Postnationalism

Summary

The internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil from national chauvinism dominated Western Europe throughout the Cold War.Increasingly, European cooperation dominated the agenda; the future lay in a healing of old wounds and international European harmony. What is more, the period 1945-1989 was almost unique in European history for the stability of its international frontiers. No other half-century can be found in which the outline of the states and the trajectory of their dividing borders was so rigidly and unchangingly fixed. For someone who grew up in these immediate post-war decades, the impression might well be that states had now found their lasting, definitive geographical expression and that Europe henceforth was to be a neat jigsaw puzzle of seamlessly interlocking states, each comprising an unambiguous nationality and territory. Despite some anomalies (a divided Germany and an isolated Berlin foremost among them), all potential territorial conflicts were resolutely kept in deep freeze, since any destabilization could trigger a devastating nuclear war between the two superpowers, the US and the USSR. The time of international rivalry and territorial conquest, which had ruled the fluctuations of the European map for so long, seemed over; nationalism, self-denounced as a result of its perverse ideological excesses of the mid-century, seemed as dead an ideology as the belief in witchcraft. Even so, some specifically national issues continued to make their presence felt.

Decolonization: Europe's Loss of Empire

Famously, the twentieth century was the time of de-colonization; the first European state to be confronted with this process had been Spain, which, following the earlynineteenth- century campaigns of Simon Bolívar in Latin America, experienced the loss of its last overseas colonies in 1898 as a time of national trauma and a point of recalibration for a sense of Spanish identity. In the course of the following century, Britain was to lose its empire in India/Pakistan and its colonies and dominions in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific; the Netherlands their East Indies (Indonesia) and Surinam; France its possessions in Indochina and North Africa; Belgium its Congo colony; Portugal, Angola and Mozambique.