This issue opens the twenty-fifth volume of Contemporary European History. In the journal's inaugural editorial in 1992, Kathleen Burk and Dick Geary noted that they were standing ‘on the brink of a new Europe’ – and what exciting times those were. Just two and a half years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and barely months after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, CEH came into existence at a time of radical change in Europe and beyond. With the treaties signed at Maastricht in 1992 and in Amsterdam in 1997 European integration accelerated apace. The European Community became a Union. The twelve became fifteen. From March 1995 the Schengen Agreement let people of any nationality travel freely between the seven participating countries without any passport controls at the borders. By the end of the decade, the Single Market was a reality, the Euro was about to be introduced and negotiations for EU membership of ten central and eastern European countries were well underway. The themes of the decade were (re)integration, federation, ever greater union. As Burk and Geary wrote in their 1992 editorial, ‘year by year, the concept of Europe as both a geographical and an historical entity becomes more credible’.

In 2005 Contemporary European History published a special issue on transnationalism, edited by Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels. The articles presented six examples of ‘transnational’ connections between Europeans from different countries, focusing primarily on contacts in the political and economic realms, and documenting a multitude of ties and links between Europeans at all levels from the end of the First World War to the early 1960s.

This was not intended to be a special issue. Instead, my task as editor was simply meant to be that of selecting an interesting selection of pieces from those articles available, or nearly ready, for publication. But upon looking at the list of possible candidates it quickly became clear that a large number dealt squarely with the history of European integration and that two others concentrated on other aspects of Europe's post-war institutional landscape. It therefore seemed to make sense to group them together.

Anti-fascism – a hallmark of the left since the 1930s, and a vague term for active opposition to Italian fascism, German Nazism and similar movements in the interwar period – used to be studied as a brief episode in the history of European nation states. The available syntheses read like collections of national studies with a clear European or Western focus. However, methodological nationalism may soon become a thing of the past – the last few years have brought a transnational turn in anti-fascist studies, which this special issue tries both to illustrate and to discuss.

Conventionally, the starting point of socialist and communist resistance to fascism in Europe and the creation of a European ‘culture of anti-fascism’ is dated to the 1930s in the context of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The hypothesis of the article is that the initiatives and debates of 1923 played a pivotal role in the creation of the transnational anti-fascist movement that transferred cultures of anti-fascism across borders in Europe and the world. The aim of the article is to analyse the first, but hitherto forgotten, efforts to make anti-fascism a transnational phenomenon in the early 1920s. Further, the article will discuss whether there are clear continuities or discontinuities in the anti-fascist articulations of 1923 and the ones created after 1933.

The article analyses forms of international scientific exchange practised by Polish medical experts around 1900. Applying a transnational historiographical approach it asks whether and how the Polish nation mattered to Polish bacteriologists and epidemiologists travelling abroad or communicating with colleagues internationally. It shows that in the 1880s and 1890s the Warsaw bacteriologist Odo Bujwid rarely connected his scientific knowledge to Polish national causes but rather benefited from imperial structures. What was more, he transcended the borders between the two nationalised bacteriological thought styles of Louis Pasteur on the one hand and Robert Koch on the other. Bujwid thus eluded a clear link between science and nationalism. His practices of international scientific exchange can be called ‘transnational’. When a Polish state was re-established in 1918 bacteriology and epidemiology became closely entwined with Polish state- and nation-building. Polish medical scientists now worked for Polish state institutions and acted as state representatives in the international arena. International exchange and border-crossing scientific mobility now served, first of all, to underline Polish statehood and to present it as a modern and civilised country. These practices of international scientific exchange can be described as ‘Olympic Internationalism’.

In 1989 I was chatting to Anthony Seldon, then the head of the Institute of Contemporary British History in London, and we agreed that the turmoil and resultant developments in the Eastern bloc gave hope for the rise of a new Europe. We were academics, and we immediately considered how information and ideas about these exciting events might be provided to the academic community. What about a journal? We looked around. There were many journals focusing on what was then termed Western Europe, and some on the bloc then termed Eastern Europe, as well as on the USSR; there was a journal on contemporary history in toto, although it was then in something of a quiescent period. Our conclusion was that there was no general academic journal which stood back and focused on the whole of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, as the area was then described. We decided that something should be done about it.

This article seeks to explain the emergence of the European Council at the heart of Europe's governance between 1975 and 1986. It highlights four factors that quickly made the newly-created institution both indispensable and stable, despite concerns over the excessive reliance on the intergovernmental method in European cooperation processes. These factors were the rise of globalisation in its multi-faceted policy dimensions, a satisfactory new-found institutional balance, the public impact of societal actors’ connections with regular and frequent heads of government meetings and the democratic legitimacy issue in European integration. The article further argues that this period witnessed the de facto emergence of the three-pillar Maastricht structure and shows how the study of the early days of the European Economic Community can shed light on the current development of the European Union and the European Council after the 2009 Lisbon Treaty.

This article examines the officers who led the Habsburg Army during the First World War. It highlights the complexity of their identities, demonstrating that this went well beyond the a-national – nationalist dichotomy in much historiography. It also argues that these officers' identities had a profound impact on how their army functioned in the field. The article first studies the senior command in 1914–16, showing how its wartime learning processes were shaped by transnational attitudes. These officers had belonged in peace to an international military professional network. When disaster befell their army at the outset of the First World War, it was natural for them to seek lessons from foreign armies, at first from their major enemies, the Russians, and later their German allies. The second half of the article explores the changing loyalties of the reserve officers tasked with frontline command in the later war years. It contends that the officer corps' focus on maintaining social and educational standards resulted in an influx of middle-class junior leaders whose conditional commitment to the Empire and limited language skills greatly influenced the Habsburg Army's record of longevity but mediocre combat performance.

This article shows how one can read political history from evidence on corporate corruption. The study exploits newly discovered archival material from Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, a politically connected investment bank. We contribute to current research by replacing existing conjectures with precise qualitative and quantitative evidence. After reviewing previous works and providing a sketch of information repression and media control in France during the interwar period, we argue that the study of patterns of ‘informational criminality’ provides an original entry to the writing of political history and the history of information.

Ethno-nationalist exiles in the interwar period were a unique species. While some of them relied on their own diasporic networks and waited for a chance, others established agitation platforms and regarded themselves as an alternative International of the ‘oppressed peoples’. Most of these alliances ended in failure, as it proved extremely difficult to reconcile the demands stemming from divergent national claims, such as those of autonomist factions versus irredentist or pro-independence groups, or those of national minorities seeking reintegration into their motherland as opposed to groups seeking independence. This article explores the relationship between minority nationalist exiles and anti-fascism by focusing on three issues: the emergence and evolution of ‘international alliances’ of minority activists in interwar Europe; contacts and ideological exchanges between ethno-nationalist exiles and liberal and anti-fascist segments of European public opinion and, finally, the emergence of a transnational anti-fascist nationality theory.

This article examines how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the European Community to become one of the fundamental tenets of European political identity – and in the process influenced how decision-makers approached the question of enlargement. Building on multiple archival sources, the article traces how all three Community institutions (Commission, Council and European Parliament) legitimised the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of democracy. It focuses on the debates elicited by the attempts of southern European countries to accede to the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Nordic Economic Community (Nordek) was a short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to strengthen cooperation between the four Nordic states. While the importance of the project to Britain has often been overlooked, this article suggests that Whitehall took considerable interest from the start. It demonstrates how, although officially neutral, London sought first to mitigate the effects of Nordek, then to undermine its establishment and, finally, in the wake of Nordek's collapse, to guard against its re-emergence. The aim throughout was to protect three central tenets of British foreign policy: EFTA unity in light of the second veto, Britain's own application for EEC membership and a cohesive Western Europe militarily integrated in NATO. However, the article highlights the absence of a coherent strategy towards tentative Nordic integration and the mixed success this brought, the interdependency of Anglo-Nordic relations in the pursuit and success of British foreign policy goals and the relative decline of the Britain's influence in the Nordic region.

This article focuses on humanitarians by studying the interactions between the International Committee of the Red Cross and one of his delegates, George Montandon, between 1919 and 1922. Montandon was charged with a fact-finding mission in Siberia that set the basis for larger repatriation plans on behalf of prisoners of war from the Central Powers. This article explores the nature and circulation of expertise – formal and informal – in connection with Montandon's private and professional life before the mission, during the mission itself and once the mission was over. Being a delegate for the ICRC was not a profession but rather a break from established professions as doctors, military officers and scholars in Switzerland. However, experts associated with the work of the Geneva organisation at the headquarters and at the ground level brought a vast set of skills to international humanitarianism. Through a spectrum of transnational connections and networks, at the end of the First World War the ICRC experienced processes of specialisation and standardisation of tasks which had already started in wartime. This article argues that the impulse towards an increasing professionalisation of humanitarianism ‘clashed’ with the ambiguities of the ICRC's mandate, on the one hand, and the tensions between the agency of individual relief workers and the institutions they represented, on the other.

This article aims to explore the interplay between religion and political radicalism in Europe by focusing on the case of Italian ‘White Leagues’ (Catholic trade unions) in the interwar period. Interest in this movement stems partly from the opinion that the understanding of politics in early twentieth-century Europe has often been distorted by the historiographical focus on the political polarisation between communism and fascism, which has led to the neglect of the complex ideological area in between. The article will focus in particular on the main organiser of the peasant ‘White’ unions in Italy, Guido Miglioli. He developed a network of political contacts across Europe with the aim of resuscitating the anti-fascist struggle in Italy and launching a campaign for the liberation of the peasantry. This was to be achieved through a European peasant International that would draw from the Soviet example while maintaining its Christian roots.

Established in 1933 by Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese New State was a civil, nationalist, conservative and corporatist dictatorship. A concordat was established between the New State and the Holy See in 1940, yet the treaty did not favour the Catholic Church to the degree one might expect from a Catholic interwar dictator. The fact that the political legitimacy of the Portuguese regime was not dependent on sanctioning by the Holy See justifies this apparent inconsistency. The distinctive features of the Portuguese concordat were enhanced by the authoritarian, rather than totalitarian, nature of the regime. Salazar, more so than Mussolini or Franco, was constrained by political forces not in favour of Catholic privileges. In addition, the dictator himself defended a strict separation of church and state as prescribed by the Portuguese constitution. Nonetheless, Salazar regarded the concordat as an important propaganda instrument that, in association with the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese World, would allow the internal and external prestige of the regime to be increased.

The quotation in this title expresses a dilemma, as the ‘dark millions’ were likely to remain ‘unavenged’ so long as authors were asked to take sides on the Spanish Civil War rather than colonial oppression. Indeed, anti-fascism might well be thought of as, in a sense, antithetical to anti-imperialism. This article explores the relationship between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, focusing on Britain and France. The first part looks at anti-imperialism in the era of the Popular Front; the second looks at how the tensions between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were played out in the case of the major conflicts of the later 1930s in Abyssinia, Spain and China; the third discusses the imperialist assumptions of many anti-fascists. The article concludes by looking at the early phase of the Second World War.

Common historical narratives of Finnish European policy emphasise the sudden and dramatic change of 1991–1995, when Finland, as a reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union, rejected its previously cautious approach and wholeheartedly embraced the goal of joining a unified Europe. This article, however, shows that, already in the mid-1980s, the Finnish political and economic elites questioned the country's position in the Cold War order and took bold steps in order to forge closer relations with Western Europe. A key event was the struggle for membership in Eureka, a novel European project designed to enhance cooperation in high technology.

This article recounts a little-known episode in which Yugoslav partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, rescued some 2,500 Jews from the former Italian camp for Jews in the northern Adriatic in the autumn of 1943. By focusing on this historical event, the article argues for broadening the notion of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Rather than locating ‘rescue’ in the motivations of individuals, the article takes as a point of departure the collective aspect of rescue and investigates the importance of the ideological considerations of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in its decision to rescue the Jews. Rather than in abstract ethical notions, the partisan rescue of the Jews was rooted in their political vision of the future socialist federation, of which the Jews were part.

This paper focuses on how the International Federation of University Women, founded in 1919, sought to reconcile its mission of fostering internationalism with the interests of its over thirty national member organisations. Nowhere was the challenge to its internationalist ethos greater than in post–First World War Germany. Being one of the last European member associations to join the IFUW in 1926, the Germans immediately requested their language to be used alongside English and French. The article reconstructs the struggles preceding the admission of Germany to the IFUW and the subsequent disputes over the ‘language question’ to explain why and on what terms the Germans first contested and eventually agreed in 1932 to accept the new Anglo-American and French dominance as world languages.