Die Gespenster Eurafrikas
Kenny Cupers
Architecture magazine ARCH+, No. 239, 2020
To say that Europe has a colonial past is obvious, and the "exclaves" of the current EU—from Ceuta and Melilla to Mayotte and Réunion—are many. From the perspective of Europe’s heartland, and especially considering the institutional problems the EU faces today, these remote territories seem but the sprinkled remains of a colonialism safely located in the past. But what if colonialism is at the very heart of the European project, from its intellectual origins to its postwar realization up until today? And what if central to Europe’s colonial exploitation of much of the rest of the world is infrastructure? What are its implications for the nature of the political collectivity that infrastructure engenders? And how then can we possibly imagine infrastructure as a constructive basis for a progressive and democratic future of the European Union?