This article explores the little-known response of the Irish Save the Children Fund to famine in Soviet Russia and Ukraine from 1921, as well as to hunger in the west of Ireland in 1924–5. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the Cadbury Research Library, the Women’s Library at LSE and elsewhere, it examines the translation of humanitarian relief into different local, national and transnational contexts. The Volga famine was a seismic moment in inter-war humanitarianism and the initial focus of the newly formed Irish Save the Children Fund, itself formed in the context of war and civil war. Humanitarianism in the new Irish Free State had distinctive gendered, class and religious dynamics, as well as connections to Britain and the Irish diaspora. This article argues that tracing relatively small and largely unexamined organisations like the Irish Save the Children Fund offers new angles into the relationship between humanitarianism, nationhood and social change.

Concerned by the revolutionary violence that spread in Catalonia after the failed military coup of 17 and 18 July 1936 led to civil war, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay) appointed veteran ‘front-line’ consuls in Barcelona. These consuls had already experienced revolutionary events during the Russian civil wars; however, their prior experience shaped their interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, leading them to fear a Bolshevik contagion beyond the Pyrenees border. Their bias thus shaped the French general consulate’s humanitarian action in Barcelona. Far from being strictly neutral and impartial, it adopted a resolutely counter-revolutionary stance.

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czech teachers and other civil servants came to the peripheral regions of the Slovak part of the state. Their task, apart from ensuring the functioning of the newly established state institutions, was to promote the Czechoslovak national project. Some of these officials remained in their positions for many years, overcoming major macro-political upheavals. This article analyses the role of individuals, their loyalties and networks in establishing and maintaining stability across historical ruptures in a remote, linguistically heterogeneous area of Czechoslovakia. Since these actors fostered the official state ideology and played a prominent role in the lifeworld of local communities for many decades, this article shows how these figures endured numerous ruptures, bound together the state and their localities and reinforced the state’s presence on the ground. Using the case of a Czech school principal in the predominantly German- and Hungarian-speaking town of Nižný Medzev in eastern Slovakia, this article examines the role of individual actors in promoting and shaping the various forms of Czechoslovak nation-building policies on the local level.

This article argues that practices of gratitude were central to Franco-American relations in the early Cold War. Through the story of the French Gratitude Train to the American People in 1948–1949, it brings the diplomacy of gratitude to the heart of the post-war years, reflecting on the complicated relations between the two countries and on the ability of emotional performances of gratitude to shape as well as nuance post-1945 dynamics. Rather than focusing on political elites, this is a grassroots story which revolves around lace doilies and metal toys; women, children and veterans; lingering traumas mixed with genuine amazement. Through the lens of gratitude practice and performance, the article highlights the importance of ordinary citizens, material culture and feelings in the ideological battles and geopolitical reconfigurations of the mid-twentieth century.

This article examines the complex dynamics between the intelligentsia and the broader population in the formation of national identity by looking at a case of intra-societal conflict. The article focuses on Western Belarus – the northern portion of the Polish-Soviet frontier in the interwar period – which was historically influenced by Polish, Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian cultures. In this region, the Belarusian intelligentsia's efforts to promote national enlightenment were initially met with scepticism and even hostility from the broader population. The discrepancy between the intelligentsia's self-perceived role as the nation's vanguard and society's apathy towards issues related to national identity led to internal conflict. Drawing upon Belarusian and Polish archival collections, the Belarusian interwar press and oral history interviews, the article offers an alternative understanding of the challenges associated with the process of nation-building in Eastern Europe in highlighting the often overlooked perspectives of the ordinary people who were at the centre of these intellectual endeavours.

Since 2008, growing scepticism about the ability of market forces to ensure financial stability and environmental sustainability has revived interest in credit controls. Credit controls were common in Europe before the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1980s. However, the decline in support for these policies in the 1970s is not well understood. This article examines Italy's shift away from credit controls, focusing on the role of central bank economists and the Bank of Italy's monetary policy ideas. By analysing the discourse and research of central bankers from 1973 to 1983, the article shows that persistent fiscal deficits were the main driving force behind both the introduction and the subsequent abolition of credit controls. It also highlights the influence of a new generation of economists, such as Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Mario Monti, on Italian economic policy, providing a case study that contextualises the economic ideas shaping policy making in the European Monetary Union.

This article introduces the notion of Europe's ‘long 1989’. It does so in order to connect the remarkable events in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 to a wider set of transformations that have reshaped Europe as a whole. The article focuses on three sets of transformation. Firstly, the dismantling of political systems forged in the earlier era of ideological polarisation. Secondly, the ‘modernisation’ of national economies that entailed the disappearance of the institutional expressions of class compromise after 1945 (in the Stalinist and social democratic forms). Thirdly, the unravelling of those collective identities – class, religion, gender and sexuality – that had come to shape individual experiences so forcefully across the twentieth century. The article explores the liberating effects of these transformations whilst arguing that the principle dynamic has been that of implosion. The resulting sense of loss has shaped contemporary Europe in multiple ways.

Historiographical accounts generally explain Belgian technocracy as a short-lived phenomenon of the 1930s, when the politicians Hendrik de Man and Paul van Zeeland unsuccessfully tried to reinforce state power by strengthening the role of experts (at the expense of the parliament). This article focuses on the overlooked ideas and activities of the political scientist Louis Camu, who, also during the 1930s, pushed for technocratic governance – with more success than van Zeeland and de Man. As ‘Royal Commissioner’ for civil service reform, Camu sought to transform Belgian politics and even the morality of the population at large. Yet despite his public prominence, Camu was far from a transparent political operator. While defending a Montesquieuan democracy in public, he covertly became involved in extreme-right politics during the latter years of the 1930s, culminating in his 1940 membership of a wartime reform committee that sought to abolish the liberal democracy.

Drawing on declassified reports from the KGB and Komsomol, this paper offers a new picture of dissenting activity among young people in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia between Stalin's death in 1953 and the end of the 1960s. In contrast to existing depictions of this period as a time of relative quiescence across the region, the article highlights key themes and forms of protest behaviour, ranging from political graffiti and vandalism through to mass public disorders and participation in clandestine underground groups. Further, while such actions remained well outside of the norm, we also see evidence of a wider social milieu in which ordinary citizens time and again declined to confront or report on those instances of dissenting activity that they encountered.

This article looks at the everyday experiences of rural communities in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, during the first years of Italian fascism. Following an approach that borrows from Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria, the article uses diaries, memoirs, local newspapers, and fascist reports to analyse the phenomenon of village parochialism, or campanilismo, in the context of fascist paramilitary violence. Firstly, it reassesses the role of campanilismo in provincial society, showing that parochialism was a function of community expression that contributed to the making of webs of ‘thin trust’ across rural communities. Secondly, the paper distinguishes the types of parochial conflict inherent to campanilismo from the violent conflicts generated by the fascist movement. Ultimately, the paper claims that fascist violence destroyed the functional mechanisms of campanilismo, replacing these with dysfunctional and terroristic violence that made the successful implementation of the fascist programme impossible in the provincial space.

This article proposes to connect the history of European integration with that of protest movements. Drawing on a transnational approach, it highlights a double link between the protest movements of spring 1968 in France and autumn 1969 in West Germany and the rise of the European Economic Community. Firstly, the completion of the common market on 1 July 1968 increased competition between European economies, fostering social demands on the eve of the protest. Secondly, the economic consequences of May 1968, both in France and in West Germany, underlined the new interdependencies of French and German societies within the common market. The need for convergence towards a ‘community of stability’ paved the way for negotiations on an economic and monetary union after the relaunch at the Congress of The Hague in December 1969.

In the second half of the twentieth century, West Germany was one of the largest pesticide producers and exporters worldwide. Among these exports were substances that were unpopular, obsolete, or entirely banned due to their health risks. The country case adds to our knowledge of global pesticide politics in three ways: First, politicians and industry used hunger in the Global South as an argument to justify export practices in the 1970s. Second, public criticism against this export was only successful when the health of German citizens was perceived to be under threat. Third, industry arguments led to creative and legal ways to export substances that have been problematised in the Global North. In view of this, the current EU initiative to regulate banned pesticide trade, though important, appears to remain tentative or ineffective.

The Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), established in October 1914 and overseen throughout the war by Herbert Hoover, played a pivotal role in saving millions of Belgians and hundreds of thousands of French from starvation. The proposed article aims to address this gap by examining the phenomenon of an ambivalent, even asymmetrical, diplomacy of gratitude. Herbert Hoover and his Belgian counterpart (and humanitarian rival), the financier Emile Francqui, had initially devised a strategy of remembrance of their wartime collective action, which centred on children, youth and higher education. Nevertheless, while their endeavour to establish a unified Belgian-American foundation ultimately failed due to their diverging postwar agendas, the dominant narrative of US aid encountered mounting opposition within Belgian political and academic circles. In the context of competing national memories and shifting feelings of gratitude, American philanthropy played a seminal role in the co-construction of modern higher education infrastructures in Belgium.

Critiques of police brutality and dire warnings about public safety are a seemingly inescapable topic of controversy today, saturating headlines and political campaigns all over the world. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted huge protests across the United States, with activists denouncing yet another episode of excessive police violence against a Black man. As Covid-19 lockdowns kept people tethered to their homes, protests echoed globally, affirming solidarity in the value of Black lives and critiques of police violence. In Europe, marchers filled the streets everywhere from the United Kingdom to Poland, and, notably for this essay, in France. France, of course, did not need an American example to reckon with police misconduct. Since at least the 1970s, French activists have been calling attention to the way that police violence is directed disproportionately at economically marginalised banlieues and socially marginalised immigrant populations. In 2018, French citizens witnessed the brutal policing of the gilets jaunes, a populist movement that criticised economic inequality and President Macron's neoliberal policies. With horror, they read stories of protestors battered by police batons, grenades, and tear gas, losing hands and eyes in the fray. More recently, in June 2023, the police murder of Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, following a routine traffic stop, reopened old wounds. ‘Who, exactly, do the police serve?’, protestors asked. Certainly not Nahel.

This article focuses on the early history of Northwestern European opinion polling (1940s–1950s), specifically the cases of the Netherlands and Sweden. The evolution of opinion polling and its influence on post-war politics and society should be understood in light of processes of international transfer and entanglement. The Dutch-Swedish comparison brings into focus the ways in which the national experiences of the Second World War influenced how opinion pollsters discursively linked the practice to ideas about democracy. Furthermore, the article highlights entanglements across the boundaries of science, as commercial survey methods were picked up by social scientists, and across national borders, as opinion pollsters across Western Europe were in frequent contact with each other.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe did not bring about widespread destruction of the material heritage of communist dictatorships in the region. In fact, given that – on the whole – public acceptance of the regime change has been high, the process of de-commemoration has been more contested than anticipated. This paper focuses on the process of de-commemoration after the fall of communism in Poland. It examines urban residents’ responses to the renaming of streets, paying close attention to the practices and discursive strategies they adopted to resist change. Investigating these responses provides a means of understanding the multifaceted aspects of the contested nature of de-commemoration and sheds light on the ways in which the top-down remaking of urban streetscapes affected local residents. It also enables us to better understand the nature of the post-communist transition in the region and provides insights into the everyday conflicts that underlie symbolic change.

Crackdown on religious institutions characterised the onset of the postwar communist dictatorships in East Central Europe. The literature commonly assumes that the new religious policies were influenced by the Soviet Union. However, the adoption of the Soviet blueprint was not straightforward and manifested differently across various regions. This article analyses the implementation process by examining the treatment of nonlegalised religious minorities in early Cold War Czechoslovakia. It argues that beyond adopting the legal framework, the strategy was not seriously informed by the Soviet realities. Through an analysis of the state's attitude towards Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostal movement and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, this study concludes that the Czechoslovak Communist Party did not have any clear plan of action. The relationship with the religious organisations developed organically. It was heavily influenced by confessional distinctions among denominations and ad hoc local decisions, highlighting a deeply decentralised approach to creating religious policies.

The Czechoslovak oppositional initiative Charter 77 produced dozens of documents on human rights between 1977 and 1992. Yet it never dedicated a separate document to women's rights, even if the issue of women's equality was well represented in global human rights discourse at the time. This article explores this absence in Charter 77's intellectual production. It analyses in detail several Charter documents and samizdat publications that touched upon issues of women's equality, showing that some Charter signatories were ready to acknowledge that the socialist state granted women formal equality, while suggesting that neither material conditions nor cultural norms provided full emancipation. However, a more prevalent critique marked the socialist agenda of women's emancipation as something that restricted women's individual freedom in their personal lives. I argue that in their legalistic approach, the Charter milieu largely lacked the conceptual tools to explore discrimination against women as the manifestation of the broader imbalance of power between men and women beyond the law.

This article discusses the Swedish Business Fund (Näringslivets fond) from its creation in 1940, over the postwar decades of welfare state consensus and the radicalised 1970s into the privatisation drive of the 1980s. The article shows that the Fund was created to break the business interest out of the corporatist model and establish it as a market liberal voice in Swedish politics. In doing so, a main ambition of the Fund was to act as a battle instrument for business, and the article shows that it demonstrates a continuous presence of Hayekian thinking with the welfare state. The article revisits the story of the so-called wage earner funds debate (1976–83) and argues that the Fund saw anti-funds mobilisation in view of the preparation of a larger programme of privatisation.