Used Up and Misused: The Nation State, the European Union and the Insistent Presence of the Colonial

Abstract

This Essay will assert that, through the migration and settlement of people and the movement of goods and capital, the savage, bankrupt estate of the old order in Europe has been appropriated. The way in which the member states of the E.U. have appropriated territories is similar to the migration and movement of units of production to the lands occupied by people considered primitive in earlier historical periods and in other geographical locations. Far from witnessing the birth of a political community without precise historical precedent, the origins of the European Union are distressingly familiar.