During the First World War the survival of hundreds of thousands of Latvian refugees, dispersed across the Russian Empire, overlapped with issues of identity. Latvians in Siberia and the Far East created a refugee organisation complete with military, diplomatic and cultural programmes for themselves and their homeland. The key players attempted to recreate the same organisational trajectories and outcomes during the Second World War, under very different geopolitical conditions. This article presents new archival research and suggests new interpretations of the dynamic nature of political organisation, refugee experience and identity in Latvia through the first half of the twentieth century.

In the years 1936–41, the Croatian Peasant Party, led by Vladko Maček, operated two militias – the Croatian Peasant Defence (HSZ) in the villages and the Croatian Civil Defence in the cities. The HSZ was intended to protect Croatian peasants from attacks by Serb Chetniks as well as by communists, and was thus itself a symptom of the lawlessness prevailing in the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The HSZ also formed part of Maček's efforts to compete with the fascistic Ustaša movement, an armed organization behind the so-called ‘Velebit uprising’ of 1932.

This article revisits the motives behind the Czechoslovak scheme ‘Russian Action’, which granted thousands of Russian émigrés residence and financial support in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, it looks at the efforts to bring to Czechoslovakia Russian civil war refugees living in Constantinople. Historians have conventionally focused on Prague as the home to intellectual and cultural exiles from Russia and have also decreed that the émigré policies of Czechoslovakia were driven principally by the humanitarian concerns of a liberal and democratic government. This article looks, instead, at the regime's deep-seated political motives, in particular its plans for a future, Bolshevik-free Russia, reconstructed under its guiding hand. In so doing, it raises questions about Czechoslovakia's self-image, ideology and place within the international hierarchy.

This article uses recently released archival material to examine the role of the Irish government in the negotiation of the Sunningdale communiqué of 1973, which marked, among other things, an agreement to establish a Council of Ireland and was therefore a key part of the first attempt to establish a power-sharing devolved executive in Northern Ireland. The article will problematise the distinctions which have been made between various strains of political thought held by leading intellectuals and politicians on the national question and show how the discourse of ‘revisionist nationalism’ and reconciliation which sponsored the key institution of the Sunningdale communiqué, the Council of Ireland, was in contradiction to the meaning attached to the functions of the Council, which was in fact closer to traditional nationalist aims.

Exile is the experience of impotence. This, at least, would seem to be the lesson of the mid-twentieth century. The heterogeneous groups of Russian exiles scattered across Europe after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the opponents of Franco forced to flee from Spain in the 1930s all had plenty of time to brood on Karl Marx's dictum that exile was no more than ‘a school of scandal and of meanness’. If the causes they espoused were eventually in some limited sense vindicated, this victory owed almost nothing to their efforts, and few of the original exiles had the ambivalent pleasure of living long enough to witness the downfall of their opponents. More recently, the central European exiles who found refuge in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s followed a largely similar path: unable to shake Soviet communist rule in their erstwhile homelands, they were obliged to survive on the long-term exile's meagre diet of propaganda, ritual, rumour and intrigue.

In the wake of the German invasion of June 1941, sixteen and a half million Soviet citizens were evacuated to the country's interior. Unlike the archetypal European refugee, the Soviet evacuee was displaced but not stateless. This article, based on previously unexamined sources from archives in Russia and Uzbekistan, examines the status of the displaced in a state in which rights were grounded in territory and the lack of fixed residence could have dire implications. More specifically, it focuses on the way in which the evacuee was conceived in relation to the ‘refugee’ and the ‘deportee’.

In summer 1936 Vladko Maček's priorities lay with rebuilding the Croatian Peasant Party after its six years of illegality under King Aleksandar's dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yet the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was to have a polarising and radicalising effect on Croatian society. Both communists and supporters of the fascist Ustaša movement looked to Spain as a model for resolving the ‘Croat question’ at a time when Croats were becoming increasingly frustrated with Maček's passivity. As a propaganda war raged in the press of the radical left and right, the Croatian Peasant Party tried to ignore the conflict. Maček's failure to realise the impact of the war in Spain on the political situation in Croatia is indicative of some of his weaknesses as a leader in difficult times. The Croatian Peasant Party missed the opportunity to take a strong moral stance against fascism during the Spanish conflict, and Maček's fence-sitting from the 1930s onwards permitted the more extreme ideological movements in Croatia to take advantage of the rapidly changing conditions of a Europe engulfed in war.

The social sciences have always faced a fundamental problem. Their central concern is to understand modernity, yet, as the product of modernity itself, they could never achieve the critical distance to do this. In recent decades some scholars have sought a way out in the notion of postmodernity, the idea that we have entered a new era from which ‘modernity’ can be judged from the outside. However, since a central component of the postmodernist paradigm is the suspension or at least the relativisation of both epistemological and normative frameworks, it deprives itself of the very analytical tools it would need for the task. For a while, following the end of the Cold War, a hyper-modernist view enjoyed some prominence, according to which, far from being transcended, modernity was culminating in the dominance of a single social, economic and political model represented by the victorious United States.

These seven books reflect the great diversity and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Second World War. They encompass a broad range of genres, including analytical monographs, vivid and compelling memoirs, an edited conference collection and a work that makes hitherto classified archival material available to a wider audience. Together they demonstrate the vitality and breadth of recent Second World War scholarship, reflecting that the war remains a subject of significant scholarly and popular interest.

During the twentieth century Armenia and Poland alike were sites of widespread population displacement, which brought into sharp focus arguments about national ‘survival’ advanced by patriotic leaders who found in refugees the embodiment of recurrent national suffering. Population displacement also attracted external support from sympathetic foreigners and from the Armenian and Polish diaspora, who regarded it as an affront to civilisation. Among Armenians a groundswell of support for repatriation gathered momentum after both world wars, because Soviet ‘protection’ offered the most realistic chance for national survival. In contrast many Poles opted not to return to Poland after 1945, regarding the communist takeover as a betrayal of Poland's struggle for independence.

According to theories of evolution, species evolve according to survival imperatives generated by their physical environments. Traits are selected and rejected based on their adaptability to the structures of the physical world in which these species live. Biological differences mirror differences in climate; the acutely developed senses of many species have adapted either for capturing prey or eluding predators, and so forth. So too in economic systems do we observe changes in human behaviour modes and policies that suggest adaptation. With respect to money, scholars continue to look for the most important adaptation mechanisms to explain the evolution of international monetary relations. What was once the preserve of strictly economic analysis has now become open ground for a wider array of social scientific analyses. In only a few short decades the study of monetary relations has developed into a more fully multi- and interdisciplinary enterprise. The four books reviewed here represent some of the latest attempts at constructing a broader social scientific explanation of monetary history. These valuable works complement one another in filling gaps in the literature on a complex and more diverse adaptation of monetary relations. Above all they stand as impressive political economies of monetary relations. Moure and Kettell concentrate on specific cases of monetary policy transformation in the interwar period, while Flandreau et al. and Obstfeld and Taylor cover a broader evolutionary timeline. The value of the contributions lies in several factors.

The historical connection between war and genocide is clear and apparent. Scholars of mass killing have repeatedly pointed out the linkages between the First World War and the Armenian genocide of 1915, between the Second World War and the Holocaust, between the 1993–4 war and the genocide in Rwanda, and between the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Srebrenica. Scholars of war, most often military historians, have been less ready to tie what they see as two distinct social phenomena – war and genocide – into the same bundle. This was especially the case, until recently, for the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the Jews. The Wehrmacht, the German fighting forces, were seen to be implementing an enormously ambitious military campaign against the Soviet Union, which, in the end, they lost. Meanwhile, the Nazi security organs – the SS, the SD, and the Einsatzgruppen – carried out the ‘Final Solution’, inspired primarily by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchs.

All four of these books are interesting additions to the corpus of historical research into European integration. Parr and Poggiolini's books are precise, document-based accounts of the trials and tribulations surrounding Britain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC); Ludlow's book, which is based on an imposing quantity of archive research in six countries, is the most important work in English to date on the evolution of the European Community (EC) in the period that elapsed between Charles de Gaulle's veto of British entry and the Hague summit of December 1969, when the member states’ leaders ‘brought to an end a seven year struggle over its purpose, mode of operation and membership’ (p. 198). Gillingham's book reads like a 300-page op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and is largely concerned with current events rather than history, but that does not mean that it has nothing of relevance for historians, as I hope to show at the end of this review.