The Christian Social Union's domination of Bavarian state and society is such that it has justifiably been described as Bavaria's ‘official and hegemonic party’ (Staats- und Hegemonialpartei). However, it is important not to take the CSU's regional identity as an historical given. This article examines how the CSU set about constructing an integral Bavarian (gesamtbayerisch) identity during the 1950s and early 1960s by articulating the diverse historical experiences of the region-state's localities and sub-regions as a common Bavarian heritage. Drawing on articles about Bavarian cities, reports on historical re-enactments and commemorative speeches by party leaders, the article explores the celebration of this heritage in terms of ‘political character’, culture and Christianity.

The history of western Europe and of European integration has been explained primarily with reference to internal political and economic factors, or to its relations with the United States. This article argues that decolonisation and the emergence of the Third World as a political and economic actor had a profound influence on western Europe, mainly contributing to a further weakening of the role of the nation-state. The impact of the Third World was particularly strong in the period from the global revolution of 1968 to the high point of détente in 1975.

This article explores what kind of ‘Europe’ was produced in the processes of transnational infrastructure building. It focuses on international organisations dedicated to Europe's infrastructural integration as a promising research site, where infrastructural collaborations (or the lack thereof) were articulated and negotiated. Case studies of the Bureau International des Autoroutes (1931), the Union for the Coordination of Production and Transport of Electricity (1951) and the European Conference of Transport Ministers (1953) explore the challenges of transnational system building. They also suggest that Europe's infrastructural interlacing was a contested process, producing, if successful, multilayered networks in which corporate, national and meso-regional borders remain clearly discernable.

Using a theoretical approach that takes into consideration the options available to small states in international relations as well as those factors that influence foreign policy decision making, this article tests the usefulness of the approach on a specific case study, the so-called Mosul crisis in northern Iraq in 1924–5. From the perspective of the alternatives opened to small states in the international arena in the aftermath of the First World War and on the basis of Sweden's stated foreign policy doctrine, Sweden's actions in the Mosul crisis were understandable and consistent with the basic premises of the suggested theoretical approach.

This article revisits the motives behind the Czechoslovak scheme ‘Russian Action’, which granted thousands of Russian émigrés residence and financial support in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, it looks at the efforts to bring to Czechoslovakia Russian civil war refugees living in Constantinople. Historians have conventionally focused on Prague as the home to intellectual and cultural exiles from Russia and have also decreed that the émigré policies of Czechoslovakia were driven principally by the humanitarian concerns of a liberal and democratic government. This article looks, instead, at the regime's deep-seated political motives, in particular its plans for a future, Bolshevik-free Russia, reconstructed under its guiding hand. In so doing, it raises questions about Czechoslovakia's self-image, ideology and place within the international hierarchy.

Exile is the experience of impotence. This, at least, would seem to be the lesson of the mid-twentieth century. The heterogeneous groups of Russian exiles scattered across Europe after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the opponents of Franco forced to flee from Spain in the 1930s all had plenty of time to brood on Karl Marx's dictum that exile was no more than ‘a school of scandal and of meanness’. If the causes they espoused were eventually in some limited sense vindicated, this victory owed almost nothing to their efforts, and few of the original exiles had the ambivalent pleasure of living long enough to witness the downfall of their opponents. More recently, the central European exiles who found refuge in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s followed a largely similar path: unable to shake Soviet communist rule in their erstwhile homelands, they were obliged to survive on the long-term exile's meagre diet of propaganda, ritual, rumour and intrigue.

The social sciences have always faced a fundamental problem. Their central concern is to understand modernity, yet, as the product of modernity itself, they could never achieve the critical distance to do this. In recent decades some scholars have sought a way out in the notion of postmodernity, the idea that we have entered a new era from which ‘modernity’ can be judged from the outside. However, since a central component of the postmodernist paradigm is the suspension or at least the relativisation of both epistemological and normative frameworks, it deprives itself of the very analytical tools it would need for the task. For a while, following the end of the Cold War, a hyper-modernist view enjoyed some prominence, according to which, far from being transcended, modernity was culminating in the dominance of a single social, economic and political model represented by the victorious United States.