What — and Who — is “ European ” in the Postcolonial EU ? Inclusions and Exclusions in the European Parliament ’ s House of European History

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What -and who -is 'European
Pöttering's initiative moved forward in fits and starts, with all funding coming from the European Parliament (ep). Once appointed, the heh's Board of Trustees, 'Committee of Experts' of historians and curators, and the Academic Project Team appeared eager to limit its public exposure as much as possible. forum

Emphases and Controversies
It is not difficult to guess why, for critical perspectives greatly outnumbered neutral (let alone enthusiastic) reporting when the proposed museum did cross the media's radar screen. After the initial 2007 announcement the heh received sporadic press attention at best in the Netherlands, most of it highlighting the views of detractors, both Dutch and international, and all of it reflecting scepticism if not outright hostility. Journalists looked to Dutch meps from parties ranging from GroenLinks to D66 to the pvv to provide sneering verdicts about 'Pöttering's mausoleum' that was described, by turns, as unnecessary, risibly behind schedule, 'a hobby of few Brussels gentlemen', and nothing more than a pro-eu propaganda exercise favouring further integration. 4 Commentators incessantly honed in on the costs after the financial crisis took hold from 2008 onwards. Exceeding €55 million by the time it opened, it had already been condemned as fiscally irresponsible and yet another symptom of the eu's democratic deficit. 'The fact that a million-euro project like a museum is not even debated in times of austerity shows just how much the majority of those in Parliament have become untethered from reality', Trouw reported in 2011. 5 Or, as the Elsevier Weekblad put it, 'the House of European History will more likely call to mind the eu's wastefulness than its beneficial effects '. 6 Attitudes about the museum and attitudes about the European Union seemed inseparable as well as a product of their times, and so too was the heh in and of itself. Pöttering's initiative was announced in the wake of momentous developments across the eu. France as well as the Netherlands had rejected the European Constitution only two years before in referendums  Bound to be contentious at the best of times -particularly for those whose minds were clearly made up long before seeing the result -let alone  Strike Support Fund) on loan from the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (iisg). Because it 'echoed job losses in many Western European countries', the miners' strike 'provoked a large wave of solidarity' also seen in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, the caption notes. Dutch engagement with a British event constituted just one example of many international phenomena.
Even something as seemingly singular and iconic as a 1947 Dutch edition of Anne Frank's diary appears in the heh not solely as a means of commemorating the most famous Dutch victim of Nazi concentration camps, but because it has come to illuminate the terrors of Nazi wartime occupation and the Holocaust for Jews throughout Europe for the millions of international readers it has reached ever since. Frank's diary prepares the visitor for what lies at the crux of the museum, namely Europe's twentiethcentury descent into totalitarianism, war and mass death, followed by its hard road to recovery and selective engagements with this brutal past after 1945.
As other contributors to this forum explore in further depth, its approach to the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the Soviet Union during and after Stalin has proven its most controversial aspects, with the integration of Eastern European post-communist countries as eu member states matched here by the integration of Eastern European narratives and memories. As these foci suggest, Europe's West and East form the center of gravity in many heh displays, with one of the consequences being that its North and South are rendered more peripheral. 13 Their coverage also does not approach the level of attention devoted to the history of the European Economic Community/ European Union itself.
To its immense credit, the heh does not shy away from controversial themes, including those concerning the eu. Its 'Milestones of European Integration' exhibits succeed in bringing the eu's own history to life far more effectively than the vast majority of dry scholarly accounts on the subject.

The Presence and Absence of Colonial and Global Histories and Peoples
Alongside the history of nationalism and militarism that led Europe into two world wars, totalitarian regimes, the Holocaust, the Gulag and the Cold War, so too is Europe's global involvement in slavery and colonialism granted space in the permanent collection. Indeed, Europe's entangled history with the rest of the world was given critical and insightful attention in ways that many observers had not anticipated during the extended planning period.
The heh explicitly addresses the racist, exploitative, violent and militaristic aspects of European imperialism, particularly as they concern the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Statesmen's signatures approving the partition of Africa at the close of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference; images of slavery and anti-slavery; scientific instruments used to measure skulls and justify racial hierarchies; a machine gun; a French school atlas teaching children that 'colonialism and national "progress" were one and the same'; a chicotte forum Rubber and photographs that exposed its abuses. These and many other items are impressively displayed with explanatory texts which make no effort to minimise European self-interest and brutality. Moreover, colonial commodities extracted for Europeans' benefit and marketed with racist imagery -including a Dutch Korff cacao box -illustrate how objects and mentalities of imperial origins travelled back to Europe, filling museums and playing a transformative role in popular culture and the arts. This is shown as another aspect of European history shared across national borders, apparent both in countries that had large overseas empires of their own and those that did not, as a Swedish coffee box replete with colonial motifs exemplifies.  In its current form, the heh devotes so little attention to the end of Europe's overseas empires in its postwar exhibits that visitors might be forgiven if they left thinking either that colonialism had been over long before the eec began, or that colonialism had never ended at all. They will not have learned, for example, that Algeria, legally defined not as a colony Empire in reshaping both Europe itself and European empires overseas from the nineteenth century onward is also ignored. Before its ultimate collapse after the First World War, it gradually lost hold over much of the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. As such, it was not just many eu member states in Southeastern Europe that grew out of former Ottoman territory in the modern era but also pivotal parts of the British, French and Italian empires that spanned the Mediterranean up until France finally withdrew from Algeria in 1962. Despite the inseparable histories of Europe and the (ex-)Ottoman Empire, the long-proverbial 'sick man of Europe' was rendered insufficiently European for the heh.
To return to several of the questions posed near the entrance of the permanent collection, namely 1) 'What is Europe?' and 2) 'Where does Europe begin and where does it end?', the implicit answers provided by the heh would seem to be 1) 'Not Turkey', and 2) 'At Greece's and Bulgaria's borders with Turkey' -the borders of today's eu. Excluding Turkey from European history sends a strong message about Turkey's awkward status as a prospective eu member state that now has a decades-long history of its own. With the former Soviet Bloc and post-Soviet Russia together with Turkey having long functioned as Europe's closest 'Others', the museum's strong emphasis on the former makes its neglect of the latter all the more striking. As Thomas Risse writes of the eu's Eastern enlargement, 'it was never contested that Central Eastern Europe belonged to Europe and had a legitimate right to eu membership' after the collapse of communism. 'In the case of Turkey, this is much more controversial', not only due to human rights questions and the rule of law but also on account of exclusions predicated on geography, culture 19 On related issues, see Risse, A Community of Europeans?,6,78,199,[210][211][212]Kaiser,'Limits of Cultural Engineering'. whatand whois 'european' in the postcolonial eu? 145 buettner unemployment migrants suffered and how economic crisis 'led to a drastic reduction in immigration policies in countries that had made extensive use of foreign labour in the 1950s and 1960s'.
Although examples like this are welcome additions to the heh's collection, they are nevertheless too few to provide an adequate account of the nature of postwar arrivals and settlement. 20 They neglect to mention that many migrants to Western European colonising countries arrived as citizens with rights thanks to policies introduced after the Second World War that had the intention of soldering European metropoles and their empires togetherpolicies subsequently rolled back from the 1960s onwards once decolonisation intervened. However much European countries may have restricted legal entry and residence for many wanting to come after laws changed, this did not prevent millions who were already present from remaining and rebuilding family lives in diaspora once relatives could join them in Europe. Others who lacked citizenship may have arrived as 'guest workers' from Turkey, Morocco or other countries, but they too often became permanent residents and eventually gained citizenship despite the range of obstacles thrown in their path. Yet by stressing only the 'drastic reduction in immigration' and showing migrants being expelled, however, the heh stops short of illuminating the long-term rootedness of millions whose settlement history commonly extends to two or more generations, and who count as both citizens of the nations they live in and as eu nationals-whether or not they are popularly accepted as such.
The ways that black, Asian, Turkish, Maghrebi, and other intercontinental migrants and their European-born descendants have transformed Europe from within and rendered it increasingly multicultural sadly receive no attention in the heh. In Étienne Balibar's influential account, the 'irreversible phenomenon of hybridization and multiculturalism now transforming Europe' is transnational in ways that easily fit two of the museum's three criteria for inclusion, namely in that they are 'events and processes' that 'expanded across Europe' -or certainly substantial portions of it -and 'are relevant until today'. As Balibar continues, this 'started with specific, reciprocal ties between former metropolises and their former empires (France and Northern and Western Africa, Britain and India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, the Netherlands and Indonesia), but is now quite generalised as a pattern of interaction between Europe as such and its "exterior"', meaning forum foreign labour in the 1950s and 1960s' that it implies ground to a halt and its sensitive treatment of the current refugee crisis that has reached new levels since 2015, the visitor is presented with a Europe that to all intents and purposes is completely white and secular. In this vision of Europe, the postwar migration flows highlighted and celebrated are those that take place between eu countries connected by open borders, not those penetrating the eu from without. By the same token, the growing national and linguistic diversity within the expanding eec/eu that the museum places at centre stage is not matched by due attention to ethnic and religious differences. 22 In this reading, because they do not fulfil the first criterion for what the museum sets out to cover by virtue of not having 'originated in Europe', millions of people ranging from longstanding eu citizens to refugees who recently risked their lives to illegally cross the Mediterranean become collectively portrayed as 'in' Europe but not 'of' Europe, as Stuart Hall memorably phrased it. 23 Curatorial choices, in sum, risk lending legitimacy to the exclusionary agendas so prevalent at both national and transnational European levels.

Conclusions
What the heh's current permanent exhibition offers, in short, is a contested transnational and an incomplete global history of modern Europe. The museum is to be commended for gathering together a fascinating range of artefacts, including many rarely seen in conventional museum displays, and presenting them in a novel way that poses provocative questions and resists standard nation-centred foci. This in and of itself makes a visit to what is a stunningly renovated art deco-era building well worthwhile. Moreover, it deserves praise for its engagement with a number of fraught controversies still raging today, not simply those concerning totalitarianism, the Second World War, the Holocaust/Shoah and the legacy of communism in Central and Eastern Europe but also the divided responses to the European Union itself.
The heh team could easily build on these foci to encourage visitors to reflect further on its core subject matter and move beyond it. Devoting more attention to the presence of Algerians and the Algerian War itself in early 1960s metropolitan France, to name just one possibility, would help the museum better fulfil another of its stated ambitions, that of 'taking the wider global context into account'. 26 It presently does this selectively in the ways explored above, as well as through a section on the top floor devoted to 'Europe as seen from abroad'. Yet to fully achieve this aim would require rethinking its emphasis on 'events and processes which have originated in Europe' as the main qualification for inclusion. Taking on board not only 'events and processes' but also peoples and cultures originating from beyond Europe as equally crucial to Europe's past, present, and future would open the door to alternative points of view, such as Frantz Fanon's. On what grounds might Europe in today's globalised world be understood as 'literally the creation of the Third World', as Fanon provocatively proposed during the age of decolonisation? 27 Urging museumgoers to grapple with this argument would make a trip to the heh even more rewarding than it already is.