This article examines an overlooked group of participants within 1970s housing occupation movements in Western Europe – migrants. More specifically, I analyse Italian migrants’ participation in housing occupations in the city of Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, from 1970–3. By engaging in visible protest, Italian migrant occupiers performed ‘acts of urban citizenship’ that ruptured understandings of localised citizenship and belonging. This case study thus illuminates two interrelated historic phenomena: (1) how social rights became de-territorialised and attached to the individual rather than the nation-state; and (2) how the city became a crucial site of citizenship formation, even across national borders.

This essay focuses on West Germany as exemplary global-local intersection of the spiritual turn in the long 1960s. It shows how spirituality as practices and beliefs seeking a closer connection with the divine within or outside religious groups experienced a multifaceted renaissance in the countercultures of the long 1960s. In this spiritual quest contemporary explorations in the expansion of consciousness and the increasing interest in meditation were pivotal practices. The essay reflects the international exchange of knowledge about body-mind practices from Amazonia and Mexico to the United States, India and West Germany, showing how actors were influenced by international and national connections. Practitioners found the practices of spirituality neither in Christian contemplative traditions nor in Jewish versions, but in various forms of what seekers received and practised as Hinduism or Buddhism, etc., that gave contemporary followers and seekers a means of connecting to higher truths – to God – without God.

This paper deals with appraisals of Havel made in Spain in the 1990s. During this decade, the Czech politician's popularity reached a peak in Europe, and Spanish politicians approached his vision of morality in politics in different ways, taking advantage of it to support different political and national projects. In the first half of the decade, interpretations of Havel were especially productive in Catalonia, where two almost antagonistic political projects drew inspiration from Havel and elaborated on different concepts of European small nations. The decade's second half gave way to a more one-sided vision of him, in which he was transformed, thanks to the Spanish conservative president José María Aznar, into a reference point to support conservatism and the Atlantic agenda.

To understand the mindset that obstructed the paths out of the interwar crisis, we need to reconstruct widely held expectations for the future of states. To examine how such expectations changed, diverged and competed, this paper investigates the work of inquiry committees, ranging from British and German committees engaged in post-war economic planning to the League of Nation's Commission of Enquiry for European Union of the early 1930s. The paper concludes that the interwar crisis can only be understood if we put the Great War and the Great Depression into a common frame. The war changed expectations, but not as drastically as we would instinctively assume. The expectation of an order of expanding, integrating blocs was challenged by the emergence of new ‘small states’ but survived. It was shattered when efforts to overcome the economic slump failed, leading to a broader acceptance of territorial revisionism across Europe than hitherto assumed.

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 article traces the origins and early developments of European fusion research in the framework of Euratom and of postwar nuclear international institutionalism, and as an episode of both the technoscientific Cold War and the interaction between big science and politics in the history of European integration. Based on original Italian, French and European Union archival sources, the article deals with four main passages of Euratom's fusion history: the Euratom treaty and Euratom's first five-year programme (1958–62); the early attempts to establish a Euratom ‒ CERN Joint Study Group for Fusion Research (1958‒9); the launching of Euratom's first fusion programme; and the contribution of Euratom's ‘fusion association contracts’ with the member states to the creation and training of a European transnational epistemic community of fusion scientists and technocrats. The Merger Treaty of 1965, the ‘crisis’ of Euratom and the prospect of British entry in the Community, as well as the ‘tokamak revolution’ of the late 1960s, would contribute to substantially redefine the European fusion programme.

The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered ‘interweaving’. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the ‘women's question’ – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists’ reception of 1970s feminism.

Tax avoidance has become a hotly discussed topic. These debates have been informed by academic research done by social scientists. Historians, relative latecomers in the field, argue for a greater consideration of the interwar period so as to understand the pathway dependencies of the infrastructures used for tax dodging practices today. This article explores the question of how Luxembourg became, in the 1930s, an important node in the network of legal re-coding of capital for tax shopping purposes. The Holding Act of 1929 offered legal security but was vague enough to foster a fiscal bricolage that allowed notaries, banks and lawyers to serve a heterogeneous group of people eager to pay less tax. Concealing the real beneficiaries of the holding while at the same publicising the opportunities of the legal coding proved to be a complementary process.

By reconstructing the lending policy of the European Investment Bank (EIB) from its inception in 1958 to the late 1970s, this article shows that, until the 1970s, the EIB did not pursue EEC (European Economic Community) policies but policy elaborated at the national level. The individual member states’ political priorities and preferences played a key role in shaping the loan operations and the bank's loans were used rather more individualistically by each community country in pursuit of national aims. This situation started to change in the 1970s when internal and external developments to the EEC redeployed and refocused the methods and objectives of the bank so that lending progressively became the result of the interplay between EEC institutions. Gradually, the EIB moved away from being a mere member state's tool to pursue individual national policies, transformed into an EEC policy-driven bank and it became the financial arm of the EEC.

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

This research examines the central banks of interwar Europe through the lens of statistics. It focuses particularly on how the rise of economic and statistical expertise simultaneously supported the existing goals of central banks to retain national autonomy and the tenets of liberal internationalism espoused by the League of Nations. The institutionalised efforts to improve quantitative research culminated in the 1928 Conference of Central Bank Statisticians, where delegates envisioned creating new channels of cooperation based on standardised terminology and a centralised information bureau. By framing central banks within the historiographies of statistics and interwar internationalism, this article details the confluence of factors that shaped a new dependence on expertise.

The present article focuses on the political and social influence of the antimilitarist movement in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s. The article shows how throughout the 1970s the issue of conscientious objection became part of a wider context of struggle for the individual and collective rights and freedoms the Francoist dictatorship denied the Spanish population, achieving an important political impact by concentrating its action on Spain's external image. Throughout the following decade, the antimilitarist movement grew within a context of large-scale mobilisations and public debate around pacifism and antimilitarism, on the occasion of the referendum on Spain's permanence in NATO. The most important campaign was that of resistance both to military service and the alternative social service, the so-called insumisión.

This article examines the state's actions to arm and disarm the civilian population in Spain during the convulsive final years of the Bourbon Restoration period (1917–23). While this topic has received little attention in the abundant literature on the crisis of the liberal regime in Spain, it is crucial to fully understanding the inherent causes and nature of the high levels of political violence which characterised this period. By analysing the ‘selective rearmament’ of part of the population by both legal and illegal means, this article considers the relationship between dynamics of civilian disarmament and rearmament and the evolution of the alleged state monopoly on violence in Spain.

In the late Habsburg period, Fiume's municipal flag became the representative symbol of local patriotism. This article argues that local patriotism in Fiume was a form of identification that combined features of modern nationalism with loyalties to the Habsburg Empire. With the disappearance of the dual monarchy and the subsequent transition period (1918–24), the Fiumian flag was redefined and contested both as a symbol of Italian irredentism realised through annexation and of Fiume's independence by local autonomists. Thus, the article demonstrates how local patriotism survived the empire's dissolution and how attachment to a locality was a significant feature of European political life in general during that period.

This article focuses on two practices which, while neglected by historiography, played a fundamental role in the re-emergence of the fascist community after 1945, namely travel and reading. Travel allowed fascists to realise that the political cause they were fighting for had remained alive even outside their own borders, and to strengthen and renew their transnational network, while reading books – often banned books – allowed them to reinforce their ideology and score a victory over the authorities. By leaving aside a reconstruction focused purely on political events, this article sheds light on how fascists were materially able to re-think their political identity and to influence, albeit to different degrees, the transformed political context of the immediate post-war period.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish anarchist movement became not only the driving force behind a social revolution but an active participant in an increasingly modern conflict which would eventually see thousands of its affiliates and militants serving on the frontline within the Republican Army. This article proposes to examine how military images, themes and symbols came to dominate anarchism's wartime culture, in the process reconciling their antimilitarist ideals with front-line service and asserting their exceptional quality as antifascist warriors. Examining a geographically and ideologically broad set of cultural materials, this article demonstrates a high degree of participation by many sections of the anarchist movement in the heavily militarised culture of the wartime Republic and European antifascism. This manifested itself in cults of battlefield heroism, the veneration of combative masculinity and the situating of ‘the front’ as the moral centre of the movement.

Taking as a case study the commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony of Cabo Verde to memorialise the Portuguese ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century, this article scrutinises how those mnemonic schemes acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. It analyses the management of those schemes in the fixation of the narrative established as official history of ‘discovery’, in a context featured by controversies, uncertainties, omissions and historical lack about that very ‘discovery’. It also critically examines the contradictions, the concoction of facts and the distortions created by the promoters of the commemorations and monuments, as well as the role they played in that process. This article proves how, through the commemorations held and the monuments erected, the promoters of colonial memory distorted the protocols of interpretation of the information on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde present in the Portuguese official documents and how they shaped the global understanding of that fact.

This article examines the Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art, 1300 to 1900, which was hosted by the London Royal Academy in 1927. Based on materials from multiple archives, it demonstrates that this event showcased both artefacts and the internationalist policies that had led to their preservation and display. This exhibition constitutes a leading example of a new kind of political performance, which expanded after 1945 and still affects international gatherings and cultural diplomacy to this day.

Tens of thousands of White Russians were forced to leave their country after 1920. Many of them were career officers and soldiers imbued with anti-communism, who were then hired by diverse armies. They acted as transnational soldiers of the counter-revolution during the interwar period. This article analyses the trajectory of some dozens of them, who volunteered for the Francoist army in 1936–8 during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards, many of them joined the ranks of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’ as interpreters to take part in the invasion of their home country by the Germans. Their experience as occupiers was highly ambiguous and oscillated between disappointment and nostalgia once they perceived that the objective of the invasion was not to liberate Russia from communism, but to enslave the country and its inhabitants. However, once they returned to Spain, they cultivated a hero myth of their past experience and regarded themselves as winners.

This article analyses the scientific and ideological impact of the 1951 tick-borne encephalitis epidemic in Rožňava (Czechoslovakia). Scientists in Rožňava discovered the possibility of transmission of the tick-borne encephalitis virus through non-pasteurised milk. The article focuses on both the outbreak in Rožňava, with its social and ideological implications, and the subsequent virological research, which became a means of prestige and symbolic power for Czechoslovak scientists within the domestic and international scientific community. The article shows that an epidemic can become a tool of power. The Rožňava epidemic, although now forgotten, helped establish the institutional background for virological research in Czechoslovakia and was at the origin of the still cutting-edge knowledge of tick-borne encephalitis.