ABSTRACT

Coming to terms with the long-term impact of empires and decolonizations and selectively grappling with their diverse histories and legacies counts as a widely shared experience in many European countries in recent decades. Although Western and Southern European examples remain the most familiar cases within the ‘imperial turn’ now taken by many scholars, this chapter positions colonialism and decolonization as an entangled European history that still reverberates across the continent today. It extends to Nordic countries and Central and Eastern Europe, including during and after the state-socialist era. Europe has been historically forged by maritime as well as continental land empires (including the Habsburg empire, imperial and then Nazi Germany, and Tsarist Russia followed by the Soviet Union); as such, colonialism not only extended outwards to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia but inwards as ‘internal colonialisms’. Juxtaposing intra- and extra-European colonialisms ‘Europeanizes’ empire as a common transnational heritage—one that extends to Europe’s integration process since the 1950s and recognizes the Europeanness of Europe’s millions of ethnic minorities who form part of postcolonial Europe.