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 employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly ‘common-sense’ understandings of ‘Italian-ness’ (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to ‘Italianise’ their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials’ moral authority, political support and ‘totalitarian’ façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an ‘Italian identity’ among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state.

This article examines the advice columns of a Spanish anarchist periodical, La Revista Blanca, in the 1930s. It considers how this example of interactive media, influenced by wider European scientific discourses including eugenics, contributed to shaping anarchist socio-sexual morality. By analysing the periodical's discussions of bodies, birth control, and ‘free love’, the article draws attention to anarchism's inherent tension between the free will of individuals and their obligations to collective progress. It asks how this tension played out at the intersection between anarchist sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’, and by extension how we might situate anarchist women in ‘feminist’ history.

This review article focuses on two key developments in urban history. The first is that the new transnational approach to urban history is significantly advancing the field and the second is that within the European context an important new emphasis is being placed on Eastern and Southern Europe. As claimed by Claus Møller Jørgensen in his review of nineteenth-century transnational urban history:

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.

This article examines British planning for a post-war international order which took place throughout the spring and summer of 1944. The history of this planning process has been largely overlooked in the historiography examining both the creation of the United Nations organisation as well as British diplomacy in the period. When historians have addressed the creation of the organisation, focus has been on the efforts of the Roosevelt administration, usually at the expense of the other great and small powers who contributed in important ways. The work here describes how British officials ordered their thinking on the post-war world and assembled detailed plans for what would become the United Nations organisation. Importantly, the planning in these months involved a concurrent effort to develop an alternative ordering mechanism for the European continent – known as the ‘Western Security Group’ – which, in theory, might balance against a revanchist Germany and hostile Russia. There was thus, by the summer of 1944, a new grand strategy for the post-war period, one which rested on the seemingly paradoxical positions of a world organisation and a balance of power on the European continent. Understanding how British officials arrived at this policy – and specifically how they aligned these disparate strategic strands of regional and international planning – shines light on an important element in the intellectual thought and diplomatic practice of British statesmen in this most consequential of periods.

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 an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay was a rejoinder to those who would see harbingers of the Soviet collapse in the heterogeneous social tendencies of the postwar period. Instead, Bittner draws attention to the sources of cohesion that held the Soviet Union together through the challenges of wartime and beyond. However, Bittner intended his essay not as a general theory of post-war Soviet society, but as an observation about the integrative tendencies that kept the Soviet Union together during the Second World War and in the decades that immediately followed. So when did this alchemical potential for ‘self-organization, resilience, regeneration, redefinition, and creation of new social forms and structures’ come to an end?2

At the Ulster Museum in Belfast two artefacts connect the momentous events of 1916 with the thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. One piece is the work of republican prisoners interned aboard HMS Maidstone in the Belfast docks in the early 1970s: a plaque, signed by its creators, bearing a portrait of the only socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, James Connolly. The other is a painting by Gusty Spence, the founder of the modern loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It commemorates the Battle of the Somme: two soldiers in silhouette, bugles to their lips, on either side of a standard bearing the words ‘In Immortal Memory’, a reference to the 5,000 troops from the 36th Ulster Division who were killed or injured going over the top on 1 July 1916. These two objects not only bring home the importance of history and memory to the paramilitaries who fought each other during the Troubles but also point to how the story of the modern conflict is already being crafted for current political debates and future generations. As William Blair writes, the greatest challenge for the Ulster Museum in the near future will not be remembrance of the battles of a century ago but ‘dealing with the difficult and divisive legacy of “the Troubles”’.1 This is also an issue which historians have already begun to confront, often through their contributions to the debates surrounding the so-called ‘Decade of Centenaries’, stretching from the Home Rule crisis of 1912 to the end of the Irish revolution in 1923. These five books deal with the politics of memory in Ireland generally, and Northern Ireland in particular, and how memorialisation of traumatic events – official, unofficial and private – has shaped both the public sphere and the hidden recesses of everyday life. Two almost simultaneous events from 1916 – the Easter Rising in Dublin and the Battle of the Somme – have acquired extraordinary resonance in the contemporary politics of memory in Northern Ireland.

On 1 March 2022, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin's government of waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she drew explicit links to the Nazi war of aggression in order to legitimise sanctions against Russia as she stressed the UN's mission to work for peace enshrined in the UN charter. Twelve months earlier, in February 2021, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz sentenced a forty-four-year-old Syrian citizen to four and a half years’ imprisonment. Based on the ‘shared values of humanity’, the verdict made headlines as the court explicitly cited the universal jurisdiction principle enshrined in the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (VStGB) that had been enacted in 2002 to bring German law into accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.1 Since 2002, German courts have adopted these international law principles and legal norms in a series of legal actions against foreigners to prosecute crimes against humanity.