History has it that, when an aide informed then-MEP Otto von Habsburg about an upcoming football match between Austria and Hungary, the relative of Emperor Franz Joseph asked against whom they would be playing?
Although the last emperors on the continent were disposed, killed or exiled after the Great War of 1914-1918, the concept of Empire continues to fascinate contemporary European intellectuals from both sides of the spectre.
Ardent Brexiteers in the UK depict the EU as the “Fourth Reich”, while enthusiastic supporters venture to portray the EU as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire or the reinvention of the Austrian-Hungarian dual monarchy.
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At the time of the great enlargement of the EU with 10 new member states in 2004, the Polish-born Oxford scholar Jan Zielonka suggested in his book Europe as Empire that the EU should leave the dream of a Westphalian super-state behind and instead adopt a neo-medieval paradigm.
“The European state is dead, long live the European empire!”, he wrote. Shortly afterwards, the then president of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso launched the suggestion during a press conference that the EU was to become the first-ever “non-imperial empire”.
Faced with the Russian aggression against his country, the Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba used an interview with the New York Times for elaborating his conviction that the EU should be seen as a ‘liberal empire’.
Whatever the reason for the appeal of the concept of the EU as an empire may be, it contradicts both the idea and the construction of the Union.
