Conquer or be conquered: European countries examine their settlement

Two framed items hang near the bottom of the spiral staircase connecting the multi-levelled European Parliament in Brussels. Some argue these items, sourced from 15,000 kilometres away, are out of place. Others believe they deserve to be there.  

One of them is a dot painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Kani Patricia Tunkin. The artwork, titled ‘Discover’ (Minyma Malilu), shows swirls of white and yellow backdropped by deep red – an intense hue found throughout the Pitjantjatjara woman’s Kanpi community.  

This landscape is tens of thousands of kilometres south of Belgium, dead in the heart of the Australian outback. Kangaroos hop across the tundra dotted with wakati (native pigweed) and kampurarpa (bush tomato). The colours in this painting are a far cry from the chrome and concrete greys common in Brussels’ Leopold Quarter, a place where Tunkin’s artwork has been displayed for 10 years.  

‘Bringing them home’

Next to Minyma Malilu is a large, framed copy of the bill former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented to the national parliament in 2008.

The document details the government’s “Apology to the Stolen Generations” — a watershed moment in the country’s history, in which Rudd formally apologised for the government’s forcible removal of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from 1910 to 1970. 

“For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry,” Rudd said while delivering the motion to Canberra’s House of Representatives 16 years ago.

“We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.” 

The ‘Bringing them Home‘ report details the impact of numerous state and federal policies mandating the removal of Indigenous children from homes, schools, communities and families. It includes testimony of First Nations people; some refer to it as “cultural and spiritual genocide”.  

A decade since Australia gifted these documents to the European Parliament, Euronews Culture wanted to better understand how countries within the bloc have grappled with their colonial histories.

Have any member states apologised for their colonial conquests, and are any interested in paying reparations to Indigenous peoples impacted by the nation-building that made these European giants? 

University of Iceland anthropology professor Kristín Loftsdóttir said the approach varies from country to country, but that European nationalism is now linked to what happened hundreds of years ago, in far off lands.  

“It’s only now that all this [colonialist] horror is brought to the surface and to me, that is shocking,” she said.  

Conquer or be conquered

When Loftsdóttir began her academic career, she was struck by how little research was being conducted on how the Icelandic identity was shaped by imperialism and colonialism.

Speaking from Hafnarfjörður, a port town 10 kilometres from the country’s capital, she said she wanted to research how her homeland approached its history. According to her, Iceland never had formal colonies but its identity was shaped by Danish occupation from the 1940s.  

One way the land of fire and ice was impacted by this was through its attempts to mimic the behaviour of its coloniser and to “position itself as belonging with the civilised, ‘white’ European countries,” Loftsdóttir said, adding that certain Icelandic stakeholders demonstrated conqueror tendencies.  

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A recent example is the late-2000s Icelandic investors that aggressively pursued corporate takeovers and investments outside their Nordic locale.

They were known as Corporate Vikings and have been described by the Icelandic press as “financial plutocrats” that could “strike fear into the hearts of foreigners”. (Their pursuits pre-empted the 2008 financial crisis).  

“It was very much linked to this past of Iceland wanting to prove itself as belonging to Europeans,” Loftsdóttir said of the business people. They wanted to be seen as “the big guys” and to rid themselves of their minority complex.  

‘Nordic exceptionalism’

Outside of Iceland, Loftsdóttir said some northern European countries suffer from what’s called “Nordic exceptionalism”. This sociological concept became popularised in the 1990s and describes the alleged refusal of Nordic countries to examine their settler histories. The literature claims that certain northern European countries that experience high levels of wealth and prosperity feel immune from criticism about what assets or opportunities landed them there.   

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“The Nordic countries, they have this aura of being … prone to equality,” Loftsdóttir said, stating they often offer armed forces to peacekeeping missions and champion strong social security measures. “But the colonial past of the Nordic countries has not been seen as very harmonious with that image,” she said.

This image of prosperity is in stark contrast to how some Nordic countries acknowledge their First Nations communities. An example of this is the Sámi people: Indigenous peoples inhabiting Sápmi, which now spans Norway, Sweden, Finland and a sliver of Russia. “They were displaced, and identification was used as a weapon of assimilation,” Loftsdóttir said.

There are roughly 80,000 Sámi peoples living in Lapland, and many have argued that their ways of life have been ignored. “For instance, wind farms, wind turbines. There are hydropower plants or mines that are opening up under the name of the green transition,” said Elle Merete, the head of the EU unit at the Saami Council.  

While Loftsdóttir said there have been numerous truth and reconciliation commissions in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly, its success has varied across countries. Most notable is Greenland.  

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The case of Greenland

In March, 143 Inuit women sued the Danish state for allegedly violating their human rights by being forcibly fitted with contraceptive devices in the 1960s and 1970s. As many as 4,500 women and girls — half of all Greenland’s fertile women population — were fitted with these coils aimed allegedly at curbing the country’s population. 

In 2020, the governments of Denmark and Greenland launched a probe into the program, with the outcome of the investigation due next year. This is one example of the harmful impacts of colonisation, Loftsdóttir said. “It’s really, really, really, horrible.” 

The Greenland government launched a truth-telling commission in 2014 aimed at examining the country’s recent history, with Denmark also invited to participate. According to a United Nations (UN) report of the process, the Premier of Greenland Aleqa Hammond asked the then-Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt to take part in the reconciliation process. She rejected the invitation.  

“At the public meetings people could tell their own experience with the different subjects, both in plenum and through actual interviews with the commission staff,” states Jens Heinrich, the UN head of representation for Copenhagen and the Greenland government. According to Heinrich, this was an important process for the First Nations people. “For many, this was the first time they could express their story,” he writes.  

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The report states that although Denmark refused to participate in the reconciliation process, this was a step forward for the Greenland government. Loftsdóttir said this is a “strong” example of one European country attempting to reconcile with its history. But there are many actors that could halt this progress, including the far-right.  

Why the rise of the far-right could derail progress

Loftsdóttir said surging populist and conservative governments could derail the progress of progressive governments by refusing to acknowledge these stories — and by contemporaneously pursuing isolationist policies. An example of this manifestation is the pursuit of “aggressive border policies”.  

“I think I feel a little bit like we have the left hand and the right hand wanting different things,” she said. “But these discussions on these border politics, they seem to completely ignore the historical relationship of Europe with West Africa and the history of colonialism.” 

These histories are playing out into contemporary structural inequalities, Loftsdóttir added, listing examples such as the poverty experienced by non-white international communities.

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These inequalities are rooted in history. “This is not the past,” Loftsdóttir said. “It’s also part of the present that we are living in.” 

And while there are no clear solutions, truth-telling commissions can often be the first step to recognising a wrong that was committed.

Although Australia – that sunburnt continent on the other side of the world – has a long way to go with correcting the wrongs of British settlement and colonisation, its apology, for some, is the beginning of this process.  

“[Australia’s] Bringing them Home report about the Stolen Generation was only delivered in 1997 and a lot of these Nordic countries are only looking at this work today,” Loftsdóttir said.  

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“Racism is not only just individual forms of thinking. It’s also structural inequalities that we have inherited from the past.”