EUrope – History , Violence and “ Peripheries ”

The idea and study of international society can be applied empirically to Europe and the Europe Union (EU), with a significant overlap between the idea of Europe and the EU being symbolized as EUrope. As the example of EUrope demonstrates, the development of international society genuinely depends upon violence in its peripheries, in EUrope’s case exemplified by colonialism and imperialism of European states: states of which most are now core members of the European Union, but until only some 50 years ago have been fierce and violent colonizers of the world. As such, the study of Europe and the EU is ontologically linked to the study of colonialism and post-colonialism what founds and necessitates epistemologically an historical and comparative approach. The refusal of this ontology and epistemology may enable to study internal policy processes, but would remain within self-centric and solipsistic foci on the European ‘Self’ and would thus block systematically all attempts to interrelate the EU to the world. Such a refusal would further render it impossible to envision the EU as an international or even global actor conducting policies other than hegemonic and paternalistic (even if self-understood as benevolent).


Introduction
'International Society', as promoted mainly by Martin Wight and Hedley Bull (Note 1), describes an historically oscillating movement between cooperation among a group of states, expansion, detraction, and globalization.Whatever stage 'international society' may be/might have been in, historically and present-day, the center of this movement seems to be, and to have been, the Western world and Europe and their export, and/or superimposition, for the better or worse, of Western/European political, cultural, and legal standards on non-European/non-Western 'states' (Note 2) -among which not all have been or are states in the European meaning, but empires, monarchic kingdoms, tribes, nomadic societies, etc.The inequality among state relations and the violence, sometimes also war, which are inherent in these movements, appear to be manifest in what Bull (most explicitly, but also others) called the 'institutions' of international society and their 'functions' (see Bull, 1977).However, the political violence, which represents an inherent part of the movements of international society, is an under-conscious and under-thematized aspect of international society and the respective discussions in the literature which can be linked to the so-called English School.
This paper shall therefore be focusing on the aspect of violence as part of the emergence and development of international society.To put it differently, without violence there would be no international society, and hence I will be arguing that violence is and has been an incremental part of international society and its movements (Note 3).Those patterns of violence, however, are shifting.They are informed by patterns of physical, or direct, forms of violence -foremost materialized in historical imperialistic and colonial movements of international society -and of structural and cultural forms of violence.Thus, forms of violence of the international society are multilayered, and in historical imperialism and colonialism the use of physical violence was accompanied, if not based upon cultural and discursive patterns of anthropological stigmatizations and racist discrimination as well as that forms of structural and cultural violence are still present in contemporary international relations and their many post-colonial legacies.The disappearance of direct/physical violence is certainly not the case for international politics in general, but if international society is understood as a form of intensified cooperation among states based on common organizations, then the pattern of physical violence can be said to have disappeared in respective contexts (Note 4).
The terminology used so far may already have suggested that I will be using Johan Galtung's differentiation of violence into the three forms of direct (i.e.physical), structural, and cultural violence (Note 5); while we see some similarity between the last one and the form of violence which emerges through the analytical lenses of Edward Said's Orientalism-argument and Foucauldian discourse analysis (Note 6).
I shall discuss three forms of violence in international society exerted through physical/direct, structural, and discourse/cultural formations.Apart from present-day forms of international society among legally -not though politically -equal states, where physical violence almost disappeared and formations of structural and discourse violence appear to dominate (such as in the European Union [EU], in ASEAN or NAFTA as well as in their external relations), all three forms of violence interplay and mutually support each other in all other cases, historically in manifestations of imperialism and colonialism and contemporarily in politics of building international society.

"International Society" and the Study of Violence
Johan Galtung, founder of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), its director from 1953 until 1969, and from 1969 to 1978 professor for peace and conflict research at the University of Oslo, developed a typology of forms of violence.He distinguished three major patterns, or 'super-types' as he also calls them (see Galtung, 1990: 294).These patterns refer to violence according to their phenomenology and manifestation as direct, structural, and cultural, with the latter two being conceived of also as psychological ('working on the soul') while direct violence is physical and personal ('working on the body' as Galtung argues (1968: 169).Between physical and psychological violence is an interesting link in that the threat of physical violence is perceived by Galtung as an act of (psychological) violence which falls within his comprehensive definition of violence 'since it constraints human action ' (1969: 170).Since threats of violence (may they aim at direct, structural, or cultural acts of violence) are executed via structural and/or cultural violence, there is a further link between these three main patterns of direct, structural, and cultural violence (Note 7).Before this link shall be discussed at the end of this section, the concept of violence must be discussed first whereby this link will become clearer.
First, it has to be asked why Galtung occupies himself with typologies, categorizations, and empirical exemplifications of violence when his actual interest lies in peace studies and the elaboration of conditions of peace and the avoidance of violence respectively.He gives an illustrative metaphor in order to explain this occupation by comparing the role of the study of violence for peace studies with the study of pathology for health studies: they both occupy themselves with disturbing reasons of what is aspired and with what is located at the opposite of the desired: health here, and peace there, and pathologies and violence respectively as the disturbing (see Galtung, 1990).Consequently, the more types and phenomena of violence are knowable and understandable, and the more comprehensively they are known and understood, the more effective possibilities there are to counteract them and to tackle their roots in order to accomplish peace and or a more peaceable world, including strategies for conflict settlement and resolution.The study of violence is hence seen as a necessary step for finally accomplishing a higher goal; at the same time, however, it is an endlessly wide field since phenomena of violence are widespread in their character and manifold in their causes, effects, and interrelations.And it is exactly for this wideness and manifoldness that Galtung deliberately rejects any narrow concept of violence which would only and mainly aim at intended physical violence of an identifiable actor.He notes that '(if) this were everything violence is about, and peace seen as its negation, then too little is rejected when peace is held up as an ideal.Highly unacceptable social orders would still be compatible with peace.Hence, an extended concept of violence is indispensable ' (1969: 168).
The idea of the manifoldness of violence, and the interrelations between such manifoldnesses, will give birth to Galtung's three super-types of physical/direct/personal, structural, and (later in his career also) cultural violence.But what is to be understood as violence itself which then becomes manifest in these three types?Here, Galtung develops a definition of violence which is supposed to be open enough to grasp its widespread character and expressions.He notes: 'Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations ' (1969: 168).This definition appears so comprehensive that it is difficult to think of any sphere, dimensions, or agency in the social and political realm which would not fall under the rubric of violence.Some specification is necessary, and Galtung, aware of this, introduces the criterion of avoidability and un-avoidability of such influences, understood not deterministically or by nature, but by social and/or political action.Accordingly, violence is further specified as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is.Violence then is that which in-creases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance.Thus, if a person died from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century it would be hard to conceive of this as violence since it might have been quite unavoidable, but if he dies from it today, despite all the medical resources in the world, then violence is present according to his definition (1969: 168).
In other words: when influences prevail, which 'constrain human action' and which contribute to the impossibility of the full realization of (one's) human life needs, but which are avoidable through social and political action and which would need not to occur according to means over which social and political actors dispose, then violence is present.As such, violence is located within the realm of social and political order and action.If negative influences on the conduct of human life are unavoidable in their occurrences, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, then there is no violence; if, however, after the occurrence of such an incident, help (such as evacuation, food, sanitation, etc.) is not being provided most comprehensively to support the realization of life needs of the people harmed, then violence is present (Note 8).It is clear from this understanding that the presence and amount of violence are directly related to questions of equality/inequality, justice/injustice, and power over resources and decision-making.This may be illustrated by a further, contemporary example: Every day x-thousand of people die or become infected from the HIV-virus worldwide; the circumstances of these infections may have or may not have causes related to violence (sometimes they certainly have as in cases of direct violence over the body of others such as rape or prostitution).The circumstance that medication against HIV-infection is available and in Western societies most infections can meanwhile become cured with a good chance that the virus does not affect the immune system, that people infected in foremost African countries, however, are cut off this medication -thus the constrains on their lives and health were avoidable -by being not made available certain resources and by not disposing over power in decision-making processes, which are responsible for their being cut off from necessary medication, would be to be perceived (and condemned) as a phenomenon of violence (Note 9).Since for the exertion of this kind of violence no single person or distinct group of persons may be responsible or accountable, Galtung calls this type of violence, i.e.where no clear actor is identifiable, structural violence: 'We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect ' (1969: 170).And further he notes: 'Personal violence shows (…) structural violence is silent, it does not show ' (1969: 173).
When we follow Galtung and disassociate the presence and exertion of violence from distinct agency and from a clearly identifiable actor, either the concept of violence turns into a self-perpetuating argument accusing and blaming everything and everyone, or, and that in order to keep the concept analytically valuable, we have to disassociate the concept of violence principally from the idea of individual guilt and responsibility.Saying this, does not mean that we would not be able to declare guilt and responsibility in certain cases of violence (which is particularly important in a legal and ethical perspective), implies, however, that we cannot do so instantly and always.Referring to the example above, the circumstance that millions of people are cut off from necessary HIV-medication may be due not to the decision of a single, namable person, but most probably may be due to a spectrum of manifold and complex structures of capitalist economies that are operating in and governing the free-market system of pharmacy production and distribution, world trade, and development policies.As Galtung says, sometimes violence is silent, but nevertheless there and maybe most effective.On the other hand though, even if dropping the idea of guilt and responsibility, we accomplish a most important analytical tool to detect violence even, and especially when there is no one particular actor behind its exertion since associating violence only and always with a distinct actor behind it does not allow to see many phenomena which, too, fall into Galtung's definition of avoidable constrains of human action and humans' realization of life needs.And finally, structures are of a different nature than a human person as actor, but, too, provide a tangible picture of both the occurrence and the causes of violence.Examples are: constrains of national political and economic systems causing inequalities of, and discriminations against, certain parts of the population; political and economic principles and rules of an international society which discriminate against other nations that do not belong to this international society or are in the peripheries of its organizational and power center; certain mechanisms of decision-making in national or international institutions and their effects on those who are not part of the decision-making circles; degrees of possession over natural resources and production means and their function as access venues on international markets and for acceptance and membership in international organizations; group and state hierarchies; militarization; inside/outside-identities, -discriminations, and -rationalities with regard to nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender; etc. etc.
Galtung's 'violence triangle' is complemented by a third category, that of cultural violence.Cultural violence shares with structural violence the characteristic that there is no clearly identifiable individual actor or group of actors behind the exertion of violence 'acts', rather 'aspects of culture' operate as legitimizing reasons for personal/direct/physical and/or structural violence.When Galtung notes that '(by) cultural violence we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence -exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic and mathematics) -that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence ' (1990: 291) and that further 'The study of cultural violence highlights the way in which the act of direct violence and the fact of structural violence are legitimized and thus rendered acceptable in society.One way cultural violence works is by changing the moral color of an act (…) (another) by making reality opaque so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent ' (1990: 292) We are resembled of Michel Foucault's discourse analyses of power, particularly its repressive forms (read: violence) (Note 10).Especially in Madness and Civilization (1967), The Order of Things (1970), The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Discipline and Punish (1995) and herein by his concept of panopticism Foucault sensitizes his audience for the aspects of social and political power which are (sometimes the constitutive and at the same time repressive) part of what we take and accept as normal, even natural, while the narratives on what is 'normal' and 'natural' and their dominance or weakness are again the result of power struggles and discourses.Thus, there are interests at play which manipulate both the reality according to those interests and our perceptions of this 'reality' which, in the words of Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoller create a reality 'in order to act upon it ' (1997: 11).Galtung's wordings that cultural violence makes reality 'opaque' and 'makes direct and structural violence look, even feel right -or at least not wrong ' (1990: 291) are in line with the aspects of the creation and manipulation of reality and perceptions and narratives of/on 'this' reality à la Foucault; and even more similarity between their analytical foci and lenses becomes obvious when we look at the realms of their analyses.
We are all more or less familiar with the empirical foci which we (can) derive from Foucault's concept of discourse.Having a closer look at what according to Galtung exemplifies cultural power -namely religion, ideology, language, art, empirical and formal science (read 'modes of rationality') -and what he suggests as empirical foci for the analysis of cultural power, one wonders why there are not more cross-references in secondary literature between the oeuvre of both authors or immediate mutual references between both (Note 11).Anyway, Galtung mentions some instances for whose analysis the concept of cultural violence can be used and by whose application we become aware of patterns of how violence (i.e.direct/physical and structural violence) is being legitimized through notions/perceptions/teachings/stories/world views/narratives in and by religion, ideology, language, art, empirical and formal science (i.e.discourses): some of the instances may be listed here since they can contributetogether with the instances of structural violence above -to develop more precise ideas on what an analysis of EUrope, which merges the study of international society and post-colonialism and herby on cultural violence, may focus on.Such an analysis would encompass phenomena like prejudice; sanitation of language; militarism; neoclassical economic doctrine of comparative advantage and its rationality (Note 12); perceptions of modernization and progress here, and backwardness there where 'modernization, development, and progress are seen as apodictic [and] not to believe in them reflects badly on the non-believer, not on the belief ' (1990: 298); politics where 'one country sets the tone for others' (ibid.)such as in contemporary politics conditionality; and further to these, all kinds of 'cultural elements' of which can be shown that they are being used 'empirically or potentially (…) to legitimize direct or structural violence' (ibid.).

EUrope and the Study of Colonial and Post-colonial History
Studying the European Union and the developments of international society from a European core into non-European peripheries from a historical and comparative perspective evinces a profound paradox which becomes most virulent and problematic in the EU's self-understanding as a benevolent actor: eight of its 27 current members with this eight being among the core and longest members of the Union (namely France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) have, until just recently, a history and political legacy as the world's fiercest and as most violent colonizers and imperial powers, carving deep memories, harm, and vulnerabilities into violated peoples' collective memories, while the EU, supported by a large field of mainstream EU scholarship, perceives of itself as a normative civil power and benevolent international and global actor.That the EU's rhetoric of European governance as a model of global governance may give raise to profound anxieties and resistances among previously colonized states with, at the same time, an obvious naivety of EU actors about their own benevolence and reception/perception around the world, manifests and exemplifies the paradox mentioned.
This paradox is what Dipesh Chakrabarty has in mind when he speaks of 'asymmetric ignorance' and refers herewith to the 'dominance of "Europe" as the subject of all histories ' (2000: 28, 29).The list of phenomena, which would need to be analyzed under the rubric of cultural violence according to Galtung, requires extension through a spectrum of additional foci when the study of violence is being merged with a post-colonial perspective on the international society of Europe and the EU.Chakrabarty helps us in suggesting such foci when arguing that political modernity itself is a thoroughly European thought model linked to 'concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, the distinction between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, [and] scientific rationality' which would 'all bear the burden of European thought and history ' (2000: 4).Since those concepts are not just tools which could be willfully chosen, or not, from a range of alternatives by European policy-makers and social scientists in their making of politics and their writing history, rather they have accomplished the rank as the global 'condition under which politics is being made and under which historical knowledge is produced ' itself (2000: 29) in and by Europe as well as throughout the world, we face two consequences of this paradox: First, EU policy makers and scholarship who operate not on a profound comparative and historical basis, but rather engage self-centristically the study of 'domestic', i.e.EU, policy processes on the basis of a 'post-ontological' (so Caporaso (Note 13)) self-understanding cannot but be naïve with regard to understanding EU politics (enlargement, for example) as merely benevolent paternalism (instead of critically asking for perceptions of others and eventual post-colonial implications) since their knowledge production is fundamentally trapped in those conditions under which Europe always performs as THE subject of (global) history.At the same time, this mechanism and this conditionality of own knowledge (production) and political agency do not become visible and tangible to them.And, secondly, every perspective from around the world finds itself in conditions of structural subalternity -or "everyday symptom" of subalternity, as Chakrabarty writes (2000: 29) -towards as well as in resistance against those European modes of knowledge production and policy making.
It is difficult to see somewhere on the horizon that this paradox with its long-standing historical legacies and burdens would have came to an end -neither with respect to non-European subalternity, nor with respect to European paternalism -rather than carries on into contemporary EU politics.Chakrabarty's term of a "hyperreal Europe" is very instructive here which would have been constructed by the "tales that both nationalism and imperialism have told the colonized" (2000: 41) -a term which applies in a historical comparison immediately to the EU Eastern enlargement policy of 2004 and respective discourses initiated by the EU around EU benevolence and the benefit of EU membership for Eastern Europe; while at the same time then leading EU politicians, foremost the EU commissioner for Enlargement, Guenther Verheugen, and the president of the EU commission, Romano Prodi, as well as mainstream EU scholarship would have responded with surprise and dismay when confronted with critical perspectives and alternative perceptions of their enlargement politics (see, for example, Boeroecz 2001) due to their intellectual containment and persistent belief in the "Europe as the subject of history"narrative and respective knowledge productions, particularly with regard to visions of modernity and modernization, historical progress and teleology, and economic development (Note 14).
We appear to have therefore convincing reasons to study the movements of European international society as manifestations of forms of post-colonial violence and Galtung's typology as discussed above may be very helpful here.This applicability of concepts of political violence in looking at Europe and the EU -i.e. this perspective of post-colonial 'asymmetric ignorance' -appears to have unequally more validity when viewed from European peripheries while at the same time seemingly enjoying no validity within the political and scholarly elites who reside within the core of European knowledge production and the historical subjectivity of EUrope.However, this is not an indication of the wrongness or mistakenness of what could be called critical EUropean studies, bringing together EU studies, post-colonialism, and the study of international society, rather than another, now geopolitical manifestation of asymmetric power relations between EUropean core and peripheries -a core which is ironically identical more or less with the eight colonizing states of European history (as mentioned in the beginning of this section) and peripheries which assemble the victims of European colonial and imperial history.
When approaching the "Europe as the subject of history"-narrative and respective knowledge productions as well as their persistence into the 21 st century more specifically with Galtung's typology, we recognize that this narrative leads to and conditions violence on all the three dimensions of direct, structural, and cultural violence; with again the historical focus on these dimensions representing the fundamental ontology of the study of Europe and the European Union.Such a study suggests that the dimension of direct violence, which flew from the "Europe as the subject of history"-narrative, has been a basic pillar of European expansion, using strategies and techniques of colonial and imperial war and subjugating and annihilating thousands of peoples and vast civilizations in the Middle East, Central Asia, East and South East Asia, Africa, and South and North America.Those techniques and strategies appear meanwhile to belong to history even though they played a major role in the movements of European international society far into the 20 th century.A historical study of European international society through the centuries from the 1500s to the European Union applying Galtung's typology of violence reveals, however, even more that with an end of direct violence the narrative of Europe as the subject of history did not stop to be violent at all.One of the heuristic advantages of Galtung's types of structural and cultural violence -as discussed above in section 2) in greater detail -consists in the ability to see and to decipher elements of violence which we would not be able to recognize if we had not such a comprehensive concept of violence.A concept of violence, which would reduce violence to phenomena of physical force, would not be able to detect elements of violence which are continuing to expose non-European peoples to European/EUropean politics, even after physical/direct violence came to an end mainly with the processes of de-colonization after the Second World War and especially UN Resolution 1514 (XV) of 1960 by the United Nations General Assembly.However, and we see this by applying the types of structural and cultural violence, violence carried on and continues to influence the relations between Europe/EUrope and the world.This continuation of violence between Europe/EUrope and former colonies around the world in form of structural and cultural violence is the main platform of all kinds of post-colonial theory and respective empirical studies.Speaking with Galtung, when structural violence is violence 'built in' political, economic, bureaucratic, and social structures, it is then the analysis of those structures in terms of inequalities between Europe/EUrope and the world which deciphers structural violence: as violence that is produced, supported, and fueled by those structures.And, as mentioned above, Galtung's type of cultural violence is congruent with Foucault's concept of discursive power (as force and domination) in that cultural violence manifests and is being articulated in social and political discourses -such as state symbols and iconographies; anthems; literature; linguistic codes; political speeches and political semantics; popular culture; etc. -which either serve directly, or are being instrumentalized for, the legitimization of direct and/or structural violence; and are as such to be seen as violent themselves.
With regard to the EU, structural and cultural violence -or, with Chakrabarty: 'asymmetric ignorances' -against and towards 'peripheral' states and regions can be found and demonstrated in a multitude of politics ranging from neo-liberal economy and free market ideologies, to hypocrisies of democracy promotion and human rights policies, to European Neighbourhood Policies, to the EC/EU acquis communautaire, to finally all politics of identity creation (ideas of 'Europeaness') as they become expressed in EUropean immigration politics (see amongst others Behr, 2005).One of the most pregnant examples of structurally and culturally violent EU policies is certainly its Eastern enlargement of 2004 and (are and) have been the social, political, and economic discourse and structures accompanying and supporting the unification of 'old' EUrope with ten new (Eastern) member states.
As argued by a distinctively critical body of literature (see amongst others Behr, 2007;Boeroecz, 2001;Burgess, 1997;Diez, 1999;Engelbrekt, 2002;Kovacs, 2001;Kovacs/ Kabachnik 2001;Phillipson, 1992Phillipson, , 2002;;Ugur, 1995), EU institutions, and foremost the EU Commission and the then commissioner for enlargement, Guenther Verheugen, have initiated a political discourse in the run-up to the Eastern enlargement of the Union (which just recently has experienced another step with the finalization of membership negotiations on June 30, 2011, with Croatia) which constructed a binary reality for Eastern European states consisting of either EU membership or chaos, anarchy, and poverty as future prospects.Thus, a development was portrayed for those states which depicted only one viable and 'rational' trajectory for their future, and this was eventual EU membership.In order to accomplish such membership, however, Eastern European states had to undergo a profound procedure of transformation according to the economic and political rationalities of 'old', or 'core' EUrope.
The key regulation for new members was laid down in the conclusion of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), Title VIII, Article 49 which determines that 'each European state' can apply for membership in the European Union under the condition of observing and guaranteeing the basic political principles laid down in Article 6, paragraph 1 of the Treaty: the states keen to join the Union must guarantee freedom, democracy, human rights, and rule of law, as well as the basic political rights of the Rome Convention of Human Rights and Basic Freedoms of 4 November 1950.Title VIII, Article 49 further specifies that with each state applying for membership distinct accession treaties must be contracted.The European Council in Copenhagen concretized the regulations for accession and passed the 'Copenhagen criteria' in 1993.The paramount request was institutional stability to guarantee democratic rule of law and basic human rights; second, a free market economy had to be established, including the capacity to withstand economic competition in the Union; and third, the new states were required to take care of all obligations of membership as well as of the objectives of the political and economic Union.
The third criterion aims at the adoption of the 'acquis communautaire'.Until the accessions of 2004 became effective, the 'acquis communautaire' steadily developed, and in 2001 encompassed some 90,000 pages of regulations by the Commission, as well as the precedents of the European Court of Justice over the last 50 years; all joint declarations and conclusions of the Union regarding common foreign and security politics and home and justice affairs; all international agreements of the Union with third countries; all intergovernmental agreements among single member states of the Union; and finally, all principles of primary EU law stemming from the Treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice (Note 15).Thus, primarily the EU commission discursively created a distinct reality in order to (be able to) act upon it while the adaptation and transformation process of Eastern European states according to Western EUropean economic and political standards and rationalities must be seen as an epitome of structural violence: violence built-in the structures of adaptation and transformation: economic, bureaucratic, political, and social structures to be implemented in Eastern European states in order to 'successfully' accomplish transformation and to be assessed by the EU commission as ripe for earning membership status (Note 16).
Respective enlargement politics and their structurally violent impacts have been embedded in and legitimized by political discourses which promoted EU accession as THE only rational, viable, and sustainable path for the development of Eastern Europe as a whole and Eastern European states after their independence from the Soviet Union.Because those discourses reduced alternative ways and options for their development to one dimensioni.e.EU membership -and thus helped to legitimize the individual politics of accession as discussed above, these discourses are to be seen as forms of cultural violence.It is noteworthy, however, that this discourse has been supported by Eastern European states themselves applying for EU membership during the 1990s.Thus, we find two conceptual features fulfilled here: firstly, Galtung's explanation that neither structural nor cultural violence would have a clearly identifiable actor who is accountable and to could be blamed so that at best a multitude of discourse participants can be named; and, secondly, the explanation of Chakrabarty for the 'success' of colonialism, namely that the values and rationalities of the colonizer need to be -and as he empirically demonstrates looking at India -embraced by local elites (2000: 4), seems to apply, too, to EU enlargement which was not only unilaterally promoted by leading Western European EU member states, but also by Eastern European applicant (and later EU member) states.
The most significant nature of the political discourse surrounding EU enlargement politics as legitimizing the structural violence of adaptation and transformation processes -in short: of EU politics of conditionality towards Eastern Europe -, which made it so powerful and at the same time reinforced the legitimization of structural aspects of EU accession and membership, are its metaphysics of a historiographic teleology and its geopolitical underpinnings.Through both, politics is becoming reified and what is indeed a political construction -i.e. the building of international society more generally, and EU integration more particularly -appears as naturalness and historic-political inevitability.EU Eastern enlargement of 2004 appears as the fulfillment of the laws of history and accordingly as the only reasonable and meaningful course of action after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Bloc (for more detailed analysis, see Behr, 2007;Diez, 1999;as examples Prodi, 2000;Verheugen, 2000).

Conclusions: History, Violence and "Peripheries"
Scholarship, which wants to critically engage the contemporary European construction of international society and EU integration, must take into account two conceptual necessities: first, it needs to built upon an historical ontology of Europe from times of colonialism and imperialism to present-day; and, secondly, within the context of respective studies, the focus on international society -i.e.here EU and English School scholarship -should meet colonial and post-colonial theory.From such perspectives, the movements of every international society and thus, too, of the European Union can be deciphered as forms of asymmetric ignorance and ultimately violence exerted from a core of states of a specific international society over its peripheries.
The direction of movement of international society into, and the exertion of power and violence from the core over, peripheries suggests a concluding geopolitical figure for critical EU studies.The breading of violence of the "Europe as the subject of history"-narrative and its post-colonial persistences are accompanied by a division of the world into imaginations of core and peripheries.The geographical imaginations of core and periphery are thereby not neutral at all, but charged with hierarchical thinking assuming and promoting steadily declining political power and significance the further the international society stretches into 'its'/the peripheries.Even though member of one and the same international society, the peripheral parts find themselves in a sub-altern role.This is as true for colonial and post-colonial relations between EUrope and the world as it is true for the relations even within the European Union as several politics of membership graduation and unequal treaties demonstrate.
The political strategy of unequal treaties between core states and peripheries -a well known power tool from 19 th century imperialism and the so-called 'standards of civilization' (see Gong, 1984) -became manifest, for example, in restrictions of free movement for citizens of the new member states of the 2004 enlargement for the first seven years of their membership in the Union.Those restrictions were enacted by the EU even though the new member states had incorporated the Union's acquis communautaire in full, fulfilled all treaty obligations, and free movement is supposed to be and indeed was a right of all (other, i.e. 'old') member states' citizens according to the Schengen Agreement.Unequal treaties, which have been concluded between European and non-European states in the centuries of European colonialism and imperialism and which also occur within the international society of the European Union and their underlying geopolitical core-periphery imaginations are thus another articulation of inequality, discrimination, and asymmetric power relations (for further discussions see Ansell/Di Palma 2004).
To sum up: history, violence, and periphery appear as the analytical and conceptual triad for critical EU scholarship where the study of international society meets colonial and post-colonial theory.It appears that EU scholarship with a primary European and policy oriented focus carries on the colonial and imperial narrative of Europe as the subject of history and is thus compelled to remain Euro-centric.Such scholarship and respective understandings of the Union ignore not only the past and the legacies of the Union itself, but continue to keep Europe with itself, neglecting Europe's own (historically grounded) contingency.Europe defined and found itself always via a constructed non-European 'Other' while throughout most of Europe's history those processes of definition where explicitly violent (in terms of direct, physical violence).Two lessons may be suggested to be learned: first, neither Europe, nor the EU, nor European studies can and should renounce the relation between Europe/EUrope and the world and the understanding (and critical analysis) of respective mutual processes of interpreting the 'Other' and of identity building; secondly, those processes, analyses, understandings, interpretations, and their practices and techniques not only have to take the 'Other', the non-European, seriously into consideration, but further to this EUrope has to open itself explicitly up towards 'its' peripheries and sub-alternities in order to overcome its histories, legacies, and present-day practices of violence.Europe and the EU can redeem their own contingencies and surmount their political and cultural centrisms and hierarchies only through the constant transformation of EUrope's 'Self(s)' via an expressive glasnost towards non-European 'Others' -at the end of which process the desirable destabilization of binaries may possibly loom.violence due to the genuine character of inequality of and within the international system made up by modern system of (i.e. in this context post-19th Century) sovereign states (see on this for example Walker, 2002) as well as due to the Hegelian notion of self-centric and solipsistic recognition which underlies the English School thinking (see on this for example Behr, 2010, III.2).Note 4. Interesting though are cases where and when cooperation and cooperative behavior is demanded as in incidents of politics towards what is called 'failed states', as contemporarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and formerly in Somalia (according to the UN mandate in 1993).Here, the pattern of physical violence for the built-up of international society, with regard to its intended emergence so to say, has certainly not disap-peared.Note 5. See Galtung, 1990;1969;1971;1978. Note 6. For Foucault see 1967, 1970, 1973, 1995, for Said see 1978.Note 7. It seems that this link between threats of violence, which are to be perceived as (acts of) violence, and structural and cultural violence is somewhat of a blind spot in Galtung's conceptualizations which clearly elaborate the typologies of violence and their interrelations, however, seem to forget clarification on threats of violence as a type of violence further to the mere statement that they are (to be perceived as) violence.Since threats of (each kind of) violence are, however, conditioned by, depend upon, and relate to, structural and/or cultural violence as the carriers of those threats, structural and cultural violence are both forms of violence itself as well as the conditions of the possibility of direct/physical/personal violence at the same time.Thus, it seems that structural and cultural violence always hold the potential of developing into, and preparing for, physical/direct/personal violence.Note 8.The hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and its disastrous aftermath are a poignant example in this case.Note 9. See comparable the argument on water and water politics developed in Castro, 2006.Another example of structural violence is the domination of markets and local economies in Africa by European products through EU price politics whereby EU products, particularly highly subsidized agricultural products, are cheaper than local products and local market structures and economies becoming destroyed.
Note 10.It is important, though seems often to be overlooked when contemporary social scientists work 'with Foucault', that power does not necessarily and always have a negative connotation and consequence in Foucault.It certainly can, but power and power struggles also contribute to the creation of knowledge, an at least ambivalent function since knowledge, itself ambivalent, can be used in repressive ways (i.e. in a violent manner) and, too, in, and as, liberating strategies.Note 11.One of the few authors who relates Foucault's concept of discourse and power to Galtung's typology of 'cultural violence' is Solà Martín, 2005.Note 12.In this regard Galtung notes: 'One example of cultural violence would be the neoclassical economic doc-trine, understanding itself as the science of economic activity … Thus, (The) doctrine of comparative ad-vantages serves as a justification for a rough division of the world in terms of the degree of processing which countries impart to their export products (…) the principle of comparative advantages sentences countries to stay where the production-factor profile has landed them, for geographical and historical rea-son (…) And thus it is that the 'law' of comparative advantages legitimizes a structurally intolerable status quo.In short, this 'law' is a piece of cultural violence buried in the very core of economics ' (1990: 300, 301).Note 13.On the panel "The Uses of History and Historical Comparison for Critical EU Studies" at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association APSA in Washington DC, September 2010, James Caporaso criticized as discussant the use of history and historical comparison for EU studies as anachronistic because of ontological and recommended 'post-ontology', i.e. focusing on policy processes, to the author as panacea for EU scholarship.Note 14. See on those discourses more below.Note 15.See 'Communication from the Commission', 'A Project for the European Union ', Brussels, May 22, 2002, COM [2002] 247 final.In this regard it is important to distinguish between primary and secondary EU law: whereas the requirement for prospective member states to adopt to all of the abovementioned EU properties (the 'acquis') is just secondary law as this requirement relates to the Presidency Conclusion of Copenhagen in 1993, only the basic political principles laid down in Title VIII and Article 6, Treaty of Maastricht are primary EU law.And just as primary EU law is compulsory in legal terms, it can be con-cluded that the requirement for standardization by adopting the 'acquis' is of a political nature.It is as such not obligatory in legal terms, but is, however, of undoubtedly political weight.Note 16.Following Frederick Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler, these monitoring and evaluation procedures can be compared with the tradition of imperial bureaucracy in the nineteenth century that 'occupied itself with classifying people and their attributes; with censuses, surveys, and ethnographies; with recording transactions, marking space, establishing routines, and standardizing practices' (Cooper and Stoler, 1997: 11).This comparison reveals a common feature of European politics of standardization in the 19th century (see Gong, 1984) and EU politics, including its underlying political thought.It emphasizes the construction and organization of 'authoritative knowledge' -a means employed by powerful political actors to pre-construct reality and to formulate a particular vision of the political world in order to act upon it.The more such constructions are politically formalized and institutionalized, which is the case in the highly dynamic EU system, the better it serves the execution of power.24The surveys, progress reports and opinions on each membership candidate published on the EU web-page prior to their accession in May 2004, exemplify such practices of authoritative classifying.