THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

Edited by
MARTIN THOMAS
and

ANDREW S. THOMPSON

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 CHAPTER 31
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ELIZABETH BUETTNER

AFTER periods of imperial expansion and consolidation when the numbers of

Europeans who left to begin new lives in the empire as settlers or expatriates greatly
exceeded the numbers of colonized peoples travelling to the heart of empires, during
the decolonization era there was a fundamental shift in the relationship between me-
tropoles and colonies. Drawing on histories of Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Portugal, and Belgium, this chapter illuminates broader demographic contours of
this post-1945 Europe-directed migratory phenomenon together with its causes and
consequences. Equally, it considers how these transformations were experienced as
Western Europe moved from the colonial to the postcolonial era and grew increas-
ingly multicultural by the late twentieth century.’

Declining empires, empires in the process of undergoing ‘transfers of power’ when

colonies achieved formal (if often highly circumscribed) independence, and former
colonies after decolonization all produced European immigrants hailing from a wide
social spectrum. Their class, level of education, cultural identity, birthplace, and reasons
for embarking varied markedly, but for contemporaries the most striking distinction
between different groups often revolved around racial, ethnic, or religious affiliations.
Although minorities with exclusively Asian, North and sub-Saharan African, and
Caribbean ethnic backgrounds tended to attract far more attention both at the moment
of arrival and long after their settlement in Europe, estimates suggest that Europeans
and those partly of European ancestry made up more than half of those making the
journeys. Between 5.4 and 6.8 million people arrived in Western Europe from former
colonies during the forty years after 1945, and between 3.3 and 4 million were either
LE TOT EO
TOR CEM
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602 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

European or at least partly so.? Some had been born in Europe and returned home
when colonial careers as officials, military personnel, or in non-official professions
ended, when decolonization made ongoing residence in ex-colonies either undesirable
or untenable, or when they no longer felt they ‘belonged’ in former imperial realms.
Alongside former expatriates were European settlers—some of whose ancestors had
emigrated generations earlier, some whose colonial lives were of far shorter duration.’
In many cases, European (or European-descended) expatriates and settlers trickled
‘homewards’ either on an individual basis or in relatively small numbers at a given mo-
ment. Such groups—like Britons and Anglo-Indians heading to Britain at the time of
India’s and Pakistan's independence in 1947 and from other regions in the 1950s and
1960s, or French returnees from Southeast Asia or West Africa during and after the
1950s—did not generally attract significant national public attention. This had little
to do with their aggregate totals: in Britain, for example, the 1991 census revealed that
approximately 560,000 resident whites had been born in former colonies.* While
departures from former empires undoubtedly were destabilizing and often traumatic
for those directly uprooted, for British society at large repatriated colonials were an un-
problematic and ignored group, as were many of their counterparts in neighbouring
European countries.°
Decolonizations that were relatively peaceful or uncontested rarely produced notice-
able waves of European departures during the period immediately before or soon after
the end of European governance. Unsurprisingly, this did not apply to those arriving
en masse, often upon panicked exits from crisis-ridden colonies at the time of independ-
ence. Within days of the Belgian Congo's independence on 30 June 1960, Congolese
soldiers of the Force publique had mutinied, adding substantially to the political ten-
sions pervading a decolonization that saw Belgium seeking to maintain a high measure
of neocolonial control, regardless of having formally transferred sovereignty. Amidst
an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear, and sometimes violence as some of the mutinous
troops physically attacked European men, women, and children, an estimated 38,000
colonials were hastily flown back to Belgium in less than a month in a spectacular airlift
operation organized by the Belgian government and Sabena airlines. Over a third of the
Belgian nationals then resident in the territory fled home (many of whom later returned
to Africa to reside in the former colony for the immediate future), while others took
temporary refuge elsewhere in Central Africa.® Although colonizers’ tearful arrivals at
the Brussels airport dominated national news and made international headlines at the
time, they soon faded from public attention, eclipsed in part by comparison with two
far larger European colonial ‘exoduses’ that came in their wake: French departures from
Algeria in 1962, and Portuguese retreats from Angola and Mozambique in 1974 and 1975.
Approximately 1.5 million people (over 3% of the 44 million citizens of metropol-
itan France) were ‘repatriated’ from settler societies in French North Africa between
the early 1950s and mid-1960s, about a third from Morocco and Tunisia. But close to a
million landed in port cities of southern France from Algeria, many during the summer
of 1962.’ France had finally agreed to Algeria's independence that July after an eight-
year undeclared war against an insurgency that pitted the Algerian Front de Libération
ES
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 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 603

Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) against the French army and an increasingly
militarized large European settler community. By the end, settler and army extrem-
ists had formed the underground Organisation de lArmée Secréte (OAS, Secret Army
Organization) that engaged in a diehard terrorist campaign to keep Algeria French
by any means necessary. Their efforts backfired completely, making French President
Charles de Gaulle even more eager to disengage and rendering it impossible for the
settlers to remain after independence.
Portugal’s colonial wars waged over more than a decade against freedom fighters in
Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea (who also included insurgents from its Cape Verde
Islands) achieved a similar result in the mid-1970s. The Carnation Revolution in April
of 1974 was sparked by army officers acting against the dictatorial Portuguese state that
had long insisted that Portuguese-ruled parts of Africa did not count as ‘colonies’ but
rather ‘overseas provinces’ that were—and must remain—integral parts of Portugal
(just as French Algerian partisans had once stressed that Algeria was not a colony but
departments of France itself). The shift to democracy at home brought decolonization
in Africa by the end of 1975. Within little over a year, more than 500,000 settlers from
Angola and Mozambique and over 200,000 Portuguese troops returned home, causing
Portugal's population to swell by 5-10%. As with Algeria, the lengthy wars, racial hos-
tilities, and spiralling violence made the prospects of staying on after empire impos-
sible for many Portuguese. Like France's repatriated pieds-noirs (as Europeans who had
been settlers in Algeria came to be known), most of Portugal's retornados (returnees)
abandoned virtually everything they owned in Africa, aside from a few suitcases,
memories of the past, and resentment at having their African lives and privileges
abruptly curtailed.®
Not all mass migrations to Europe from ex-colonies happened as quickly upon de-
colonization. When the Netherlands conceded independence to Indonesia (formerly
the Dutch East Indies) in 1949 after years of fighting an anti-colonial insurgency, some
members of the colonial community had already left. Others gradually made their way
to the Netherlands or opted to relocate elsewhere (with California and Australia being
popular alternatives, just as South Africa and Rhodesia attracted considerable num-
bers of Britons and Portuguese who hesitated to return to a Europe from which they
felt estranged after their colonial lives elsewhere). Those who initially stayed on faced
an increasingly insecure future by the 1950s as tensions escalated between the Republic
of Indonesia and the Netherlands, mainly because the Dutch insisted on maintaining
control over West New Guinea. In retaliation, Indonesia expelled remaining Dutch
nationals and confiscated their property in 1957, after which tens of thousands more
with Dutch ancestry left. Approximately 300,000 people came to the Netherlands
from Indonesia between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. A small minority were of
Moluccan, Indonesian, Chinese, or Papuan backgrounds, but most were Dutch citizens.
Among the latter, about 80,000 were totoks, or ‘European Dutch, who had been tem-
porarily resident in colonial society and often were born in the Netherlands (or had two
Dutch parents), while over 180,000 were ‘Indisch Dutch’ Eurasians of mixed descent,
most of whom had never been to Europe before.’
604 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

Dutch citizens who resettled in the Netherlands after the loss of the East Indies illus-
trate the diversity typically found among repatriated ex-colonial populations. European
Dutch from the former Indies who were more affluent often faced far easier returns than
those of mixed descent, who were less likely to have families in the metropole or suffi-
cient financial resources to aid their transition. Most Indisch Dutch had been situated
between the European minority and Indonesian majority in colonial society and bene-
fitted from their legal status as Dutch and racial and cultural affiliation to the colonizers,
yet experienced racial and class discrimination from European Dutch who looked down
upon them as inferior ‘Indos. Until the 1957 rupture, the official attitude was that Dutch
who were more ‘Oriental’ in culture and appearance (and typically not well off) should
remain in Indonesia and not resettle in the Netherlands, despite their legal right to do
so. Afterwards, political circumstances forced Dutch authorities to recognize that they
needed to accept them—a reluctance reflected in a stepped-up official involvement in
the repatriation process. Public proclamations emphasized the need to welcome and
accommodate citizens from the former Indies, but placed tremendous pressure upon
those whose cultural leanings were more Indisch and hybrid to assimilate within con-
ventional Dutch society.”
State policy towards the Indisch insisted that racism had no place in Dutch society
and emphatically reiterated the Netherlands’ proud history as a nation tolerant of new-
comers. But the reality faced by poorer Indisch was often at odds with lofty rhetoric.
Having left behind material possessions, their accustomed place in society, and a con-
vivial lifestyle in a warm climate revolving around hospitality, the Indisch sacrificed
everything they knew and were expected to completely adapt to metropolitan Dutch
‘norms’: frugality, meals of meat and potatoes instead of spicy dishes with rice, and
quiet, self-effacing respectability. Dutch policy sought to dissolve them into the main-
stream and iron out colonial cultural differences, which meant discouraging them from
forming ‘ghettoes’ where they would communally perpetuate Indies cultural traditions.
That many Indisch persisted in eating traditional dishes, maintaining close-knit
colonial family and friendship networks, and living near other Indies repatriates re-
flected not only defiance of Dutch expectations that did not value their background.”
It was also a response to encountering everyday prejudices and racist ‘Indo’ stereotypes.
Despite their citizenship and colonial identity that derived in large part from ancestral
and cultural affiliations to the colonizers, they were commonly viewed as foreigners and
outsiders in the Netherlands after empire. According to a 1966 study, arrivals from the
former East Indies felt that the Dutch:

feel superior, they look down on us. In their eyes, we are a lesser sort of people, who
possess few abilities and are lax. Many are badly informed about who we actually are
or what we were out there. They think that we are Indonesian or else Ambonese, that
we lived in straw huts, that we have never walked in shoes and that we used to sleep
on the ground. Many are amazed we speak Dutch. We are not seldom looked upon as
intruders, who make the labour market difficult for people here and for whom extra
taxes have to be paid.
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 605

Cultural biases, ignorance, and racist taunts from Dutch children who addressed them
as ‘black nigger’ and ‘chin-chin-chinaman’ compounded their difficulties, offering evi-
dence that the assimilation expected by officials was hindered not only by Indisch de-
sires to preserve valued aspects of their heritage but also by Dutch who saw them as
unwelcome and ‘other’ largely on account of ethnic difference.”
For Europeans or those of partial European descent who returned after empire,
then, transitions from colonial to postcolonial metropolitan life were often extremely
difficult, not least if they had never lived in Europe before, if many years had elapsed
since they had emigrated, or if they lacked resources and supportive family members to
smooth their passage. Like so many Indisch Dutch, other former colonials preferred to
remain tightly connected with others who shared their background after leaving over-
seas life behind, often by necessity and rarely by desire. Pieds-noirs from an Algeria that
had ceased to be French often chose to maintain close contact with other repatriates,
whether by resettling near other pieds-noirs who gravitated towards southern France
along the Mediterranean coastline or becoming active in pied-noir associations.'* These
groups shored up social networks, campaigned for state compensation for their losses
upon leaving North Africa, and facilitated the circulation of nostalgic recollections of
the lost world of Algérie francaise.
Some Europeans never fully adjusted to decolonization transitions forced upon them.
As one elderly Portuguese woman who had long lived in Mozambique wrote in her
diary in 1975, settlers who fled back to Portugal faced a future so uncertain that it seemed
like no future at all: ‘a cousin, to whom I was very close, left. Later, destitute in Lisbon, he
killed his wife and then himself. They were good people. They were dead anyway, they
only made it official: Others readapted as best they could over time, often finding solace
in ongoing relationships with other former colonials and memories of past times that
became recast as a golden age—tempo doeloe, as Dutch repatriates referred to the East
Indies before Dutch rule lost ground to its challengers.’® Some succeeded in moving for-
ward after challenging initial transitions that involved finding new homes and (for men
in particular) new jobs. One Belgian ex-colonial administrator later looked back on the
early 1960s as a nerve-wracking time characterized by a search for a new career after
leaving the Congo. Upon finding permanent employment in the diplomatic service—
which in his case meant further postings in Central Africa, among other places—he re-
called that ‘it was not displeasing to be thus assured that I, too, was “decolonizable” *”
Yet being ‘decolonizable’ was far easier to achieve if the person in question was white and
fairly affluent. Many Dutch from the former East Indies visibly stood out as mixed race
and came without substantial savings, while many French pieds-noirs and Portuguese
retornados were virtually penniless upon arrival. For them, shedding their former colo-
nial identity was less straightforward, ifindeed that was even their intention.
Despite their different circumstances, however, integrating former colonials of
European backgrounds into Europe stood in sharp contrast to the situation faced by
other ethnic minorities who came from overseas empires after 1945. Terminology used
to describe many postcolonial migrants of purely or partly European origin typically
emphasized their connectedness to the metropole and portrayed them as deserving
FIs nr rt
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606 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

candidates for public sympathy—people who had ‘lost everything’ when they left Africa
or Indonesia, for example, and worthy of being classified as victims or refugees (as was
the case of Belgians who fled the Congo in July 1960). Above all, ‘repatriate’ or other
words like retornado rhetorically stressed that European countries were their father-
lands to which they were rightfully coming back—even if many described as such
had never set foot in the homeland of their ancestors until decolonization turned the
tables. Widespread usage of these terms suggested an official willingness, often shared
by much of the wider public, to accept Europeans and Eurasians whose identities had
been forged in the empire as legitimate members of national communities—as British,
French, Belgian, Dutch, or Portuguese—that had become reconfigured after empire,
including groups associated with controversial, embarrassing, and painful decoloniza-
tions that many at home preferred to forget. Even those like the pieds-noirs and Indisch
Dutch, whose colonial past remained part of their cultural identity and literally their
name (or, in the case of many Indisch and other mixed-race peoples, by physical signi-
fiers of difference) grew ever more unproblematically European, even if their arrivals
had been contentious and their hearts, politics, and some of their ancestors remained
linked to the colonial world and rendered them distinct from the metropolitan ma-
jority. Repatriated Europeans and Eurasians ultimately belonged, a belonging com-
monly denied to postcolonial minorities who lacked identifiable European ancestral
origins—even if they too possessed the legal right to resettle in Europe as citizens when
they made their journeys.

MIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP,
AND DISPUTED BELONGING

Colonized peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean region were present in Europe
long before empires fell into terminal decline after the Second World War. There was
nothing strictly ‘postcolonial’ about the arrival and settlement of ethnic minorities of
colonial origins: preexisting smaller streams of migration from the British, Portuguese,
French, and Dutch empires to European metropoles grew prior to formal decoloniza-
tions, gathering pace in the late 1940s in the case of Britain and France. Significantly,
increased mobility, numbers, and permanent settlement emerged in large part thanks to
policies meant to preserve empires in times of transition, and had not been envisioned
as heralding a changed postcolonial world order.
The British Nationality Act of 1948 formalized equal British citizenship rights for all
colonial and Commonwealth subjects, regardless of race.!8 Arising a year after India’s
and Pakistan's independence, it marked an effort to consolidate relations with remaining
colonies and former colonies within the Commonwealth at a time when centrifugal
forces threatened loyalties to Britain and Commonwealth cohesion. The Act permitted
free migration and settlement for all citizens wishing to live and work in Britain—an
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 607

appealing prospect indeed for many people from underdeveloped economies at a time
when Britain was entering a period of full employment and gradually recovering from
the war. France, meanwhile, sought to defend its imperial status quo that had been se-
verely disrupted by war by renaming the French empire as the French Union in 1946
and inaugurating a new constitution that turned colonial subjects into Union citizens.
Colonies became ‘overseas departments’ (as was the case with Martinique, Guadeloupe,
and French Guiana in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean island of Réunion), ‘overseas
territories (Madagascar along with sub-Saharan African and Pacific colonies), or ‘asso-
ciated states’ (the five territories composing French Indochina). French Algeria main-
tained its preexisting juridical status as three departments of France until becoming
independent in 1962. Arabs and Berbers from Algeria, who had acquired the right to
migrate to the metropole in 1914, received French citizenship in 1947. Algeria consist-
ently sent by far the largest number of migrants to metropolitan France of any part of its
empire/Union, a flow France only tried to legally curb starting in the late 1960s."
Comparable citizenship redefinitions also emerged in the post-war Netherlands and
Portugal, again as attempts to preserve empires at a time when maintaining them had
become internationally controversial and precarious. After losing Indonesia, the Dutch
government introduced a new constitutional framework in 1954: the Statuut or Charter
of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.”° Intended to demonstrate that conventional colo-
nial relationships had been nobly surpassed by more equitable and consensual arrange-
ments, this made the Netherlands, Suriname on the northeast coast of South America,
and the West Indian islands of the Netherlands Antilles equal partners with a common
nationality and internal self-government. Like Britain's 1948 Nationality Act and
France's 1946 constitution, the Charter accorded a single nationality, giving Antilleans
and Surinamese (whose origins were largely African, Indian, and Javanese, reflecting
the territories’ history of African slavery and, in the case of Suriname, Asian indentured
labour) unrestricted opportunities to live and work in the European Netherlands. The
1950s also saw Portugal change its imperial nomenclature as it grew increasingly in-
sistent on maintaining its empire by denying its existence (and thus the validity of de-
colonization) in the face of international criticism. It recast its colonies in Africa and
Asia as ‘overseas provinces’ in 1951 and granted their entire population Portuguese citi-
zenship in 1961, regardless of race or birthplace. Making Africans and mixed-descent
mesticos officially Portuguese was a defensive shift meant as proof that the Portuguese
nation was a pluricontinental as well as a multiracial one where racial inequality was
nonexistent—in theory at least, ifcertainly not in reality.
In all four countries, these symbolic colour-blind legislative measures meant that co-
lonial, and later postcolonial, peoples who travelled to European metropoles were often
not technically ‘immigrants’ but rather internal migrants within the British empire
or Commonwealth, French Union, Kingdom of the Netherlands, or a Portuguese na-
tion that was transoceanic and discontinuous but—allegedly—one nation all the same.
As such, they were located within the same framework as Europeans and European-
descended repatriates discussed earlier—that is, until European governments changed
their entry policies either on account of, or in the wake of, decolonization, a topic to
tecsc anpetiaalenie.an-
ooautanen
608 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

which this chapter will return. In the meantime, legal provisions allowing migration
into late-colonial Western Europe created rapidly expanding ethnic minority popula-
tions after the 1940s, in some cases from places that initially remained under European
rule and in other instances from former colonies.
The British and French cases both demonstrate how decolonizations per se did
not necessarily alter migration policies towards inhabitants of Britain's empire/
Commonwealth and France’s overseas departments and territories or Algeria. One
contemporary study estimated that in 1960 there were 115,000 West Indians, 25,000
West Africans, and 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, most of whom had come
during the mid-19s50s as labourers within an expanding economy.” Their numbers also
included students and professionals, such as nurses from the West Indies and doctors
from India who proved integral to the functioning of the newly established National
Health Service within the emergent post-war welfare state. West Indians were the most
noticeable ‘coloured’ migrants in 1950s Britain, arriving at a time when these territories
remained under colonial rule (which only ended in Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962 and
in British Guiana in 1966, for example). Most British West African colonies achieved
independence in 1960, a transition India and Pakistan had already made in 1947.
Indian, Pakistani, and East African Asian migration to Britain became most prom-
inent after empire had ended but when British official prioritization of Commonwealth
ties continued to facilitate their passage. Its marked growth throughout the 1960s oc-
curred once India and Pakistan placed fewer obstacles in the way of prospective emi-
grants and Uganda and Kenya made it difficult, if not impossible, for their South Asian
populations to stay in postcolonial states dominated by African majorities. Migration,
moreover, rose exponentially once it became clear that Britain would terminate its
open-door policy for colonial and Commonwealth peoples, which came about fol-
lowing the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts and further legislation in
1971. These moves, which corresponded to the decreased domestic importance of the
Commonwealth ideal as a British political priority, began by placing limits on annual
entry numbers and ultimately ended primary migration altogether. The rush to ‘beat
the ban’ meant that Britain’s population of South Asian origin jumped to 112,000 in 1961
and 516,000 by 1971.”
France's largest non-European migrant group, as noted earlier, came from Algeria,
both before and after the end of Algérie francaise.”> By the time the FLN launched its
armed liberation struggle in 1954, circular migration patterns were already firmly
entrenched among thousands of Algerian men who came and went across the
Mediterranean as manual labourers. Their travels to and from metropolitan France
stemmed from the long-term havoc settler colonialism had wreaked upon indigenous
Algerian society. Land expropriation, chronic poverty, harsh taxation, and limited eco-
nomic prospects meant many Algerians lacked the means of subsistence without wages
earned in France and sent back to their families. War between 1954 and 1962 only in-
creased the disruption and impoverishment in North Africa that acted as ‘push’ factors,
while in France les trente glorieuses, the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic growth and
rising prosperity after 1945, meant that the plentiful industrial jobs on offer continued
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 609

to act as the main ‘pull. Decolonization in 1962 also did nothing to reduce the Algerian
presence in France, despite the fact that France no longer formally included its three
Algerian departments. Approximately 90,000 harkis (Algerian soldiers who had fought
on the French side) and their families fled to avoid retribution from the victorious FLN,
while labour migration not only continued unabated but increased even further. Like
Africans from other former French colonies, Algerians initially kept their right to free
circulation after independence.”* Ongoing underdevelopment in North Africa and the
toll taken by wartime destruction and French sabotage upon their departure made the
new Algerian government as desperate for the foreign exchange earnings from workers’
remittances as the families and villages migrants came from.
While the 211,000 Algerians residing in France in 1954 grew to approximately
350,000 by 1962, reached nearly 474,000 by 1968, neared 711,000 by 1975, and exceeded
805,000 in 1982, migrants heading to the metropole from other overseas departments
and territories also rose.” By the late 1990s, over 200,000 people from Martinique and
Guadeloupe—over a quarter of their largely African-descended populations—had re-
located to mainland France.”° Just as these islands never stopped being overseas depart-
ments, their inhabitants never lost French nationality or became ‘postcolonial: This was
not true of the West and Central Africans whose homelands had been part of the French
Union prior to decolonization in 1960 and whose peoples, like Algerians (together with
Moroccans and Tunisians), ultimately lost their legal right to French citizenship and
residence. Key shifts occurred first in 1968, when the government introduced quotas on
the number of Algerians allowed entry in a given year, and in 1974, when primary labour
migration from outside the European Economic Community was terminated. This did
not, however, mean that non-European immigration ground toa halt in 1974.7” Family
reunification in Europe gradually reshaped the demographics of existing minority
communities to include more women and children. Instability in sending countries ac-
counted for the rise of other nationalities long after restrictions had been implemented.
France's most marked increase in arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has
only occurred since the 1980s, when wars, political upheaval, and grinding poverty
across many parts of Africa enhanced France's (and other European countries’) ap-
peal as a promised land offering work and security.”* But as was also the case in Britain,
France's new official stance meant that countless new arrivals led a precarious existence
as undocumented illegal residents.
Ifthe drawn-out ‘moment’ of decolonization in and of itself did not produce an about-
face in British and French approaches to migration from their empires and former em-
pires, what prompted state decisions to reverse previously inclusive policies? Although
the need for workers during times of economic expansion and boom had been a crit-
ical factor behind the retention of migration and nationality rights (that not only per-
mitted the entry of colonial and postcolonial ethnic minorities but at times extended
to active labour recruitment initiatives overseas), the economic downturn in the 1970s
was not the driving force that instigated demands for change. First and foremost, it
was native concerns about racial and cultural difference, social cohesiveness, and mi-
grants’ supposed lack of assimilation—if not categoric inassimilability—that led to
610 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

increasingly vocal demands that the presence of minorities be limited, if not rolled back
via repatriation.”
Regardless of the imperial history that lay behind their presence in late colonial and
postcolonial Europe, many Europeans could not be persuaded that colonized or for-
merly colonized ethnic minorities had a legitimate claim to belong. Minorities typically
seemed not only distinct from European society but also culturally (and economically)
beneath the mainstream. Some migrants lived in isolation from the metropolitan ma-
jority, like the Algerians in bidonvilles (shantytowns) built up around cities like Paris and
Lyon that could offer newcomers low-level jobs but little in the way of decent housing.
As was also the case with West Indians and South Asians inhabiting dilapidated build-
ings in working-class British neighbourhoods, they became publicly associated with
urban decay, overcrowding, squalor, crime, and disease. When migrants competed
with working-class British and French for scarce housing, they were condemned for
‘invading’ poor areas, accelerating their downward spiral, and turning them into over-
whelmingly ‘coloured; ‘black; ‘Asian; or ‘Arab’ slums.”
Along with suffering intense housing and workplace discrimination, colonial and
postcolonial migrants (many of whom were initially young men) allegedly posed a
sexual threat. Mixed-race relationships were widely stigmatized, becoming emblematic
of how ‘coloured’ men had audaciously breached boundaries, crossing Europe's borders
and entering nations, neighbourhoods, homes, and white women’s bodies.” Algerian
men encountered by Abdelmalek Sayad, a leading sociologist, explained that ‘the worst
racism is the racism of the dance hall’ But ‘{e]ven at work, you can’t be anything but a
labourer; ... They've never seen a Kabyle foreman, an Algerian or an Arab boss ... our
place is in the immigrant jobs, as they put it, all the filthy jobs where you lose your health
and perhaps even your life’; in short, to the French, ‘there's always a frontier, you're not
the same as them.”
This regularly placed migrants’ self-perceptions at odds with views encountered in
Europe, as the experiences of educated West Indians in 1950s and 1960s Britain dem-
onstrate. Raised in colonial societies as native speakers of English where schools con-
tinually stressed that Britain was their ‘mother country’ life in England often shattered
illusions of belonging. As a student from Trinidad put it, West Indians might ‘feel that
they know the English. They expect a certain reciprocity which in the majority of cases is
non-existent. This is their first realization that they are different. Soon they are compli-
mented on the standard of their English. Very good for a foreigner!’
Social anthropologist Sheila Patterson concluded from her research in the 1960s that
entrenched beliefs in their role as ‘civilizers’ made the British ‘uneasy living with immi-
grants of races they are unused to treating as equals, writing of the ‘considerable con-
fusion and insecurity among all classes in Britain as the erosion of imperial power and
national prestige continues. Although it had become ‘necessary to adopt new attitudes
and to form new relationships with other nations and with former colonial dependants,
many seemed unwilling to do so, perhaps accounting for the seemingly wilful levels of
ignorance and disdain accorded to migrants’ alleged primitiveness, inferiority, and dis-
tance from British culture so often encountered.** A French researcher writing in 1973
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 611

felt similarly, emphasizing that ‘the French only accept foreign cultures with an air of
paternalism at best’, especially if non-European. ‘Not living “like us’, “those people” can
only be uncivilized, “savage” at worst (Maghrebis, Africans), since we alone are the car-
riers of civilization? In her view, ‘colonial propaganda remains present’ past the end of
empire, the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ having become transferred onto metropolitan
soil.*> Time and again, European self-distancing from (post)colonial migrants and re-
current refusals to accept their legitimacy as citizens, co-workers (let alone bosses),
neighbours, or spouses coexisted with portrayals of these groups as outsiders who cre-
ated social problems.
Although migrants’ supposed lack of integration or inassimilability was often de-
ployed as an excuse for condemning them, exclusionary agendas typically underpinned
Europeans’ insistence on distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them’ If Britain and France
ultimately retreated from earlier conceptions of citizenship of late-imperial vintage that
had extended overseas and across racial divides during the 1960s and 1970s, in Belgium
colonial peoples were never included to begin with. Before the Congo's independence,
Belgium had sought to maintain white superiority in Central Africa and avoid métissage
(racial mixing) at home by preventing all but a handful of Africans from taking advan-
tage of educational or work opportunities in Europe. Nor were Africans recruited as la-
bourers after 1945. Africans might count as Belgian subjects, but they were never turned
into citizens with the right to settle in the metropole. After decolonization, the numbers
of Congolese remained very low in Belgium, only rising slowly as political and economic
conditions in Africa deteriorated in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, people of Congolese
origin form a small fraction of Belgium's foreign-born or foreign-descended popu-
lation, the largest groups being from Moroccan, Turkish, Italian, and other southern
European backgrounds, most of whom came as industrial workers.*® Many live on the
margins of society and often the law, having arrived illegally or stayed after student visas
expired, with the categories of student, illegal migrant worker, and asylum seeker be-
coming porous and overlapping.
Approaches to ethnic minorities of imperial origins in the Netherlands and Portugal
reveal both similarities to and differences from these three cases. Migration rights
and citizenship affirmed by the 1954 Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands led
to expanding numbers of educated and then predominantly working-class peoples
travelling across the Atlantic, mainly from Suriname but later from the Antillean is-
lands.” This did not occur thanks to official efforts to recruit workers in prosperous
times of full employment; rather, most Surinamese came of their own initiative.
Similar to the Belgian example, Dutch employers and the state often preferred ‘guest
workers’ from the Mediterranean basin—southern Europeans, but especially Turks and
Moroccans—precisely because they lacked the protective privileges of citizenship and
could be readily dismissed if their labour was no longer needed. But economic stag-
nation and limited prospects in the Dutch Caribbean region made migration to the
‘mother country’ as appealing as it was to other West Indians who headed for Britain
from its colonies and Commonwealth or to metropolitan France from French overseas
departments.
612 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

nero Sit ene

Ultimately, the escalation of Europe-bound migration from Suriname became one
numbers of
of the most important determinants of its decolonization in 1975. As the
working class, they
Afro- and Indo-Surinamese settling in Dutch cities became heavily
of lan-
bore less resemblance than the educated classes to the European Dutch in terms

eon
Surinam ese—and
guage and culture. Like ethnic minorities in Britain and France, the
a social problem
the Afro-Surinamese above all—became conventionally construed as
Stereotyp es widely associ-
by politicians, in the media, and in the public imagination.
ion, and single-
ated them with petty criminality, hustling, drugs, pimping and prostitut
Anxiety about the social
parent families who allegedly abused Dutch welfare benefits.
in the 1960s and early 1970s made
and cultural consequences of Surinamese settlement
of the 1954 Charter.
many white Dutch eager to reconsider the inclusive stipulations
and the public
Concerned about the ‘mass exodus’ to their shores, Dutch officials
n dilemma, regardless
looked to decolonization as the solution to a perceived migratio
should remain part of the
of mixed views in Suriname about whether or not the territory
Kingdom of the Netherlands.**
however, curb mass mi-
Suriname’ independence—partly forced upon it—did not,
Indians and Pakistanis who
gration, as many white Dutch had hoped it would. Like
arrivals in the early 1960s,
hastened to Britain to ‘beat the ban’ on Commonwealth
independence would herald
Surinamese journeys skyrocketed as it became clear that
In little over a decade,
the end of unrestricted Dutch citizenship and settlement rights.
left, with 50,000 going
more than a third of Suriname’s population of less than 400,000
additional 30,000 arriving in 1980 as
to the Netherlands in 1974 and 1975 alone and an
who made the journey
the five-year transitional agreement was about to expire. Those
behind lost the rights they
maintained Dutch citizenship, while those who remained
is, they counted among
held under the Charter and became Surinamese—unless, that
nationality remained
the new nation’s small white population, whose hold on Dutch
Antilles who subsequently
largely intact.°? So did that of residents of the Netherlands
akin to that of
insisted on remaining part of the Kingdom, preferring to keep a status
into an un-
Martinique and Guadeloupe vis-a-vis France rather than follow Suriname
certain independence.
n flows from
Dutch efforts to halt colonial, postcolonial, and intra-national migratio
ironic con-
the West Indies thus largely backfired. In the case of Suriname, this was an
impermanent stays
sequence of new policies that helped turn previously cyclical and
Migrants
into permanent residence and thereby consolidate settled communities.
families
who had already come to the Netherlands knew that if they went back to their
likely to ar-
their chances of being able to return were low, and this made them more
postcolonial
range for relatives to join them instead—a development replicated across
-
Europe. As women and children became increasingly significant members of multigen
of cultures
erational minority groups, new questions arose concerning the adaptability
and identities after migration—both of the migrants themselves, their European-born
part.
or European-raised descendants, and the European nations of which they became
This chapter returns to this topic in its conclusion after first comparing Portugal's transi-
tion into a postcolonial, multicultural society with that of its neighbours.
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 613

In contrast to the Netherlands which pressured Suriname (if not its Antillean islands)
towards independence, Portugal’s long-tenacious hold on its ‘overseas provinces’ was
only severed once colonial wars brought down a dictatorship wedded to the conception
of Portugal as a nation that spanned continents and encompassed many races. As the
poorest and least developed country in Western Europe, Portugal had a strong trad-
ition of emigration rather than immigration. Over a tenth of its population left in the
1960s and 1970s, with the jobs available in booming countries like France, Germany,
and the Netherlands proving as economically attractive to impoverished Portuguese
as they were to Moroccans, Turks, and other groups.*° Mass departures along with the
need for Portuguese soldiers to fight African insurgencies nonetheless created an un-
accustomed labour shortage that was filled by arrivals from the Cape Verde islands and
other Portuguese-speaking Africans, who did similar jobs in the construction industry
and other sectors as the Portuguese themselves took at higher wages abroad.*! While
Portuguese emigrants were foreigners in France and other countries, newcomers from
Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique had counted as Portuguese citizens since 1961.
Their circumstances changed rapidly after the 1974 revolution, however: decolonization
in Africa immediately prompted a new nationality law in 1975 that restricted citizenship
to persons of Portuguese ancestry. This affirmed retornados’ Portugueseness while with-
drawing it from most Africans and Cape Verdeans, regardless of whether they lived in
Portugal or in a former colony.*”
No longer an empire that called itselfa pluricontinental nation, Portugal also impli-
citly ceased to be an assertively multiracial one. Although race was not specified as a
criterion for inclusion or exclusion, the emphasis on descent made it so to all intents and
purposes. This made Portugal similar to the Netherlands when it left Dutch nationality
open to Europeans in Suriname but not the Afro- or Indo-Surinamese majority, as well
as to Britain, where immigration legislation enacted in 1968 and 1971 reworked eligi-
bility around ‘patriality’—British birth or ancestry.* The link between race and nation-
ality that recurred in popular understandings that positioned non-whites as outsiders
who did not rightfully belong in Europe took new legal form, whether upon decolon-
ization in the Netherlands and Portugal or in the aftermath of empire in Britain and
France.** Yet in spite of Portugal's restrictions enacted in 1975 that were subsequently
reinforced by further legislation, far more minorities from its former colonies arrived in
the 1980s and 1990s than before, a scenario similar to the growing Francophone African
presence in France and Belgium during and after the same period. The state enforced its
migration policies inconsistently in ways that favoured the construction industry and
other economic sectors, where employers looked to low-paid and often illegally resident
workers from Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique as Portugal embarked on consoli-
dating itself as a democracy and developing its backward infrastructure.
Describing the Africans who lost French citizenship after decolonization, Frederick
Cooper stresses that ‘the definition of the “immigrant” in France ... is not a given, but
a product of history’ Africans ‘had become immigrants; experiencing a withdrawal
of status and rights also suffered by postcolonial Africans, Asians, and West Indians
elsewhere that did not extend to groups like the pieds-noirs, retornados, and others
614 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

accorded the privileges of ‘repatriates.*° By contrast, the Europeanness of the European-

descended—especially of those who were white, not mixed-race—was rarely called into
question, even for those born in former colonies whose first trips ‘home’ may only have
occurred when empires receded. Some repatriates and their children, moreover, not
only benefitted from their inclusion as nationals but also actively sought to deny the
same status to ‘Arabs’ or other groups descended from formerly colonized as opposed
to formerly colonizing peoples. The noticeable pied-noir presence within the far right,
anti-immigration Front National in France provides only the most visible example of the
political form that repatriates’ self-distancing from the immigrant ‘other’ took.*” This
phenomenon was also discernible in countries like the Netherlands where, several dec-
ades after their arrival, the Indisch Dutch were favourably compared—by wider society
and by themselves—to other migrant groups as far better integrated.** Significantly,
those accused of falling furthest short were not the Afro-Surinamese, Indo-Surinamese,
or Antilleans with Dutch colonial antecedents, but Moroccans, Turks, and their
children—peoples who arrived mainly as labourers from places not only disconnected
from the Netherlands’ history of empire, but whose outsider status was also closely tied
to being Muslim.*?

CONCLUSION

Decades after becoming transformed by unprecedented levels of late colonial and

postcolonial migration, early twenty-first-century Western Europe’s population and
cultures are characterized by what Steven Vertovec calls ‘super-diversity.°° While
migration from colonies into the specific metropoles that had governed them ac-
counted for much of Europe's cultural and ethnic mix, it coexisted with other global
and intra-European flows, like those that took Moroccans not only to France (which
once held Morocco as its protectorate) but also to the Netherlands and Belgium, the
postcolonial Congolese not just to Belgium but to France, and the Portuguese to France
and Germany. These provide only several of countless examples of human mobility and
resettlements—some temporary, some permanent—occurring since European em-
pires declined, collapsed, and Europe's own integration process gathered pace. Many
Western European cities, neighbourhoods, and nations are now strikingly cosmopol-
itan and multicultural in ways once unimaginable for most people. Over time, many
people from mainstream white society have not only developed a greater acceptance
of diversity but responded enthusiastically to some of its most publicly prominent
cultural manifestations. European youth cultures, popular music, and diets have
changed radically over the past fifty years, having made space for South Asian ‘curry’
in Britain, Indonesian dishes in the Netherlands, and musical fusions involving reggae,
rai, bhangra, rap, hip hop, and other influences performed and circulated across
postcolonial Europe by minorities who trace their origins to the West Indies, South
Asia, North, West and Central Africa, and beyond.
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 615

If postcolonial and other migrations and their ongoing cultural resonances have
remade many European countries, however, not all Europeans have accepted these
transformations or view the people most closely associated with them as fully or
unconditionally European. Alongside aging newcomers who have settled since
the 1940s are their second-, third-, and at times fourth-generation descendants,
European-born and almost always qualifying as citizens. Rather than being recog-
nized as British, French, Belgian, Dutch, or Portuguese, ethnic minority migrants’
children might still be ‘second-generation immigrants —a non-sequitur and a literal
impossibility to be sure, yet a formulation that aptly conveys still-prevalent under-
standings that consign them to a status as permanent outsiders who either never
can fully belong or never should. As Ahmed Boubeker has written of contemporary
France, ‘(t]he foreigner is no longer one who comes from elsewhere, but rather one
who is permanently reproduced within the social body. ... Like a social or ethnic
partition of the hexagon [France], there is a radical rupture between recognized citi-
zens and second-class ones.*! Many minorities in other countries would find this
view depressingly familiar.
Together with multicultural European realities and the spread of what Paul Gilroy de-
scribes as ‘convivial’ multiculturalism, rejection of and backlashes against diversity and
multiculturalism remain recurrent.** Some postcolonial identities are now widely con-
sidered unproblematic, like the ‘harmless identities’ of today’s Indisch Dutch and their
descendants whose integration in the Netherlands has long been celebrated as a success
story.> Yet minorities continue to experience racism alongside social and cultural ex-
clusion, with discrimination and hostility often (but never invariably) becoming predi-
cated on cultural difference rather than colour.** Among the forms of ethnic cultural
specificity that remain most worrying today are those of religion, and none more so
than Islam.» Since the international ascent of Islamic fundamentalism and radicalism
since the 1970s but already apparent earlier, Muslims—whether they hail from within a
given nation’s former empire (like France’s Algerian- and Moroccan-descended popu-
lations or Britain's Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities), or from outside
it (as is the case with peoples of Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds in Belgium and the
Netherlands)—have become subjected to the most fear and intolerance by far. Muslims’
contentious place within postcolonial European nations attests to the ongoing divi-
sions drawn not just between Europeans and ‘others’ but among minorities themselves,
peoples whose origins and whose re-forged identities after migration defy summary
description.**

NOTES

1. Topics discussed throughout this chapter receive further treatment in Elizabeth

Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), Chs. 6-8.
2. Bouda Etemad, “Europe and Migration after Decolonization’, Journal of European Economic
History 27, no. 3 (1998): 457-470.
616 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

2 Comparative treatments of European (and European-descended) repatriations in-

clude Jean-Louis Miége and Colette Dubois, eds., L’Europe retrouvée: les migra-
tions de la décolonisation (Paris: Harmattan, 1994); Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe's
Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003); Caroline Elkins
and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects,
Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), Part III; Buettner, Europe after
Empire, Ch. 6.
. Ceri Peach, “Postwar Migration to Europe: Reflux, Influx, Refuge’, Social Science
Quarterly 78, no. 2 (1997): 271-273; Michael Twaddle’s contribution to Miége and Dubois,
LEurope retrouvée, 45-46.
. Elizabeth Buettner, “‘We Don’t Grow Coffee and Bananas in Clapham Junction You
Know!’: Imperial Britons Back Home’, in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers and Expatriates:
Britons Over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 302-328.
. Pierre Salmon’s contribution to Miége and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, 191-212; Guy
Vanthemsche, La Belgique et le Congo: Limpact de la colonie sur la métropole, new and
rev. ed. (Brussels: Le Cri Editions, 2010), 318, 260-261; Catherine Hoskyns, The Congo
Since Independence: January 1960-December 1961 (London: Oxford University Press,
1965), 89-104, 122-124; Pedro Monaville, “La crise congolaise de juillet 1960 et le sexe de la
décolonisation”, Sextant 25 (2008): 87-102.
. Colette Dubois’ contribution to Miége and Dubois, L’Europe retrouvée, 92; Jean-Jacques
Jordi and William B. Cohen's chapters in Smith, Europe's Invisible Migrants, 61-74 and
129-145; Jean-Jacques Jordi, De lexode a lexil: Rapatriés et pieds-noirs en France: Lexemple
marseillais, 1954-1992 (Paris: Harmattan, 1993); Benjamin Stora, La gangréne et loubli: La
mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Persee, 1991).
. R. Pena Pires et al., Os Retornados: Um Estudo Sociografico (Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos
para o Desenvolvimento, 1984). In English, see especially Stephen C. Lubkemann, “The
Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return”, Diaspora 11, no. 2 (2002): 189-213,
and Lubkemann'’s contributions to Smith, Europe’ Invisible Migrants, 75-93, and Elkins
and Pedersen, Settler Colonialism, 257-270.
. Gert Oostindie, Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating,
Silencing (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), Chs. 3 and 4; Herman
Obdeijn’s chapter in Miége and Dubois, l'Europe retrouvée, 70.
10, John Schuster, “The State and Post-War Immigration into the Netherlands: The
Racialization and Assimilation of Indonesian Dutch’, European Journal of Intercultural
Studies 3, no. 1 (1992): 47-58; Guno Jones, “Dutch Politicians, the Dutch Nation and the
Dynamics of Post-Colonial Citizenship”, in Ulbe Bosma, ed., Post-colonial Immigrants
and Identity Formations in the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2012), 36-38.
ll. Wim Willems’ contribution to Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 33-59; Wim Willems,
De Uittocht uit Indié: 1945-1995 (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2001); Ulbe Bosma, Terug uit
de kolonién: Zestig jaar postkoloniale migranten en hun organisaties (Amsterdam: B.
Bakker, 2009).
12, Lizzy van Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed: Zestig jaar strijd om cultuur en identiteit
(Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2008); Andrew Goss, “From Tong-Tong to Tempo Doeloe:
Eurasian Memory Work and the Bracketing of Dutch Colonial History, 1957-1961",
Indonesia 70 (2000): 15-22.
. J. Ex, Adjustment After Migration (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 42, 53.
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 617

14. Andrea L. Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and
France (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2006); Stora, La gangréne; Joélle
Hureau, La mémoire des pieds-noirs (Paris: Hachette, 2001).
15. Ester Lee, I Was Born in Africa (Atlanta, GA: Minerva, 1999), 75.
16. Sarah De Mul, “Nostalgia for Empire: “Tempo Doeloe’ in Contemporary Dutch Literature”,
Memory Studies 3, no. 4 (2010): 423-428; Paul Bijl, “Dutch Colonial Nostalgia Across
Decolonisation’, Journal of Dutch Literature 4, no. 1 (2013): 128-149. On Britain, see
Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), conclusion; Elizabeth Buettner, “Cemeteries, Public Memory and
Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, History & Memory 18, no. 1 (2006): 5-42;
Buettner, ““We Don't Grow Coffee’”. For a comparative overview of memories of empire in
postcolonial Europe, see Buettner, Europe after Empire, Ch. 9.
17. Jan Hollants van Loocke, De la colonie 4 la diplomatie: une carriére en toutes latitudes
(Paris: Harmattan, 1999), 57-58.
18. Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), Chs. 5-7; Randall Hansen, Citizenship and
Immigration in Post-war Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 2.
19. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking
of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 39-43; Frederick Cooper,
Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chs. 2-3; Janine Ponty, Limmigration dans
les textes: France, 1789-2002 (Paris: Belin, 2003), Chs. 6-7.
20. Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a
Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), Ch. s.
21. Donald Wood, “A General Survey’, in J. A. G. Griffith and H. H. Long, eds., Coloured
Immigrants in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 9. On Britain's
Commonwealth migration, see Wendy Webster, “The Empire Comes Home:
Commonwealth Migration to Britain’, in Andrew Thompson, ed., Britain’s Experience of
Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122-160.
22. Ceri Peach, “Demographics of BrAsian Settlement, 1951-2001”, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra, and
S. Sayyid, eds., A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co.,
2006), 168-181.
23. Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997); Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient dAlgérie: Limmigration algérienne en
France, 1912-1992 (Paris: Feyard, 1992).
24. Cooper, Citizenship, 415, 423-429.
25. Ponty, L’immigration, 363-364.
26. Claude-Valentin Marie, “Les Antillais en France: une nouvelle donne’, Hommes et
Migrations 1237 (2002): 26-27.
27. Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: Laventure d'une politique de immigration
1938-1991 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 69-87; Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation:
Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992), 46-53;
Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society,
2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), Ch. s.
28. Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism
(Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2007), 26.
618 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

29. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 77; Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration:
Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998).
30. Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington,
IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004), Ch. 3; Tyler Stovall, “From Red Belt to Black
Belt: Race, Class, and Urban Marginality in Twentieth-Century Paris’, in Sue Peabody
and Tyler Stovall, eds., The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 351-369; Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard’s chapter in
Benjamin Stora and Emile Temime, Immigrances: L'immigration en France au XXe siécle
(Paris: Hachette, 2007), 67-96; Jim House and Andrew Thompson, “Decolonisation,
Space and Power: Immigration, Welfare and Housing in Britain and France, 1945-74’,
in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013); Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939-1965 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), Ch. 6; James Proctor, Dwelling Places: Postwar Black
British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), Ch. 2; Elizabeth
Buettner, “‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth
Immigration in Early 1960s Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42,
no. 4 (2014): 710-740.
31. Webster, Englishness and Empire, Ch. 6; Elizabeth Buettner, ““‘Would You Let Your
Daughter Marry a Negro?’: Race and Sex in 1950s Britain’, in Philippa Levine and Susan R.
Grayzel, eds., Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 219-237.
32. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48-49.
33. Elliott Bastien, “The Weary Road to Whiteness and the Hasty Retreat into Nationalism”,
in Henri Tajfel and John L. Dawson, eds., Disappointed Guests: Essays by African, Asian,
and West Indian Students (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 48.
34. Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Study of West Indians in London (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1965), 210-211.
35. Juliette Minces, Les travailleurs étrangers en France: enquéte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 407.
36. Anne Cornet, “Les Congolais en Belgique aux XIXe et XXe siécles”, in Anne Morelli, ed.,
Histoire des étrangers et de l'immigration en Belgique de la préhistoire 4 nos jours (Brussels:
Charleroi, 2004), 377-386; Mayoyo Bitumba Tipo-Tipo, Migration Sud/Nord: Levier
ou Obstacle? Les Zairois en Belgique (Brussels: Institut Africain-CEDAF, 199s), 89-98;
Vanthemsche, La Belgique et le Congo, 94-96, 319-320.
37- Overviews include Herman Obdeijn and Marlou Schrover, Komen en gaan: Immigratie en
emigratie in Nederland vanaf 1550 (Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2008), Ch. 6; Leo Lucassen and
Jan Lucassen, Winnaars en verliezers: Een nuchtere balans van vijfhonderd jaar immigratie
(Amsterdam: B. Bakker, 2011); Hans van Amersfoort and Mies van Niekerk, “Immigration
as a Colonial Inheritance: Post-Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945-2002”,
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32, no. 3 (2006): 323-346; Bosma, Post-colonial
Immigrants,
38. Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 103, 177-200.
39. Ricky van Oers, Betty de Hart, and Kees Groenendijk, “The Netherlands” in Rainer
Baubéck, Eva Ersboll, Kees Groenendijk, and Harald Waldrauch, eds., Acquisition and
Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European Countries, Vol. 2: Country Analyses
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 401-402.
 POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS TO EUROPE 619

40. Caroline B. Brettell, “Ihe Emigrant, the Nation, and the State in Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Portugal: An Anthropological Approach’, Portuguese Studies
Review 2, no. 2 (1993): 51-65.
Al. Luis Batalha, The Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal: Colonial Subjects in a Postcolonial
World (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004).
42. Rui Manuel Moura Ramos, “Migratory Movements and Nationality Law in Portugal’,
in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Towards a European Nationality: Citizenship,
Immigration and Nationality Law in the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2001), 217.
43. Ann Dummett, “Britain’, in Baubéck et al., Acquisition and Loss of Nationality, Vol. 2,
561-568.
44. Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and
Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Chris Waters, ““Dark Strangers’ in
Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963”, Journal of British Studies
36 (1997): 207-238.
45. Ana Paula Beja Horta, Contested Citizenship: Immigration Politics and Grassroots Migrants’
Organizations in Post-colonial Portugal (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2004);
Martin Eaton, “Foreign Residents and Illegal Immigrants in Portugal’, International
Journal of Intercultural Research 22, no. 1 (1998): 49-66.
46. Cooper, Citizenship, 445, 442.
47. Emmanuelle Comtat, Les pieds-noirs et la politique: Quarante ans aprés le retour
(Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009), Ch. 5; John Veugelers, “Ex-Colonials, Voluntary
Associations, and Electoral Support for the Contemporary Far Right’, Comparative
European Politics 3 (2005): 408-431.
48. Van Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed, 149-150. It has been suggested that far-right Dutch
politician Geert Wilders is partly descended from Indonesian Dutch Jews. See Lizzy van
Leeuwen, “Wreker van zijn Indische grootouders: De politieke roots van Geert Wilders”,
De Groene Amsterdammer 36, 2 September 2009.
49. Oostindie, Postcolonial Netherlands, 15-16, 43-47; Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx,
eds., Immigrant Integration: The Dutch Case (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000); Leo
Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, “The Strange Death of Dutch Tolerance: The Timing and
Nature of the Pessimist Turn in the Dutch Migration Debate’, Journal of Modern History
87, no. 1 (2015): 72-101.
50. Steven Vertovec, “Super-diversity and Its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6
(2007): 1024-1054.
51. Ahmed Boubeker, “Le ‘creuset francais, ou la légende noire de l'intégration’, in Pascal
Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La société
francaise au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2005), 188-189.
52. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004);
Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf, eds., The Multiculturalism Backlash: European
Discourses, Policies and Practices (London: Routledge, 2010); Elizabeth Buettner, “‘Going
for an Indian’: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’,
Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 865-901.
53. Esther Captain, “Harmless Identities: Representations of Racial Consciousness among
Three Generations [of] Indo-Europeans’, Thamyris/Intersecting 27 (2014): 60; Van
Leeuwen, Ons Indisch erfgoed.
620 ELIZABETH BUETTNER

54- Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,
Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 21.
55- Thomas Deltombe, Lislam imaginaire: La construction médiatique de l'islamophobie
en France, 1975-2005 (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2005); Joan Wallach Scott, The
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and Others: From ‘Race’ to ‘Faith’, in Vertovec and Wessendorf, eds., Multiculturalism
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56. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 442-451.