Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the enthusiasm it inspired about the potential for European unity and democracy, it has become fashionable to see post-war European history in terms of convergence. Historians have researched the integration of the European continent into the global, in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and economic globalisation. Internally, processes of convergence are seen to link the trajectories of nations on a continent where integration eventually trumped the divisions of nationalism, regionalism and the Iron Curtain. This story of an ‘ever deeper and wider union’ was also reflected in the ways in which the transformations of Southern and Eastern Europe were narrated. The idea of a so-called ‘return to Europe’ inspired histories that connected the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the Southern European states of Portugal, Greece and Spain from the mid-1970s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe from 1989. This dominant account has presented Southern and Eastern European ‘peripheries’ moving towards the (Western) European core and its norms, values and models of liberal democracy. Even though some have raised objections to these teleological and Western-dominated narratives of transition they have remained strikingly potent in histories of post-war Europe. Only very recently have they received historiographical critique. Partly this is due to the enduring appeal of centre-periphery approaches that continue to influence intellectual debates about European identity and history. This is also because research on the transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe has for a long time remained rather insular. Historians have been slow to enter a research field that has been dominated by institutional and political approaches, and they have remained more focused on national histories. Where historians of either Eastern or Southern Europe have addressed the transnational or transregional aspects of transition, this has mainly focused on the appeal of the West or its Atlanticist dimensions.

This article examines German Catholics’ sense of community and identity during the Second World War. It analyses how far they were able to reconcile their religious faith with support for Nazism and the German war effort and questions the extent to which Catholicism in the Rhineland and Westphalia represented either a sealed confessional subculture or a homogenising Nazified ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). The article argues that, in their pure forms, neither of these analytical paradigms accounts for the complexities of German Catholics’ attitudes during this period, which were far more contested and diverse than outlined by much existing historiography. Religious socialisation, Nazi propaganda and older nationalist traditions shaped Catholics’ mentalities during the Third Reich, creating a spectrum of opinion concerning the appropriate relationship between these influences and loyalties. At the level of lived experience, Catholics’ memberships of religious and national communities revealed themselves to be highly compatible, a tendency which in turn exerted a restraining influence on church–state conflict in wartime Germany.

Focusing on events on the south-east Ulster frontier, this article seeks to think afresh about the sectarian dimensions of republican violence on the Irish border amid the twin upheavals of revolution and partition. Drawing on a variety of primary sources, it questions a number of the intuitive notions that surround the phenomenon. In doing so, it highlights the limitations of the current discourse on sectarian violence and aims to encourage a more nuanced appreciation of the complex processes and behaviours that both facilitated and limited such violence at a grassroots level.

This forum explores continuities and transformations in the way Europeans thought about integrating their continent politically, economically and ideologically across the twentieth century. It questions the idea of a Stunde Null, which sees European integration primarily as a response to the destruction of the Second World War. Instead, the forum shows how mentalities, ideologies, challenges and constraints that arose before 1945 shaped the way European elites conceptualised and pursued unification in the post-war decades. The European leaders who orchestrated integration after 1945 were looking both backward and forward, trying to revive older visions for a unified continent and overcome long-standing problems while simultaneously aspiring to a new, supranational regional order that would preserve Europe's position as a global power. In exploring such continuities, this forum adds a regionalist dimension to the burgeoning literature – by Patricia Clavin, Daniel Gorman, Mark Mazower and others – on the connections between interwar internationalism and the post-1945 global order, and on the continuity of intellectuals, experts and politicians through the middle half of the twentieth century.

This article studies the Italian contribution to shaping the ideas and practices of development in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Italy changed from a case study for social scientists dealing with the problems of development into a model, and finally into a reluctant donor to less developed countries. It describes Italian thinking regarding economic and social development in the underdeveloped areas of the South. It also discusses the effectiveness of expert networks in promoting the Mezzogiorno as a case study of development practices in the 1950s. It then focuses on development aid to Somalia and shows how this could hardly be construed as a replication of the Mezzogiorno model in an underdeveloped post-colonial setting. Finally, through an analysis of Italian strategy within the DAC, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, it argues that the Italian authorities were incapable of building on Italy's economic miracle or making any significant contribution to Western development aid, squandering the trust acquired throughout the 1950s.

This article examines how the ‘moral panic’ about sex trafficking during the interwar years manifested itself in Le Havre, a French port which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had become synonymous with the illegal trade. Interrogating hitherto neglected material in departmental archives, it explores how the problem of the trafficking of women (la traite des femmes) changed after 1919, how the administrative consequences of directives by the League of Nations could influence behaviours in everyday life and how an episode of female migration from Eastern Europe interacted with French political agendas to magnify and, in some cases, generate a problem.

For four decades Spain played an important role in debates over the future of politics, culture and economy in state socialist Hungary, particularly for the left: first as the fascist and underdeveloped ‘other’ against which the state socialist regime legitimised itself, then as a similarly peripheral country that had managed to integrate into global economy, return culturally to Europe and peacefully establish democracy. Close relationships developed between the Spanish socialists and Hungarian communists in the 1980s and offered the latter the hope they would survive any political transition. This article demonstrates the importance of Eastern–Southern European connections – both concrete and imagined – in sustaining, and then overcoming, Europe's post-war divides.

Visions of Europe belong to a particular time. They carry with them the hallmark, the dominant patterns of thought, of their birth. But there also exist substantial continuities between three of these crucial moments: 1848, 1945 and 1989. At these times the process of building nation states also reached a peculiar moment of crisis – or a turning point. The idea of Europe, reformulated at these times of political collapse, existential angst and an explosion of the imagination, stands in an intricate relationship – Hegelians might like to call it a dialectic – with the conception of national cultures and national politics.

Ever since the collapse of the Greek military regime in 1974 European campaigns over human rights and democracy in Greece have been commonly understood within an anti-totalitarian narrative that has celebrated resistance against both communist dictatorship and right-wing authoritarianism as part of a common journey towards a democratic continent. This article analyses the little-studied history of European solidarity movements with Greece during the 1960s and early 1970s that stretched across both the West and East of the continent. In so doing, it suggests that these campaigns were a facet of the politics of détente and rapprochement that brought together Western and Eastern Europe. Communist peace movements played a central role in these human rights campaigns. This was far from a common anti-totalitarian movement; rather, campaigns for Greece were enmeshed within movements that worked on a wide range of issues – from support for Eastern European dissidents and anti-fascism to world peace and protest against the Vietnam War. Nor were they about ‘a return to Europe’: above all they thrived on common connections in East and West with the Third World.

The article examines the role played by the Portuguese oppositionist diaspora in the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship (c. 1968–c.1974). It advances an explanation for the apparent lack of success met by several exile groups when trying to persuade the Western democracies to withdraw (or at least reduce) their support for Lisbon's authoritarian regime during a period in which the public was increasingly aware of human rights abuses. The choice of this particular juncture is justified for several reasons. Firstly, it was a time of renewed expectations regarding a possible liberalisation of the regime in the aftermath of the replacement of the incapacitated Oliveira Salazar by the younger Marcelo Caetano (September 1968), an event that confronted the different sections of the Portuguese opposition with a number of dilemmas, both at home and abroad, and exposed rifts that would take some time to repair. Secondly, this was also an epoch of momentous social and cultural change in Europe, with obvious ramifications for the political orientations and attitudes of those who, for different reasons, had decided to leave Portugal in the 1960s. Finally, the vicissitudes of the East–West détente are seen here as equally important for understanding the opportunities and limitations of the anti-Estado Novo opposition abroad.

In the 1920s various French elites argued that the nation state was not viable in an increasingly interdependent world economy dominated by ‘continental blocs’ such as the United States and the Soviet Union; instead, they hoped to expand French economic power through larger political structures, whether France's existing empire or a federal Europe. French foreign minister Aristide Briand called for the organisation of Europe at the same time that other elites advocated the consolidation of the French empire. Although imperial rivalry would trump European cooperation in the interwar years, the 1920s created a framework for post-1945 debates about whether France would achieve economic growth and maintain political independence through colonial development, continental cooperation or some combination of the two. Conventional narratives locate the origins of European integration in the devastations of the Second World War and the crisis of empire. This article argues that integration was conceived within and in tension with, not outside of, an imperial framework.

German intervention in the Spanish Civil War was decisive for its development and result. Traditionally scholars have focused their attention on the support given by the Third Reich to the military rebels; however, they have widely neglected the study of the relationship between Germany and the Spanish Republic during the first four months of the war, when both countries maintained diplomatic relations. This paper aims at exploring a crucial aspect of that historical period, namely the circumstances of the Spanish diplomats in Berlin during those first four months, and the strategies that the German and the Spanish governments carried out in the harsh diplomatic battle that they ended up fighting. The author explains the difficult working conditions of the Spanish diplomats who were loyal to the Republic and stayed in Berlin in July 1936, when most of their colleagues deserted. Finally, he explores how the German Foreign Affairs Department, in collaboration with the Gestapo, managed to restrain the Spanish Republic diplomatic action in Germany.

The Spanish Communist Party (PCE), under the leadership of Santiago Carrillo (1960–1982), developed the path of Eurocommunism. This was in part a rethinking of communism's approach to Western parliamentary systems, as well as an indigenous strategy for adapting the party to the transition in Spain from dictatorship to democracy. However, the influence of Eastern European developments was clear not only in the development of the party's struggle against the dictatorship but also in its reaction to Eastern European dissidents and to Solidarność, when the PCE called for an aggiornamiento to align themselves to these new tendencies. This failed, and in the end more orthodox communists came to dominate the party. But the debates about the transformation in Eastern European communism played a major part in developing the new line of the Spanish communists, and in shaping their central role during the Spanish transition to democracy.

This article explores the comparative history of violence in European civil wars from 1917 to 1949, beginning with the war in Russia and ending with the one in Greece. Its main goal is to prepare a framework for a transnational comparative debate on the category of ‘civil war’ and its historical and analytical elements in order to better understand why internal conflicts are universally assumed to be particularly violent and cruel. Responding to the need for an inclusive approach in determining the nature of civil war, I discuss the theory of violence in connection with civil wars and conclude that if civil wars are, and are perceived as, especially violent, this is due to many and multidirectional elements, including the importance of symbolic conflicts, the juxtaposition of different conflicts within any civil struggle and, in the case of Europe between the world wars, the presence of radicalising elements such as fascism.

This article reassesses Willy Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik of the 1970s. It does so by linking Brandt's policy initiative to earlier German Social Democratic plans to integrate Europe that had existed since the 1920s. The analysis suggests that Brandt's attempt to mediate between the West and the East in the 1970s revived earlier SPD policies to integrate Central European societies that had been divided after the world wars. Continuities between Social Democratic thought and practice are therefore highlighted – continuities that are usually overlooked in narratives that have stressed how dramatically German Social Democracy shifted from the interwar to the Cold War eras.

This article studies the political ideology of the Italian political movement Fronte dell'Uomo Qualunque in the light of the problems of party democracy in Italy. The movement existed only for a few years in the aftermath of the Second World War, but the impact of its ideology on post-war Italy was large. The article argues that the party's ideology should be studied beyond the anti-fascist–fascist divide and that it provides a window onto the contestation of party politics in republican Italy. It contextualises the movement in the political transition from fascism to republic and highlights key elements of the Front's ideology. The article then proceeds to demonstrate how the movement distinguished itself from the parties of the Italian resistance and advocated a radical break with the way in which the relationship between the Italian state and citizens had been practiced through subsequent regimes. The way in which the movement aimed to highlight the alleged similarities between the fascist and republican political order, and its own claim to democratic legitimacy, constitute a distinct political tradition which resurfaced in the political crisis of the 1990s.

This article analyses the relationship between Portugal and Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989, with a specific focus on the influence of the Carnation Revolution. This analysis includes the Portuguese communist migration to Czechoslovakia, the contact between the Portuguese and Czechoslovak communists during Portugal's transition process, a diplomatic incident in 1982 and the specific conditions within the Portuguese student community at Czech and Slovak universities. The article also explores the fact that Czechoslovak communists, despite hopes that southern Europe might ‘go socialist’, did in fact very little to support communist forces in Portugal after the collapse of the Caetano regime. Likewise, the post-dictatorial governments in Portugal did little to help Eastern European dissidence. Instead, political players in both countries saw each other much more in terms of economic advantage and realpolitik.

This article traces the deep cultural and experiential foundations that animated Christian Democratic Europeanism between the mid-1940s and the birth of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s. It shows how the language of Europeanness, generated in a period of multiple and intense crisis, congealed around symbolisms of Christianity and spirituality. More specifically, it connects the post-Second World War Christian Democratic vision of Europe to the 1920s German-Catholic articulation of the Abendland (the Christian West), understood as a supranational and symbolic space alternative to the Soviet Union and the United States and imbued with anti-materialist, anti-socialist and anti-liberal principles. The argument here is that, in mutated form and in context of the Cold War, this view sustained the political reconstruction of Western Europe after the horrors of the Second World War, the ‘European’ thought and language of Christian Democracy and the commitment to the project of European integration.

This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality of the family was not a retreat from ideology, as is often argued, but was in fact a reinstatement of interwar ideologies in a new key: social Catholicism in the former case, National Socialism in the latter. These divergent trajectories explain why Würmeling and Schelsky, despite being two central defenders of the family in the 1950s, could not work together. The essay follows their careers into the 1960s, suggesting that the fractious state of familialism in the 1950s helps us to understand its collapse in the face of the sexual revolution.

A steady stream of creative new scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe has been arriving at the desks of reviews editors in Contemporary European History. Commissioning and editing essays on this scholarship has persuasively demonstrated its wider importance, not least in challenging the ambiguous and arbitrary line that continues to divide European historiography between East and West. We have therefore taken the decision to present the following five articles collectively, as a means of reflecting on and interrogating assumptions in European historiography. Why do Germany and France still dominate narratives of the Great War? Can we speak of urban continuities and similarities across the socialist and capitalist spheres? How does studying food offer new insights on the global phenomenon of socialism and socialist production?