9.1. (De/Post)Colonial Memories

The study examines how Belarus employs postcolonial narratives and historical memory in its strategy of migration instrumentalization against the European Union. The main research question is: How does the Belarusian regime manipulate colonial tropes and anti-Western discourses to undermine Europe's security, moral authority, and identity – and how do EU and Polish responses inadvertently reproduce colonial patterns of thinking about "others"? This strategy not only undermines EU security but also erodes democratic values of pluralism and inclusion by reinforcing populist narratives as disinformation, challenging the European democratic order. The analysis relies on qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of official political statements, media coverage, and EU institutional communications regarding the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border from 2021 to 2025. The theoretical framework integrates postcolonial perspectives (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak) with critical security studies and securitization theory from the Copenhagen School (Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver) and Paris School (Didier Bigo). The analysis reveals that Belarus invokes anticolonial narratives and "reversed guilt" rhetoric, portraying the West as a neocolonial aggressor and moral hypocrite, thereby legitimizing migrant instrumentalization as symbolic retaliation. Drawing on Kelly Greenhill's concept of coercive engineered migration, it highlights the narrative dimension: the regime exploits postcolonial tropes of "anticolonial resistance" against the West to deepen the EU trust crisis. Meanwhile, EU and Polish responses – based on border militarization and dehumanizing metaphors – reinforce binary divisions of "civilization" and "barbarism," enhancing the strategy's effectiveness. In conclusion, Europe's democratic resilience requires not only military tools but also reflective memory work and strategic communication to counter manipulations rooted in colonial schemas, fostering inclusive democratic identity and mitigating disinformation in the social media era.

This paper examines how memories of colonialism and anticolonialism are invoked and negotiated within the European Union’s evolving memory politics. Although recent European Parliament resolutions have begun to recognize colonialism as part of Europe’s dark legacy, the Union’s dominant mnemonic framework continues to prioritize the memory of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes while largely neglecting colonial violence and struggles against imperial domination. The paper addresses this gap by analyzing how colonial and anticolonial memories are expressed in parliamentary debates within the European Parliament and in the national legislatures of Croatia, Cyprus, Malta, and Slovenia, all of which have historical or symbolic connections to the Non-Aligned Movement. Through discourse analysis of plenary debates, the paper develops a typology of colonial memory that distinguishes between supranational and national invocations. It explores how these memories shape contemporary EU memory politics. By recovering the forgotten legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement and its tradition of anticolonial solidarity between Europe and the Global South, the paper contributes to a more inclusive understanding of the continent’s past. It advances scholarship in four ways: first, by promoting a transnational perspective in memory studies; second, by expanding comparative inquiry into smaller and semi-peripheral states; third, by highlighting parliaments as underexplored actors in the field of memory; and fourth, by extending the concept of mnemonic nonalignment beyond the post-Yugoslav context. In doing so, the paper shows how Europe’s anticolonial pasts have been marginalized within institutional memory, and how their recovery can foster a more balanced and globally aware approach to EU memory politics.

The transnational turn in memory studies highlights the importance of exploring memories that transcend national boundaries in multiple ways and dimensions. While the ‘traveling’ of memory seems to be an inevitable trend in the present globalised and mediatised era, certain histories naturally lend themselves to transnational remembering. Defying historiographical trends that for decades have privileged the national sphere, the study of the colonial legacy in the present time is inevitably concerned with the transnational dimension of remembering. At the same time, as has been widely discussed, colonial histories are often disconnected and displaced in European societies, and mnemonic narratives are still frequently Western-dominated. This paper engages with questions revolving around the relationship between transnational memory work and colonial histories by focusing on the memorialisation of the deportation and imprisonment of Ethiopian citizens in Italy during the Fascist period. Upon invading the sovereign and independent state of Ethiopia in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s regime implemented a brutal repression of local resistance. In 1937, as a reprisal for an attempt on the Ethiopian Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, the Fascists deported 282 Ethiopian citizens to the Asinara island, a penal colony off the Sardinian coast—an island within an island. The memory of this event has remained quiescent and disconnected in a country that, like most of Europe, has a troubled relationship with its colonial past. Yet, over the past two years, visual and performative memory work by Ethiopian actors has rescued this colonial history from oblivion. By exploring such multi-dimensional memory work, this paper highlights the potential of transnational remembrance to address the shortcomings of Eurocentric colonial revisionism. Additionally, the paper interrogates the potential of the island space to engender transnational memory work that defies such revisionist tendencies, while also investigating the limitations of islandness in shaping national and European narratives.