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

European Colonial Pasts and the EU’s Democracy-promoting Present: Silences and Continuities [1]

The International Spectator [2]

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

Authors:
Anna Khakee [3]
23/08/2022

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

Details

  • Details

    The International Spectator, Vol. 57, No. 3, September 2022, p. 103-120
  • In:
    The International Spectator [2]
  • Issue

    57/3
  • ISBN/ISSN/DOI:
    10.1080/03932729.2022.2053352

External links

Buy this article online [4]

Source URL:https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/c10/european-colonial-pasts-and-eus-democracy-promoting-present-silences-and

Links
[1] https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/c10/european-colonial-pasts-and-eus-democracy-promoting-present-silences-and [2] https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/lista/all/international-spectator [3] https://www.iai.it/en/persone/anna-khakee [4] https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2022.2053352