One of Europe’s leading historians has said that cities in the global north that curb their carbon emissions are doing more to address colonial injustices than those who focus their efforts on taking down statues and changing street names.
David Van Reybrouck, who is the Belgian author of a bestselling history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a new book on Indonesia’s independence from Dutch rule, has become one of the key drivers of a nascent and often fraught debate about Europe’s colonial legacies. Those who have lauded his work include the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
In an interview with the Guardian, Van Reybrouck took a swipe at the movement of historical reckoning for being too focused on the past, calling instead for more awareness of the “colonisation of the present and the future”.
“There is more to colonialism than historical colonialism,” Van Reybrouck said. “Today’s climate change is deeply colonial: it has been largely caused by the temperate zones from the northern hemisphere and it is most deeply felt in the tropics and the Arctic. You cannot decolonise without decarbonising and vice versa.”
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He was quoted as saying that the dominance of identity politics in US, British and Dutch societies meant that a vital conversation about enduring colonial structures risked being relegated to mainly marginal debates around symbolic gestures rather than radical solutions.
“A mayor who makes her city fossil-free by 2040 has done more against colonialism, racism and discrimination than another mayor who decolonises all the street names, statues and schoolbooks while keeping the city running on fossil fuels,” he said.
Former colonial powers, said Van Reybrouck, should jointly contribute to funds to fight the impact of the climate crisis in the global south rather than just engaging in state-to-state negotiations about reparations.
In his book Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, published in David Colmer and David McKay’s English translation last week, Van Reybrouck makes a broader pitch for rethinking the unravelling of Europe’s colonies in the global south. Not only should they be seen as a tug-of-war between coloniser and colonised, he argues, but as a series of dynamic processes in which independence movements across Asia and Africa nourished each other.
“These horizontal dynamics are often forgotten, because we’re entirely focused on the local resistance against the colonised,” Van Reybrouck said.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
