In 1947 the liberal Protestant minister Willem Banning drafted a new programme for the Labour Party, in which the party dropped the Marxist view of history and class struggle. New Labour in the Netherlands was envisioned as a party that strove for a democratic and just society. Banning's role in reforming the Labour Party was part of his broader project of breaking down structures of socio-political segregation that had existed since the end of the nineteenth century. Banning argued that the Labour Party had to abandon its atheist ideology to open up to Protestants and Catholics. This article will examine Banning's views and ideals and show how he contributed to the transformation of Labour into a social democratic party and seek answer to the question: how could a liberal Protestant minister become the main ideologue of the Labour Party?

This article examines the ideological and political transformations that allowed dialogue between Catholics and socialists to bear fruit in the Federal Republic of Germany in the immediate post-war era. It focuses on the role played by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, the prominent Catholic intellectual, constitutional theorist, historian and future Constitutional Court justice.

This article argues that the topos of dialogue between Christians and Marxists fulfilled a key role in the creation and maintenance of power relations in religious politics in East Germany. Three case studies illustrate the topos of dialogue as a strategy of struggle: 1. the campaign against ‘revisionism’ and ‘politicised religion’; 2. the church policy strategy of ‘differentiation’; 3. the critique of the phenomena commonly associated with the Christian–Marxist dialogue outside East Germany in the mid-1960s. These instances of socialist religious politics, while having their own dynamics, were closely related through specific actors and argumentative strategies.

In the 1960s a shift occured in how shamanism was represented in Soviet anti-religious journals, in which shamanism was transformed from an ethnographically documented cultural practice peculiar to Siberian indigenous populations, into an – albeit ‘primitive’ – form of a universal human capacity for altered states of consciousness and a precursor of various forms of mysticism. The article argues that this shift coincided with a shift in the Soviet atheist project, as well as a point of comparison that reveals similarities and differences between Soviet and Western modernist projects.

This article explores a major shift in European Protestant thought about socialism during the mid-twentieth century, from intense hostility to acceptance. During the twentieth century's early decades it was common for European Protestant theologians, church leaders and thinkers to condemn socialism as a threat to Christianity. Socialist ideology, many believed, was inherently secular, and its triumph would spell anarchy and violence. In the decades after the Second World War, however, this hostility began to wane, as European Protestant elites increasingly joined Christian-socialist associations and organisations. By focusing on the Protestant ecumenical movement, this article argues that one of the forces in this change was decolonisation, and in particular the rise of Christian and socialist thinkers in the Global South. It shows how concerns about Christianity's future in Asia and Africa helped some European Protestants to rethink their long-held suspicion towards state-led economic management and distribution.

On the still divided Joseon peninsula, a united Korean women's ice hockey team competed at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. Only a few months later, the French, Croatian and Russian heads of state quite literally invited themselves on to the winners’ podium at the 2018 FIFA men's World Cup in Moscow. Such conspicuous examples are emblematic of the role of modern sport in the realm of international relations.

In August 1902 the British Conservative MP for East London, William Evans-Gordon, spent two months in Eastern Europe surveying the living conditions of Jewish populations across the Russian Pale of Settlement. His reflections – and photographs – morphed into a booklet published the following year in London, entitled The Alien Immigrant. Abstracts from the manuscript were read in the commission hearings that led to the adoption of the Aliens Act in 1905, a milestone in the introduction of immigration controls across the United Kingdom and the codification of the legal right to asylum. Among the places that Evans-Gordon visited was Vilna, also known in Polish as Wilno – today's Vilnius. The city was ‘one of the most congested cities of the Jewish pale’; it lay in ‘the centre of the great Jewish drama’. Facing the misery of the Jewish ghetto Evans-Gordon ruminated on the conditions of life in the slums of east London which were populated by Jewish families during the period of the ‘Great Departure’. Eerily anticipating present-day debates across Europe, The Alien Immigrant framed the migration crisis as a ‘national question’ and warned prospective migrants that the United Kingdom could not offer them a better future. Evans-Gordon's arguments gave popular anti-Semitism a progressive veneer. ‘When altruism towards aliens leaves some of our poorest folk without homes and without work’, he noted, ‘it is time to say that the burden of solving the problems of Eastern Europe is not to be laid on them’.

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.