From the Editor

Since it was possible to go faster, it was necessary to do so — not merely to hasten the increase of trade among our six countries and improve their standard of living, but also to arrive as soon as possible at a point when the [European] Community would be ready to be enlarged and to share its prosperity with other countries in Europe and Africa.¹

Depending upon how one interprets this quote by the Frenchman Jean Monnet, often referred to as the “father” of the European integration movement, it is not clear whether (or how) Africa figured into the development of an economically and politically consolidated Europe. Was Africa really being considered for membership in this burgeoning club, becoming a full participant in the European Common Market’s economic growth? Or, to take a more cynical view, was Africa being set up by some of Europe’s leaders to be exploited?

The Mediterranean Quarterly is always striving to bring to the fore new, fresh ideas and perspectives to issues long thought to be already well understood. The first essay in this issue, “A Statue to Nasser? Eurafrica, the Colonial Roots of European Integration, and the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize,” by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, both based at Linköping University in Sweden, may be considered both provocative and long overdue. The authors argue that the Treaty of Rome and subsequent formation of the European Economic Community, which eventually evolved into today’s European Union, was perhaps not formed on the completely altruistic terms that are often cited or remembered.

Of course, most of the original architects of European unity in the 1950s would argue that the prime objectives were the lowering of trade barriers to consolidate and pool Europe’s resources as well as to cement the political reconciliation of France and Germany following three devastating wars between 1870 and 1945, which had completely upset the international system and Europe’s primary position within it. What has often been forgotten (or perhaps deliberately neglected) and which may raise some eyebrows among Europe’s politicians and academics today is the role Africa was being considered for by some in Europe’s rebirth. Caught between a threatening Soviet Union and an uncertain and paternalistic United States, upon which Western Europe depended for its security, Europe’s geopolitical position would be reasserted through closer ties with Africa, which according to some European leaders at the time would play a key role economically, politically, and perhaps even militarily in Europe’s future.

Certainly, individual European countries expressed varying degrees of interest in this idea due to each one’s unique background and experiences with African colonies. The French were then embroiled in a bloody civil war in North Africa, struggling to keep Algeria part of le Métropole; Belgium was in the midst of its own retreat from the Congo; and Germany had lost its African colonies after World War I, as had Italy after World War II — all of which would perhaps explain the ambiguity associated with the implementation of this aspect of Europe’s reemergence. With some validity, therefore, Hansen and Jonsson’s article is certain to reopen debates about European neocolonialism and will perhaps shine a spotlight on some underappreciated and little understood motivations related to the origins of European integration.

The next essay in this issue, by Martin Murphy, visiting fellow at the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies, provides a sophisticated treatment of the origins and evolution of the North African Barbary Pirates. As Murphy convincingly argues, they were not really pirates at all but, rather, corsairs who since the fifteenth century had survived on the tribute paid and the ransoms collected from European shipping. Murphy demonstrates that the Barbary “system” broke down when the Europeans observed the newly independent United States, which refused to play by these rules, score some naval successes against the corsairs in the early nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the Europeans, led primarily by the British navy, finally refused to put up any longer with the privateering they had become accustomed to over the previous centuries. Murphy’s piece is...