The EU as an Imperial Construct: Assessing the Applicability of the Notion

The revision of the approaches to the concept of empire coupling with the obvious new quality of the European integration process in 2000s are provoking the attempts to interpret the logic of the European Union evolution in the terms of imperial transition. This article is dedicated to the verification of such a hypothesis through the particularization of the imperial design and, then, its comparison with the reality of the integration process. The imperial pattern of the polity is determined using some basic parameters – systemic, structural, institutional, economic, narrative, genetic. The analysis allows to conclude that there is no sufficiently solid soil under the “imperial” hypothesis of the European integration process now. Thus, there are some traces indicating the option for the EU to be developed in such a direction. Besides the hypothesis of J. Zielonka on the EU as a neo­medieval imperial project is examined. We are admitting some resemblance of Holy Roman Empire and nowadays EU phenomena. Nevertheless, the disputable “imperial” nature of the former doesn’t allow to consider such a resemblance as an argument in favor of the “imperial” nature of the latter. Meanwhile this resemblance can be interpreted as one of the signs of the nowadays transit of the global world order to his “neo­medieval” design which is based on the decline of the Nation­State territorial sovereignty, the rise of the non­Westphalian IR actors and tools as well as the reincarnation of the civilizational/confessional motivation of the foreign policy.

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