Materialising the Third Force: European Industrial and Financial Cooperation in Colonial Iron and Aluminium Production and the Making of Eurafrica during Decolonisation

This article revisits Eurafrica not primarily as a diplomatic vision or ideological construct, but as a series of material arrangements that took shape during the final decades of the European empires. It examines large-scale extractive projects in the transforming French colonial empire between the late 1950s and early 1960s, focusing on how industrial firms, banks, and state officials coordinated to secure access to strategic raw materials amid decolonisation and Cold War rivalry. Drawing on iron and aluminium ventures in Mauritania, Gabon, Guinea, and the French Congo, the study traces how these projects were embedded in the emerging frameworks of European economic cooperation. Rather than expressing a unified Eurafrican programme, corporate and governmental actors invoked the language of partnership pragmatically. It served to attract capital, distribute financial exposure, negotiate legal protections, and manage the political uncertainties surrounding African independence. More then from geopolitical visions, cooperation developed from the structural constraints of postwar Europe, where sectoral coordination, intergovernmental committees, and development finance became central to industrial expansion. In this context, Eurafrica operated as a transitional configuration: it preserved key features of colonial extraction while recasting them within multilateral corporate forms. By shifting attention from discourse to infrastructure, contracts, and financing mechanisms, the article contributes to debates on European integration, decolonisation, and global business history. It argues that European integration extended beyond the continent’s borders, binding African resources into projects of regional cooperation while reshaping the asymmetries inherited from empire.