Eurafrique’s paternalist framing revived the Berlin Conference’s civilizing mission rhetoric.

Evidence

French prime minister Guy Mollet’s perspective on Eurafrique, by contrast, was paternalistic. In 1957 he said that “all of Eu­rope ­will be called upon to help in the development of Africa.” Mollet’s formulation recalled that of the ­father of the Pan-­European Movement, Richard Coudenhove-­Kalergi, who had coined the term “Eurafrique” in 1929, proposing that the common proj­ect of creating arable land and curing disease in Africa would bring Eu­ro­pean powers together. This ­angle on Eurafrique more clearly echoed the sentiment of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 when the Eu­ro­pean colonies expressed their unity in the common proj­ect of suppressing slavery and bringing ­free trade to Africa, in what Carl Schmitt calls the “last common land-­appropriation of non-­European soil by the Eu­ro­pean powers.” — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 641

Categorization

• QUESTION: Track how the civilizing-mission vocabulary of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference gets recycled in mid-century economic integration discourse — useful throughline for the chapter.
• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM-compatible theme of European powers rationalizing empire through developmentalist projects, parallel to themes in the sacrifice and civilizing-mission literature.