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

Abstract

Elizabeth Buettner has written an exceptionally useful book the great strength of which is to bring together Europe’s withdrawal from empire after 1945; the great migrations into Europe which began before the end of empire but expanded enormously in the decades thereafter; the cultural shocks which this inflicted upon Europe’s ex-imperial nations; and the after-view of empire, described here as ‘forgetting and remembering empire’. To cover these topics across a single state with such sophistication would be an impressive achievement. Here the experience of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal (though neither Spain nor Italy) is brought together and at certain points usefully compared. This will make it an essential text for a wide range of courses in European, global and imperial history—and indeed for anyone interested in the roots of Europe’s contemporary anxieties. Part One of the book, on Europe’s transition to the post-colonial era, will be the most familiar to those who have followed the growing literature on decolonisation and the end of Europe’s empires. Buettner helpfully reminds us that the recognition that empire must be given up did not follow directly from the end of the Second World War and the onset of the so-called ‘Superpower’ era. Far from it. The enormous damage that the war had wrought on Europe’s economies, even those (like Britain’s) that had escaped invasion, meant that the value of colonial raw materials, purchased with soft currency (not dollars) at below world prices, was hugely increased. The result was what has been called (in the Anglophone literature) the ‘second colonial occupation’, in which economic controls, ‘development’ programmes and (in some places) significant European settlement, replaced the stagnation and indifference of the ‘nightwatchman’ policies of the inter-war years. In the British case, Buettner steps cautiously into the debate set off by Bernard Porter’s sceptical analysis of the extent to which British popular culture was permeated by imperialism. Even after it was acknowledged as anachronistic, she suggests, empire ‘closely informed common understandings of national identity, patriotism, and race-consciousness, structuring attitudes about racial “others” and white Britishness alike’. But there is, of course, a certain contradiction here. If empire was so deeply embedded in popular consciousness, it is surprising, even astonishing, that the electorate and (so far as it can be measured) public opinion displayed such extraordinary indifference as its leaders abandoned colony after colony. No significant popular protest was made. Whatever empire’s enduring appeal, public attachment to the thing itself was much too feeble to delay its abolition. That ought to make some of the commentary cited here a little more careful.