To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, ‘the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe’. The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states’ resolution ‘to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’. Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the ‘core Europe’ of the ECSC as a collective ‘supranational’ break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.

Since its creation in 1992 the journal Contemporary European History (CEH) has actively sought to bridge Cold War divides and to bring the histories of Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe into the same frame of analysis. In the journal's twenty-five-year history there has probably been no single institution that has played as significant a role in training new generations of historians as the Central European University in Budapest (CEU). Founded just a few months before the journal, CEU and CEH are products of the same sweeping changes set in motion with the fall of the Berlin Wall. CEU was founded with the explicit task to shed light on on-going processes of ‘democratisation’ and to train a new cohort of regional thinkers and leaders that could understand and direct them. CEH was created to provide a forum for the development of a new kind of history of Europe and its constituent parts, freed (at least in aspiration) from the shackles of Cold War divides.

This article demonstrates the connection between the ideology and activities of the Jewish Territorialist Movement and broader geopolitical trends and discourses during the late interwar and immediate post-war period. The Territorialists, active from 1934 within the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, were representative of such contemporary trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Freelanders relied on accepted notions and practices such as colonialism and colonisation, ‘whiteness’, race, biopolitics and agro-industrial science, as well as (empty) spaces and un(der)developed territories. The Territorialists’ alignment with geopolitics makes the movement's little studied history a relevant chapter in the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, the continuities in Territorialism's aspired social engineering project help to problematise the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.

When Ireland became independent in 1922 there was widespread support for the imposition of a moral order that reflected Catholic teaching. This was remarkably successful: divorce was outlawed while contraception was prohibited as part of this process. The consensus on moral issues was challenged for the first time during the 1970s. The legalisation of contraception became the main battlefield between conservatives and liberals. This article analyses successive attempts to change policy and discusses the impact of social and political change in a homogeneous Catholic state. Ireland remained a predominantly religious country and the Roman Catholic Church wielded considerable influence. The controversy over contraception challenged the Church's authority and the society's deeply embedded moral values. For the first time, Irish politics was divided on matters of church and state. Resolution came in 1979, however the legislation reflected the continuing influence of the bishops on policy making. It also highlighted the caution of politicians who remained reluctant to act. In contrast to elsewhere in Western Europe, the legislation was not a turning point but an example of conservative retrenchment. The legislation generated a conservative backlash that successfully imposed traditional Catholic values on Irish society during the 1980s. The main sources used are the archives of the Departments of Justice and Health.

Dictatorships, autocracies and authoritarian political systems must adapt if they wish to survive. The long-lasting dictatorship of Franco's Spain (1939–75) underwent a series of internal adaptations during its almost forty years of existence. The initial project of the Franco regime, which included the destruction of its social and political enemies, lasted until the end of the Second World War. The second phase, marked by a failed autarkic experiment, ended in 1959. The economic change that followed entailed a moderate opening in political terms, whilst maintaining a dictatorial apparatus. This article examines a further feature in the evolution of the Franco regime which initially sought to impose a monolithic national identity (Spanish) by means of the repression of its national minorities (Basque, Catalan, Galician and so on). Due to the absence of a violent political movement as existed in the Basque Country in the form of ETA, Catalonia is a particularly fruitful source to examine the shifts that took place in the Franco regime's policy towards Spain's historic nationalities. This article focuses on the intermediate spaces that appeared between overt opposition on the one hand and active collaboration on the other. This article assesses the evolving policy towards Catalan culture and identity during the dictatorship. I find three main phases in the regime's strategy: repression, followed by comparative tolerance with a final phase of the co-option of Catalan culture, for the purposes of regime legitimation.

Using a wide variety of European archival sources, this article analyses the development of financial policies after the First World War. Through studying French politics it demonstrates how, following the significant increase in direct fiscal charges in order to cover the costs of the conflict, international fiscal competition exercised strong pressure on the tax systems of large European countries and, as a result, contributed over the course of the 1920s to a process of lowering the taxes levied on high revenues and fortunes. Significantly, the stabilisation of the French franc in 1926 was supported by a simultaneous alignment of the French tax system and neutral tax havens which in turn enabled the return of previously exported assets.

Drawing on an extensive range of French archival sources as well as Jean Monnet's papers, this article challenges several commonly held views regarding the establishment of the Monnet Plan by re-examining the domestic political context in post-war France. It reveals that the distinctive ‘supra-ministerial’ structure of the Monnet Plan was developed only after, and in direct response to, the October 1945 legislative elections in which the French Communist Party won the most seats and subsequently gained control of France's main economic ministries. Furthermore, Monnet managed to convince communist ministers to surrender important powers from their ministries to Monnet's nascent planning office on false premises, a finding that challenges the usual depiction of Monnet as an open and honest broker.

Scholars generally agree that ‘independent’ institutions such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and European Central Bank have created a space and role for themselves that has no equivalent in national political settings. However, we still lack a better understanding of the importance of this independent branch in the EU polity. This article contends that the central relevance of independence is connected to the historically rooted connection between ‘independence’ and ‘international government’ – a relationship the history of which can be traced back to the League of Nations’ foundational period as the inaugural scene for the nexus between power and knowledge in international politics. Ultimately, this article questions the extent to which this specific grammar of international government has been constitutive of the EC polity in terms of valued modes of legitimacy and types of authority.

This article adds to an on-going conceptual discussion on the usefulness of the ‘bystander’ term when applied to the Holocaust and its aftermath. This catch-all concept, mostly associated with Raul Hilberg, has been the subject of fierce criticism, leading some to apply it only with adjectives (‘innocent’, ‘active’ or ‘passive’) and others to dismiss the concept altogether. Taking the Jewish–Gentile relations in Topoľčany as a case study, it becomes clear that the concept has many shortcomings when applied to the microcosm of a particular event. On the basis of Giovanni Sartori's writings on concept formation and the ‘ladder of abstraction’, we argue against dismissing the concept altogether in exchange for limiting its degree of applicability. As shown, the ‘bystander’ concept can be useful when approached with discipline and while being aware of the level of its generalisation.

In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. Initially these newcomers were lumped in Western German discourse under the term ‘refugees’. Yet, within less than a decade, the term ‘expellees’ emerged as a more popular denotation. Scholarship has offered two explanations for this semantic change, emphasising the political influence of both the Allies and the ‘expellee’ leadership. This article presents a complementary reason for this discursive shift. We argue that ‘expellees’ marked the symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims in order to balance out German guilt for Nazi crimes.

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, this article traces the long lineage of the notion of European electricity network. Since the 1930s engineers and policy makers conceived of a geographical conception for rationalising and optimising electricity supply: a European one. This article purports that three vectors undergirded threads of continuity: institutional, intellectual and physical (technological networks). These vectors, and the actors involved in them, created strong path dependencies that kept the idea of a European system firmly on the agenda. Today's international electricity market of the European Union should be seen as an extension of this legacy.

This article examines debates between Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia concerning the post-Second World War Balkan borders in preparation for the Paris Peace Conference of 1946. While for most of the twentieth century Greece and Yugoslavia were close allies united in their position against revisionist Bulgaria, after 1944 the communist affiliations of the new Bulgarian and Yugoslav governments determined the rapprochement between the latter two states. As various proposals for border revisions and the possibility of a Balkan Federation were discussed, the Balkans became a prime battlefield in the emerging Cold War split between the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States. By examining a period of extreme political fluidity between 1944 and 1947, this article explores how the legacy of long-standing national tensions combined with the new political realities after the Second World War created the current borders of Bulgaria, Greece and the (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia.

Since their foundation, the European Communities were characterised by a specific recipe for the labour market, centred on the promotion of labour mobility and a marked focus on vocational training and social dialogue. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources, this article retraces the roots of that recipe in the reformist thinking of the interwar years, with a special point of reference in the International Labour Office. Identified within that body since the 1920s, the recipe evolved through the experiences of the great crisis and post-war demobilisation. It was then adapted to the needs of European economic integration.

Since the 1960s in Italy and Germany the notion has prevailed that ‘the state’ has given support to right-wing terrorism. This article challenges such views by examining the internal dynamics of right-wing terrorism in both countries with reference to Ehud Sprinzak's theory of ‘split delegitimisation’. To explain the different scale of Italian and West German terrorism one must analyse personnel continuities, the nature of the perceived ‘communist threat’, as well as the national political culture. Thus, without neglecting state support for the far right, this article emphasises how the internal dynamics of terrorist groups respond to political and social frameworks. Only if we acknowledge that right-wing terrorist groups possess their own agency can we fully understand their development. This is even more urgent in a time when – once again – the far right is on the rise in Europe.

This article discusses the main lessons of the Marshall Plan's Technical Assistance Programme. The point of departure is the Danish case, but the perspective is wider, and the article aims at broadening the somewhat narrow chronology and geography often applied in studies on the history of the Marshall Plan. When following the Technical Assistance up until the mid-1950s in a Scandinavian country it becomes clear that American diplomats didn't just want the Europeans to work harder, but that their drive for productivity also promoted Americanisation in the form of an US-style business and consumer culture. The ‘American Way’ presented through the Technical Assistance Programme, though not uncontested, was a powerful and appealing model for prosperity applicable to all areas of the economy, from agriculture to retail.

This article challenges the assumption, frequently made in scholarship on Soviet media, that news was absent in the Soviet Union. Working across press, radio, and television, the article shows how after 1953 reform of Soviet news became a priority for journalists, editors and media professionals. The article focuses on discussions among journalists and officials about the future of journalism, arguing that journalists’ notions of professional excellence played a crucial role in shaping news coverage. In a climate of Cold War competition with western radio, new technological possibilities and changing political priorities, journalists gradually overcame their condescension towards news, emphasising its civic potential as an agent of social ‘democratisation’, and the artistic nature of reportage. This new configuration was precarious, however, and collapsed after the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1968. As the Party placed new restrictions on the flow of information, news lost its professional prestige.

The editors of Contemporary European History are delighted to present this roundtable on the Soviet famines of the 1930s, which brings into conversation leading scholars from around the world working in the field of Soviet history.

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

The European Coal and Steel Community was marked by institutional innovations. They have masked strong continuities in administrative and business communities and their governance practices, however, which persisted after 1945. Based on fresh research in national and international organisation archives, this article explores the origins before, during and after the First World War of two key elements of these practices, their evolution over time and their influence on post-war Western European governance of the steel sector: the struggle for executive autonomy and close transnational industry cooperation. Both practices clashed in the ECSC, became amalgamated and had lasting impact on the present-day European Union and its democratic deficit.

This article widens the analysis of international organisations by including communist organisations, in particular the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Drawing on archival research in Moscow, Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva and Rome, this article traces the origins, the evolution and the collective actorness of both organisations. Both COMECON and the Warsaw Pact went through a process of institutionalisation, reorganisation and multilateralisation and began to share many characteristics with their Western counterparts, such as the European Economic Community and NATO. Contrary to conventional wisdom these organisations thus developed into multilateral international organisations, which the other members could use to challenge Soviet unilateralism. Comparing COMECON and the Warsaw Pact with each other and with their Western counterparts, this article shows how these Eastern European international organisations contributed to shifting the balance of power within the Soviet Bloc by empowering their members as sovereign states and themselves as collective actors.