Post-Colonial Europe

As a theoretical discourse, post-colonialism examines the cultural conditions characteristic of those independent societies that once formed part of a larger colonial empire. Its evocation implies an inherent dichotomy between the period before and after decolonization, as well as the far-reaching European powers and those nations formally subordinate to colonial empires throughout regions such as Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the Asian Pacific. Post-Colonial studies emerged from Edward Said’s assertion that British and French scholarship constructed the Orient as a lucid ‘other’ to Western Civilization; however, the past few decades has seen a dramatic blurring of this East-West binary, whereby the malleability of contemporary Europe now constitutes an irritation to post-colonial theorists.

One of the primary problems confronting post-colonial theorists is defining with precision the core tenets of a ‘post-colonial’ Europe, largely as a result of the continent’s collective inability to effectively divorce itself from its imperialistic past. Contemporary Europe has become a variable concept, rather than a fixed geographical or cultural block, a land that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere as a result of an ‘irreversible phenomenon of hybridization and multiculturalism’ (Etienne Baliabar). Where Europe was once defined along religious lines, the swelling torrent of immigrants from former colonial outposts has contributed to the perpetual heterogenization of European populations, bringing with them their own forms of religion and constituting a challenge to hundreds of years of Judeo-Christian hegemony across the continent.

For many, the European Union constitutes the most ideal model of a collective European identity, with its repudiation of borders and a commitment to regional integration and unified continental cooperation. However, the EU is by no means an all-inclusive federation, with notable omissions including Turkey, Switzerland, Norway, as well as a number of former Soviet satellites, all of whom remain outside the union for a variety of different reasons; meanwhile Morocco’s unsuccessful application to join the EU in 1987 illustrated that even in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ era, ‘Europeanness’ transcended geographical boundaries. Moreover, the EU is constitutive of the fact that over sixty years after the end of the century’s second great continental conflagration, Europe remains politically fractured. The union has long been split into a number of camps, each of them pulling the federation in different directions, ultimately rendering it a political paper tiger. Further complicating matters, during the former presidency of George W. Bush, his administration sought to further redefine Europe, by labelling those nations who reject American unilateralism as the benighted “Old Europe”, whilst those that support the moulding of a new world order catering primarily to American interests as the prescient and pro-active “New Europe”.

For Professor Frank Schulze-Engler, the term ‘post-colonialism’ remains problematic, due to his assertion that colonialism endures long after the final whip is cracked, its effects reverberating throughout posterity for both subjugator and subject alike, via a myriad of social and cultural constructs. Just as the former colonies of European powers are unable to permanently erase their history of servility, contemporary Europe continues to be shaped by its position as erstwhile colonial overlord, ultimately rendering the concept of ‘post-colonialism’ a self-contradictory paradox.