This project will be the first to systematically examine the allegiance of European policy entrepreneurs, by deploying the key concepts of ‘colonial exceptionalism’ and ‘co-imperialism’. By focusing on these concepts this project will examine case studies that will question whether these elites identified themselves primarily as members of a global empire or as members of a European club of colonizing nations. The aim of this research is to find out whether plans for European unity were the product of the tenacity or the rejection of European key assumptions about the capacity and the right of Europeans to rule the non-Western world and to recreate it after its own image.