From its inception the Editorial Board of Contemporary European History has met annually to discuss matters of journal business and policy. Members have travelled from the United States and Australia, as well as several European countries, to be present at these meetings and have never just made up a list of distinguished but inactive names. At the annual meeting of 1997 it was suggested that, for a change, we should use the opportunity of the 1999 meeting to allow board members to reflect on their own fields of historical research at the turn of the century. As a result the April 1999 board meeting, which took place in New York thanks to the good offices of the Remarque Institute of New York University and its Director, Professor Tony Judt, transformed itself into a small conference, ‘Reflections on the Twentieth Century’. It is some of the (revised) ‘think-pieces’ of that conference that form this issue of the journal. Not all papers given at the conference appear here. Those that do have been seen by external referees.

This study attempts to explain how in the twentieth century the concept of a European order which had evolved from the European balance of the nineteenth century, but with an added democratic dimension after 1919 and 1945, played a role in international relations, despite the two world wars which almost put an end to it; how it helped to sustain the concept of a minimum of European solidarity, despite numerous national and ideological conflicts; and how, at the start of a new century, this concept may again be significant for a continent that has not had a similar opportunity to establish a lasting peace since the Congress of Vienna. The concept of a European order may in particular serve as a way of accommodating Russia, which has no real prospect of becoming a member of the European Union.

The contrast between the European civil wars in the first half of the century and the contribution of a uniting and united Europe to the maintenance of the ‘free’ Western world in the second half is so marked as to suggest that no single explanation of this massive change will suffice. Only an analysis of conjunctures can reveal what divides and unites the countries of Europe and assess Europe's impact on the world. This paper combines an assessment of four lengthy periods (pre-First World War, interwar, divided Europe and post-Cold War) with a secular view of Europe's position and role in world politics and the international economy. It consists of two parts: a brief account of the basic thesis and of the characteristics of the idea of ‘Europe’, and an historical analysis of the four periods.

This essay considers the basic differences between the development of the modern nation-state in west and east European contexts. It suggests that, because the foundations of state formation in the latter in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were ethnonationalist, a long road lies ahead in eastern Europe before the region can free itself from its lengthy captivity between the bad extremes of Empire on the one hand and the ethnonational Nation-State on the other. It disputes the idea that ethnocultural homogeneity within the borders of the nation-state provides a viable solution, even if the way to the creation of such homogeneity may be painful, and claims that policies which aim to create this ethnocultural homogeneity tend to prolong the swing of the region's political organisation between Empire and Nation-State. The only way out of the dilemma would appear to be the inclusion of these states in the processes of voluntary (non-imperial) regional and European supranational integration.

In response to the atrocities committed during and after the First World War and the need to create a stable east European settlement, the diplomats in Paris constructed the world's first system of international protection for minorities. The League of Nations, charged with the enforcement of the Minority Treaties, set up a cautious ‘political’ system, which failed either to shield minorities or pacify their governments. No international system was revived after the Second World War, but since the fall of communism, Europe – looking forward to the future as well as back to the past – has organised new supranational institutions to protect endangered religious and national groups.

The rise of big business is one of the most important phenomena of the twentieth century. This article reflects on its role in Europe's economy and society. Four aspects are given particular attention. The first concerns the extent to which big business can be considered as a European (as opposed to a US) phenomenon. The second considers the balance between common European characteristics (persistence of family ownership, extent of state involvement) and national specificities (company size, corporate governance, education and training, career patterns). A third part discusses the contribution of big business to economic development, especially the controversies surrounding the ‘Chandlerian’ model, based on the US experience, as well as the discrepancies between business performance and economic performance. Finally, the article warns about the pitfalls of a simplistic ‘cultural’ approach to business history.

This article aims to offer a first overview of family politics in twentieth-century Europe. The term ‘family politics’ is here taken to imply not just family policies – what states do for, or to, families – but, more broadly, the relations between individuals, families, civil society and the state. Four different visions of family politics, at different moments of the century, are analysed in detail: that of the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Russian Revolution; that of the great dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco) from the 1920s to the 1940s; that of Catholicism in the central decades of the century; and finally that of democracy, from 1945 onwards. It is argued that in each of these instances there emerges a strikingly different configuration of the relations in question (individual–family–civil society–state). For many of the Bolsheviks the family itself was the target of attack, while the individual was to be subsumed into a collectivised society. For the great dictators civil society was swiftly eliminated and the family was formally exalted, but the crucial relationships became those between the authoritarian state and regimented individuals. For the Catholic Church of Pius XII the principal menace to the Christian family was seen to come from the state on the one hand and individualism on the other; the family and an integrist society were to be the principal links of his chain. Democracy alone, albeit imperfectly, has held fast to all four elements, trying in different ways in different countries to strike a balance between them.

This article begins by examining recent work on labour history by some French and British historians, who have been influenced by postmodernism and the ‘linguistic turn’ but often find themselves locked into what are primarily ‘cultural’ explanations of labour's identity and development. It disputes the culturalist methodology and stresses that an alternative model of discourse analysis insists on contextualisation, which in turn re-instates the significance of realms of explanation outside language, text and culture. It also sees the comparative method as a means of identifying historical structures, and concludes with a schematic account of European labour in the twentieth century.

Vivien A. Schmidt, From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 476pp., £19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-521-55553-1. Nikolaos Zahariadis, Markets, States and Public Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 229pp., $37.50, ISBN 0-472-10542-6. Jim Tomlinson, Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy. The Attlee Years 1945–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 331pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-521-55095-5. Martin Chick, Industrial Policy in Britain 1945-1951. Economic Planning, Nationalisation and the Labour Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998, 221pp., £35.00, ISBN 0-521-48291-7. Jonathan Boswell and James Peters, Capitalism in Contention. Business Leaders and Political Economy in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 251pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-521-58225-3. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 843pp., FF 195, ISBN 2-070-74995-9. Richard Sylla, Richard Tilly and Gabriel Tortella, eds., The State, the Financial System, and Economic Modernization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1999, 295pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-521-59123-6.

Michèle and Jean-Paul Cointet, eds., Dictionnaire historique de la France sous l'Occupation (Paris: Tallandier, 2000), 732pp., FF 290, ISBN 2-235-02234-0. Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 231pp., £45.00 (hb), £14.99 (pb), ISBN 0-582-29909-8. Sarah Fishman, Laura Lee Downs, Ioannis Sinanoglou, Leonard V. Smith, Robert Zaretsky, eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), 336pp., £45.00, ISBN 1-859-73299-2. Bertram M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance, 1938–1946 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 433pp., £73.95, ISBN 0-313-29421-6. Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 285pp., £31.50 (hb), £14.00 (pb), ISBN 0-226-67349-9 and 0-226-67350-2. Lynne Taylor, Between Resistance and Collaboration: Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940–45 (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 195pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-333-73640-0.

Benjamin Stora, Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie-Vietnam en France et aux Etats Unis (Paris: Decouverte, 1997), 252pp., FF 125, ISBN 2-707-12667-5. Benjamin Stora, Le transfert d'une mémoire – de ‘l'Algérie française’ au racisme anti-Arabe (Paris: Découverte, 1999), 148pp., FF 75, ISBN 2-707-12968-2. Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 250pp., ISBN 1-859-73927-x. Charles-Robert Agéron, ed., La guerre d'Algérie et les Algériens, 1954–1962 (Paris: Armand Colin 1997), 346pp., ISBN 2-200-01895-9. Jean-Jacques Jordi and Mohand Hamoumou, Les harkis, une mémoire enfouie (Paris: Autrement, 1999), 139pp., FF 120, ISBN 2-282-60866-1.