German war aims in the First World War developed over the course of the war in part as a response to shifts in the structure of global markets. Germany's industrial economy before the war relied substantially on access to global markets for raw materials, which were mediated by networks of infrastructure constructed as collaborative efforts by private capital and states, particularly the American and British imperial states. During the war, Great Britain and eventually the United States leveraged their position within those networks to isolate the German economy. In response, the German state sought to generate its own public-private alliances to develop German-dominated infrastructures of circulation and exchange in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. This often entailed working through other states, appropriating their sovereignty to further German ambitions. Military victory, however, so weakened these dependent states that they were unable to serve their expected role in advancing German imperial goals.

Five decades after the United Nation's first conference on the environment in 1972, the IPCC warned that ‘any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all’. Faced with steeply rising greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating biodiversity loss and continued degradation of oceans, forests and soil, the situation appears increasingly baffling. Why do we not see effective measures to turn these developments around? As the situation grows dire, it becomes more mysterious: what exactly is this crisis and why has it proven so difficult to solve? If the problem persists, is it because it is not properly understood? Yet, the environmental question has been studied for decades and diagnoses are legion: capitalism, colonialism, overpopulation, economic growth, humanity's inherent short-sightedness, patriarchy, the private property system – or the tragedy of the commons, the disconnect from nature in Western culture, corporate anti-environmental campaigns, the Neolithic adoption of agriculture – or its more recent industrialisation, the miscommunication of environmentalists and scientists, Christianity and neoliberalism have all been proposed as fundamental causes of the crisis. Despite this long and rich history of debate, it may be, as Pierre Charbonnier argues, that we need a more precise understanding of the ‘ecological question’ to find a way out of the present impasse. In line with Katrina Forrester and Sophie Smith's argument, we are convinced that such rethinking of the environmental must be historical, but also that it must pay special attention to economic aspects. Since the end of the Second World War, economics has risen to prominence as a form of expertise in governance at the expense of other kinds of knowledge, and the environment has become closely intertwined with the economic in the ways it has been governed. In that light, it is not surprising that current discussions among scholars, climate scientists, politicians and social movements hold that the environmental crisis calls for a reevaluation of the economic. History is central to this endeavour and can be ‘usable’ in the current crisis, as it, in Deborah Coen's words, can ‘reveal the contingent and often contradictory traces of the past in the present – and to provide clarity for the future’. In this introduction we discuss three partially overlapping ways in which historical perspectives can be helpful to the effort of constructing an ecologically stable society. In contrast to the general tendency in the twenty-first century academy to divide into ever more specialised fields, we call for a broader conversation among historians of the economic and of the environmental to reveal the paths that brought us here – and the ones not taken. We need new histories of thought, institutions, movements and governance that combine the economic and the environmental to reach a better understanding of the present crisis, decode the specific mechanisms of inaction in the face of looming catastrophe, and strive towards more apt formulations of the environmental. We wish to contribute to an emerging conversation located at the intersection of history of economic thought, intellectual history and political history more generally by pointing to strands of research that could be drawn together and that this special issue is meant to engage in dialogue.

The aim of this paper is to trace the evolution of the neofascist networks from the vantage point, between 1945 and 1953, of Madrid, a city where a myriad of extreme right activists gathered to discuss and promote their cause at a transnational level. Exploring the local socio-political context in which these (neo)-fascists moved, and the networks that they formed, the study delves into the creation of ratlines crucial for fascists to escape from the Allied prosecution once the Second World War was over, the consolidation of the city as a central meeting point for fascists from all over the world (from Degrelle to Skorzeny, passing by Horia Sima or Filippo Anfuso), discussions around the possible creation of paramilitary organisations, and the everyday lives of (neo)-fascists operating in Madrid. On the basis of police reports, secret service intelligences and other primary sources, this paper foregrounds the role of the fascist diaspora and the subsequent interactions as driving forces enabling entanglements, and cooperation among (neo)-fascist movements and the Francoist regime, at various formal or informal political levels.

This article offers a new perspective on the Swedish protests against the Vietnam War by placing it in its broader global Cold War context. As a case study on ‘people's diplomacy’ and ‘united front strategy’, it acknowledges the importance of Chinese and Vietnamese influences on the peace campaigns in Sweden and aims, as far as possible, to reconstruct Hanoi's motives, strategies and actions to create and direct Sweden's policy and opinion on the war. With the extremely generous political freedoms granted it by official Sweden, Hanoi was able to find new international allies as well as organise political propaganda manifestations from their Stockholm base. In the end, North Vietnam's version of the war as being about national liberation fought by a people united in their resistance to a foreign, genocidal, aggressor won a large enough share of the opinion in the West to force the American political leadership to give up the fight. Hanoi's Diplomatic Front in Sweden was one of the important battlefields behind that victory

During the First World War, hundreds of exiles and refugees from across Europe arrived in neutral Spain. This article investigates the colony of Russian exiles that settled in the country and their interactions with the Spanish labour movement. It contends that the exiles played a prominent role as conveyors of information on the Russian Revolution, which served as an important source of inspiration during the social upheavals that rocked Spain in 1917–20. The authorities tried to sever the connection between local activists and the Russian exiles through persecution. The article concludes with reflections on the significance of neutral countries as safe havens for internationalists during the war, comparing the Spanish and the Mexican case studies. It contends that neutrality helped preserve transnational radical networks, while contact with exiles rendered the labour movement in these countries more cosmopolitan and knowledgeable of world events and ideological trends.

The humanities recently rediscovered the category of the ‘planetary’ for a social theory of the Anthropocene critical of the human remaking of the planet. This article brings together Dipesh Chakrabarty's work with Russian planetary and geopolitical thought. Focusing on Vladimir Vernadsky's and Boris Veinberg's research around the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, it argues that knowledge on planetary interconnections informed the territorial and industrial expansion of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. According to planetary scientists, humanity's peculiarity as a species and planetary reach hinged on its control of energy. As ‘cosmic technologies’, wind and solar power could expand the biosphere and make the territory's fringes habitable. Thus, insight into the vast scales of the universe did not dwarf but augment humanity – and particularly scientists. The article concludes that the planetary should be understood as an extension of global politics rather than a divergence from it.

In the early 1970s, when the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) was coming to an end, some Catholic intellectuals began to defend people's right to end their failed marriages and seek happiness with a new partner. In so doing, they recognised that love was the primary purpose of marriage; if it was absent the union ceased to be valid. These intellectuals thus broke with a discourse that had until then been deep-seated in both Catholic theology and Francoist morals and laws. According to these, love was only a secondary end of marriage and the conjugal union was indissoluble, leaving people no choice but to tolerate it if it was an unhappy one.

In contrast to previous state-centric accounts, this article sheds new transnational light on the 1919 Paris peace settlement through its investigation of proposals for transnational associations’ roles in the envisaged new world order. The popularity of some of these proposals, and their perceived potential to contribute towards a more democratic, legitimate and peaceful international order, stimulated their consideration during official negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, and subsequent League of Nations practice was also perceived to have reflected some of the ideas put forward in the proposals. This article provides a typology of these proposals, and it critically evaluates the claims made with respect to their repercussions for democracy, legitimacy and peace. The article further elucidates how, despite their limitations, these proposals helped open up diplomacy to transnational associations both at the Paris Peace Conference and in the League of Nations era.

Writing in the mid-1940s, the British civil servant Sir Stephen Tallents would reflect that the interwar period saw a shift in terms of how ‘thoughtful Britons’ viewed their empire: less in terms of ‘machinery and organisation’ and more in terms of ‘growth and nurture’. This essay interprets Tallents’ remarkable observation in light of the history of an organisation with which his career was closely associated: the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33). By examining together the diverse activities of this organisation, which ranged from funding agricultural, ecological, and economic research to producing documentary films, this essay contextualises the emergence of Tallents’ view of imperial growth and development.

While the historiography on the religious Cold War has tended to focus on Christian anticommunism, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sought to transcend the Cold War while simultaneously advancing religious freedom in the Soviet Union. This article connects the WCC's ecclesiastical diplomacy to the wider story of human rights, from which religion has too often been excluded. The WCC's quest for Christian fellowship led it to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church into its membership, but this commitment generated tensions with the rise of Soviet dissidence. Moreover, the WCC's turn towards the left and the Third World contrasted with newly ascendant voices for human rights in the 1970s: Amnesty International's depoliticised liberalism, evangelical anticommunism, and the Vatican under John Paul II. Thus, the WCC, an early and prominent transnational voice for human rights, ran afoul of shifts in both the Cold War and the politics of protest.

This article examines the activities of the Soviet military-political organs in the Baltic Fleet. It shows that the web of party institutions transformed the fleet into a space of political and social activism that had little to do with the strictly military aspects of government policy. Such activism was nevertheless unfailingly promoted, even as it became clear that it compromised core elements of military efficiency such as discipline and well-defined chains of command. This argument has implications for our broader understanding of the nature of the Soviet state. It indicates that once the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideology had become institutionalised in the state via the ubiquitous presence of party organs, pragmatic retreats for organisational efficiency became exceptionally difficult to implement.

This article explores how a specific strand of neoliberal-oriented intellectuals, namely those who revolved around the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), conceptualised the EEC policies between the 1980s and the early 1990s. In particular, this contribution considers two MPS general meetings, respectively held in 1982 and 1990, which were dedicated to the issue of European integration. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, this article first assesses how neoliberal thinkers commented on and interpreted the EEC transformations during the 1980s. Second, it challenges the assumption according to which the run-up to the establishment of the EU was the outcome of a consolidated project of neoliberalisation of the EEC and EU institutions. Finally, this article shows in which terms these neoliberal thinkers conceived of the depoliticisation of European institutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the looming end of the Cold War.

What can historians bring to the current discussion about refugee journeys? Building on the example of a group of 1,115 young Jewish survivors who went to Canada in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, this article addresses two essential questions: why did they leave and why did they go to Canada and not elsewhere? Drawing on Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc's notion of a ‘world of possibilities’ and taking into consideration age as a category of analysis, I argue that one can formulate hypotheses about these journeys by, first, mapping what was and was not available to the young survivors at different moments of their displacement and, second, by looking at how individuals navigated these possibilities and constraints. In so doing, this article aims to nuance approaches that uncritically emphasise agency, and therefore erase the specificity of young people's experiences of displacement.

For twenty years, during which time he started to promote Intermediate Technology abroad and began writing Small is Beautiful (1973), E. F. Schumacher was an economist with the National Coal Board. As such, he led what he called a ‘double-life’. On the one hand, his work at the coal board involved colossal plant, pollution and brute human labour, the difficulty of which could be alleviated only by the adoption of heavy coal-extracting machinery. As time went on, Schumacher became deeply involved in managing and defending the declining coal sector, through the rationalisation and further mechanisation of its production activities. On the other hand, through his personal involvement in the Soil Association, his reading of the Gandhian literature and his exploration of Buddhism and other esoteric interests, he increasingly sought to promote a non-violent approach to economics, based on appropriate technology and gentle, labour-intensive methods, especially in the so-called developing countries. This paper tells the story of Schumacher's growing struggle to reconcile these contrasting spheres of his life, until such time as he could finally leave the coal board, give himself completely to Intermediate Technology and begin writing his influential book.

This article analyses the distinctive characteristics of how the League of Nations sought to publicly legitimise itself from 1919 to 1939. Discussing the work of the Information Section of the League Secretariat, it traces the organisational development of this section throughout the interwar years and argues that a preference of ‘collaboration’ through liaison with influential members of the public in the League's member states permeated this section's work, and that this strategy was, in the eyes of League officials, necessitated by the tight political constraints the Secretariat was subjected to rather than the result of an inherent ‘elitism’ of the officials.

This article analyses the relationship between charted (drawn) maps and mental maps of the contested border-region between Italy and Yugoslavia following the First World War. Drawing upon graphic and verbal depictions of tourist routes, railways, supply chains, demographics, topographic features and telephone and telegraph lines, the article analyses representations of an unstable border at a moment of peak uncertainty. In so doing, it reveals the centrality of architects, engineers, tourist bureaus, artists and cartographers in forging an imaginary geography that correlated with emerging political divisions in post-war Europe. On both sides of the contested border, cartography was utilised to change the way people conceived political geography. Maps, the article argues, both revealed existing mental maps and helped to shape new ones.

The role of business and multinational corporations (MNCs) in early international environmental governance is not well understood. Typically, historians accord business growing influence after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, coincident with the rise of a market-oriented sustainable development paradigm. In this article, we highlight the considerable involvement of self-styled business actors in the formative 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme. Tracing the interconnected networks of British economist Barbara Ward, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Canadian oilman-turned-UNEP boss Maurice Strong, we identify business actors as key in the passage from ‘planetary’ to ‘global’ environmental rationales characteristic of environmental politics between the 1970s and 1990s. However, we also show that business was a sought-after (even if often ambiguous) partner in the 1970s’ moment of innovative ‘planetary’ environmental thinking and institution making. The contested status of MNCs in 1970s internationalism shaped this early business involvement in the history of environmental governance.

This article engages with the most recent literature on the global circulation of corporatist projects, discussing three reform schemes elaborated in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century – G.D.H. Cole's guild socialism, Dudley Docker's technocratic business parliament and Harold Macmillan's conservative industrial self-government. Overcoming the often too rigid equivalences between corporatism and fascism, this article seeks to ascertain to what extent and with what nuances corporatist ideas circulated among non-fascist political circles in Britain. It is argued that the schemes analysed shared a similar corporatist matrix, which nonetheless served as the core idea of different political strategies. In the conclusions, it is claimed that these dissimilarities are consequential to the degree of adherence to the principles of capitalism, i.e. the profit-earning motive and the private ownership of the means of production, as well as to the democratic level of the institutions proposed.

This article examines how states with a fascist past – Germany, Austria and Italy – used modernism in the visual arts to rebrand national and European culture at the Venice Biennale of Art after 1945. I argue that post-war exhibitions of modern art, including those at the Biennale, reveal a vast confrontation with Jewish absence after the Holocaust. Christian Democrats and proponents of European integration attempted to reimagine modernism without the Jewish minority that had shaped it in crucial ways. Meanwhile, living Jewish artists resisted their exclusion from the post-war interpretations of modernism, as well as absorbtion of modernism as part of national heritage. Their criticisms lay bare a seeming paradox at the heart of post-war Europe: a desire to claim the veneer of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism without returning its enabling demographic and cultural diversity. This article points to the significance of philosemitism for establishing post-war national and continental identities.