The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past ed. by Róisín Healy, Enrico Dal Lago, and: Europe, Migration and Identity: Connecting Migration Experiences and Europeanness by Jan Logemann, Donna Gabaccia, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, and: Europe Entrapped by Claus Offe, and: The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds, and: Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 by Dan Stone, and: The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History ed. by Dan Stone (review)

Standard textbooks on European history have generally divided the twentieth century into two halves: the first dominated by upheaval, turmoil, war, and genocide, and the second, characterized by peace and stability culminating in European unity. The books discussed in this review suggest the emergence of an alternative historical consensus, one that stresses certain continuities such as the continued significance of the memory of the First World War, combined with an emphasis on the fraught and complex nature of post-1945 Europe and the lack of any closure or resolution to historical change in contemporary Europe.

To what extent can one refer to a “European” identity in today’s world? The contributions contained in the volume Europe, Migration and Identity: Connecting Migration Experiences and Europeanness offer some important insights into what “Europeanness” is, and to what extent one can discuss, in the wake of the postwar drive towards European unity, a common European identity. As the editors point out, transnational migration has always been a “constitutive element of European societies” despite a traditional historical emphasis on national demarcations (pp. 2–3). Following historian Konrad Jarausch, the contributors problematize any notion of a homogenous European identity, instead emphasizing “multiple, shifting, and hybrid identities . . . transmigrants who oscillate between countries and between national, ethnic and cosmopolitan affiliations”(p. 2). In her essay, Saara Koikkalainen shows in the case of highly educated Finns who have shifted their residence within the European Union, 60 percent of these (internal) migrants saw themselves as “European,” thereby making their mobility that much easier. Nevertheless, she points out that “Europeanness” does not substitute for a Finnish identity (p. 97). It remains a “secondary identity marker” (p. 26). A European identity, concludes Kiran Klaus Patel, is a surprisingly “recent and fragile phenomenon” (p. 29). The rise of a xenophobic populism in response to mass migration from the Middle East and Africa also suggests the limits of a transnational identity.

While the victims of imperialism have generally been viewed as non-European, the collection The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past raises the issue of to what extent imperialism and the “reverberations of the colonial experience across the European continent in the modern period” have impacted the internal politics of Europe itself in the modern era (p. 3). The volume reformulates cases of national expansion (for instance, Germany’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 and Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina) as forms of Continental imperialism and also looks at such neglected historical phenomena as the return of former settlers from Algeria and their impact on France. The book contains a number of case studies concerning colonial practice within Europe itself during the process of national expansion in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making nuanced distinctions among the various examples...