Historians have long been fascinated by the postwar era, but understandings of this crucial period have begun to change in recent years. The increasing salience of global, transnational, and entangled historical methodologies has shone a spotlight on new articulations of national, regional, and international forms of belonging that throw much of the conventional wisdom about postwar Europe and European identity into question. If the Eurocentric legend of the “Thirty Glorious Years” has featured especially prominently among historians of France, there is a growing awareness that it is impossible to consider postwar reconstruction outside the context of empire and decolonization. More than a mere transition from a world marked by empire to one defined primarily through nation-states, this period witnessed a profound reworking of fundamental state structures, including education, bureaucracy, economic planning, and attendant attitudes towards racial and religious difference. This roundtable features the authors of three monographs that will be published in 2022 that engage with these questions. While their books focus on France and its empire in the era of decolonization and the afterlives of empire in France’s former colonies, they also speak to larger processes of economic and political organization, the racial coding of European citizenship, and disentangling postcolonial states from their imperial pasts.

In brief (5-minute) informal remarks, each roundtable participant will offer a snapshot of their book’s major contributions to the field, paying particular attention to the tensions between forms of integration—in which populations, states, or economies were knit together—and decolonization—understood as a process in which those very same entities were pulled apart. By teasing out the relationships between these entangled histories, and tracing how European integration and decolonization shaped various domains (such as education, economic policy, and institution building), the presenters will invite the audience to think through how spatial reconfigurations, claims to rights and belonging, and new forms of bureaucracy shaped the postwar era. Following these brief remarks, the chair/commentator will offer a 10- to 15-minute response emphasizing the common themes of the books under discussion. The rest of the session will be devoted to Q&A, and active conversation, with the audience.

Considering recent interest in European institutions (due in part to Brexit), race and racism (with the Black Lives Matter movement and movements for racial justice across Western Europe), colonial memory (the rapport Macron) and economic reform (given the attention paid to Covid-19’s global economic impact), this roundtable is sure to be of interest to a range of academic historians and graduate students, as well as to secondary school teachers hoping to gain more insight into the historical roots of some of the topics they cover in the social studies classroom.