There was a time, not so long ago, when empires roamed the earth. Imre Ferenczi, a well-known demographer working at the International Labor Organization, estimated in 1938 that nine countries, covering just 14% of the worldâs surface and comprising only 23% of the worldâs population, controlled 42% of the worldâs population and 66% of planetâs landmass. Relatively small countries could rule over enormous territories: the surface area of the United Kingdom was only 0.8% of the territory ruled by the British empire, metropolitan France represented only 4.5% of the territory of the French empire, and the Japanese islands were less than one fifth of the territory controlled by the Japanese empire. According to Ferencziâs estimates (circa 1930), fewer than four million âwhitesâ were settled in these large overseas territories.1 They were everywhere a minority in comparison to the indigenous population. In fact, they were actually a tiny minority, comprising between 0.5 to 8% of those territoriesâ inhabitants (Ferenczi 1938). Ferenczi, albeit critical of colonialism as a solution for demographic pressures, did not present his findings as particularly shocking or surprising. The very same word âdecolonization,â coined by Moritz Bonn only a few years before, was rarely used for several decades.2
Today, eighty-one years later, only 17 territoriesâwith an overall population of less than 2 millionâare defined by international law as non-self-governing territories.3 Their very existence is somewhat troubling for the current international order: the United Nations has even instituted the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (abbreviated in C24). This committee is entrusted with regularly reviewing the situation of these territories and publically disseminating information on decolonization to their populations. In 2005, the UN introduced an annual âsolidarity weekâ in support of the people of non-self-governing territories. The world has definitely changed.
As is the case with most political forms, empires believed themselves eternal. When the idea of âdecolonizationâ started to circulate, it was often ridiculed (Betts 2012). A few decades later, decolonization appears to have been inevitable, brought about by all-powerful âwinds of change,â to use Harold McMillanâs 1960 statement (Cooper 2005). Still, the speed and scope of the process often surprised even the most knowledgeable observers. Decision makers who could once scarcely consider self-rule as even a distant possibility found themselves discussing it as occurring in a matter of weeks (Van Reybrouck 2014). The United Nations admitted eighteen new members in 1960 alone. Less than forty years after the publication of Ferencziâs paper, the empires he had studied had all vanished. Crucially, they had brought with them the very idea of empire as a political form; not to mention the legitimacy, previously taken for granted, of racial hierarchies as legitimate foundations for the international order (Jansen and Osterhammel 2017).
The speed and scope of such transformations of the world are difficult to overestimate. The League of Nations was founded at the end of World War I by thirty-two sovereign states. Only three of them were Asian (China, Japan, and Siam) and a mere two were African (South Africa and Liberia). A truly sovereign African state, Abyssinia, joined the League only three years later. At the apogee of its glory (1934â1935), the League of Nations still counted only fifty-eight members, more than four-fifths of which were European (or European settler states). The situation was not much different when the United Nations was founded. The original members numbered fifty-one, only two of which were located in sub-Saharan Africa. By 1960, however, the UN already counted ninety-nine members, twenty-one of which were in Africa. A decade later, the number of members was 127. In 1976, when the last European empire crumbled, membership in the United Nations skyrocketed to 147 (Etemad 2007). Membership today stands at 193. Not too bad for a political form, the nation-state, whose death has been celebrated at regular intervals in the academic literature.
In a matter of only a few decades, a world openly and institutionally dominated by European and Japanese empires has transformed itself into a horizontal community of formally independent nation-states, a majority of which are ruled by members of ethnic and racial groups that would have been, only a few decades ago, deemed unfit for office. Such a radical transformation of world society has influenced the social dynamics of the contemporary world in a myriad of ways, many of them not yet adequately appreciated (Steinmetz 2014). We definitely live in a postcolonial world whose trends and strains can be understood only by taking into account the economic, political, social, and cultural legacies of decolonization (Thomas and Thompson 2018).
This book is an attempt to explore in depth one such consequence: the social and cultural impact of the traumatic âreturnâ or ârepatriationâ of colonial populations to their âhomelands.â4 In fact, decolonization was often (but not always) accompanied by the shrinkingâif not the utter disappearanceâof the âcolonizingâ population from the former colonies. The circumstances of such disappearance have been diverse. In some cases, it was an atomized and largely peaceful movement toward the metropole or toward other countries offering better opportunities. In the six cases studied in this book, however, substantial portions of the colonial population moved out of the decolonizing countries under traumatic circumstances (although as we will show, they did so in different ways and for different reasons). Sometimes, as was the case of the Japanese in Manchuria, it was a hurried flight under the pressure of an advancing army. Sometimes, as was the case for many Belgians in Elizabethville and many Portuguese in Luanda, it was an emergency evacuation to escape violence and rioting and was motivated by the fear of retribution. Among the French population in Algeria and the Italian population in Croatia, many interpreted the occurrence of violent eventsâsuch as the Oran massacre and the Vergarolla attackâas what would have happened had they stayed. Still in other cases, such as those of the remaining Italians in the Libya of the 1970s and the Dutch population in Indonesia in 1957, it was a formal decision made by the new authorities to expel and confiscate the colonistsâ property. In any case, the âreturnsâ we study exposed many of the returning persons to considerable duress. Even those who repatriated safely experienced a traumatic change of psychological and social status that was compounded by the loss of most, if not all, their property (Smith 2003; Buettner 2018).
The impact of their repatriation for the former metropoles was equally wide and deep. For Japan and Italy, mass repatriations took place in the context of defeated and destroyed countries with weak institutions and very limited resources (Hashimoto 2015; Audenino 2016). The Netherlands received hundreds of thousands of returnees during a period when the government was busy promoting the emigration of their âsurplusâ citizens (Oostindie 2011). Portugal, a poor country that had just completed a (largely) peaceful revolution, faced in a very short span of time an increase of its population of more than 6% (Pena Pires et al. 1984). For France and Italy, witnessing such âreturnsâ was also a living reminder of the loss of territories that had been considered for decadesâor centuriesâan integral part of the ânationalâ body (Ballinger 2003; Shepard 2008). Belgium, which had had a relatively small settler population (and consequently received a relatively small number of returnees), had to deal with its own responsibilities in the Congolese quagmire and was held responsible for the circumstances in which the flight had taken place (Goddeeris 2015). The fact that their mass âreturnâ was followed by what might be considered a relatively peaceful and successful incorporation into the new Western European order is one of the facts the studies included in this book seeks to explain.
Nor should it be forgotten that the ârefluxâ phase included the first settlement in Western Europe of non-European populations.5 The Algerian Harkis, the Dutch Indisch , the former Moluccan soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, and the former colonial subjects all settled in the metropole, and in addition, some of the coloniesâ mixed children were allowed to settle Western Europe as well.6 Even larger numbers of colonial and postcolonial subjects arrived in Western European countries as workers, both before and after independence. To do so, they used the possibility of free mobility that many colonial states had granted their former colonial subjects as part of their attempt to transform their colonial empires into transnational unions (Peach 1997; Buettner 2018). Their arrival was accepted only very reluctantly and was accompanied by a large dose of denial and delusion. Mixed individuals were often mistreated and faced with intense discrimination. Still, their settlement represented the first break between the association of Europeanness and Whiteness, the seed for the increased racial and ethnic diversity of the subcontinent (Bosma et al. 2012).7
In this book, we analyze how such traumatic experiences were narrated, ignored, debated, and contested in the former colonial metropoles, and how they interacted with the process of shaping the new postcolonial identity and collective memory . Using the theory of cultural trauma (which we summarize in the next two paragraphs), we will explore the ways in which the experiences, grievances, narratives, and claims of the returnees have succeeded or failed in gaining public recognition for the repatriates.
Decolonization as Cultural Trauma
The idea of analyzing decolonization as a trauma-inducing event is definitely not new, although the theory has been utilized mostly to analyze the traumas of the colonized and only very rarely those of the (former) colonizers. In cases of the latter, they are technically called âperpetrator traumasâ (Tsutsui 2009; Kalter 2016). Still, many analyses of the decolonization process have relied on the concept of ...