Social behaviour, values and principles are all grounded on collective memories. The stories we tell ourselves about the past attribute a sense of naturality and inevitability to how we interact with one another and organise ourselves; they justify why things are the way they are. The power to build those stories is dialectically related to power structures, being constituted by, as well as constituting them. How does it work, then, when dominant groups use remembrance to amend the violence from which they obtained power? The question is central to understanding the intentions underlying the coloniser States’ increasingly popular proposals of reckoning with colonial injustices. The movement, initiated by the end of the 20^th century, was especially fuelled by the discussions provoked by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In the two years that followed, 7 occasions - a third of the total of their kind - were marked by verbal commemorations of colonialism. In this research, I use critical discourse analysis to investigate the political dimension of their text. My main questions are whether the commemorations challenge or reinforce the structures of subalternisation, and how.

Although critical research agendas have become more prevalent in recent years, the ‘decolonizing’, ‘decentering’ and ‘rethinking’ scholarships of EU studies have so far not succeeded in adjusting the mainstream and widespread perception of the European Economic Community (the European Union’s predecessor) as a non-colonial construct. Europe’s colonial history is seen by the general public as something from the past – a stance that is convenient for Brussels and is actively kept intact in initiatives such as the House of European History. Inspired by and drawing from Boatca’s definition of ‘Coloniality of Memory’, Hansen and Jonsson’s ‘Myth of Immaculate Conception’, Sierp’s conception of ‘EU Politics of Memory’, and Polonska-Kimunguyi’s ‘Myth of Peace and Statehood’, this chapter engages in a critical analysis of how the collective memory and perception of a non-colonial EU emerged and is brought about to this day. In doing so, this research aims to further expose persistent colonial structures that have thus far secured the EU’s place in the global political sphere.

This article analyses how the EU reacts and responds to recent resentment and antagonism that third countries have voiced when it comes to European colonial past. By conducting a comparative frame analysis and emotion discourse analysis of how the EU discursively engages with other regional groups (i.e. CELAC, ASEAN and African Union), this article argues that the EU adopts the emotion regulation strategy of cognitive reappraisal to avoid dealing with negative feelings that would derive from a proper reckoning of its past. To avoid anxiety and loss of status linked to shame and guilt, the EU attempts to reframe the memory-emotion nexus related to its colonial past in ways that trigger positive emotions, emphasizing a bright future of equality and partnership. In doing so, the EU aims to maintain its self-narrative intact and retain its superior hierarchical position on the international stage.

This paper seeks to elucidate the role that colonization played in the making of Europe’s modern transnational pharmaceutical industry and in the establishment of the European Community’s single market for pharmaceuticals. Rich anthropologic and (sub-altern) historical studies document how European colonizers condoned and promoted the theft of raw materials and indigenous knowledge, testing experimental therapies on indigenous peoples, and privileging the trade of European pharmaceuticals in colonies – all of which were precursors to European industrialists’ modern pharmaceutical success. On the other hand, mainstream historical and business scholarship describes industrial pharmaceuticals as originating in 19^th century European and American firms that benefitted from industrial policies leading to significant breakthroughs in the inter-war years and a post-war boom in innovation that have made it one of the world’s most profitable industries today. This literature is generally uncritical of the colonial origins of industrial pharmaceutical advances. Meanwhile, between the 1960s-1990s, the European Community introduced regulation and law to progressively integrate, harmonize, and ultimately expand the single European market for pharmaceuticals. The constitutional basis and EU institutional governance of these actions is firmly rooted in the promotion of free movement of goods and the (global) competitiveness of European industry.

This paper’s innovation is in bringing together different, previously unconnected, bodies of knowledge on pharmaceutical policy in European colonies, the ‘mainstream’ history of Europe’s pharmaceutical industry, and EU integration and law advancing a single pharmaceutical market. The first body of knowledge establishes the colonial lens and instrumentalization of industrial pharmaceuticals by colonial powers. The second body of knowledge uses the first to critique the established history of the transnational pharmaceutical industry. The third body of knowledge contextualises EU integration and law for pharmaceutical market-making and for the benefit of Europe’s transnational pharmaceutical companies using insights from the foregoing literature. This paper uses a systematic review of secondary scholarly literature (snowball searched for original/primary sources, where possible), and primary sources in archives of the European Union and selected companies.

By interweaving these histories, I seek reveal the past contributions by, repressions of, and (possibly) support for former European colonies, thereby re-interpreting the origins and effects of the EU’s modern pharmaceutical policy. Accounting for Europe’s colonial past is a critical exercise that should be undertaken now to inform the current revision of the EU’s pharmaceutical legislation (a once-in-20-year reform that defines the operation of Europe’s pharmaceutical sector).