so much on peoples rather than on states or citizens?
These concepts all rely on a distinction which was central to colonial law, the distinction between citizens who were ethnically European and citizens or people with different legal statuses who were from colonized populations and not ethnically European.
I show how that distinction is reflected in three categories – peoples, inhabitants, and workers. When it comes to peoples, I make the case that if in 1957 you would have said ‘we want to create an ever-closer union amongst citizens of Europe’, you would have indicated a much broader group of people than those living in continental Europe with European ethnicity. If you would have said that all of those governed by the member states are supposed to be in the European integration project, you would have talked about a much, much broader group of people. Instead, what you do in the drafting is that you say it’s the peoples of Europe.
By doing that, you’re indicating an ethnic belonging to the nation, to the European nation. These are the beneficiaries of European integration, not all those governed by the member state.
You also analyze the concept of the worker in the Treaty of Rome and how the six founding states advocated for an exclusionary understanding of the concept to protect the interests of their own citizens. In general, how would you characterize how they thought about the model individual, given their particular understanding of the categories of peoples, inhabitants, and workers? More generally, how should these legacies of racialization change our narrative concerning the origins of the EU?
It’s a very good question, that of the model citizen or individual. At the very least the drafters were comfortable with the distinctions, coming from colonial law, that were based on ethnicity. They used, for instance, the term “national workers” to distinguish between workers who were citizens and ethnically European and those who were citizens but not in the European Union.
It’s also important to say that there were, within the EEC member states, different views on to what extent to incorporate workers from the colonies.
France, for instance, was open to having certain parts of the Algerian workforce incorporated. Italy did not want to do that, but a compromise was forged. Clearly, it relied on that distinction, which was written into the Treaty. The question is, what does that mean? For me, it means that it’s important to turn to today.
Today, which is a different political context, we see a renewed interest in distinguishing between EU citizens based on ethnicity. That is not to say there is a causality between 1957 and now, but it is important to point out the legal construction that was there from the beginning. There is a renewed interest in using legal constructions to treat citizens (and we’re not even talking about non-citizens) differently, depending on whether they’re born in the EU or outside of the EU. By recognizing that history is repeating itself within European integration, I hope that we can become more resolute in overcoming ethnicity-based distinctions. We should call them out and reject them as lawyers and as academics, as people analyzing legal developments and discussing the political context of today. As you were saying, this is a question of the original narrative and how we can change it, or how we can nuance it. That nuance, that calibration makes it easier for us to analyze what is happening right now.
Could you elaborate a bit more on how these colonial categories influence our understanding of the concept of a citizen in the EU today?
I don’t think it’s a causal link. I’m interested in thinking about it as a kind of a repetitionwhich exists in case law and in legislative efforts. If you take the Scandinavian countries, where I’m sitting right now, just because you’re a Swedish citizen doesn’t mean you’re Swedish. Maybe you’re not an ethnic Swede or you’re a Danish citizen, but you’re not actually an ethnic Dane.
That distinction to me is the same legal construction, the same legal project as what happened in the colonial context. It’s the same as saying, ‘oh, you both belong to France, but one of you is a real French person and the other is a French subject’.
And just acknowledging that we have that repetition, not necessarily a causal link, is a way of raising the stakes in our analysis of what’s going on in the contemporary political context.
In the context of a historical reading of the Treaty of Rome and colonial origins of some key EU terms – like the principle of non-discrimination or the concept of the peoples of Europe, the concept of inhabitants – how do you suggest we relate to these ideas today? How should we think about decolonizing current treaties and who could take on that responsibility?
A very important question that should be asked in the next treaty reform is: should the EU associate colonies? Is that something that should be done? And should it be done on the terms that it’s currently done on, without even asking the people who live there if they want to be associated or not? And there is no way of exiting if you become independent (de facto there is, but there is no formalized procedure for doing it).
I would argue that we should also reread the language of the association regime. We should really think about how the EU might regulate the islands (because these are mostly islands today), perhaps by using the language of peoples and not inhabitants.
Another question I would like to think more about is the following: ‘how do we use the legal categories that were drafted in the context of colonial politics and in some way shaped by them?’ How do we use them today in a different way? How do we make sure that they’re not used to harbor the same type of discrimination?
That question is interesting in relation to the principle of non-discrimination and workers. There are cases from the EU Court of Justice that accept that old distinction. I always take the example of the CJEU case Jyske Finans from 2017, where two EU citizens would like to use a car loan. One of them is born outside of the EU and the other one is not. The one born outside of the EU has to show additional documentation of their identity and the one born inside the EU does not. The Court of Justice said that’s fine, that it’s not discrimination based on ethnicity.
That case is an example that again accepts a distinction between the ethnicity of two EU citizens in the same way that was accepted in 1957.
I would use the knowledge of how colonialism shaped the EU as an imminent critique, if we want to talk in sort of academic language. We often think about what colonialism did to the countries and territories that were colonized. Of course, that is very, very important. But what I’m also interested in is what we did to ourselves. These ways of accepting discrimination, these ways of accepting that we don’t actually treatpeople equally in the way we might think we do. These are self-inflicted wounds that we need to heal. For me, that is the important part, criticizing what our colonial history has done to the laws of the European Union itself.
In collaboration with Caglar Ozturk and Benedek Kovacs.
