HENA0392KU English/CEMES - Free topic 20: Europe After Empire (Exam form A) - CANCELED

This course examines the broad impact of the unravelling of the imperial world order on European societies since 1945. In the decades after the Second World War, profound material and ideological changes instigated the progressive rollback of the British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese empires (in the wake of the disintegration of the German and Italian empires in the preceding era). The key question this course considers is the impact of these profound global orientations on the European societies themselves. Scholars have long debated the extent to which Europe was materially affected by the five-hundred-year experience of overseas exploration, colonisation and conquest. This course takes up this debate in the closing decades of that story. It begins with a survey of the major social and political ideologies that were associated with imperial power from the late-nineteenth century, before proceeding to an analysis of the specific resonances of imperial decline across Europe’s western seaboard. Some of the common themes to be addressed are the reception of retornados (returned migrants from the empire), the politics of ‘declinism’, changing conceptions of nationhood, and the continuing resonances of empire in contemporary civic memory and commemorative culture. The course will also consider the origins of European integration in the context of the contemporaneous collapse of the European world order. Source material will be drawn widely from politics to film, literature, civic culture, symbols, songs and other indicators of collective notions of civic purpose and belonging. A number of prominent guest speakers will be invited from around Europe to address the course theme in their national context.