This article addresses the influence of personalism – an anti-liberal, anti-socialist intellectual movement which developed in France in the 1930s – on the process of European integration during the European Commission presidency of Jacques Delors (1985–95). The received wisdom is that the personalist tradition contributed to shaping the early developments in European integration in the 1950s but its influence later declined with the consolidation of the bipolar equilibrium in Europe. Instead, this work shows that personalism gradually re-emerged during the mid-1970s and 1980s and inspired the Commission's search for an anti-individualist European social model, the supranational democratisation of the integration process and the continental vision of European integration after 1989.

This article focuses on the Francoist ‘New State's’ foreign policy as a means of explaining the failure in food supplies which led to ‘Franco's famine’ in the early 1940s. It contends that eschewing strict neutrality in favour of pro-Axis policies after the outbreak of the Second World War contributed to creating the famine. Faced with Spain's Germanophile stance, first Britain, and later the United States, took a series of measures aimed at preventing any form of Spanish participation in the war. Most significant among these was the strictly managed economic blockade of Spain, which exacerbated problems of basic supply that had already been created by the dictatorship's policy of autarky. The result was the aggravation of famine conditions. The article will further demonstrate that the dictatorship was perfectly aware of the blockade's effect on the population and the suffering it caused.

What can a focus on intimacies and affinities between radical immigrants in Ireland and their Irish counterparts tell us about the transnational scope of the global Irish revolution? This article answers this question through the lives of Rose MacKenna, an Irish playwright and socialist, and her husband Sidney Arnold, a Latvian literary translator. The activist career of this obscure Irish-Latvian couple took them from revolutionary Dublin in the wake of the Easter Rising to Petrograd in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This article argues that MacKenna and Arnold, by virtue of their obscurity and marginality, rather than in spite of it, can suggest the sources and methodologies required to uncover the transnational world of Ireland's radical intelligentsia.

On 10 May 1981, French voters elected a socialist president, François Mitterrand, whose programmes promised to change their daily lives. Less than two years later, his government definitively endorsed economic austerity. The adverse international context, it was argued at the time, forced France to prioritise its European commitments over radical reform of capitalism. Since then, most commentators have interpreted this decision either as a betrayal by the socialist elites or as a symbol of their economic incompetence. This article reappraises these narratives. Based on archival research and a large body of lesser-known critical French-language scholarship, it contends that the 1983 austerity plan was neither a sudden shift nor a neoliberal turn. Without denying the crucial political and symbolic dimensions of the decisions of the left in 1983, the article also shows that the crucial stages of the liberalisation of French capitalism occurred in fact later in the decade.

In a brilliant 1972 cartoon, the creator of Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz, depicts the contemplative beagle going through a crisis of rage. Snoopy discovers that a six-storey parking garage has been built on the site of the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, a place in which, we are led to understand, he had spent some of his happiest childhood moments. Snoopy cannot contain himself. ‘You stupid people’, he shouts; ‘You're parking on my memories’.

In the slipstream of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there has been a global mobilisation around monuments and statues of famous figures involved in the slave trade and European colonial conquest. In former colonial states – such as France and Britain – and states shaped by the legacies of slavery – such as the United States – activists have defaced, damaged or torn down monuments associated with these contested pasts. This is hardly a novelty. The destruction of physical symbols is often a response to regime change. But, in this case, the mobilisation has taken a different form. Instead of legitimising a new regime and new elites, the destruction of monuments is part of a demand for justice from historically marginalised groups who are seeking to reclaim their heritage. The deconstruction of these monuments automatically entails the deconstruction of dominant national narratives that have contributed to such marginalisation.

Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed.1 In the past few years, however, building in part on the perceived success of Holocaust art restitution but also on the increased visibility and impact of national and global social movements demanding racial justice and institutional decolonisation, major international museums have come under ever stronger pressure to return art looted as part of colonial occupations. Perhaps the most organised of the current campaigns is the campaign to return the so-called ‘Benin Bronzes’ – a vast collection of various artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin (in today's Nigeria) and dispersed across major international museums, most prominently the British Museum in London, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, among others. Since 2020, a number of museums have pledged to return their holdings of Benin Bronzes and restitute them to Nigeria, where a major new museum is being built to display them in Benin City. All of this activity has also reenergised perhaps the most famous case for restitution – the movement to return the Parthenon ‘Elgin’ marbles from the British Museum to the Acropolis in Athens.

One day in December 2019 I knew something was badly amiss. Russian President Vladimir Putin had called a meeting with the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States – the vague post-Soviet association of former Soviet republics that semi-defer to Russia – in order to discuss history. Not just discuss: he actually brought a thick stack of archival documents to the meeting, which, he said, demonstrated certain truths about the history of the Second World War. These had allegedly been forgotten or perhaps deliberately ignored in the West. He then selectively cited from these documents (most, if not all, of which are well-known to historians) to prove that, effectively, the West, and especially Poland, were responsible for the war.

Debates about history have never been strictly confined to the world of scholarship. They have also been at the centre of political controversies in society. ‘The problem for professional historians’, Eric Hobsbawm once observed, ‘is that their subject has important social and political functions’.1 ‘This duality’, he noted, ‘is the core of our subject’. This essay offers some reflections on the political role of historians, exploring the relationship between their scholarly work and their involvement in political debates. A closer look at the issue shows that it is not so much a problem as an opportunity for historians to engage with their subject on various levels, from the realm of scholarship to the realm of contemporary politics, which makes their position in society both more complex and more critical.

Academic historians often complain that their work is not appreciated by the public and that the impact of their books is limited to a few other scholars. There are, however, situations where historians face the opposite challenge, namely a great deal of interest from both the public and from politicians who want to exploit or interfere with their work to further their political agendas. This arises most often in countries that are undergoing deep political and social changes. At these times, the legacies of the past that emerge after a fundamental regime transformation, like the collapse of dictatorship, have a profound impact on historical research and discourse.

Today, the Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) is presented as a timeless touchstone of German commercial sentiments, but that was not always the case. Until the mid-twentieth century, the law was relatively unknown and unevenly applied across Germany. This began to change thanks to the market protectionism of Bavarian brewers in two conflicts of integration between the 1950s and 1970s. The first was sparked by West German market integration and pitted capital interest Old Bavaria (Altbayern) against consumer practices in Franconia. The second followed a parallel development but was initiated by Western European market integration and set Bavarian and West German brewers and regulators in opposition to Brussels. In both, brewers, fearful that integration threatened their market share, rallied around the Reinheitsgebot to win political allies, cudgel industry outliers and generate popular support through claims to culture and tradition. Analysing the transformation of the Reinheitsgebot, this article theorises the causal ‘entanglements of scale’ by which a little-known provincial law transformed into a German icon.

Using visual-historical methods, this article seeks to offer insights into the experiences of two historiographically underrepresented – but in this specific case overlapping – groups during the National Socialist era: elderly and provincial Jews. The article centres on a fascinating set of images: namely, a selection of portraits of individuals and photos of the Jewish community inside and outside of the local synagogue on a Saturday morning. The photographer, a young man by the name of Heinz Bähr, was preparing for his imminent immigration to the United States when he returned to his hometown of Breisach am Rhein in 1937 and photographed his extended family and members of the small rural Jewish community. As the article shows, photography was not simply a means to represent the elderly through the eyes of younger Jews but was an intergenerational practice of constituting communal memory. The photos reveal the self-perceptions of those who stood in front of and behind the camera and how these actors chose to represent historical processes on film.

This article discusses the aesthetics of flexible specialisation, a form of labour marked by micro-enterprises, skilled artisans, flexible machinery, municipal welfare and strong kinship and subcultural networks. Focusing on the writing and projects of Nanni Strada and Andrea Branzi, the article describes the fate of this labour configuration within so-called ‘Radical’ design in the central and northeastern sections of Italy (‘The Third Italy’) during the 1970s. I look at how these practices were exported abroad and deteriorated in the face of increasing global competition. The article pays particular attention to the Soviet reception of Third Italy design and the reciprocal interest by Radical designers in Soviet Productivism in order to consider the persistent ideologies of third way production.

This article evaluates intellectual debates on antisemitism in Germany in 1932, the last year before the establishment of Nazi dictatorship. The focus is on understudied cases of journals and books, in which both Jewish and National Socialist authors published right next to each other and on the same pages. In this context, the article makes three arguments: first, it analyses apologetic themes by right-wing authors and shows that a significant number of National Socialists still pretended that they were not actually antisemitic in 1932. Second, it reflects on the problem that Jewish intellectuals often disagreed on how to respond to the rise of antisemitism and thus entered into very different forms of debate with the German right. Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, the article also demonstrates that Weimar media had simultaneously developed an acute awareness of future threats and the possibility of large-scale atrocities on German territory.

This article will focus on the prominent role played by the British Conservative government, guided since 1979 by Margaret Thatcher, in re-launching globally an energy model based on cheap fossil fuels by leveraging the newly available petroleum extracted in the North Sea. Between 1980 and 2010 global oil consumption increased by 50 per cent, while both coal and natural gas consumption nearly doubled. North Sea oil represented a crucial, if never openly acknowledged, ally for Thatcher, serving the purpose of bringing down oil prices, while at the same time achieving other crucial policy goals.The advent of the British North Sea oil weakened OPEC control of the global oil market, helped crush the resistance of the British coal miners, fed the ‘de-nationalisation’ of British energy sector, and then contributed to promote the ‘neoliberal governance’ of the EU energy sector.

Between 1969 and 1993, a genuine ‘European welfare state’ was forged at the level of the European Economic Community (EEC), even though this expression was not used per se. After a definition of the welfare state as a three-pronged set of policies, the article develops first the flourishing period in the 1970s, when many ambitious ideas such as a common reduction of working hours, or the control of multinationals, emerged. In a second step, it explains the failure of this project due to the neoliberal backlash of the early 1980s and the division of the welfarist coalition. Ultimately, the whole project was rekindled as a flanking wing of the internal market programme when the latter was launched in 1985. Hence, when the internal market opened up in 1993, a very unique kind of European welfare existed at the international level. It was less redistributive than that of national welfare states and more geared towards the management of common norms.

In December 2021 a famous Greek TV and radio journalist and well-known anti-vaxxer, Yiorgos Tragkas, passed away due to Covid-19 complications. In the previous two decades, Tragkas had become a controversial figure, employing an anti-elite, pro-Russian and anti-Western narrative that fed into the country's underdog culture. His ethnocentric, populist, toxic tabloid journalism had been a popular genre in Greek political culture since the early 1980s. However, the debt and migration crises that shook Greece fuelled populist politics and a wave of misinformation.1 Tragkas jumped on the bandwagon of this new era by whitewashing the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party on national TV and by live appearances dressed up as a Second World War Nazi officer, with photos of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel on his desk.

Policy, voluntary, psychological and educational interest in gifted children emerged across Europe in the early twentieth century but surged dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores the transnational voluntary circles hoping that gifted youth would bring peace and liberal democracy across Europe in these years. It analyses, also, how such work came into conflict with the expectations of conservative press in Britain: that gifted children would in fact bolster national economic progress. Critically, the article demonstrates that parents and children, drawing on professional and cultural capital, resisted ideas of gifted youth as global assets. Interest in giftedness revealed the growing ‘agency’ of articulate, affluent, middle-class families within the contexts of individualism and neoliberalism, but also its limits. Further, we can and must centre the experiences of young people in our scholarship, to truly understand how ‘agency’ operates within families and beyond.

This article reveals how, in the interwar period, British colonial authorities in Cyprus borrowed from the combination of political authoritarianism and economic development characterising Italian rule in the neighbouring Dodecanese, as both a solution to Greek irredentism and an administration suitable to ‘Mediterranean populations’. British authorities shunned, nonetheless, the chronopolitics and biopolitics buttressing fascist governance, which aimed at the political and cultural assimilation of Dodecanesians into the Italian national community. In conversation with the literature on imperial formations, the article therefore highlights the forms and limitations of the circulation of administrative practices and ideas across European colonial boundaries.

The Romanian government encountered unexpected difficulties after the First World War with the increase of religious minorities, particularly evangelicals in the newly acquired border region of Bessarabia. International affiliations and increasing success in rural areas led government officials and the Romanian Orthodox Church to label these groups as foreign pawns or socially deviant sectarians. The Baptist Church in Chișinău proved a special case of concern as its leadership included a Jewish man, Lev Averbuch. Averbuch's congregation was a diverse religious community, filled with Romanians, Russians, Bulgarians, Jews, Greeks, and others. Their multi-ethnic composition, multi-lingual services, ties to international organisations, and controversial sermons speaking out against nationalism and antisemitism were used by police and Orthodox Church authorities to paint them as a threat to national security. The analysis of Averbuch's interwar community of Jewish Christians in Chișinău shows the region was not a homogenous religious space and that religious identity was of greater value than national identity. It provides insight into the fluidity of religious, ethnic, and even geographic borders, and how policies of national consolidation were challenged at the local level by religious minorities during Europe's tumultuous interwar years.