This article examines the Scandinavian countries’ response to extreme political movements in the interwar period. Historians have considered the crisis agreements of the 1930s as pivotal to Scandinavian resistance to fascism. The present article revises this explanation by conducting a comparative empirical study of political practice and rhetoric. The comparison makes it clear that the socio-economic measures were primarily aimed at combating the economic crisis. However, the social democratic labour parties conceptualised their social and economic policy as a defence of democracy after Hitler seized power in Germany. The findings indicate that the social democratic solution to the depression in Scandinavia left no political space for either communism or fascism.

The recent evolution of both the historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and even the general population's perception of the conflict, cannot be separated from the changes in the political and cultural paradigms in Europe since the end of the Cold War. By this I mean that Europeans, but not only them, have been evolving from a mostly ideological view of the past to an increasingly humanistic one.

This article examines the politics of wine making in Alsace in the two decades after the region returned to French rule in 1918. During these years Alsatian wine makers worked to transform their wines to meet the tastes of French drinkers, following five decades of producing wine for German consumption. As wine makers grappled with the question of how to secure the future of their industry, Alsatian wine became emblematic of the most contentious aspects of Alsace's reintegration into France. The introduction of new laws on viticulture raised the question of what was French about wine, the wine industry's woes symbolised the difficulties of Alsace's economic reintegration and wine became an emblem for often fierce wrangling over identity and belonging in the recovered region. This article traces this process and argues that while wine became a symbol of the complications of reintegration, its importance in understandings of French national culture equally allowed it to offer a solution to the problems that return to France caused for Alsace's wine industry in the interwar years. In this way, this case study of the politics of wine making in Alsace is suggestive of wine's broader power as a symbol of national belonging.

In 1947 the liberal Protestant minister Willem Banning drafted a new programme for the Labour Party, in which the party dropped the Marxist view of history and class struggle. New Labour in the Netherlands was envisioned as a party that strove for a democratic and just society. Banning's role in reforming the Labour Party was part of his broader project of breaking down structures of socio-political segregation that had existed since the end of the nineteenth century. Banning argued that the Labour Party had to abandon its atheist ideology to open up to Protestants and Catholics. This article will examine Banning's views and ideals and show how he contributed to the transformation of Labour into a social democratic party and seek answer to the question: how could a liberal Protestant minister become the main ideologue of the Labour Party?

This article highlights the contribution of East Central Europe to interwar internationalism by showing how solutions to regional challenges gave birth to the Union internationale des associations d'alpinisme (UIAA), a permanent international organisation for mountaineering. The territorial fragmentation caused by the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire required alpine clubs to lobby for the softening of new political borders while simultaneously contributing to state building efforts. Successful experiences with bilateral agreements in the Tatras and re-emerging Neo-Slavist ideas led to the founding of the Association of Slavic Tourist Organization in 1924, which in turn motivated the establishment of the UIAA. The leading figures in this process were alpinists with a distinct internationalist profile who navigated seamlessly between their role as agents of the state and private citizens.

This article examines the ideological and political transformations that allowed dialogue between Catholics and socialists to bear fruit in the Federal Republic of Germany in the immediate post-war era. It focuses on the role played by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, the prominent Catholic intellectual, constitutional theorist, historian and future Constitutional Court justice.

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state.

While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.

This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy's middle- and upper-class households during fascism's twenty years in power. Due to significant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country's popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy's typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By promoting the beverage's hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moderate consumption of the peninsula's standardised wines with the dictatorship's nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine's honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country's typical wines as Italy's wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’.

This article argues that the topos of dialogue between Christians and Marxists fulfilled a key role in the creation and maintenance of power relations in religious politics in East Germany. Three case studies illustrate the topos of dialogue as a strategy of struggle: 1. the campaign against ‘revisionism’ and ‘politicised religion’; 2. the church policy strategy of ‘differentiation’; 3. the critique of the phenomena commonly associated with the Christian–Marxist dialogue outside East Germany in the mid-1960s. These instances of socialist religious politics, while having their own dynamics, were closely related through specific actors and argumentative strategies.

This article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

This article explores wine production, consumption and trade in the context of late socialist Bulgaria and the wider Eastern Bloc. In particular, it connects wine to the process of building legitimacy in Bulgaria, as part of post-Stalinist culture of consumer abundance and even connoisseurship that was steeped in nationalist narratives and meanings, as well as utopian visions of the future. To complicate such narratives, it also delves into the contradictory ways in which late-socialist anti-alcohol narratives and campaigns similarly looked to local, if not national, precursors to ground their counter model of a sober socialist present and communist future.

This article examines three case studies between 1951 and 1960 to illustrate how the 1956 Revolution and mass defection of Hungarian Olympic athletes following the Melbourne Games impacted the relations between Hungarian sport leaders and athletes. While sport leaders recognised the need to soften their policies towards athletes, athletes learned that socialist Hungary, and not the capitalist West, oftentimes offered them the best opportunities for their sport career and desired lifestyle. These changes shaped the emerging politics of cooperation in the post-1956 Hungarian sport community, in which cooperative members of both groups could achieve their respective diplomatic, career and lifestyle goals.

In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.

In the 1960s a shift occured in how shamanism was represented in Soviet anti-religious journals, in which shamanism was transformed from an ethnographically documented cultural practice peculiar to Siberian indigenous populations, into an – albeit ‘primitive’ – form of a universal human capacity for altered states of consciousness and a precursor of various forms of mysticism. The article argues that this shift coincided with a shift in the Soviet atheist project, as well as a point of comparison that reveals similarities and differences between Soviet and Western modernist projects.

This article considers the significant increase in wine consumption in Britain in the period 1965–85. It explores the social and cultural meanings attached to wine through a case study analysis of Good Housekeeping, a women's magazine aimed at a mainly middle-class readership. The vast majority of wine consumed in Britain at this time was European, the appeal of which was, for many, rooted in an idealised evocation of continental sophistication. In illuminating the development of new socio-cultural habits, this article reveals the influence of continental tourism is bolstering enthusiasm for wine, as well as the impact of greater availability and affordability in popularising consumption.