Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture by Elizabeth Buettner (review)

Elizabeth Buettner’s new book, Europe after Empire, is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on decolonization and its discontents. The breadth of this book is distinctive. Buettner’s ambitious study includes the story of imperial collapse and reconfiguration not only for Britain and France (which have already been the subject of much scholarly attention), but also for the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium. Buettner sets herself a difficult task in expanding the geographical range of the field. But the integration of the histories of less powerful empires—those that worked on a smaller scale—with their larger, better known counterparts makes for productive comparisons.

From the beginning of the book, Buettner adopts a broad definition of decolonization, concerning herself not only with formal transfers of power, but with the lengthy processes of Europe coming to terms with the legacies of imperial violence and entanglements. In the introduction, Buettner makes a compelling case for insisting on “the importance of Europe itself as an object of historical scholarship. . . . The ways and extent to which specific European nations experienced decolonization themselves come into much sharper focus when studied comparatively” (pp. 12–13). Thus, she rejects both the older (and largely debunked) academic tendency to keep Western European nations separate from their empires and —more strikingly—the persistent one of keeping them separate from each other. Even as Europe became increasingly integrated, she notes, academics stayed rooted in their national boundaries. The imperial turn, she argues, leads inexorably to the Continental turn.

The book is structured in three parts: “Decolonization for Colonizers,” “Migrations and Multiculturalism in Postcolonial Europe,” and “Memories, Legacies, and Future Directions.” In the first part, each of the five chapters offers a political narrative of decolonization in one of the European countries under discussion; in the other two sections, these national stories are interwoven. It would have been helpful to have more passages of direct comparison in part 1, where each chapter seems to operate independently. Some simultaneous events are noted (for example, Ho Chi Minh’s founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in French Vietnam coincides with the Indian National Congress’s demands for swaraj), but readers need to do some work to piece together these stories. In parts 2 and 3, the reward for the comparative dimension of the project is much more evident as is the originality of Buettner’s approach. Chapters on postcolonial repatriations and ethnic minority migrations, multiculturalism, and the remembering and forgetting of empires offer many fascinating juxtapositions: of the Salman Rushdie affair and saudade, of pieds noirs and retornados.

Who is responsible for the narrow outlook that has characterized much of the history of decolonization thus far? British historians come off rather badly in Buettner’s account, the “worst offenders” in ignoring the empires of other nations. It is an interesting choice, then, that Buettner’s own account begins with Britain, which tends to reinforce its importance rather than decentering it. She surveys the history of decolonization for Britain, for example, from the emergence of purna swaraj to the Falklands, synthesizing a vast array of literature. These initial chapters—compared to the later, more expansive ones—can feel a bit rushed, and it is not always easy to understand why certain flash-points become focal points. But especially in the chapters on Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Buettner makes a vital contribution in bringing these more neglected areas of study into a central narrative. Portugal provides a particularly interesting (and, until, now underexplored) case study, as the “first and last” European imperial power.

One of the many strengths of this volume is that Buettner brings each nation’s history of involvement with (and ambivalence about) the European Economic Community and European Union into the narrative of decolonization. She charts how the EU was built on the unstable ground of decolonization and describes how debates about who is considered European reflect a colonial past. This is an impressive achievement, not least...