Citizen and subject : a postcolonial constitution for the European Union?

In many of his recent interventions Etienne Balibar has stressed the strategic importance of including the history of colonial expansionism (maybe better: the history of what Edward Said has termed the colonial project) in any critical reflection on the question of European citizenship and constitution. This inclusion, not exclusive to academic debate, is a fundamental issue of everyday life in Europe due to the “increasingly larger and legitimate presence, despite the suffered discriminations, of populations from colonial origins in the old metropolises”. Reflecting on colonial history then is ridden with “new tensions and violence” whilst potentially inscribing what Balibar calls a “lesson of otherness” into the very code of European citizenship and constitution: the European recognition “of otherness as an indispensable element of its own identity, its virtuality, its ‘power’” (Balibar 2003, 38-39).