The current official population estimate of Roma in Europe is between ten and twelve million. This range indicates several glaring points of concern; firstly, the two million between that range is too large a discrepancy for official population numbers and suggests the possibility for further inaccuracies. Secondly, that number has not changed for several decades; while this is not immediately concerning, the relatively high birth rate and the young general age of most Roma communities make no population change across that many decades highly unlikely and deeply improbable. Researchers and other officials have historically pulled these numbers from a mix of population surveys and estimation, calling into question where the root of the inaccuracy lies. Further complicating this, there is no agreement on whether the inaccuracies in the official count make it too high or too low. However, the one consistent claim for both sides is that Roma populations themselves are contributing to the inaccuracy, either through purposeful sabotage or simple misunderstanding. This highlights an important question: if it is true, as self-identification methodology argues, that the most accurate and authentic way to collect identity data is to depend solely on the individual for both their willingness to identify as well as the categorizing terminology, how then can the belief that Roma populations fundamentally misunderstand the definition of their own identity and therefore produce inaccurate final population numbers also exist? This paper will highlight how the early fears of “Others” fueled both the desire for exact numbers of minorities and the belief that the official numbers could be a misrepresentation, before evolving into the contemporary discourse on the accuracy of identity and population counts, to evaluate what statistical and socio-political shifts are needed to address this problem.

There is increasing interest in post/decolonial perspectives on the European Union (EU), which includes the problematization of dichotomies that typically characterize EU scholarship and policies - for instance, distinctions between internal ‘versus’ external policies and between the EU ‘versus’ its member states. These scholarship underlines the need for EU in international affairs studies to account for (neo)colonial dimensions of the ‘European project’. Against this backdrop, our paper aims to better understand if and how the ‘virgin birth’ myth on the origins of the EU continues to inspire current narratives on European integration, with a focus on the European House of History. Located in the European Quarter in Brussels, the House aims to be ‘a place where a memory of European history and the work of European unification is jointly cultivated’ (Pöttering 2007). Specifically, we analyze the fourth floor, called ‘Rebuilding a divided continent’, which displays the post-war period (1945-1970s). While scholarly literature has critically assessed different aspects of the House, the exhibitions on the fourth floor have not been extensively researched from a post/decolonial perspective. Inspired by insights from Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K Bhabha and Meera Sabaratnam, we analyze the ‘othering’ dynamics as displayed on the fourth floor. Empirically, we investigate what is (not) represented and how this is done in relation to the colonial past and continuities by interpreting and contextualizing the pictures, objects and movies. We find that the European ‘self’ is portrayed as the primary subject of world history while limited attention is given to subaltern perspectives. The myth of the virgin birth is largely reenacted because EU’s entanglements with the colonial past and colonial continuities are not recognized. The conclusions reflect on the wider ramifications of these findings and on areas for future research.

This paper explores how conversations sparked by the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the United States developed in the contexts of Hungary and Poland. It consists of analysis of empirical trends that emerged from eleven key informant interviews with Black, LGBT, Romani, and women's rights activists from the two countries, as well as two focus groups about BLM that were conducted in Warsaw and Budapest in May 2022. How young people (aged 22-30) from Hungary and Poland understand and address their own histories, perspectives, and motivations in relation to the global BLM movement (particularly vis-a-vis the Global West and the colonial histories of its European neighbors), how BLM may have influenced these understandings, and an assessment of the practical contributions these insights might promise for more robust transnational discourse in the future are analyzed and assessed.

This paper argues that studying the legacies of colonialism and the end of empires can help explain cleavages and political battles in the contemporary European Union. Euroscepticism is mostly analyzed as a consequence of the developments of European integration and current political and ideological changes (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2013; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). On the other hand, more historically oriented approaches to Euroscepticism emphasized unique national contexts in which they emerged (Gilbert and Pasquinucci, 2020). This paper takes a different approach arguing that there are historical commonalities in various national versions of Euroscepticism as several groups of European countries started or entered European integration in similar historical contexts (Petrović, 2018). Euroscepticism is a thin ideology with resistance to supranational integration as its core concept and is thus closely connected to nationalism. The end of empire Euroscepticism is a term that describes the roots of Euroscepticism in founding member states that lost their empires after the Second World War.

The end of empire is often mentioned as a factor in describing British Euroscepticism (Spiering, 2004). However, all founding member states, except Luxemburg, were or have been colonial empires. This has left a considerable mark not only on the beginning of the European integration process (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014) but also on current divisions within the EU. Germany and Italy entered European integration after extreme right regimes in these countries were defeated in the Second World War. Both countries lost territories to their east and saw an influx of refugees. France was a leading country in starting the process of European integration but fought in two unsuccessful colonial wars during that process. The French-Indochina War of 1946–1954 and particularly the Third Franco-Algerian War (1954-1962) were traumatic events for French society. The latter brought the loss of the “Jewel of the Empire” and an influx of French refugees (pieds-noirs) who came to France in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The end of empires created groups and milieus which showed an affinity towards the radical right during the EU crises, more than half a century after war defeats (Veugelers, 2019; Raos, 2018; Fonzo, 2017). Different attitudes towards national and European past shape national and European cleavages.