The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a post-colonial power

Abstract

The aim in this contribution is to amplify the call, articulated across a range of disciplines relevant to international politics, for a paradigm shift that decentres the study and practice of Europe’s international relations. Such a perspective is necessary both to make sense of our multipolar order and to reconstitute European agency in a non-European world. The analytical categories proposed in this article for a decentring agenda – provincialization, engagement and reconstruction(s) – can help to navigate the nexus of the empirical and the normative in such a decentring process. Applying the decentring logic to the EU’s own foundational narrative, the authors suggest that, only by acknowledging the inflections of colonialism in the EU project itself, can the Union reinvent its normative power in the 21st century.