The times they are a-changing, Bob Dylan once noted, and so are the concepts we use to make sense of the world. One of these concepts is decolonization. It clearly has gained wider currency in recent years, but it has also changed in meaning.

Initially, “decolonization” was invented by European elites and “worked to absorb and deflect the phenomenon it ostensibly described.” Then, the concept entered the vocabulary of anticolonial thinkers – maybe most prominently Frantz Fanon’s, who gave it a new, combative meaning. His “decolonization” was a call to arms as much as it was the promise of an existential revolution: a complete undoing, a reversal even, of the colonial situation. Many activists in Asia and Africa, however, simultaneously used, or preferred, other concepts. They spoke of “freedom, “self-determination”, “national liberation,” or “anticolonial revolution” to demand, implement, and interpret the end of empire. After the 1970s, finally, “decolonization” was mostly used by historians. They serenely employed the somewhat bulky term as a device of periodization, and to designate a process they studied – a shorthand for the years between 1945 and 1975 that brought the final demise of European overseas empires.

And then something changed. Across large parts of the globe, the last decade or so has witnessed the emergence of academic and social movements that proclaim, and put into practice, a turn towards “decolonial” politics. Rhodes Must Fall, the dethroning or defacing of other monuments connected to the past of slavery or colonialism, as well as parts of the Black Lives Matter movement are examples, and their power to make a difference in the conversation about colonial legacies and present-day racism has been impressive. Calls for “decolonizing” the classroom, the museum, the courts, the penal system, but also our diet, health system, fashion industry, and of course our minds have become ubiquitous. “Decolonize everything!” is the title of a podcast, and a slogan printed on T-shirts.

This effervescence of a new, decolonial politics has produced different reactions. Among them is, unsurprisingly, the fierce opposition of those – from conservatives to liberals – who feel threatened. They denigrate the movement as “wokeness” or “cancel culture” menacing national traditions, Western identity, the freedom of speech, or the reign of reason itself. Others, by contrast, fear that the movement is not going far enough yet or is being coopted by neoliberal capitalism. As the term “has taken over our social media timelines with a vengeance”, as Bhakti Shringarpure noted, and “decolonization is all kinds of trendy these days,” they criticize that “decolonizing is the new black”, caution against “fake decolonization”, and demand “to decolonize the decolonization movement.”

It seems obvious to me that much is gained by the recent decolonial movement. Instead of conceiving of empire as a historical period that can be contained in the past and studied – or worse, romanticized – from the safe distance of the present, activists now, not unlike earlier “postcolonial” thinkers, urge us to consider how colonialism endured beyond the end of empire into our present. They inspire us to interrogate the many ways in which structures rooted in colonialism continue to define what we learn and how we think. They make us alert to whose voices get heard and who is being excluded, and how we can, how we must change this.

Like others who are sympathetic to the decolonial turn, I also think, however, that much gets lost in the insistence on a structural “coloniality” that risks obfuscating the difference between past and present, and that tends to see colonialism everywhere. Ironically, I would like to add, some of the new uses of decolonization — as a call to action, and as utopia –, tend to obscure the significance of decolonization as history, that is, as a set of processes in the twentieth century that remade ideologies and practices of empire, and that gave birth to a distinctly post-imperial world between 1945 and 1975. While colonial mindsets did not simply vanish with the end of imperial rule, they did not remain unaltered, either. And while it is ultimately impossible to determine when exactly empire ended or when decolonization will be complete, we must, I believe, take seriously the historical transition out of formal empire.

The richness of this transition can be studied in many ways, and in various locales. In my new article for Contemporary European History, I focus on its history in the metropole and approach it through the lens of migrations. Looking at Portugal in its Western European context, I aim to shed light on the concrete effects that the unravelling of empires had. How did Portugal deal with this transition, and with the people it brought (back) to the country? How does empire both die and live on in the post-imperial metropole? How did decolonization remake communities, and what are the roles of racialization and racism in this process? In conversation with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, my article argues that decolonization – and the migrations from the (former) colonies that it provoked – triggered and molded a new process of post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe.

This claim is substantiated by surveying how migrations of decolonization affected citizenship, the welfare state, and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white ‘returnees’ from Portugal’s African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white ‘immigrants.’ It argues that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonized territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire.

The recent decolonial movement has liberated the concept of decolonization from the specialist language of historical studies, infusing it with renewed urgency. But history is still needed in order to avoid ‘excessive abstraction, rampant culturalism,’ and a sweeping ‘”everything is colonial”-rhetoric’. Decolonization as a combative present, and as a utopian future, can only gain from looking at decolonization as history.

Read the full open access article Building Nations After Empire: Post-Imperial Migrations to Portugal in a Western European Context on Cambridge Core now.