How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

This article explores an attempt by one Polish organisation – known until 1952 by the name of its weekly journal Dziś i Jutro, thereafter as PAX – to assemble a ‘Catholic-socialist’ international in the decade following the Second World War. This transnational project was predicated on co-operation across the Iron Curtain by Catholic thinkers and activists opposed to the rearmament and incorporation of (West) Germany into an integrated European community. The project's author Wojciech Kętrzyński deployed a discourse of protecting the ‘human person’ based on the prioritisation of global peace. Polish encounters with francophone Catholic activists from across Western Europe – especially with the French journal Esprit – bred serious intellectual engagement across the Iron Curtain at the level of Catholic philosophy and theology. Paradoxically, however, these activists accepted that the dignity of the human person would be best served by transnational anti-Germanism, at the price of complicity with – or outright participation in – Stalinism. The self-styled Catholic-socialist project thus failed, yet, surprisingly, it failed neither immediately nor completely. It thus reveals that possibilities existed throughout the cold war – even at the height of Soviet-bloc Stalinism – for intellectual, cultural and political exchanges and partnerships across the Iron Curtain.

Women entered police service between the wars in much of the world as a result of agitation by the international women's movement and the League of Nations. Nearly everywhere a gendered division of police work emerged, with female police primarily responsible for social welfare tasks and their male colleagues handling investigations and arrests. Poland represented a notable exception. Tapping into both international and national concerns, Polish policewomen laid claim to extensive powers by invoking the grave threat of the traffic in women. This focus on trafficking had a paradoxical effect, expanding the possibilities for female policing even as it justified a range of restrictive measures against prostitutes and poor female emigrants.

This article examines the public and private responses to the accidental deaths of King Albert I and Queen Astrid of Belgium in 1934 and 1935. The public and private mourning for Albert and Astrid and the impact of their deaths and funerals can only be understood when we analyse these events against the background of structural transformations in national identity, international and national politics and media culture in interwar Europe. The analysis of the responses to these events thus offers unique insights into the relationship between the Belgian monarchy, politics and modern mass media in the 1930s. The memory of the war experience permeated both funerals through the massive presence of war veterans. Condolence letters to the royal court show how Astrid's popularity made the Belgian monarchy more human and approachable than it had ever been, while their sudden deaths simultaneously stimulated the mystification of both royal figures. Albert's funeral even constituted an event of symbolic significance in the interstate relations of Belgium with France. The meaning of both these high-profile deaths was negotiated within the mass media.

This article explores the divisions created by the Great Patriotic War, its aftermath and the reconstruction of Russian cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It examines the conflicts created by rebuilding housing, infrastructure, restoring communities and allocating resources in cities where war's painful legacy continued to be felt. The war's impact varied enormously between cities on the frontlines and in the rear. Contrary to official propaganda rebuilding was a protracted process, which created divisions rather than unity.

The Labour and Socialist International (LSI) was a major vehicle for transnational socialist cooperation during the interwar years and thus seemed to continue the traditions of socialist internationalism. In the realm of international relations, however, it championed key tenets of liberal internationalism. The LSI supported the idea of a League of Nations and embraced the notion of a world order based upon democratic nation-states. While it criticised some aspects of the international system, its overall emphasis was on reform rather than revolution. The article sheds light on the wider phenomenon of interwar internationalism by tracing the LSI's relationship with the League of Nations, with the politics of peace more generally and with the competing internationalism of the communists.

This article discusses loyalty trials conducted in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland region known as Felvidék after it was reannexed to Hungary by the First Vienna Award in 1938. All civil servants who had worked for the Czechoslovak state had to appear before local loyalty commissions to prove their loyalty to the Hungarian state. The commissions' task was complicated by two competing conceptions of loyalty – one investigating civic loyalty, the other national loyalty – and the politicisation and ethnicisation of peoples' daily practices for the previous two decades under Czechoslovak rule.

Large numbers of Aromanian immigrants in Southern Dobruja joined the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael during the early 1930s. Deterritorialised by population transfers and state-building in Greek Macedonia, they reterritorialised themselves as ethnic Romanians ‘coming home’ to colonise Southern Dobruja. This article situates the Aromanian turn to fascist politics within the problems they faced during migration. It argues that Aromanians used fascism to assert their identities as Romanians and to claim ethnic privileges that had been denied them as immigrants.

In 1976 Sweden adopted a law on workplace democracy, presented by the Social Democratic government as the ‘reform of the century’. What can the reform tell us about the history of the Swedish Model and how it was revised during the early 1970s under the prime minister, Olof Palme? This article compares four grand narratives of the development of welfare states, viewing dominant narratives of the Swedish Model as influential myths in their own right. The article argues that despite its global reputation as a hallmark of ‘democratic socialism’, the Swedish workplace democracy reform was a broad cross-class compromise, in the wake of a pan-European wave of similarly labelled reforms. Furthermore, the reform served to protect workplaces against Communist activism. The argument builds on the internal meeting protocols of the board and executive committee of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

This article analyses Christian Democratic International organisations after the Second World War, namely the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (NEI) and the Geneva Circles (secret discussion groups), in order to understand how and to what extent this international network has been important for European Christian Democratic Parties and for the overall process of European unification. The goal is to describe the relationship between the Christian-inspired parties and their efforts to define a common ideological framework and a successful Europeanism capable of competing with other political groups and ideologies, especially communist and nationalist forces. The main sources used are the minutes of meetings of the NEI and the Geneva Circles.

Coming about in a phase of renewal and electoral success for the European socialist parties, the rise of the Italian Communist Party in the 1970s elicited differentiated reactions within the Socialist International. While providing an account of the transnational socialist debate on Italian Eurocommunism, this article suggests to understand it in the context of a wider discussion on the political identity and aims of the European left. Divisions on the new ‘communist question’ amongst the socialist movement mirrored the divergent opinions on how to react to the changes that were taking place in European economics and society, as well as in the international system.

This article examines the transfer of Swedish concepts of urban modernity to British cities after 1945. It shows how an affinity between design and architecture elites facilitated the transfer of key concepts that were mediated in cities. Moreover, it argues that the often contested transfer of Swedish modern architecture and design to northern English cities initially meshed with municipal ambitions to improve working-class housing and culture. Thereafter the influence of Swedish modern was continued in altered form by the preponderance of Swedish prefabrication techniques in the construction of new poured concrete and high-rise estates during the 1960s. These aspirations to improve the urban environment with Scandinavian examples of good living often magnified the difficulties of modernising the industrial conurbations of the north.

The current historiography of the Dutch urban renewal order focuses on an elite of audacious planners and technocratic civil servants, who allegedly embraced the comprehensive redevelopment of inner cities along functionalist lines. However, professional pamphlets and minutes from the 1950s and 1960s reveal a much more ambivalent and uncertain state of mind in the field of urban renewal, especially in the views put forward by local administrators. This article will demonstrate that insecurity about the dawn of the modern age was crucial for the swiftness with which Dutch planning and political elites abandoned comprehensive redevelopment in the early 1970s.

The German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) had famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. During the Second World War, however, Arendt also spoke out repeatedly against the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Rejecting both alternatives, Arendt advocated for the inclusion of Palestine in a multi-ethnic federation that would not consist only of Jews and Arabs. Only in 1948, in an effort to forestall partition, did Arendt revise her earlier critique and endorse a binational solution for Palestine. This article offers a new reading of the evolution of Arendt's thought on Zionism and argues that her support for federalism must be understood as part of a broader wartime debate over federalism as a solution to a variety of post-war nationality problems in Europe, the Middle East and the British Empire. By highlighting the link between debates on wartime federalism and the future of Palestine, this article also underscores the importance of examining the legacy of federalism in twentieth century Europe for a more complete understanding of the history of Zionism.

This article discusses the concept of ‘religious regimes’ in order to identify institutionalised arrangements regulating the social position of religion. By analysing such regimes and the views underpinning them, three visions of the societal role of religion come into focus: segmented pluralism, the Christian nation and the secular nation. Taking up Dutch post-war history as a case study, it becomes clear that religious regimes regularly result from fragile compromises. The concept thus yields insight into the gradual transitions between different institutional arrangements regarding religion and into the impact of changing views on the societal role of religion within and outside religious communities.

The concert given by the West German rock star Udo Lindenberg in East Berlin on 25 October 1983 links cultural, political, diplomatic and economic history. The East German regime had banned performances by the anti-nuclear peace activist and musician since the 1970s, but eventually allowed a concert, hoping to prevent the deployment of American nuclear missiles in West Germany. In allowing this event, however, East Germany neither prevented the implementation of the NATO double-track decision of 1979 nor succeeded in controlling the political messages of the impertinent musician. Desperate for economic aid from the West, East Germany decided to cancel a promised Lindenberg tour in 1984, causing widespread disillusionment among his fans in the country.

From its inception the European Community had a civil aim: the need to stimulate a European civil consciousness. Viewed as a pre-condition for the popular acceptance of increased European integration, this provided the rationale for the Community's public communication policy of 1951–1967. The Community pursued this civil aim through two distinct public communication approaches: popularist (1951–1962) and opinion leader led (1963–1967). We contend that the way the Community undertook its public communication policy cannot be understood without considering the Community's civil aim. This leads us to question some of the common views held concerning the significance of European public communication policy from 1951 to 1967.1

Concentrating on the production of knowledge of poverty and homelessness, this article discusses how particular spatial settings influenced the construction of social problems in the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the practices of three kinds of knowledge producers – social scientists in academic circles, ‘practitioners cum activists’ engaging in advocacy research and experts in governmental committees – the analysis focuses on the early stages of a rediscovery of poverty in Western Europe as it was debated in international fora as well as in West Germany and France. It shows that the way in which poverty was represented as a new challenge to Western ‘affluent societies’ was in many respects an urban story, as the ongoing housing crisis and newly defined problem areas served as major points of reference for the revived interest in social deprivation. Moreover, urban actors – locally active NGOs and municipal authorities – played a preeminent role in launching debates on the apparent paradox of poverty in affluence. With their own work often grounded in particular urban problem zones, many contemporary observers tended to spatialise poverty. For them, poverty was bound to particular places; it was an exceptional sphere that helped generate a particular behaviour that made it difficult for ‘the poor’ to rise. While a growing part of the population had access to housing of a standard previously reserved to the middle class and had become able to choose where to live, life in peripheral shantytowns or dilapidated inner cities became the ultimate signifier of a social position beyond the established class structure.

The main goal of this paper is to consider white Irish immigrants within the context of immigration of colour in post-war Britain. It considers the similarities in the imperial-historical reasons for the immigration of mostly poor rural workers from the West Indies, South Asia and Ireland. The discussion explores the experiences of both white and non-white immigrants in London and Birmingham up to 1971, comparing all three groups but focusing on Irish immigrants. I aim to append the Irish experience to analyses of post-war immigration, which tend to focus on non-white Commonwealth immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia. By exploring the Irish experience, I question existing scholarship which suggests Irish immigrants assimilated into post-war Britain free of the ethnic tensions and difficult conditions that migrants of colour indisputably endured. I also demonstrate the degree to which British historians have disregarded the experiences of Irish people in Britain.

The United States' support for the Franco dictatorship, along with British dominion over Gibraltar, caused an increasing sense of frustration towards the United States and United Kingdom amongst broad sectors of the Spanish public during the 1960s and 1970s. Growing resentment towards the Anglo-American presence in Spain threatened to jeopardise the geopolitical objectives of these two governments given the strategic importance of the Iberian Peninsula in the Cold War. Both the Americans and the British identified the promotion of the English language as a cultural tool to develop empathy amongst those Spaniards who would drive forward the eventual transition to a post-Franco era. This ‘soft power’ strategy fit perfectly with the pro-modernisation efforts taking place in several parts of the world. English teaching did not serve as a magic potion, however. Cultural seduction was not a cure-all to right the wrongs inflicted by the Anglo-American geostrategic priorities. This article explores the benefits and limitations of English language promotion in Franco's Spain and reflects on the ability of ‘soft power’ to influence what was a rather hostile hard-power context.