LSE - EUROPP Edgar Pieterse September 22nd, 2023 European cities must do more to address the legacy of colonialism

 LSE - EUROPP 

Edgar Pieterse

September 22nd, 2023

European cities must do more to address the legacy of colonialism

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The EU’s approach to Africa has done little to challenge exploitative power relations between Europe and the Global South, writes Edgar Pieterse. But could partnerships between European and African cities offer a better route to fostering solidarity?

What is the function of cities – arguably the apogee of cultural achievement – when an empire dies? What does a good death look and feel like? Can Europe’s cities become the midwives to usher in new sources of identity and pride that challenge defensive nostalgia for the continent’s fading “greatness”?

The slow death of the European imperial project has been delayed by stubborn cultural chauvinism; a hard-to-expunge belief that, ultimately, the future of the world is some form of liberal democracy, seen as an inheritance of European enlightenment. The subtext being that imperialism couldn’t have been all that bad if Europe endowed the world with its future.

Coming to terms with the Anthropocene and its runaway environmental dystopia should once and for all dislodge European chauvinism and confidence. But it won’t. Europe makes a lot of noise about its commitments to Africa’s sustainable development and more equitable trading relations, but its flagship EU Green Deal does little to challenge exploitative power relations between Europe and the Global South. Its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), for example, sets out to reposition European firms as global leaders in an emerging low-carbon and circular economy, but fails to commit Europe to addressing the true cost of climate mitigation in the Global South and carries dire economic development impacts for many African countries.

Given the hard realities of geopolitical realpolitik, and in spite of the warm and fuzzy rhetoric of Europe’s just transition, might it be too much to wish for that European cities see a role for themselves to call out contradictory and unjust EU strategies? Might African and European cities forge direct agreements of solidarity and partnerships for just transitions? In this short reflection I want to hold on to a fictional European city with the audacity to figure out what it might mean to recover a Europeanness rooted in the values of freedom and solidarity. How might this city consider its role in relation to interdependent futures?

The decolonial current that is slowly but surely finding space and resonance in the Global North is perhaps a good starting point. European cities that want to acknowledge their culpability in the continued aftermath of colonialism and its distortionary effects in contemporary economic and political systems can proactively pursue three interwoven imperatives: (1) recognition; (2) reparations; and (3) redistribution.

Recognition

Most African cities reflect the original colonial imperative to have a base station to manage extractive industrialisation. Over time, divisions between the luxurious trappings of small colonial elites and the neglected dormitories for essential workers were fixed in space through racialised modernist design principles obsessed with functional division.

These regimes of control were designed to guarantee uninterrupted extraction of raw materials and minerals and required the erasure of languages, cosmologies, tacit knowledge systems and social values of reciprocity and interdependence. This cultural violence was mobilised by racialised norms in Europe that both justified the grand imperial projects and the establishment of international and trade relations that would safeguard the unfair technological and financial benefits accrued through intergenerational injustice.

Coming to terms with these deep, multi-generational and compounded forms of exploitation is the central focus of a politics of recognition. The much-publicised debates about returning African cultural artefacts, for example, the Benin Bronzes, is but the tip of the iceberg of what we need. What can European cities do to normalise recognition policies and practices and acknowledge both historical and contemporary wrongs?

Reparations

It is not especially viable for European cities to finance and effect reparations, but they can lend their political capital and voice to the symbolic importance of such action. At COP27, a report was tabled that clearly defined the investment needed for mitigation, adaptation, resilience, damage and natural capital.

The authors underscore that the US$100 billion per annum investment committed to at COP21 in Paris in 2015 had not yet been realised by 2022, demonstrating a shocking lack of commitment and follow-through. Furthermore, they suggest that in any case, the US$100 billion figure is a gross underestimation. “The world needs a breakthrough and a new roadmap on climate finance that can mobilise the $1 trillion per year in external finance that will be needed by 2030 for emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) other than China.”

By raising the ambition and consistency of European governments and the EU, cities can generate powerful political pressure for progress. Reparations must go beyond financial investment to include technical know-how, technology and skills development for a new generation of low-carbon, circular cities. This would be consistent with the social justice values of the New Leipzig Charter that morally anchors the political ambitions of European cities.

Redistribution

A lot of work remains after reparations to ensure that uneven playing fields are systematically rebalanced. Cities will need capital, research and development, and institutional and digital learning to put into practice circular, regenerative built environments and explore new models of citizenship based not on consumption, but on generating public goods.

As the global community figures out post-carbon urban futures, learning and resources must be shared equitably in open-source forums. To be sure, practical approaches to redistribution are inconceivable without cultural work to shift norms, expectations, dispositions and demand structures inside European cities. The current framing and management of the so-called migration crisis is a powerful litmus test of whether European cities are ready for this heavy cultural lifting.

European cities are indeed the midwives for a zero-carbon, circular city of the near future. But this societal learning project must also incorporate a reckoning with the bloody history of extraction and pillage that enabled industrialisation and post-industrialisation.

This article is based on a contribution to Old Cities New Ambitions: The Future of Urban Europe, published by LSE Cities

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Tayvay/Shutterstock.com

About the author

Edgar Pieterse

Edgar Pieterse is Founding Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

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