This article traces the early contacts between the Spanish anti-Republican conspirators and Germany prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936. It offers new insights into the role played by General Sanjurjo in the run-up to the coup d'état and highlights the importance of chance and personality in the process which led to the Nazi intervention in Spain. The activities of Admiral Canaris' Abwehr as well as of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party prior to the coup are also reassessed. The article uses new Spanish archival evidence to identify how Franco's emissaries met with Hitler, while General Mola's emissaries followed in the wake of the contacts established by Sanjurjo. It challenges the role attributed to the German businessman Johannes Bernhardt enshrined in existing literature. Its conclusions also challenge existing military and economic interpretations of Hitler's decision to assist Franco by asserting the importance of large strategic motives behind the Führer's move.

Globalisation, the buzzword of the late twentieth century, calls for the attention of historians. As others have already suggested, one way to contribute to the historicisation of the phenomena encapsulated in this idiom is to pay attention to connections over long periods. Connections between municipal governments and exchanges about the subject have both been neglected by historical scholarship for various reasons, but they can contribute to the history of the ‘construction of the universal’. Indeed, the information systems of municipal connections – their vectors, actors and structures – have defined, intersected with, nourished or undergone a series of would-be universalist ‘transboundary formations’. These formations are shifting combinations of values, collective actions, practices, rules, organisations and individuals, all of which are advanced as possible futures for mankind. By examining some of these discourses of ‘social order’ and ‘world order’ and the way in which they combine with municipal connections, this article attempts to produce the ‘municipal contribution’ announced in its title.

Throughout the 1960s the international monetary system crumbled in a gradual process which was punctuated by a series of crises. The international community proposed, debated and ultimately procrastinated over major reforms, and opted instead for ad hoc ‘plumbing’ solutions such as the Gold Pool and bilateral currency swaps. While this turmoil unfolded, Britain made repeated attempts to join the European Economic Community. This article shows that while monetary issues were not as often publicly discussed, they were a crucial factor in the negotiations for British membership. It also aims to bring together the discussions on the reform of the international monetary system in the 1960s with those on the enlargement of the EC.

The idea underlying the present theme issue developed during the 1990s and was established as a project between 1997 and 1998. To some extent, our undertaking was prompted by the wave of new Soviet Russian and East European studies literature (especially from the region itself) emerging in the wake of the transformation of 1989–91, since when there has been a veritable revival of the totalitarian approach. Narratives were organised along the well-known dichotomies of passive victimised societies and victorious, omnipotent and relentlessly oppressive party-states. As in western scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, historical and other studies of cultural and intellectual life under communism tended again to be coached in terms of conflicts between political rationality asserted with totalistic pretensions and idealised ‘communities’ of ‘knowledge’, ‘professionalism’, and ‘arts’, or in terms of conflicts between ideological and political legitimisation and ‘the uncompromising search for truth’ or ‘artistic experimentation’. Communist attempts politically to control knowledge and artistic production, their early efforts to secure monopolistic positions for particular epistemological and aesthetic paradigms (as in class-relativist science or socialist-realist art) have been seen and presented as a one-way imposition from above.

This article examines the emergence of the Soviet regulation of foreign travel in a specific context: the space in which Soviet international aspirations overlapped and interacted with Party–intelligentsia relations at home. The discussion ties together two major, international aspects of Party–intelligentsia relations. The first is a detailed discussion of the regulation of foreign travel, exploring the manner in which access to the outside world in the early Soviet years was, like other scarce or highly sought-after resources, subject to bureaucratic monopolisation and, as a result, became not only subject to party-state regulatory agendas but also a prime staple of patronage transactions. The second is an examination of how the emergence of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1920s began to influence Soviet domestic interactions with the non-party intelligentsia. Specifically, the article examines the particular way in which the intelligentsia was enlisted in foreign cultural relations by the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The article shows the policies and attitudes behind the creation of VOKS as an ostensibly non-governmental association and dissects the many aspects of its intricate engagement with the non-Party, intellectual public known by the Russian term obshchestvennost'. The analysis suggests that the widespread assumption that personal and bureaucratic relations are dichotomous or fully separable ignores the way in which institutional agendas and personal connections were routinely intertwined in Soviet patronage. Furthermore, key stages in the Soviet handling of the intelligentsia's access to international contacts, from the New Economic Policy to Stalin's ‘Great Break’ to the Great Purges, were fundamentally shaped by the intense ideological and cultural significance invested in the foreign cultural resources as they were transformed from prized assets to fatal sources of contagion.

The French police during the Second World War were used both as a tool of collaboration between the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier and to enforce an internal political reform, known as the National Revolution. The police initially responded enthusiastically, since an input of new resources was promised and the regime's main opponents – communists and foreigners – were also traditional police targets. A fierce repression ensued, police actions including the handing over of communists to the Nazis and playing an important role in deporting foreign Jews to their deaths. However, after two years police support began to falter, and by mid-1943 many police forces were at collapsing point. The police were suffering from an acute patriotic identity crisis and were the target of Resistance propaganda. The promised new resources had largely failed to materialise, which both demoralised the police and further undermined their efficiency.

Attempts to develop a ‘municipal science’ bear witness to the challenges posed by the city to methods of government in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in France. Both in France and on the international scene, reformers sought new ways of thinking ‘scientifically’ about towns and their government. This article takes a serious look at ‘municipal science’, a fragile development which was never fully accepted in academic circles. It studies the endeavours to provide a scientific clothing for the reforming discourse developed by associations of town councillors and disseminated by teaching institutions or journals devoted to municipal administration. It also examines the contribution made by this crusade – at once political and scientific – to the renewal of public action through local authorities.

Between 1942 and 1945, 5,300 Organisation Todt workers were brought to Jersey to build the defensive fortifications ordered by Hitler. A small number of Russian slave labourers escaped from island camps and were sheltered by Jersey residents until the liberation. The article describes the activities of these helpers and the rudimentary network of safe houses they created, as well as comparing their motives with those of the rescuers of Jews in occupied Europe. It ends by outlining reasons for the neglect of this episode of British wartime history and suggests the adoption of a comparative approach as the best way towards an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of resistance in the Channel Islands.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Portugal and its regime, Salazar's New State, were presented to the Irish public as a model of a new, socially just and Catholic brand of politics. Deliberately ignoring the repressive nature of the New State, Irish defenders of corporativism benefited from the lack of impartial information concerning it. This lack of information, at least in official circles, was overcome through the establishment of a legation in Lisbon in early 1942. Irish diplomats were able to provide a truer account of life in Portugal, countering the earlier propaganda and providing an interesting picture of the New State at work.

The new Polish state was founded more than 100 years after Poland's partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria. The partitioned Polish lands had been included one way or another in the administrative structure of the ocupying powers, and the individuals who became active in urban issues in the new state were socialised by associations established by the partitioners. Poland became not only a arena for a meeting of Prussian, Russian and Austrian imaginations about local government but also a place with a great variety of municipal praxises as well. The author analyses different meanings of local government with special attention to those employed by municipal officers from Warsaw and Cracow within the Union of Polish Cities. There were strong regional cleavages in the Union, but the political development of the Polish state strengthened centralisation and the Union itself remained united.

In November 1962 the British and French governments signed an irreversible agreement to build together the Western world's first civil supersonic aeroplane: Concorde. This article explores the background to the agreement, looking in particular at why Britain and France co-operated with each other rather than with the United States or West Germany, the other possible partners. The central argument is that the agreement was driven not by technological convergence in the aircraft industry but by a weakening of Britain's position in 1961 caused by American unwillingness to partner Britain in the supersonic adventure and Britain's decision to apply for membership of the Common Market. The French government was then able to exploit that weakness in order to acquire technological expertise particularly in the field of aircraft engine construction.

This article utilises primarily archival sources to explore unofficial networks in the Stalinist music world. It analyses the relationship between the patrons, clients and brokers whose personal interactions helped an inefficient and over-burdened music bureaucracy to accomplish its two basic tasks: administering musical production and ensuring the material wellbeing of Soviet composers, musicologists and musicians. Musicians used unofficial networks to resolve professional disputes with bureaucratic institutions and to acquire material support, especially scarce apartments. Because they were used to manipulating bureaucratic procedures, unofficial networks sometimes came under attack. Investigating these ubiquitous informal interactions therefore contributes to our understanding both of the Stalinist music system and the cyclical campaigns to purge the Soviet arts.

This article analyses the contribution of European socialism to the building of a variegated network of reformers in municipal politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Unsuccessful as a network inside the Second International, a broader international federation of cities, the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA), was proposed in 1913. Belgian, French, Dutch and English socialist leaders remained strongly influential in this federation between the two world wars, working in connection with co-operative movements and the International Labour Office based in Geneva. The fifty years of debates and projects animated by the international journal Les Annales de la Régie Directe founded by the French socialist Edgard Milhaud allows us to follow the development of a generation of local reformers from the beginnings of municipalist thought and praxis up to the idea of building a decentralised European Community of cities and regional authorities.

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.

Based on recently released official documents, the article explores the role played by advanced technology in the Wilson government's efforts to join the Common Market. The analysis focuses on the development of the ultra-centrifuge process – a new technology to produce enriched uranium. The article shows that in restricting collaboration to the Netherlands and West Germany, the British government sought to undermine France's leading role in Europe and to undermine Franco-German relations. It also demonstrates that Britain was determined to establish a European solution to the question of uranium supply even if this led to serious frictions in the Anglo-American special relationship.

This article analyses the strategic manipulation and use of contacts by artists and art historians in state-socialist Czechoslovakia, and focuses on the role of friendship, political favours, professional nepotism and bribery in this process. It criticises Howard Becker's belief that totalitarian regimes cannot partake in discourses of patronage common to Western democracies because of the lack of freedom of individuals. Instead, it argues that the conventional concept of patronage can only partly explain the motives behind the use of contacts by individuals, because its focus is limited to exploring vertical relationships between ‘powerless’ and ‘powerful’ social actors. The analysis therefore takes a wider and more dynamic view, and looks at the interplay of vertical and horizontal processes.