How two competing ideological strands both called Eurafricanism shaped both the European far Right, and the Post colonial Left, center left, and center right

Europe tells a comforting story about itself.

It says the age of empire ended in the mid-twentieth century. It says decolonization was a moral awakening, a turning of the page. It says the European project that followed—its unions, treaties, humanitarian language, and development programs—was built as an antidote to the old brutalities.

And yet the material relationships that mattered most did not end. They were reorganized.

A useful way to name that reorganization is Eurafrica: the idea—sometimes explicit, often disguised—that Europe’s postwar survival would be secured by binding Africa to Europe as resource base, strategic depth, and, increasingly, demographic supplement. “Eurafricanism” was never one coherent doctrine; it was a family of projects, competing visions, and bureaucratic habits that converged on a simple premise: Europe could remain powerful only by keeping Africa inside its economic orbit.

This essay is a deep dive into what happened when Eurafrica stopped being a dream and became a system. It is also a story about how one defeated alternative—settler Eurafricanism—returned to Europe in exile, shaping a strand of postwar right-wing politics that still misdiagnoses the very outcomes it fears.

The argument is not that “Europe did this because it wanted to import Africans,” or that demographic change is the product of a hidden plan. The argument is harsher and, in some ways, more banal:

Europe’s continuing extraction and management of African economies predictably generates migration.
That migration predictably changes Europe.
And Europe’s Left and Right each maintain a hypocrisy that prevents them from naming the cause.

The thing everyone sees—and the thing many refuse to say plainly

Let us start with what is visible.

France has experienced large, sustained migration from Africa and former French African territories, and the demographic composition of French society has changed accordingly. That is not speculative; it is a lived reality that any honest observer can perceive in schools, neighborhoods, cultural life, and politics. Across Europe, similar patterns exist—varying in scale and intensity, but unmistakable in direction.

At the same time, it is equally true that the most popular right-wing narrative attempting to explain this shift—often condensed into phrases like “the Great Replacement”—is intellectually corrosive. It converts a real phenomenon into a conspiratorial morality play. It treats demographic change as a coordinated plot, imputes genocidal intent to elites, and frequently invokes a mystical “hidden hand” directing history. In its ugliest forms, it does what all paranoid politics does: it seeks a human enemy whose removal would make reality intelligible again.

This essay rejects that framework completely.

You do not need a conspiracy to produce a systemic outcome. You do not need a cabal to generate a trajectory. You do not need hidden intent to explain predictable effects.

What you need is structure: incentives, constraints, policy arrangements, and the long-term consequences of asymmetry between regions.

So here is the bridge this essay will attempt to build—especially for readers on the right who will otherwise recoil from anything that sounds like moral blackmail:

You are not wrong about what you are seeing.
You are wrong about why it is happening and who is responsible.

This is not an invitation to sentimentalize migration or to frame it as a pure moral good. It is an invitation to replace rage with causality. Because the single greatest error in contemporary European debate is that it treats migration as a standalone moral event—either a humanitarian sacrament or a civilizational invasion—rather than as what it largely is: a rational human response to economic and political gradients that Europe helped design and continues to maintain.

Eurafrica split into two paths

To understand how this happened, we need to revisit a postwar fork in the road.

In the decades after World War II, European states faced exhaustion: demographic loss, damaged industry, and a new world order dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union. European empires were no longer defensible in the old form, not only because anti-colonial movements were growing, but because legitimacy itself had changed. The United Nations, the Cold War, and the moral language of the time made direct imperial rule politically expensive.

But Africa still mattered—economically, strategically, and symbolically.

Out of this tension came two broad Eurafrican outcomes:

1. Metropolitan Eurafrica — the path that largely won:
   Independence in name, dependency in structure. African resources remain accessible; African elites are integrated and rewarded; African monetary sovereignty is limited; African labor and talent flow toward Europe.

   In France, this becomes most famously associated with Francafrique—a complex system of postcolonial influence, patronage, corporate extraction, and geopolitical management that kept large parts of West and Central Africa tied to French interests even after formal independence.

2. Settler Eurafrica — the path that lost:
   Not Africa as Europe’s managed periphery, but Africa as the site of a new white civilization, built by European settlers who see themselves as permanent Africans and who want a continent-wide federation of white-ruled states.

   This is where figures like Jean Decoster enter our story—men whose vision was not humanitarian universalism or postcolonial partnership, but explicit hierarchy and continental federation: Katanga, Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria, Portuguese Africa—bound together as an African West led by Europeans.

The moral language of postwar Europe made the second project impossible to defend publicly and, eventually, impossible to maintain militarily. Settler dreams were crushed—by demographics, by UN pressure, by Cold War realities, and by African nationalism.

But something important happened in the aftermath.

When settler Eurafrica died territorially, it did not die psychologically. Its people returned to Europe carrying a memory of hierarchy, order, and ethnic solidarity that was not national in the old European sense but pan-European and, increasingly, pan-white. That memory became one of the subterranean sources feeding the postwar European far right—and later, strands of global white nationalism.

This is the point where the essay becomes more than history. It becomes diagnosis.

The Left and Right both lie to themselves

One reason Eurafrica remains hard to talk about is that it exposes a double hypocrisy.

• The European Left often condemns colonialism rhetorically, frames itself as anti-imperial, and embraces a moral language of universal equality. Yet in practice, many of the policies that continue to bind Africa to Europe—resource extraction arrangements, elite capture, brain drain, and monetary systems that constrain African sovereignty—have been tolerated, managed, or defended across decades by broad centrist coalitions that included the Left. Meanwhile, migration is celebrated as cosmopolitan virtue, even as it functions as an economic tool: a way to import labor, solve demographic stagnation, and sustain growth without confronting deeper structural choices.

  In other words: anti-colonial language, colonial outcomes.

• The European Right, especially its nationalist and identitarian wings, often recognizes demographic transformation as destabilizing and insists it wants to end large-scale migration. Yet it frequently romanticizes the colonial past—or at minimum refuses to indict the economic architecture that replaced colonialism. It complains about migration while defending the conditions that cause it. It tells Africans to “build their own countries” while ignoring the policy reality that Europe has spent decades shaping those countries’ monetary space, resource contracts, and elite incentives.

  In other words: colonial nostalgia, postcolonial consequences.

This essay will make a moral claim that follows from these contradictions, and it will do so without euphemism:

If Europeans sincerely want to reduce mass migration from Africa over the long term, they must accept the cost of African sovereignty.

That cost is not sentimental. It is not a philanthropic gesture. It is a political-economic trade. It means relinquishing levers—monetary leverage, preferential access to resources, elite patronage networks, the quiet incentives that funnel Africa’s best students and professionals into European institutions, and the structural arrangement in which Africa’s value is extracted while its development is delayed.

And yes, it would mean accepting that a more sovereign and economically capable Africa might not always prioritize Europe.

This is the heart of the argument: Europe cannot keep Africa poor and expect Africa to stay put.

Why Decoster matters to a story about modern Europe

At first glance, Jean Decoster looks like a footnote: a Belgian colonial settler voice in Katanga, an advocate of a racial and federalist Eurafrica that history rejected.

But Decoster matters because he clarifies what metropolitan Eurafrica hides.

Francafrique works precisely because it does not speak its hierarchy aloud. It encases power in the language of partnership, development, and universalism. It offers elites a path into French institutions. It keeps resource flows stable. It avoids the vocabulary of race while reproducing dependency in practice.

Decoster was the opposite. He wanted hierarchy explicit, federalism overt, and European permanence in Africa as a civilizational project. He reveals the underlying logic that metropolitan Eurafrica had to cloak: that Europe wanted Africa’s value without Africa’s sovereignty.

And when Decoster’s model failed, his constituency—the settlers and colonists who believed in it—did not evaporate. They returned to Europe. Their loss became political energy. Their memory of order became ideology. Some of the intellectual architects of the postwar New Right began their careers in and around networks shaped by that return. Meanwhile, in France, the pieds-noirs from Algeria formed a powerful emotional and political base for an emerging right-wing populism.

This lineage does not explain everything. But it explains more than Europe is comfortable admitting.

How this essay is organized

This is a long essay because the subject cannot be treated as a slogan. We will move step by step, building a chain of causality rather than a collage of impressions.

• Chapter I traces the birth of Eurafrican thinking in the postwar period: Europe’s demographic panic, Africa as strategic depth, and the early institutionalization of the Europe–Africa relationship.
• Chapter II is the economic core: Francafrique as a system of resource control, monetary leverage, elite capture, brain drain, and labor importation—along with the uncomfortable truth that this arrangement produced a rare consensus across the French Left, center-left, and center-right.

  This chapter will also lay down the “meeting the right in the middle” argument: demographic change is real; conspiracies are false; the cause is structural exploitation.

• Chapter III turns to Decoster and settler Eurafricanism: the lost vision of a white African federation, why Katanga mattered, and why this project collapsed.
• Chapter IV examines the return of colonists to Europe and the re-importation of colonial racial hierarchy into European political consciousness.
• Chapter V follows the ideological trail into the European New Right: Thiriart, de Benoist, the pieds-noirs, Le Pen’s early formation, and the transformation of explicit racial politics into cultural and civilizational language.
• Chapter VI isolates a particularly revealing figure—René Binet—to show how revolutionary political structures could be racialized, how Trotskyist internationalism could mutate into a global racial “permanent revolution,” and how colonial hierarchy could be abstracted into pan-white ideology.

Finally, the Conclusion returns to the moral and political choice Europe refuses to make: dominance or distance, exploitation or decoupling.

An addendum will then widen the lens beyond Europe and Africa, comparing Eurafricanism to other historical experiments in white rule outside formal empire—small proto-states and personal regimes that reveal what Eurafricanism attempted at scale.

A final note on tone and purpose

This project is not written to flatter any camp.

It will criticize the Left’s sentimental universalism when it functions as cover for extraction. It will criticize the Right’s conspiratorial temptations and its habit of blaming migrants for structural constraints they did not create. It will insist, repeatedly, that the moral argument must follow causality: if you want outcomes to change, you must change the structures that generate them.

But it will also refuse the comfortable lie that “nothing is happening,” just as it refuses the paranoid lie that “someone planned everything.”

The reality is harder, and therefore more useful:

Europe built a postcolonial system that kept Africa dependent, kept resources flowing, and kept Europe insulated from the costs of African development. Migration is one of the costs it did not anticipate—or did not wish to name. As climate stress grows and economic gradients remain, migration pressure will not vanish through moralizing or policing alone.

If Europe wants fewer people to leave Africa, it must help create a world in which fewer people must.

And that begins with the act Europe avoids most: letting Africa govern itself.

Chapter I — The Birth of Eurafrica

Europe’s Demographic Crisis and Africa as Strategic Depth (1920s–1950s)

Eurafrica did not emerge from ideology alone. It emerged from exhaustion.

By the end of the First World War, Europe was already a wounded continent. By the end of the Second, it was demographically hollowed, financially strained, and strategically subordinate. Tens of millions were dead. Industrial capacity had been bombed, dismantled, or repurposed under occupation. Entire age cohorts were missing. Fertility rates fell sharply, especially in Western Europe. The great continental powers that had once dominated global trade and politics now found themselves dependent on American capital, American security guarantees, and American goodwill.

This is the context in which Eurafrica must be understood—not as a moral fantasy, but as a survival strategy.

The question confronting European elites in the interwar and immediate postwar periods was brutally simple: how does a weakened Europe remain relevant in a world dominated by continental-scale powers? The answer, increasingly, was that Europe alone could not. It would need Africa.

Europe’s demographic and economic panic

Between the wars, European demographers, planners, and policymakers became acutely aware of a long-term problem that no amount of rhetoric could wish away: Europe was aging, shrinking, and losing relative weight. France in particular was obsessed with demography. The trauma of World War I had convinced much of the French elite that population decline was a national security threat on par with invasion. Germany might recover faster. Russia had numbers. The United States had both people and productivity.

Africa, by contrast, appeared to European planners as the inverse of Europe’s condition: young, populous, resource-rich, and undercapitalized. The asymmetry was stark. Where Europe faced labor shortages, Africa had surplus labor. Where Europe lacked raw materials, Africa had abundance. Where Europe feared stagnation, Africa promised growth—if properly “organized.”

This was not merely the language of colonial chauvinists. It appeared in sober policy discussions, academic journals, and technocratic planning documents. Africa was increasingly conceptualized not as a collection of societies with independent destinies, but as a functional extension of Europe’s economy.

The idea that Europe and Africa formed a single geopolitical and economic space—Eurafrica—began circulating well before the Second World War. It was discussed in French colonial circles, Belgian policy debates, and even among early advocates of European integration. In this vision, Europe would provide capital, expertise, and governance; Africa would provide resources, labor, and demographic vitality. Together, they would form a bloc capable of competing with the American and Soviet giants.

What mattered was not whether Africa consented to this role. What mattered was that Europe believed it had no alternative.

The problem of legitimacy after empire

If Africa was so vital, why not simply maintain empire?

Because empire had become illegitimate—not immediately, not everywhere, but irreversibly.

Anti-colonial movements gained momentum between the wars and accelerated dramatically after 1945. The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the ideological contest with the Soviet Union made overt imperial domination increasingly costly. European powers could still rule colonies by force, but doing so risked international isolation, domestic backlash, and endless insurgency.

Algeria would later show the limits of brute persistence. But even before that, European policymakers understood that the form of control had to change.

Eurafrica offered a solution. It promised continuity without conquest, access without annexation, hierarchy without explicit racial law. In its most polished versions, it replaced imperial vocabulary with the language of partnership, development, and modernization. Africa would be “associated” rather than ruled. Sovereignty would be granted—but constrained. Flags would change; contracts would not.

This is why Eurafrican thinking dovetailed so neatly with the early European integration project. The same impulse that drove France and Germany to pool coal and steel—to bind former rivals into a system that made conflict irrational—also drove European planners to imagine Africa as an external stabilizer: a space where Europe could project coherence, secure inputs, and resolve internal weaknesses.

Africa as strategic depth

Strategic depth is a military term, but Eurafrica gave it an economic and demographic meaning.

For European planners, Africa was not merely a supplier of raw materials; it was a buffer against vulnerability. Control over African resources reduced dependence on hostile or unreliable suppliers. Control over African labor flows provided flexibility in rebuilding economies. Control over African markets ensured outlets for European manufactured goods.

This logic was particularly strong in France and Belgium, whose colonial holdings were extensive and deeply integrated into metropolitan economies. French West and Central Africa were already tied to French currency systems, trade networks, and administrative structures. Belgium’s Congo was one of the richest colonial possessions in the world, a source of copper, cobalt, diamonds, and—crucially—uranium.

To lose Africa entirely would be to accept permanent secondary status in a bipolar world. To retain Africa overtly would invite endless conflict. Eurafrica promised a third way.

The early institutionalization of Eurafrica

This thinking was not confined to fringe colonialists. It entered mainstream European planning.

The early structures of what would become the European Economic Community were explicitly linked to Africa. Association agreements between Europe and African territories were framed as mutually beneficial arrangements: preferential access to European markets in exchange for continued economic alignment. Development aid was offered, but it was tightly coupled to European strategic interests.

In French policy especially, Africa was treated as an extension of national planning. Infrastructure projects, resource extraction, and administrative training were designed to keep African economies compatible with French needs. Independence, when it came, was shaped to preserve these linkages.

What is striking in retrospect is how little this arrangement was debated as a moral issue at the time. The prevailing assumption was that Europe had both the right and the responsibility to manage Africa’s integration into the global economy. African underdevelopment was framed as a technical problem, not a political one. The possibility that African societies might choose paths incompatible with European priorities was rarely taken seriously.

Eurafrica, in this sense, was not presented as domination but as inevitability.

What Eurafrica deliberately avoided saying

There is a temptation to imagine that postwar Eurafricanism represented a clean break from racial thinking. It did not.

What changed was not the underlying hierarchy, but the language used to justify it.

Explicit racial doctrines had become politically toxic after the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazi Germany. European elites learned to speak instead of development gaps, capacity building, modernization, and partnership. Yet the structure of the relationship remained asymmetrical. Decision-making power rested in Europe. Value flowed north. African agency was tolerated so long as it aligned with European interests.

This was hierarchy without the vocabulary of race—a form of dominance that could coexist comfortably with liberal self-image.

At the same time, a different Eurafricanism still existed at the margins: one that rejected euphemism and insisted on saying aloud what metropolitan planners preferred to hide. This was the Eurafricanism of settlers, of men who lived in Africa not as administrators passing through but as people who intended to stay. For them, Africa was not Europe’s hinterland; it was home. And hierarchy was not a regrettable residue of history; it was the foundation of order.

The tension between these two visions would become decisive.

The approaching rupture

By the late 1940s and 1950s, the fault lines were already visible.

Metropolitan Eurafrica required African elites who could be trusted, currencies that could be managed, and populations that could be mobilized as labor or migrants without threatening European political cohesion. It was flexible, technocratic, and morally adaptable.

Settler Eurafrica required permanence, demographic dominance, and explicit political control. It was rigid, confrontational, and increasingly indefensible in the emerging international order.

As African independence movements grew stronger, Europe would be forced to choose. In most cases, it chose the path that preserved access while minimizing conflict: metropolitan Eurafrica. The settlers would be sacrificed. Their vision would be delegitimized, their territories dismantled, and their futures uprooted.

That choice would shape Africa’s development—and Europe’s demography—for decades to come.

In the next chapter, we will examine how that choice took concrete form in the French case: Francafrique, the most sophisticated and enduring expression of metropolitan Eurafricanism, and the system that quietly bound Africa’s fate to Europe’s long after empire was supposed to have ended.

Chapter II — Francafrique and Metropolitan Eurafricanism

Universalism, Extraction, and Demographic Importation

If Eurafrica was the strategic logic, Francafrique was its most refined operating system.

Unlike crude empire, Francafrique did not rely primarily on settler domination or direct rule. It relied on continuity without sovereignty, on influence without occupation, on a web of economic, monetary, military, and elite relationships that allowed France to retain decisive leverage over much of West and Central Africa long after the lowering of colonial flags.

It is impossible to understand modern France—its economy, its geopolitical posture, and its demographic transformation—without understanding Francafrique. And it is impossible to understand Francafrique without recognizing that it was not a right-wing aberration or a colonial hangover reluctantly tolerated by progressives. It was a cross-ideological consensus, embraced for different reasons by the French Left, the center-left, and the center-right alike.

Francafrique endured not because it was hidden, but because it was useful.

Independence without sovereignty

French decolonization in Africa was often presented as pragmatic, even benevolent. Unlike Algeria, which descended into a brutal and traumatic war, most of France’s African territories achieved independence through negotiation rather than revolution. New flags were raised. New anthems were composed. New presidents took office.

But beneath the symbols, the architecture of power remained largely intact.

Key sectors—energy, mining, telecommunications, banking—remained dominated by French firms or firms operating within French legal and financial frameworks. Defense agreements ensured continued French military presence and intervention capability. Intelligence cooperation tied African regimes to Paris. And perhaps most importantly, monetary sovereignty was withheld.

This was not an accident of transition. It was the design.

French policymakers understood that direct rule was unsustainable, but they also understood that economic independence would produce political unpredictability. Francafrique resolved this dilemma by allowing African leaders to govern domestically while keeping the most consequential levers of economic life beyond their control.

The result was a class of nominally sovereign states that could change presidents but not trajectories.

Resource control as the core of the system

At the heart of Francafrique lay resource extraction.

France’s postwar economy depended heavily on access to African raw materials. Uranium from Niger powered French nuclear energy and underwrote national energy independence. Oil from Gabon and elsewhere fueled industry and transport. Timber, minerals, cocoa, and agricultural products flowed north through trade arrangements that privileged French firms and French markets.

These relationships were rarely framed as exploitative. They were described as development partnerships, mutually beneficial exchanges, or steps toward modernization. But the structure was clear: African economies were oriented toward extraction rather than industrialization, toward export of raw materials rather than value-added production.

This mattered profoundly for African development. Countries whose economic life is organized around resource export rarely develop diversified industrial bases. They become vulnerable to price shocks, dependent on external capital, and politically fragile. Francafrique locked much of West and Central Africa into this pattern.

It also ensured that France retained leverage. Control over contracts, logistics, and financing meant that Paris could reward cooperation and punish deviation without overt coercion.

The CFA franc: monetary control in the post-colonial era

No institution better illustrates the reality of post-colonial dependency than the CFA franc.

Under the CFA system, participating African countries ceded significant control over their monetary policy. Currency stability was guaranteed, but at the cost of flexibility. Foreign exchange reserves were held partly in France. Monetary decisions were constrained by external oversight.

Supporters of the CFA franc argue that it provides stability, prevents hyperinflation, and facilitates trade. Critics argue that it suppresses growth, discourages industrialization, and locks African economies into low-value export roles.

What matters for our purposes is not which side of that debate one favors, but the political reality the system created: African states could not fully control their own economic destinies.

This had predictable effects. Without the ability to devalue currency, protect nascent industries, or control capital flows, African governments were limited in how they could respond to economic shocks or pursue independent development strategies. Meanwhile, French firms operated within a familiar and stable monetary environment, reducing risk and increasing profitability.

The CFA franc was not colonialism by name. But it was colonialism by function.

Elite capture: loyalty over nation-building

Francafrique did not rely solely on structures; it relied on people.

One of its most effective mechanisms was elite capture: the systematic cultivation of African political, military, and economic elites whose personal interests became aligned with continued French influence.

This took many forms. African leaders were educated in French institutions, socialized into French administrative culture, and offered access to French networks. Their children attended French schools and universities. Their families enjoyed property, banking access, and legal protection in France.

In return, these elites delivered stability. They maintained existing economic arrangements, protected French commercial interests, and ensured geopolitical alignment.

This arrangement solved a central problem for France: how to manage Africa without governing it. It also created a deep cleavage within African societies. Ruling classes became culturally and materially detached from their populations, oriented outward rather than inward, and invested in preserving the system that sustained their status.

Nation-building suffered accordingly. States became vehicles for patronage rather than engines of development. When crises emerged, elites often had exit options—retreat to Paris, investment abroad—that insulated them from the consequences of failure.

Brain drain as policy, not accident

Elite capture did not stop at political leadership. Over time, Francafrique evolved into a system that systematically siphoned off Africa’s human capital.

The most capable students—doctors, engineers, academics, administrators—were encouraged to study in France. Many remained there, drawn by higher wages, better infrastructure, and professional opportunity. Others circulated between Africa and Europe, but their careers became embedded in transnational systems rather than national ones.

This phenomenon is often described as an unfortunate side effect of globalization. In reality, it functioned as a structural feature of the Eurafrican system.

By absorbing Africa’s educated elite, France solved multiple problems at once. It supplemented its own skilled workforce. It reinforced elite loyalty. And it weakened African institutional capacity, making independent development more difficult.

The result was a vicious cycle: underdevelopment drove emigration, emigration undermined development, and the cycle justified further intervention and “assistance.”

Importing labor: Africa internalized

Alongside elite migration came mass labor migration.

As France rebuilt after the war and later confronted aging demographics, African labor became increasingly attractive. Workers from former colonies filled roles in industry, construction, transportation, and services. Their labor supported growth and helped sustain the welfare state.

For French capital, this arrangement was ideal. Labor shortages were alleviated. Wages were moderated. Consumption expanded. And the moral framing of immigration as humanitarian solidarity provided political cover.

This is where Eurafrica’s logic reached its demographic culmination. Instead of Europeans settling Africa—as settlers like Decoster had imagined—Africa was brought into Europe.

It is crucial to be precise here. This was not a plot to erase Europeans, nor a campaign of cultural annihilation. It was a rational response to economic incentives created by a system that kept Africa dependent and Europe aging.

Migration followed the gradient.

Why the Left embraced Francafrique

Francafrique endured because it satisfied multiple constituencies simultaneously.

For the French Left, it offered ideological comfort. Colonialism could be condemned rhetorically while its material structures remained intact. Immigration could be celebrated as cosmopolitan virtue. Development aid could be framed as moral leadership.

At the same time, the Left benefited materially. Cheap labor supported public services. A growing population supported welfare systems. NGOs, public-sector institutions, and international organizations expanded.

This produced a peculiar moral posture: anti-imperial language paired with imperial outcomes. The contradiction was rarely confronted because the system delivered short-term stability and moral reassurance.

Why the center-right accepted it

The center-right embraced Francafrique for more straightforward reasons.

It delivered profits. It ensured energy security. It preserved French influence abroad. It supported national strategic autonomy in a world dominated by superpowers.

From this perspective, Francafrique was not hypocrisy but realism. The moral costs were abstract; the benefits were tangible.

The migration paradox

Here the contradiction becomes unavoidable.

Migration from Africa to France is often treated as an independent moral or cultural issue. In reality, it is the predictable output of the Francafrique system.

When African economies are structured around extraction rather than development, opportunities remain scarce. When educated elites are siphoned off, institutions weaken. When monetary sovereignty is constrained, policy options narrow. When climate stress intensifies, pressure increases.

People move.

This does not require conspiracy. It requires incentives.

Meeting the right in the middle

At this point, the essay must speak plainly to readers who are otherwise tempted by conspiratorial explanations.

Large-scale demographic change in France is real. It is not a hallucination. It is not racist to observe it.

But it is a mistake to attribute that change to intentional “replacement” or to blame individual migrants for responding rationally to structural conditions they did not create.

Migration is not an invasion. It is an effect.

And effects cannot be reversed without addressing causes.

The far-right contradiction

Much of the European far right claims it wants to end mass migration. Yet it often defends the colonial past or refuses to indict the post-colonial system that replaced it.

One cannot simultaneously demand an end to migration and defend the structures that guarantee it.

If Europe insists on controlling African resources, currencies, and elites, migration pressure will persist. Border enforcement may slow flows temporarily, but it cannot alter long-term trajectories.

This is not a moral accusation. It is a causal statement.

The Left’s mirror hypocrisy

The Left, meanwhile, condemns colonialism while defending the mechanisms that sustain it. It frames migration as moral necessity while ignoring how its own policies perpetuate dependency and displacement.

Both camps avoid the same conclusion for opposite reasons.

The unavoidable moral claim

The conclusion follows whether one likes it or not:

If Europe genuinely wishes to reduce mass migration from Africa, it must accept the cost of African sovereignty.

That means relinquishing monetary control, allowing African states to manage their own resources, ending systematic brain drain, and tolerating the possibility that Africa’s future may not be aligned with European interests.

This is not altruism. It is realism.

Europe cannot keep Africa poor and expect Africa to stay put.

Chapter III — Decoster and Settler Eurafricanism

White Africa as a Civilization, Not a Hinterland

If Francafrique represents Eurafrica perfected for a post-1945 world of moral constraints, Jean Decoster’s Eurafricanism represents the road not taken—the option metropolitan Europe judged too blunt, too dangerous, and ultimately too illegitimate to sustain.

Decoster matters not because he was right, or because his project was viable, but because he articulated explicitly what Francafrique would only practice implicitly. Where metropolitan Eurafrica spoke in the language of development and partnership, Decoster spoke in the language of civilization, hierarchy, and permanence. Where Paris imagined Africa as a managed periphery, Decoster imagined it as a white-ruled continental homeland.

To understand why his vision failed—and why its psychological residue proved so potent—we must take it seriously on its own terms.

A settler, not an administrator

Jean Decoster was not a metropolitan planner rotating through colonial postings. He was a settler—a European who lived in Africa, invested his life there, and understood his identity as inseparable from the continent. His political activity centered in Katanga, the mineral-rich southeastern region of the Belgian Congo, and his influence flowed primarily through his newspaper, L’Écho du Katanga.

Katanga was not an arbitrary base. It was, in many ways, the ideal laboratory for settler Eurafricanism.

The region possessed extraordinary mineral wealth—copper, cobalt, uranium—and a concentrated European population tied closely to mining and industry. It was geographically distant from Léopoldville, culturally distinct from much of the Congo, and economically indispensable to Belgian and Western interests. In settler eyes, Katanga did not resemble a fragile postcolonial state in waiting; it resembled the nucleus of a viable polity.

Decoster’s writings and activism reflected this confidence. He did not advocate reforming colonial administration or smoothing the transition to African self-rule. He argued for autonomy, even independence, under European leadership. For him, the central question was not how Africa would be governed after empire, but who would govern it.

The core premises of settler Eurafricanism

Decoster’s Eurafricanism rested on several interlocking premises that distinguished it sharply from metropolitan models.

First, Europeans in Africa were not temporary guests. They were a people in formation, rooted by labor, settlement, and sacrifice. Just as Europeans had become Americans, Australians, or South Africans, so too could they become Africans—white Africans, bound to the land and to one another across national origins.

Second, Africa was not Europe’s hinterland. It was not simply a supplier of raw materials to be managed from afar. It was the site of a new civilizational project. In Decoster’s vision, Europe’s future might lie not in defending shrinking homelands, but in consolidating its presence where space, resources, and demographic potential still existed.

Third, hierarchy was not a temporary necessity but a permanent structure. Decoster did not imagine a gradual transition to multiracial democracy. He rejected the premise that numerical majority should determine political authority. Europeans ruled because they were Europeans—bearers of civilization, order, and capacity. Africans would be subjects, workers, auxiliaries, or, at most, junior partners within a system that Europeans controlled.

This frankness is precisely what made his position impossible to defend in postwar Europe—and what makes it analytically useful today.

Federation, not empire

Crucially, Decoster did not imagine reviving nineteenth-century empire. His vision was federal, not imperial.

He imagined a network—or ultimately a federation—of white-ruled African states: Katanga, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, and even French Algeria. These states would cooperate militarily, coordinate economically, and present a united front against both African nationalism and metropolitan interference.

This mattered because it distinguished settler Eurafricanism from colonial administration. The settlers were not asking Paris or Brussels to rule Africa indefinitely. They were asking to be left alone to rule it themselves.

In this sense, Decoster’s Eurafricanism was anti-metropolitan as much as it was anti-nationalist. It rejected the idea that distant European capitals understood African realities better than those who lived and worked there. It framed European liberalism as decadent, naive, and detached from the harsh necessities of governing a continent.

Katanga as proof of concept

The attempted Katangese secession in 1960–63 transformed Decoster’s ideas from theory into praxis.

When the Congo achieved independence in 1960, the new state almost immediately descended into chaos. Administrative collapse, mutinies, regional rebellions, and foreign intervention shattered any illusion of smooth transition. For settlers and mining interests in Katanga, the crisis confirmed their worst fears.

Katanga’s secession was driven by multiple actors—local elites, mining companies, Cold War calculations—but settler ideology played a crucial role. The secessionists argued that Katanga was economically viable, administratively competent, and culturally distinct. They framed separation not as rebellion, but as self-defense against a dysfunctional postcolonial center.

For Decoster and those like him, Katanga was not merely a regional struggle. It was the opening move in a continental realignment.

If Katanga could survive as a white-led African state, others might follow. Rhodesia might resist British pressure. South Africa might no longer stand alone. A settler federation could emerge—self-sufficient, resource-rich, and geopolitically relevant.

For a brief moment, this future seemed possible.

Why settler Eurafrica failed

The reasons for settler Eurafricanism’s defeat were not moral alone; they were structural.

Demography was the most obvious. Europeans were vastly outnumbered. Maintaining political control required either endless repression or sustained European immigration on a scale that was never realistic.

International legitimacy was another fatal constraint. The postwar order had no tolerance for explicit racial states. The United Nations, the superpowers, and global public opinion all opposed settler regimes, even when they quietly benefited from their resources.

Metropolitan abandonment sealed the fate. European governments—France, Belgium, Britain—were unwilling to bear the costs of defending settler projects that threatened diplomatic isolation and domestic unrest. When forced to choose between settlers and international legitimacy, they chose legitimacy.

Katanga’s defeat symbolized this abandonment. UN forces intervened decisively. Secession collapsed. The dream of a white African federation died not with a final battle, but with a recognition: metropolitan Europe would not stand behind it.

Explicit hierarchy versus implicit control

Here lies the critical contrast.

Settler Eurafricanism failed because it insisted on saying aloud what metropolitan Eurafrica learned to hide. It demanded permanence, hierarchy, and sovereignty for Europeans in Africa. It required open defiance of the moral language of the postwar world.

Francafrique, by contrast, succeeded because it preserved European advantage while conceding symbolic sovereignty. It replaced settlers with contracts, racial law with monetary policy, direct rule with elite capture. Africans were formally independent, but structurally constrained.

From the perspective of outcomes, metropolitan Eurafrica achieved much of what settler Eurafrica wanted—access, control, stability—without the political liabilities that doomed Decoster’s project.

But this very success created a new problem.

The psychological residue of defeat

When settler Eurafrica collapsed, its adherents did not simply disappear. They returned to Europe—dispossessed, embittered, and convinced that metropolitan elites had betrayed them.

They carried with them a memory of order: a world in which hierarchy was clear, identity was fixed, and authority was unambiguous. In Europe, they encountered something very different—egalitarian rhetoric, mass immigration, and a political class that denied any continuity between empire and present arrangements.

This dissonance proved fertile ground for radicalization.

Decoster’s Eurafricanism, stripped of territory, became portable ideology. It no longer needed Africa as a physical space; it needed Africa as a memory and a warning. It fed into emerging narratives of European decline, betrayal, and loss of sovereignty.

To understand how that transformation occurred—how settler consciousness was re-imported into European politics—we must follow the settlers home.

Chapter IV — The Return of the Colonists

Exile, Status Inversion, and the Re-Importation of Hierarchy

The end of settler Eurafrica did not produce reconciliation.
It produced exile.

Across the late 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Europeans left Africa—sometimes in panic, sometimes in stages, sometimes under direct threat. Belgian settlers from the Congo, French pieds-noirs from Algeria, Portuguese colonists from Angola and Mozambique, Rhodesians after UDI and sanctions: all returned to a Europe that was materially richer than the one they had left decades earlier, but psychologically alien.

They had not merely lost property or political power. They had lost a social universe in which their identity had meaning.

To understand the ideological aftershocks of decolonization, one must grasp this experience not as nostalgia alone, but as status inversion—a sudden collapse of a world in which hierarchy had been clear and unquestioned, replaced by one that denied the legitimacy of hierarchy altogether.

Colonial society as a total social order

European settlers did not experience colonial Africa as a job posting or a temporary assignment. For many, it was an entire moral and social system.

Colonial society was organized around sharp distinctions:

• Race determined status
• Status determined authority
• Authority determined security

Europeans were not merely wealthier; they were ontologically different. They occupied the top of a visible and legally reinforced hierarchy. Their labor commanded obedience. Their institutions were respected. Their culture defined normality.

Crucially, this hierarchy cut across European national lines.

A Belgian, a Frenchman, a Portuguese settler, and a Briton might be rivals in Europe. In Africa, they were part of the same civilizational category. Whiteness—Europeaness—functioned as a unifying identity, stronger than nationality.

This matters enormously. The colonial world trained settlers to think of themselves not first as French or Belgian, but as members of a broader European racial community, ruling over non-Europeans as a class.

Decolonization did not just dismantle institutions. It dismantled a lived anthropology.

The shock of return

When settlers returned to Europe, they encountered a society that no longer reflected the logic by which they had lived.

Europe in the postwar decades was moving—haltingly but decisively—toward legal egalitarianism, universal suffrage, and civic nationalism. It spoke the language of equality, rights, and abstraction. It denied the legitimacy of racial hierarchy not merely as policy, but as moral principle.

For returnees, this was not progress. It was disorientation.

Men who had been employers, overseers, administrators, or local authorities in Africa became ordinary citizens—or worse, marginal ones. Families who had enjoyed prestige and security found themselves resented, pitied, or ignored. The state that had once sanctioned their dominance now treated it as an embarrassment.

This was not just economic loss; it was symbolic collapse.

Belgian Congo returnees: loss without recognition

In Belgium, the return from the Congo was particularly abrupt.

The Congo’s independence in 1960 was followed almost immediately by chaos. Settlers fled amid mutiny and violence. Many lost everything. Belgium itself, eager to distance itself from colonial entanglement, offered limited recognition or compensation.

These returnees formed tight networks, bound by shared loss and a sense of betrayal. They did not see themselves as villains of history, but as sacrificed assets—abandoned by a metropolitan elite that preferred moral cleanliness to loyalty.

This sentiment became politically potent.

Belgian postwar radical movements, especially those that rejected both American liberalism and Soviet communism, drew heavily from this milieu. The experience of colonial hierarchy—clear, enforced, unquestioned—fed into a rejection of egalitarian abstraction and parliamentary compromise.

Europe, they concluded, had lost its nerve.

The pieds-noirs: a mass political constituency

Nowhere was the return more traumatic—or more politically consequential—than in France.

The pieds-noirs of Algeria were not a small settler class; they were a mass population, numbering over a million by the end of the Algerian War. They had lived for generations in a society structured around European dominance, legal distinction, and cultural separation.

When Algeria became independent in 1962, they left almost overnight.

They arrived in France not as heroes, but as a problem.

Many metropolitan French viewed them as reactionary, violent, or anachronistic. The state resettled them but did not rehabilitate their identity. Their loss was acknowledged bureaucratically, not morally.

The pieds-noirs carried with them a bitter lesson: the Republic would disavow them the moment their existence became inconvenient.

This lesson shaped French politics for decades.

From colonial hierarchy to European grievance

What settlers brought back was not merely resentment, but a comparative worldview.

They had lived in societies where:

• Authority was visible
• Order was enforced
• Identity was stable

In Europe, they encountered:

• Moral universalism
• Demographic change
• Cultural fluidity
• Elite denial of continuity

This contrast produced a distinctive political psychology.

Settlers did not initially think in terms of immigration or “replacement.” Those concepts would develop later. What they felt first was betrayal: by metropolitan elites who had dismantled empire and then refused to acknowledge its consequences.

The language of grievance evolved over time—from colonial abandonment, to national decline, to civilizational threat—but its emotional core remained the same: the sense that a coherent order had been destroyed by elites who neither understood nor cared about its function.

Hierarchy as memory, not policy

By the time settlers returned, the explicit racial order they had known could not be politically restored. The world had changed too much. What survived was memory, not institution.

This is a crucial transition.

Hierarchy ceased to be something that could be enforced openly. It became something that could be remembered, mythologized, and translated into new forms: culture, civilization, identity.

This translation would define the next phase of European right-wing thought.

Instead of arguing that Europeans should rule Africans, the post-colonial right would increasingly argue that civilizations must remain separate, that difference is irreducible, that equality is a dangerous abstraction.

Race would often disappear from the vocabulary—but not from the structure of thought.

The seed of pan-European consciousness

One of the most underappreciated consequences of decolonization is that it internationalized white identity.

In Africa, Europeans of different nations had already lived as a single ruling category. After return, this experience made it easier for some to think beyond the nation-state entirely.

Their enemy was no longer a rival European power. It was:

• Liberal universalism
• Egalitarian ideology
• The global order that had delegitimized hierarchy

This shift prepared the ground for movements that rejected both American liberalism and Soviet communism, and that sought a new, continental—or even racial—basis for political identity.

Decoster’s dream of a white Africa had failed territorially. But its underlying anthropology—Europeans as a single civilizational people, betrayed by their own elites—was now portable.

From loss to ideology

Not all returnees radicalized. Many rebuilt their lives quietly. But as a group, settlers formed one of the most fertile recruitment pools for postwar European radical movements.

They had:

• Lived hierarchy
• Experienced dispossession
• Distrusted metropolitan elites
• Rejected abstract egalitarianism

These traits did not automatically produce ideology, but they created receptivity.

What followed was not a direct continuation of colonial politics, but a transformation. The next generation of thinkers would take the settlers’ lived experience and refashion it into theory—sometimes explicit, sometimes coded, sometimes abstracted beyond recognition.

To trace that process, we must now turn to the intellectual and political movements that emerged from this soil: the European New Right, and the men who gave colonial loss a new language.

Chapter V — From Eurafrica to the European New Right

Metapolitics After Empire

The collapse of settler Eurafrica did not produce a coherent political movement overnight. What it produced was a field of resentment, memory, and unresolved contradiction—a space in which new ideologies could form. The European New Right did not emerge directly from colonial politics, but it absorbed and reworked the psychological inheritance of empire, translating loss into theory and grievance into worldview.

This chapter traces that translation. It shows how colonial defeat and postcolonial denial fed into a distinctly postwar form of right-wing thought—one that rejected both liberal universalism and crude racialism, yet retained a civilizational anthropology shaped by the colonial experience.

Belgium: colonial loss and continental rebellion

Belgium is often overlooked in discussions of postwar European ideology, yet it played an outsized role in the transformation of settler consciousness into radical political theory.

The Belgian Congo had been one of the most profitable colonial possessions in the world. Its abrupt loss in 1960—followed by chaos, violence, and the humiliation of international intervention—left deep scars. Belgian society was not prepared to integrate or honor its returning settlers. The official narrative emphasized decolonization as moral necessity; the settlers’ suffering was treated as collateral damage.

Out of this rupture emerged a radical current that rejected not only liberal democracy, but the entire postwar order.

Figures like Jean Thiriart began their political lives defending colonial interests and opposing decolonization. When that struggle failed, Thiriart radicalized—not toward nostalgia, but toward continental revolution. He concluded that small European nation-states were obsolete, that American and Soviet dominance represented two faces of the same imperial system, and that Europe could survive only by becoming a unified, sovereign power in its own right.

This was not traditional nationalism. It was post-national and anti-imperial—but also profoundly shaped by colonial loss.

The colonial lesson Thiriart drew was not “empire was wrong,” but “Europe was weak.” The problem, in his view, was not hierarchy but fragmentation. Decolonization had shown that divided Europeans could not hold territory, power, or destiny.

Jeune Europe and the rejection of the nation-state

Thiriart’s movement, Jeune Europe, crystallized this insight.

Jeune Europe rejected parliamentary democracy, liberal capitalism, and Atlanticism. It also rejected the idea that European identity should be confined to historical nation-states. Instead, it called for a unitary Europe from Dublin to Vladivostok, independent of both Washington and Moscow.

Colonial experience mattered here in subtle but decisive ways.

In Africa, Europeans had already lived as a transnational ruling class. Their identity had not depended on flags but on function. This made the leap from nationalism to continentalism psychologically plausible. The nation-state came to appear as a parochial relic, incapable of defending civilization in a world of empires.

Jeune Europe also inherited the settlers’ contempt for moral abstraction. Universal human rights, egalitarianism, and parliamentary compromise were viewed as weapons used by elites to disarm Europeans while empowering others. The language changed, but the underlying anthropology—order versus chaos, hierarchy versus dissolution—remained intact.

France: from Algérie Française to populist nationalism

France followed a different trajectory, shaped by the unique trauma of Algeria.

The pieds-noirs were not a marginal group. They were numerous, organized, and politically mobilized. Their sudden displacement in 1962 created a mass constituency defined by grievance, betrayal, and loss of status. Unlike Belgian returnees, they were large enough to matter electorally.

In the immediate aftermath of independence, this constituency fragmented. Some drifted into apathy. Others gravitated toward hardline movements that rejected the legitimacy of the Fifth Republic altogether. Over time, however, their energy was absorbed into a broader populist right that would eventually coalesce around figures like Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Le Pen did not invent the pieds-noirs’ anger, but he gave it a political home.

He framed their experience as emblematic of a wider pattern: elites betraying ordinary people, national sovereignty sacrificed to abstract ideals, identity dissolved in the name of progress. Colonial abandonment became a metaphor for national decline.

Importantly, this narrative did not require defending empire explicitly. It required defending order, authority, and continuity—values that colonial society had embodied, however brutally.

The emergence of metapolitics

While populist movements channeled colonial grievance into electoral politics, a parallel process unfolded among intellectuals who sought to reshape the cultural terrain itself.

This was the birth of metapolitics—the idea that political change must be preceded by cultural and intellectual transformation. Rather than contesting elections directly, thinkers of the New Right aimed to redefine the assumptions through which politics was understood.

Here, colonial experience was refracted rather than reproduced.

Explicit racial hierarchy was abandoned as politically toxic. In its place emerged a language of culture, identity, and difference. The argument shifted from “Europeans should rule others” to “different civilizations cannot be forced into sameness without destruction.”

This move allowed the New Right to preserve the core insight settlers had lived—inequality as structural, difference as permanent—while shedding the vocabulary that had become indefensible after 1945.

Alain de Benoist and the sublimation of race

No figure better exemplifies this transformation than Alain de Benoist.

De Benoist did not emerge from settler society directly, but his intellectual milieu was saturated with the aftereffects of decolonization. He rejected biological racism and explicit supremacy, not because he embraced egalitarian universalism, but because he believed those frameworks misunderstood the nature of human difference.

In his work, race was sublimated into culture. Hierarchy was reframed as pluralism. Separation was defended as mutual preservation.

This move was not anti-colonial in the way the Left understood the term. It did not condemn hierarchy; it criticized homogenization. It did not celebrate universal equality; it warned against it. Africa, in this framework, became proof of what happens when radically different societies are forced into shared political spaces—either abroad or at home.

Decolonization, for de Benoist, was not a moral awakening but a cautionary tale.

Africa as negative example

It is important to be precise here.

The New Right did not propose returning to colonial rule. It proposed learning from its collapse. Africa functioned as a negative example: a demonstration that societies organized around radically different norms could not simply be fused into a universal order without conflict.

This interpretation inverted the Left’s lesson.

Where the Left saw colonialism as proof that hierarchy was immoral, the New Right saw its aftermath as proof that hierarchy—or at least separation—was unavoidable.

This did not mean advocating violence or domination. It meant rejecting the premise that equality could be enforced across difference without consequences.

The unresolved contradiction

Yet here the contradiction reappears.

The New Right inherited the settlers’ anthropology—difference is real, hierarchy is functional, abstraction is dangerous—but it did not resolve the economic structures that produced migration. In rejecting liberal universalism, it often ignored material causality.

Africa’s poverty was treated as cultural fate rather than political economy. Migration was framed as civilizational invasion rather than structural outcome. Colonial extraction was remembered nostalgically or bracketed entirely.

Thus, the New Right repeated a pattern we have already seen: correct perception paired with incorrect diagnosis.

It saw the effects but misunderstood the causes.

Toward a global horizon

By the late twentieth century, the ideas forged in the crucible of European decolonization began to escape their original context. Colonial loss was no longer only a European trauma; it became a template for interpreting globalization itself.

European New Right ideas influenced—and were influenced by—similar currents elsewhere, particularly in the Anglophone world. The sense of civilizational decline, elite betrayal, and demographic anxiety traveled easily across borders.

What had begun as a reaction to the end of Eurafrica was now part of a broader ideological field.

To understand how this transformation reached its most radical and revealing form, we must now examine a figure who carried the logic of colonial hierarchy into the realm of revolutionary abstraction: René Binet.

Chapter VI — René Binet and Racial Permanent Revolution

From Trotskyism to Global White Universalism

If the European New Right represents the sublimation of colonial hierarchy—its translation from race into culture, from domination into difference—then René Binet represents something far starker. Binet did not sublimate. He abstracted.

He stripped colonial hierarchy of territory, stripped nationalism of sentiment, and stripped socialism of class—leaving behind a revolutionary doctrine organized around race as the sole historical subject. In doing so, he produced one of the clearest—and most disturbing—examples of how colonial experience could mutate into global ideological extremism once severed from its original context.

Binet matters not because his ideas were popular, but because they reveal the logical end point of a certain trajectory: what happens when the structures of revolutionary thought are preserved, but their moral and material anchors collapse.

Trotskyist origins: the structure remains

René Binet did not begin as a fascist or racial ideologue. He began on the far left, as a Trotskyist.

This fact is not incidental. It is foundational.

Trotskyism offered a particular political grammar:

• History driven by total struggle
• Revolution as global, not national
• Compromise as betrayal
• Liberal democracy as camouflage for elite domination

Above all, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution insisted that revolution could not be confined to one country, one people, or one moment. It had to be continuous, total, and international—or it would fail.

Binet absorbed this structure completely.

What changed was not the form of his thinking, but the subject to whom it was applied.

From class to race: the substitution

In orthodox Marxism, the revolutionary subject is the proletariat. In Trotskyism, it is the international proletariat—a class whose destiny transcends borders and cultures.

Binet replaced the proletariat with the white race.

This substitution was not rhetorical; it was structural. Race became class. Whiteness became the unifying condition that transcended nationality, language, and culture. European divisions—French, German, Belgian, Italian—were dismissed as artificial, imposed by history to weaken a people that should act as one.

In this sense, Binet was radically anti-national. He rejected ethnic particularism among Europeans just as Marxists rejected nationalism among workers. The future, in his vision, belonged not to nations but to racial blocs locked in existential struggle.

The revolutionary engine remained; the fuel had changed.

Permanent revolution becomes total racial war

Trotsky’s permanent revolution had a clear logic: any revolution that stopped halfway would be crushed by counterrevolutionary forces. Therefore, it had to expand, intensify, and globalize.

Binet applied the same logic to race.

For him, there could be no coexistence, no stable equilibrium, no pluralism. Racial struggle was permanent because hierarchy was permanent. Any concession, any compromise, any acceptance of egalitarianism was a step toward extinction.

Thus, Binet called for:

• A global white revolution
• The dissolution of European nation-states
• The creation of a unified white empire
• The total mobilization of white populations as a revolutionary force

This was not nostalgia for empire. It was not a return to colonial administration. It was something more abstract and more extreme: racial universalism.

The white workers’ international

Perhaps the most revealing continuity with Binet’s Trotskyist past was his concept of a white workers’ international.

Like Marxists before him, Binet believed that history was driven by exploitation. But where Marx saw capital exploiting labor, Binet saw a transnational oligarchy exploiting the white race. The working white masses—dispossessed, fragmented, and deceived—were, in his view, the true revolutionary subject.

This idea resonated with certain post-colonial constituencies:

• Displaced settlers
• Marginalized European workers
• Veterans of imperial labor hierarchies

In colonial society, race had functioned as class. White workers, even when economically modest, occupied a superior social position by virtue of race. Decolonization stripped them of this status without replacing it with economic security.

Binet’s ideology offered an explanation—and a promise of restoration.

Anti-oligarchic obsession and conspiratorial collapse

Like many revolutionary thinkers who lose faith in material analysis, Binet gravitated toward conspiracy.

Classical Marxism locates power in relations of production. Trotskyism locates betrayal in bureaucratic degeneration. Binet, lacking a coherent economic theory, substituted identity for structure and oligarchy for class.

In this process, he embraced the idea of a Jewish oligarchy ruling Europe and the world—a claim that was not only false but catastrophic in its implications.

It is crucial to understand how this happened.

Binet did not abandon Marxist suspicion of elites; he misdirected it. The critique of capitalism became racialized. The analysis of class power collapsed into identity paranoia. What remained was a totalizing worldview incapable of self-correction.

This is the moment where revolutionary structure becomes pathological.

Binet in the Eurafrican arc

Binet stands at a critical junction in the story of Eurafrica’s afterlives.

• Decoster wanted white permanence in Africa, rooted in land and federation.
• The New Right translated hierarchy into culture and difference.
• Binet severed both land and culture, leaving race as abstraction.

In this sense, Binet represents the deterritorialization of colonial hierarchy. What could not survive as a political system in Africa re-emerged as a global ideology, unbound by geography and unchecked by practical constraint.

It is not accidental that such thinking flourished among the defeated, the dispossessed, and the uprooted. When hierarchy loses its material anchor, it often seeks refuge in metaphysics.

Why Binet matters—and why he failed

Binet’s ideas never commanded mass support. They were too extreme, too abstract, too openly violent in implication. But they matter because they reveal the danger of unresolved contradiction.

When people perceive real decline but are denied truthful explanations, they reach for myths. When material causes are obscured, identity fills the gap. When elites refuse accountability, conspiracy becomes attractive.

Binet is a warning, not a blueprint.

He shows what happens when colonial hierarchy is remembered without context, when loss is absolutized, and when political analysis abandons economics for metaphysics.

The final turn

By the late twentieth century, Europe stood at a crossroads shaped by all the forces we have traced.

Metropolitan Eurafrica had won materially but produced demographic transformation. Settler Eurafrica had lost territorially but survived psychologically. The New Right had translated colonial memory into cultural theory. Binet had pushed abstraction to its breaking point.

What remained unresolved was the core issue: Europe’s relationship to Africa.

Until that relationship is addressed honestly—economically, politically, and morally—Europe will continue to oscillate between denial and paranoia, between sentimental universalism and conspiratorial rage.

The final chapter will bring these threads together and return to the unavoidable choice Europe still refuses to make.

Conclusion — Europe Cannot Keep Africa Poor and Expect Africa to Stay Put

This essay began with a refusal: a refusal to accept comforting stories, whether liberal or reactionary, that explain Europe’s present condition without reckoning with its causes. It ends with a claim that follows inexorably from everything that has come before—one that neither the European Left nor the European Right has yet been willing to face honestly.

Europe’s demographic transformation is not a conspiracy.
It is not an accident.
It is not primarily the moral failure of migrants, nor the secret design of elites.

It is the predictable outcome of a postcolonial system that preserved European advantage by denying African sovereignty, while outsourcing the social and demographic consequences of that denial into Europe itself.

Eurafrica did not die. It changed form.

Eurafrica’s fracture, not its failure

What history shows is not that Eurafricanism failed, but that it split.

• Settler Eurafrica—explicit, hierarchical, territorial—collapsed under the weight of demographics, legitimacy, and metropolitan abandonment. Its vision of a white African federation proved unsustainable in a world that no longer tolerated racial sovereignty.
• Metropolitan Eurafrica—implicit, technocratic, managerial—succeeded. It preserved access to resources, influence over currencies, loyalty of elites, and labor flows, while conceding symbolic independence.

Francafrique represents the triumph of this second path. It allowed Europe—especially France—to retain much of the material benefit of empire without bearing the moral or military costs of defending it openly.

But success came with consequences that were postponed, not eliminated.

Migration as consequence, not intent

One of the most corrosive errors in contemporary European debate is the collapse of outcome into intent.

Yes, Europe—France in particular—is undergoing sustained demographic change. Yes, this change is likely to accelerate under the combined pressures of climate stress, population growth in Africa, and economic asymmetry. Yes, it will reshape national identity, politics, and social cohesion.

None of this requires a genocidal plan or a hidden cabal.

It requires only:

• African economies constrained by extraction rather than development
• African monetary systems subordinated to external control
• African elites rewarded for compliance rather than nation-building
• African human capital systematically siphoned off
• European economies structured to benefit from cheap labor

Migration follows these gradients as reliably as water follows gravity.

To deny this is to insult both Africans and Europeans—Africans by pretending they migrate out of whim or moral deficiency, Europeans by pretending they cannot perceive what is plainly happening around them.

The Left’s abdication

The European Left has failed this moment in a particular way.

It condemns colonialism rhetorically while preserving its outcomes structurally. It speaks the language of anti-imperialism while tolerating, managing, or benefiting from systems that deny Africa real sovereignty. It celebrates migration as moral virtue while ignoring how its own economic and foreign policies generate displacement at scale.

This posture allows the Left to feel righteous without being responsible.

By framing migration as an ethical imperative divorced from causality, it avoids confronting the uncomfortable truth: a genuinely anti-colonial politics would reduce migration by making it unnecessary.

That would require relinquishing leverage, profit, and control. It would require accepting that African development might not be aligned with European convenience. It would require sacrifice.

The Left has rarely been willing to pay that price.

The Right’s evasion

The European Right fails in the opposite direction.

It recognizes demographic change and correctly senses its destabilizing potential. But instead of interrogating the structures that produce this change, it reaches for myth, nostalgia, and misplaced blame. It romanticizes empire or refuses to indict postcolonial dependency, even as it demands an end to migration.

This is incoherent.

One cannot demand closed borders while defending an open system of extraction. One cannot insist that Africans “build their own countries” while supporting policies that deny them the tools to do so. One cannot mourn the loss of European homogeneity while clinging to the economic order that dissolves it.

The Right wants the benefits of empire without the consequences. History does not offer such bargains.

Decoster’s ghost

Jean Decoster was wrong about many things. His vision of a white Africa was neither just nor viable. But he was honest about one thing that metropolitan Eurafrica concealed: you cannot dominate a continent indefinitely without accounting for people.

Settler Eurafrica sought permanence through presence. Metropolitan Eurafrica sought permanence through management. Both were attempts to solve the same problem: how Europe could survive its own decline by binding Africa to its fate.

Decoster lost because his solution was politically indefensible. Francafrique won because it was deniable.

But deniability does not erase causality.

The unresolved choice

Europe now faces a choice it has deferred for decades.

It can continue to manage Africa as a subordinate space—extracting resources, controlling currencies, cultivating elites, draining talent—and accept that migration, demographic change, and internal tension will intensify.

Or it can accept the cost of African sovereignty.

That cost is real:

• Loss of preferential access to resources
• Reduced geopolitical leverage
• Higher labor costs
• Slower growth
• Strategic uncertainty

But it comes with a benefit that no wall or rhetoric can deliver:

Africa that can retain its people because it can offer them a future.

No villains, no absolution

This essay has deliberately avoided assigning moral villainy to entire peoples.

Africans migrate because it is rational. Europeans benefit because it is profitable. Elites act in their interests because systems reward them for doing so.

The problem is not malevolence. It is structure.

But structure does not absolve responsibility.

Europe built a postcolonial order that preserved dominance while avoiding accountability. It now debates the consequences as though they were natural disasters or foreign invasions.

They are neither.

They are the long shadow of Eurafrica.

The final claim

The claim with which this essay ends is not ideological. It is empirical and moral at the same time:

Europe cannot keep Africa poor and expect Africa to stay put.

Until this truth is acknowledged—by Left and Right alike—European politics will remain trapped between denial and paranoia, universalist fantasy and conspiratorial rage.

Decoupling is not charity.
Sovereignty is not sentiment.
And realism, if it is to mean anything at all, must begin at the root.

Addendum — White Rule Without Empire

Eurafricanism in Global Perspective

Eurafricanism was not the first attempt to reconcile white rule, distance from Europe, and the collapse of formal empire. What made it distinctive was scale: it was an effort to preserve continental-level dominance in a world that no longer accepted explicit racial sovereignty. To see Eurafricanism clearly, it helps to set it beside smaller, earlier, or more idiosyncratic experiments—cases where white authority persisted without metropolitan empire, often through personal rule, hybrid legitimacy, or strategic ambiguity.

These examples do not vindicate Eurafricanism. They clarify it. They show what can work at small scale, what fails when scaled, and why Eurafricanism represented the last serious attempt to universalize a form of rule that history was already closing off.

I. What “white rule without empire” means

Before turning to cases, a distinction matters.

Empire is metropolitan: sovereignty flows outward from a center.
White rule without empire is peripheral: authority is asserted locally, often against or alongside metropolitan indifference.

Common features recur across such cases:

• Personal or dynastic authority rather than bureaucratic empire
• Hybrid legitimacy, blending local custom with European prestige
• Limited demographic ambition—rule by a small cadre, not mass settlement
• Dependence on local consent, inertia, or fragmentation
• Tolerance by great powers so long as interests are not threatened

These features are precisely what Eurafricanism tried—and failed—to scale.

II. The White Rajahs of Sarawak: dynastic rule by consent and distance

The Brooke dynasty in Sarawak (present-day Malaysian Borneo) is one of the most successful examples of white rule without formal empire.

Beginning in the 1840s, James Brooke established himself as “Rajah” through a combination of military assistance, personal authority, and accommodation with local elites. His successors ruled for over a century—not as colonial governors, but as sovereign monarchs recognized by local populations and tolerated by Britain.

Several features explain this longevity:

1. Minimal racial ambition
   The Brookes did not attempt mass European settlement or racial transformation. They ruled over locals, not instead of them.
2. Local legitimacy
   Authority rested on maintaining order, suppressing piracy, and mediating disputes—functions locals valued.
3. Distance from metropolitan ideology
   British liberalism, racial theory, and parliamentary norms mattered less in Sarawak than effectiveness.
4. Small scale
   Sarawak’s population and strategic importance were limited. No global coalition formed to dismantle it.

The Brooke regime survived precisely because it did not pretend to be universal. It did not claim to represent civilization as such; it represented order in one place.

This is the opposite of Eurafricanism.

III. The American Prince of Ghor: utopia without material base

The so-called American Prince of Ghor—a lesser-known and ultimately failed experiment—illustrates the limits of racial utopianism without material grounding.

Here, white rule was imagined as:

• Ideologically pure
• Racially explicit
• Detached from existing social structures

What it lacked was everything else:

• Economic foundation
• Local legitimacy
• Strategic tolerance from great powers

The project collapsed quickly because it attempted to assert racial sovereignty without embedding it in lived institutions. It was abstraction before reality—closer in spirit to René Binet than to Decoster.

Its failure underscores a broader lesson: racial ideology cannot substitute for governance. Where hierarchy is not stabilized by institutions, it becomes fantasy.

IV. Faustin Wirkus and Gonâve: sovereignty as performance

Perhaps the strangest case is Faustin Wirkus, a U.S. Marine who became “king” of Gonâve Island off the coast of Haiti in the 1920s.

Wirkus did not rule through force or racial law. He ruled through symbolic authority—accepted by local populations who integrated him into existing cosmologies of kingship. His “monarchy” was less a state than a performance of sovereignty, tolerated by American occupation authorities and meaningful to locals in its own terms.

This case reveals something crucial:

• White authority could persist when it did not challenge metropolitan narratives
• When it operated below the threshold of ideology
• When it functioned as local order rather than civilizational mission

Wirkus did not claim to represent whiteness, Europe, or progress. He claimed to be king—here, and only here.

Again, this is precisely what Eurafricanism could not accept.

V. What Eurafricanism tried to do differently

Against these cases, Eurafricanism stands out for its ambition.

Decoster and his peers did not want:

• Personal rule
• Dynastic compromise
• Small-scale hybridity

They wanted:

• Continental federation
• Permanent European demographic presence
• Explicit racial hierarchy
• Strategic independence from metropoles

In other words, Eurafricanism attempted to scale what had only ever worked when it remained local, informal, and ideologically modest.

This was its fatal flaw.

VI. Scale as destiny

Every successful instance of white rule without empire shared one constraint: it stayed small.

• Small populations are governable through personal authority
• Small territories avoid ideological scrutiny
• Small ambitions avoid coalition backlash

Eurafricanism rejected these constraints. It aimed to control:

• Vast populations
• Strategic resources
• Entire regions

That ambition triggered:

• International opposition
• Moral delegitimization
• Geopolitical containment

The UN could tolerate Sarawak. It could not tolerate Katanga as precedent.

VII. Eurafricanism as the last attempt

Seen in this light, Eurafricanism was not reactionary nostalgia—it was the last modern attempt to reconcile:

• White rule
• African territory
• Postwar legitimacy

It failed because the world had already changed in ways its architects could not accept.

After Eurafricanism, white rule without empire did not disappear—but it fragmented:

• Into cultural theory (New Right ethnopluralism)
• Into revolutionary abstraction (Binet)
• Into nostalgic populism (postcolonial grievance)

None of these forms could govern land. They could only govern discourse.

VIII. The deeper lesson

The smaller cases teach a lesson Eurafricanism refused to learn:

Rule endures when it limits its claims.

• When it governs rather than redeems
• When it adapts rather than universalizes
• When it accepts finitude

Eurafricanism claimed destiny. History replied with scale.

IX. Returning to the present

Why does this matter now?

Because contemporary European debates still oscillate between two illusions:

• That domination can be preserved without consequence
• That moral denunciation can erase causality

Eurafricanism failed because it tried to preserve white power where it could no longer be legitimized. Francafrique succeeded because it preserved European power where it could no longer be named.

Both produced migration. Both reshaped Europe.

The difference is that only one pretended not to.

X. Final synthesis