‘Project Europe’ has over the past decade run into significant headwinds. The idea of ever-tightening cooperation and integration between European countries as a path to a more peaceful future and greater wealth for all has taken heavy blows from several directions. On the one hand, the rise of populist nationalisms across the continent – most notably in the decision of the UK to leave the EU in 2016 – has challenged the very premise that integration remains a desirable end goal. On the other, the ever-hardening language and policies of ‘fortress Europe’ and their attendant, continually unfolding tragedy of immigrant deaths and destitution along Europe’s borders from the Mediterranean through the Balkans to Eastern Europe have severely shaken the credibility of the EU as an internationalist project with humanitarian ideals. Integration itself seems to have stopped, with no new members admitted since Croatia in 2013. At the root of all these troubles lies the underexplored question of the coloniality of Europe as a concept: its internal imperial hierarchies as well as its continuously renegotiated relationship with the wider world, a double process of often-contested identity formation directed inwards as much as it is outwards. It is impossible to critically analyse Europe’s seeming impasse in the 2020s or to understand the long-term trajectories of European integration without a reckoning with this imperial past.