ABSTRACT
The most common as well as the most long-standing internal differentiation within Europe has been a constructed East-West division that periodically transferred geopolitical, economic and cultural differences into ahistorical essences, traditions or paths of Eastern and Western Europe. This chapter shows how “creolization” as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean speaks to a different understanding of Europe up to this day, the history and the concept of Caribbean Europe are used to shed light on a previously developed notion of multiple and unequal Europes. It argues that a rethinking of Europe from its Atlantic and Caribbean borders successfully challenges Occidentalist notions of Europeanness and the modern nation-state, as well as related notions of internal and external borders, sovereignty and modernity. Regional entanglements that have been structurally invisibilized for several centuries, as in the case of Europe’s entanglements with its colonial possessions, suddenly acquire visibility in times of political, economic or ecological crisis.
