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Recent scholarship has shown that European integration was not just a ‘peace project’, as the official narrative of the European Union has it, but also a colonial project. In particular, it was a way for Belgium and France to consolidate their colonial possessions in central and west Africa, at a time when they were no longer able to maintain them on their own (see Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson's Eurafrica, London: Bloomsbury, 2014). The seventh member state deepens our understanding of this early period of the European project by examining Algeria's fascinating role. Between the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 until Algeria became independent in 1962, the country was part of Europe—or at least part of the European Economic Community (EEC). It was never actually the ‘seventh member state’, but rather it was included within the EEC precisely because it was part of France. Algeria had a particular relationship with metropolitan France, which was reflected in its status within the EEC. Unlike the sub-Saharan African territories (what the French called Afrique noire or black Africa), Algeria's populous north had been administered as a group of three départements since 1848. Thus, it was more like other départements d'outre-mer [overseas territories] such as Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean (which remain part of the EU to this day). Yet of course France did not treat Algeria like any other département in mainland France. Rather, it was governed as a colony where rights were differentiated along racialized lines: European settlers and their descendants had full citizenship rights, whereas most Muslim Algerians, or indigènes, did not. Megan Brown shows how, as the first steps towards European integration were taken in the postwar period, Algeria's ambiguous relationship with metropolitan France created a dilemma for French officials. She also points to how the French attempted to use this ambiguity to their own advantage.
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