![]() declined to provide any support to the fledgling government that emerged after the Soviet exit. Soviet proxy war with the Soviet Union on the territory of Afghanistan. State institutions were destroyed in the course of the U.S. The extraordinary cost of failed states to the Western world is clear from the history of Afghanistan in recent decades. And in France, activists attacked the statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the author of the Code Noir that institutionalized slavery and forced labor across French colonies. Meanwhile, in Belgium, protesters forced the removal of statues of King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo ruthlessly as his private fiefdom until images of his atrocities provoked an outcry and forced him to cede control of the territory, which became a Belgian colony. In Oxford, students demanded (not for the first time) that a statue of Cecil Rhodes – the personification of European imperialism’s brutal extraction of African riches – be removed from Oriel College’s façade. In Bristol, demonstrators tore down (and threw into the harbor) a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century parliamentarian whose company transported more than 80,000 slaves from West Africa to the Americas. And, as in the US, public symbols and monuments were at the center of the fray. ![]() ![]() PROVIDENCE/LONDON – Last year, as the Black Lives Matter movement was intensifying across the United States following Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, Europe was facing its own battles over racial justice.
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