The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.

The inefficient operation of state institutions – including municipal administration – lay at the heart of Belgium's crisis of legitimacy in the 1930s. In 1940, the German military occupation government opted to keep many of the existing administrative institutions and personnel in place. The collaborating political parties, Rex and the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), possessed little legitimacy with either the Germans or the Belgian population. However, this article argues that both parties turned this to their advantage, infiltrating the Flemish municipal apparatus (especially mayors). Yet, as their political programme and legitimation was completely derived from the Germans, their legal position as administrators (especially mayors) was very weak. Both collaborating parties compensated for this with the theory of ‘good government’. Their takeover of power was an administrative operation which, the article argues, would bring them legitimacy through everyday ‘good government’. The entire ‘Neuordnung’ in Belgium in 1940–2 was strongly legitimised on administrative, not political grounds. The failure of this tactic lay in the open politicisation of collaborationist local government. As the article shows, the post-liberation authority also faced a problem of legitimacy. Generally speaking, the trauma of occupation had seemed to strengthen Belgians' wishes for the restoration of stability rather than reforms.

The history of France's defeat, occupation and subsequent liberation may be read, and written, as a constant struggle for legitimacy. Here the diverse candidates for legitimacy are analysed (Pétain, de Gaulle and the internal Resistance) as well as the agents of legitimation, and the arbiters of that process of legitimation (French society, the German occupier, Britain and the United States). Four successive configurations are distinguished within that struggle for legitimacy: summer 1940 to spring 1941, the time of the defeat; summer and autumn 1941, when French society called into question the legitimacy of the Vichy French State; the crossroads of greatest legitimacy between late 1942 and mid-1943, which also marked the period of greatest fragility for de Gaulle; and spring to autumn 1944, when the key question was which state should be rebuilt.

The Nazi occupation of northern Italy led to the creation of the Adriatisches Küstenland operations zone, a Nazi civil administration led by Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Although this was supposedly a temporary measure, the article argues that the intention was to separate the zone from the Italian state and incorporate it into an economic and political sphere directly controlled by the Reich. The article explores the legitimising strategies exploited by the Nazi civil administration and its organs of propaganda, which focused on the political, social and economical failures of the Italian Fascist government. Rainer strove hard to find ways of encouraging each of the zone's diverse ethnic and social groups to look to the Reich – and hence to the local Nazi administration – as the promoter of its national destiny, the guarantor of its socio-political security and the harbinger of its economic prosperity, safeguarding this against the social revolution advocated by the strong local communist Resistance. Rainer's administration, in trying to eradicate the region's Italian roots, established a new ethnic hierarchy, which favoured Slovenes over Italian nationals.

This article presents a re-examination of Hungary's postwar transition from the perspective of the politics of legitimacy that were deployed by the various significant political actors. It argues that postwar state formation following Soviet occupation and legitimacy were closely connected. Hungary's communists and their allies aimed to create a state based on the ideological formula of ‘people's democracy’, which in the Hungarian context led them to build a state based on the restricted social base of the industrial working class. They ignored or antagonised alternative political traditions, particularly those associated with the rural majority and middle classes, which were instead mobilised by an alternative project that rested on a democratised conservatism. This created two visions of a potential postwar political order. The contest between these two visions generated the bitter political struggles that characterised the late 1940s and shaped the social roots of dictatorship in the country.

This article considers the postwar Czechoslovak regime's attempt to employ the courts to gain political legitimacy. In particular, it examines four retribution trials of prominent Czech collaborators and German Nazis and the role these cases played in the development of the contemporary power struggle. The article argues that the postwar regime's manipulation of the judicial system for political ends was fraught with contradictions and ultimately met with only limited success.

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.

Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.

Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.

Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.

David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.

Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang), 280 pp., $24.00, ISBN 0-8090-4643-1.

Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Modern World since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2003), 268 pp., £18.99, ISBN 0-415-25140-0.

Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 304 pp., £50.00, ISBN 1-57181-726-7.

Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 364 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-521-81236-4.

Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–48 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 200 pp., £19.99, ISBN 0-7146-8430-9.

John H. Morrow Jr, The Great War: An Imperial History (New York: Routledge, 2003), 352 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-415-20439-9.

Mario Morselli, Caporetto, 1917: Victory or Defeat? (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 176 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-714-65073-0.

Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), 318 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-747-27157-7.

The powers of Europe fought the Great War for more than four years, but it took France fifteen years to write its official history, Germany nineteen years, and the United Kingdom an astonishing twenty-six years. These works, moreover, encompass only land operations and fill twenty-three extraordinarily detailed volumes for France, an equal number for Great Britain, and fourteen volumes for Germany. The time and energy needed to compile the thousands of necessary documents, organise that data, and construct the interpretations reflect both the enormity of the war itself and the difficulty of finding meaning in an event that so deeply shook the continent.

Michel Lefebvre and Rémi Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales. Images retrouvées (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 192 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 2-02-052390-6.

Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 472 pp., £13.99 (pb), ISBN 0-521-45932-X.

Javier Rodrigo, Los campos de concentración franquistas. Entre la historia y la memoria (Madrid: Siete Mares, 2003), 251 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 84-933012-05.

Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), 388 pp., €18.70 (pb), ISBN 84-206-3706-8 (English edition: Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 304 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0299178641).

The Spanish Civil War is among the most passionate conflicts of the long twentieth century, as one which arouses considerable emotion, in favour of either the Republican or the Francoist side. Its duration – far beyond what had been predicted in July 1936 by the military rebels and most international observers – together with its rapid conversion into an arena of international dispute between two opposing world-views, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’, made it of long-standing interest for world public opinion. Moreover, its internationalisation made it appear as the prelude to the Second World War. The survival of the Francoist dictatorship until 1975 contributed to the fact that the first historical analyses of the Spanish Civil War had to be written abroad and by foreign scholars, mostly French and Anglophone. Even now the Spanish conflict continues to be a matter of interest for non-Spanish scholars, who rely on a long-standing tradition of scholarship on the topic.

Neven Andjelić, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The End of a Tragedy (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 228 pp., $34.95 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8431-7.

Tom Gallagher, The Balkans after the Cold War. From Tyranny to Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 256 pp., $114.95 (hb), ISBN 0-415-27763-9.

John Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), 309 pp., $23.95 (pb), ISBN 9639241822.

James Pettifer, ed., The New Macedonian Question (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave and St. Martin's Press, 1999), 311 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-333-92066-X.

Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation. The Attack on Yugoslavia (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 246 pp., $10.00 (pb), ISBN 1-85984-366-2.

Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), 374 pp., £17.50 (pb), ISBN 1-850-65715-7.

Emerging from the obscurity of old-fashioned, specialised ‘area studies’, since 1989 the Balkans have attracted much attention from historians. The primary reason for that has been, tragically, the war in Yugoslavia and the emergence of a postwar order. Even the post-communist transitions (in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania) attracted less attention. Nevertheless, the field benefited substantially from the increased interest in the area, and lively debates took place on contested issues, sparked not least by hasty initial schemata (and stigmata) used by outside observers, such as ‘ancient hatreds’ and the like. Parallel to the attention paid to what was going on in Yugoslavia, and perhaps more productively in the long run, was the postmodern, postcolonial approach to Balkan history, inspired by Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans, which followed Edward Said's monumental Orientalism and appeared parallel to Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe. Such refreshing studies of Western representations of the region were later complemented by the internal perspective of how such representations were received, and coped with, in the region. A profusion of ‘cultural studies’ in the broadest sense followed, reflecting both the ongoing reshaping of Balkan identities and outside demand for such studies.