That the luminous shadow of colonialism lurks not only around Asia, Africa, the Americas and other non-European parts of the world but also on Europe itself, is the message of this aptly titled book—The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past. Edited by Róisín Healy and Enrico Dal Lago, it contains fourteen different case study essays. The book focuses on the period from the 1860s to the 1960s, marking the heydays of colonialism and nationalism. The authors argue that, during this time, Europe employed colonial ideas and practices on its frontier regions in the east that amounted to internal colonialism. Conventional historiography has viewed this integration as an outcome of nationalisation and Sovietisation, separated from colonialism. This book, however, attempts to break such distinctions and thereby add new dimensions to the colonialism and imperialism debate.
Divided into three parts, the first part of the book, called “Debating Colonialism”, includes three chapters and an introductory essay, “Investigating Colonialism in Europe”, by Healy and Dal Lago. It introduces the basic framework for measuring the degree of any colonial experience. Kristin Kopp’s “discursive colonisation”, as “a historically situated process that repositions a specific relationship between self and Other into colonial categories”, forms the core of their analysis (8). Combined with it, is the idea of “Material Colonisation” that establishes four conditions: (i) exclusion of the colonised from decision-making process, (ii) undue cultural privilege for the coloniser, (iii) economic exploitation of indigenous land and labour and (iv) institutionalisation of physical violence by the coloniser (9). Consequently, all seven essays contained in the next section, “Colonialism as Nationalisation?”, as well as four in the third part of the book, “Colonialism under Communism”, use this framework as their base for explaining colonisation within Europe.
In the chapter “Is there a Classical Colonialism?”, Mridu Rai explores the multiple understandings of colonialism. She argues that colonialism could very well be imperialism sharing common criteria like economic extraction, cultural subjugation, etc. However, what makes colonialism characteristic to modern empires, unlike pre-modern imperialism, is its central idea of nation and nationality. In the post WWI era, the forceful construction of territorial nations gave rise to ethnic minorities within every nationality. A kind of neo-colonialism, ingrained in their “otherisation”, thus emerged. This was present simultaneously in both the non-European as well as the European parts of the world—colonialism “under the aegis of nationalism” (32). Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh’s case study of British-Irish relations makes this case further by highlighting the debates and discourses on questions of Ireland’s status as a colony. Ireland’s financial failure (during the zenith of British economic glory) and limited Irish participation in the British political process are among several relevant points. By revealing the discontent expressed in the contemporary Irish literature, Tuathaigh’s essay brings forth the other side of the story—the voices of the colonised.
The coloniser mentality is captured in one of the most interesting essays of this volume by Dal Lago. It deals with the stereotyping of the Southerners in Italy or the mezzogiorno by the northerners after Italian Unification. There were striking parallels of colonial practices overseas like the use of anthropological studies to brand the southerners as “uncivilized, violent and corrupt” and in need of being “civilized” by their northern brethren (69). One is immediately reminded of the white man’s burden in this connection, which was preached outside Europe. Healy argues that internal colonialism resulted not just from examples in Asia or Africa but from the overall colonial mentality dominant in the time. In her case study of “Poland under Prussia”, she shows how ethnic Poles began facing increased suppression from the 1880s even though this was certainly not the beginning of their colonisation.
The concept of internal colonialism is further clarified by Detmar Klein through his study of the (Prusso-)Germanic treatment of the Alsatians from the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. With political discrimination, legal seclusion and economic exploitation by the centre, he shows how a climate of subjugation hung over the peripheral Alsace fulfilling conditions of internal colonisation. Christopher Mick contrasts this view in his chapter “Polish Eastern Borderlands 1919-39”. He claims that Poland used certain colonial techniques, like language suppression and denying the Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians equal political and economic representation. But this situation was never an instance of surrogate colonialism (resettling ethnic groups) or exploitation colonialism like Poland experienced at the hands of German colonisers. Mick concludes that the former was more of a nationalising state than a colonising one. Clemens Ruthner offers a rather opposite picture to that of Mick’s with his case of “Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878-1918”. He contends that the Austrian state’s political, legal, economic and cultural discrimination over Bosnia-Herzegovina is nothing short of colonialism. Despite being attached to the “motherland”, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s example strongly concludes that nationalisation was apparently synonymous with colonisation.
Aoife Connolly adds another twist to this tale with his narration of the settler community in Algeria, known as the pieds-noirs. He shows how these supposed “colonisers” themselves became “colonised” after their migration to the French metropolis in the wake of the Algerian War. Their stereotyping as the “abnormal, violent, deviant” other against an imagined French nationality is almost equivalent to the colonisation of India’s subaltern communities that Rai talks about (33 and 150). The only exception here is the chapter by Nils Langer. He investigates the attempted Danisation of Schleswig and its subsequent Germanisation after 1864 through the prism of linguistic politics. The results are underlined by Sebastian Conrad’s warning that seeing “colonial aspects or tendencies in almost any form of asymmetrical relations, removes any kind of specificity from the term colonialism”. As such, Langer concludes that there were no traces of colonial attitude in Schleswig (73).
The last four chapters contribute to the idea of seeing Sovietisation as a form of colonisation despite its widespread anti-colonial ranting. Mark von Hagen presents the Soviet domination over the Ukrainians as a colonialism that needs to be accepted from a post-socialist stance. Balázs Apor, in the same light, substantiates this point in the final essay of this book: in “Stalinist Leader Cult” where he describes how the “colonised” in the satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe were forced to love and admire Stalin as a “coloniser”. Guido Hausmann’s chapter looks at Russian-Ukrainian relations during the interwar years. From maps made by political geographers, Hausmann argues that a “fight for space” was easily discernible (203). Even though the term “colonialism” did not suit the situation, there were certainly “elements of the colonialist and ‘colonised’ mindsets” (207). Another interesting variant on the topic of Russia is the chapter “Layered Colonialism” by Paul McNamara. He shows how the colonising interests of the Soviet Red Army were imposed on the Baltic lands or the Recovered Territories at the same time that the Polish nationalist policy was also aimed at uprooting the indigenous Cashubian and Masurian communities from these territories. It thus created a situation of nationalisation asserting a buoyant force from below in the same space where the force of Sovietisation was exerted from above.
In the end, the differences (if any) in patterns or degrees between overseas colonialism and internal colonialism within Europe still remains unclear. Yet, what goes undisputed is the use of certain colonial ideas or techniques that were applied on different frontier nations, which makes a convincing case for colonialism within Europe. It also gives the right nudge to scholarly endeavours for producing revised understandings of colonialism. In so doing, this book contributes to the study of all events and their consequences, not excluding colonialism, in a global and trans-national context.
