ABSTRACT
The recent publication of the Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Huggan 2013) is a timely endeavour. The contributors have every reason to present postcolonial studies as the master narrative of the twenty-first century. While critical self-reflections underline the concept’s academic sustainability, a chapter on Europe is the most unexpected part of the book. As stated by its author, ‘no handbook on postcolonial studies has addressed Europe as a region of the “postcolonial world”’ (Schulze-Engler 2013: 681). Indeed, in contemporary research literature, Europe is everywhere and nowhere, although Dipesh Chakrabarty’s suggestion to provincialize Europe had transferred Europe as a negative projection into a key element of the postcolonial discourse. Within these debates, a difficult overlap of political claims and historical references has surfaced – on the one hand, Schulze-Engler refers to a rich political discourse about a new, hybrid and multicultural Europe that celebrates the creativity of polysemantic borders; on the other, in these reflections the European past is condensed into an apparently almost uniform entity in two versions. One follows a longue durée concept that essentializes the notion of the West in the apparent unity of 2000 years of Christian-based culture. The second version focuses on colonialism as Europe’s crucial, unsolved task. This argument points out that colonial crimes were not punished in the way in which the Nuremberg trials set an end to a fascist regime (Schulze-Engler 2013: 671). In addition, the postcolonial approach is sometimes reduced to the metaphor of ‘Provincializing Europe’, which is in fact less anti-European than a critical reflection about modernization theories as analytical tools. The suggestion of ‘coming to terms with a contemporary Europe’ as a helping hand for providing a democratic European future through postcolonial reflections offered a reasonable message, at least before the European Union (EU) came strongly under political pressure. The refugee question and the UK deciding to leave the EU in 2016 both have urgently enhanced the need for a conceptual reframing of Europe as a concept in and outside the EU, while also unveiling a gap in the scholarly debate. Until now, transculturality has had an exclusively academic profile. It is rarely discussed as a political rationale that challenges the imagined community of the nation and, in lieu of an invention of tradition, offers a vision where social coherence is based on diversity rather than a presumed cultural, linguistic and political authenticity. The lack of a political message designates a remarkable difference with other turns in historiographical contexts. New inventions of traditions used 96to have a political subtext that surfaced in the academic disputes such as the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute), in the Marxist historiographies, in the confrontation between the history of the nation and the introduction of critical theory, in social and economic history (Iggers et al. 2016). Compared to these debates of the twentieth century, transculturality has been rarely raised as a point of reference, although new literature on the nation state points at new forms of identity building beyond the assumption of seemingly cultural, ethnic and historical authenticity (Münkler and Münkler 2016). In this chapter, I will further develop and discuss the hypothesis that a transcultural approach provides an epistemological potential that has not yet been tested in the European case. The chapter aims at asking explicitly whether transcultural research designs allow findings with regard to the obvious dilemma that Europe faces: while democracy, individual rights and claims of equality are uncontested (and highly appreciated) European values, the lack of an essentially non-Eurocentric epistemology leads to the tendency among scholars to privilege investigations on Europe’s territorial expansion, cultural dominance and economic success based on a Western understanding of modernization. In the first section on the state of the art, this chapter critically discusses an often assumed characteristic of Europe as a cosmopolitan and entangled society. It examines whether a transcultural lens allows for a more precise picture of the consequences that processes of exchange can have for the social fabric of European society. It investigates whether a presumed transcultural diversity can offer trust and security, and to what extent the concept of transculturality has to undergo a transformation from a rather descriptive mode to that of an analytical tool. The second part focuses on a history of Europe after the global turn by reversing the analytical lens. Instead of adding more examples and elements to the presumed fact of transcultural entanglements, this section critically challenges the assumption that the concept of transculturality only describes the process of dense and varied social exchange processes that we have come to consider as usual. 1 If this were true, time periods and spaces with decreasing density of transcultural exchange processes should present increasing asymmetrical tensions, power struggles and social confrontation. Do we gain a better understanding of power relations by using a transcultural lens? Does transculturality presume specific temporal and spatial settings? Is transculturality therefore probably an approach that helps us to investigate post-war or other transformative situations? And is this approach especially sensitive to the tensions between the territorial grounding of ordering principles and people on the move? Following the disciplinary methodologies of a global historiography based on interdisciplinary collaborative research, this chapter refers in its empirical findings to a history of Europe after the global turn.
