Situating itself at the crossroads of colonial history, international history and European history, this article examines the movement for colonial appeasement and the redistribution of African colonies in the 1930s from a frequently overlooked viewpoint: Portugal and its empire. Even though Portugal was not a principal actor in the discussion of colonial redistribution, the Portuguese empire was placed at the centre of these debates as a subject to be discussed. The article demonstrates that the great powers’ perception of Portugal as an inadequate colonial power was central to their strategy of colonial redistribution in an international context that espoused guarantees of territorial integrity to great and small states alike. In addition, it shows how Portugal entered the debate on colonial appeasement to promote a rhetoric of victimisation and bolster support for the dictatorship.

After the renewal of national independence in 1945 former anti-fascist partisans were among the Czechoslovak Communist Party's most reliable and radical allies. Nevertheless, following the communist coup of 1948, a group of partisans in the rural region of Moravian Wallachia began to mobilise wartime networks and tactics against the consolidating party dictatorship, establishing the Světlana resistance network. Simultaneously, state authorities also drew on partisan practices to reconstitute opposition and resistance in this region as evidence of an international conspiracy that could be understood and prosecuted within the framework of official ideology and propaganda. This article analyses the case of Světlana to examine the politics of people's democracy in Czechoslovakia and explore local dynamics of resistance and repression during the early years of the communist regime.

Recent scholarship on post-imperial Eastern Europe has emphasised the continuation of wartime violence in post-war states. Focusing on the early years of the Polish Second Republic, this article considers how the ‘unmixing’ of Eastern European peoples also unfolded in ways not explicitly violent. Specifically, I demonstrate how the sorting of returning refugees on Poland's new frontiers, the culling of personnel from the former imperial civil service and the submission of citizen denunciations helped to disaggregate loyal citizens from hostile foreigners. All of these practices highlight the importance of internal bordering as a process that accompanied the formal drawing of international boundaries in this period.

The Berlin Mosque was the first permanent place of Muslim worship in Germany. Never a purely local affair, the construction of the Berlin Mosque depended on the legacies of imperialism and the shifting geopolitical contexts of the 1920s. International diplomats and former Wilhelmine and Ottoman agents living and working in Weimar Berlin made sense of the mosque project through categories and ideas forged in the decades before the First World War. They gradually recalibrated their ambitions when confronted, as they were, with radical transformations of the Muslim world, from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate to the emergence of new political leaders from Arabia to Afghanistan. This article demonstrates how the construction and uses of the Berlin Mosque closely followed how diplomats and other actors, both German and non-German, assessed the geopolitical potential of a German–Muslim alliance in the post-Ottoman, post-Wilhelmine moment.

This article analyses the mechanics and the political stakes of multilateral trade negotiations in the League of Nations, in the context of the transition from empires to nation states. It examines one attempt to transfer bilateral treaty norms to a multilateral framework, the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners. This highly contested treaty addressed a policy question that was at the heart of both national sovereignty and international order – the legal treatment of foreign nationals. The attempt to regulate this question on a multilateral basis provoked intense debate about the authority of the League to mediate the relationship between international commerce and national governments.

After the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

In the early years of the East German Democratic Republic, in particular after Khrushchev's speech breaking with Stalinism, there was hope among leading economists that new reforms would usher in a truly democratic socialist economy. The newly-founded Institute for Economics at the Academy of Sciences, under the leadership of Friedrich Behrens, put forward ideas that the party soon labelled ‘revisionist’. This article reconstructs the dismantling of this group of reformist economists using detailed documents of the secret police, the Stasi. I demonstrate how the Stasi staged a show debate analogous to the known show trials under Stalin. In spite of its forced character the show debate allowed the party to both resist reform and claim their policies to be a scientific undertaking.

It is common to consider 1989 as a kind of ‘zero hour’. This applies to East Central European and to Italian history alike. A thought-provoking book, published in 1993, evoked the image of ‘an avalanche that swells downhill, speeded up and enriched by the great landslide of the nearby great mountain’. In this way the historian Luciano Cafagna described the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Italian democracy. As a matter of fact, the Italian party system, based on the leading role of the Christian Democratic Party and of the West's major Communist Party, suddenly collapsed in the three years that followed the end of the Cold War because of a growing loss of legitimacy. In hindsight, though, I argue that the first, mostly invisible, movements of this ‘avalanche’ went further back in time, to well before 1989. The early 1990s simply marked its spectacular acceleration.

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

On 19 November 1975 Francisco Franco lay dying in Madrid's La Paz hospital. Clutching the cloak of the Virgin del Pilar, and with the ill-gotten relic of St Teresa of Ávila's hand at his bedside, the ailing dictator would soon depart this existence following the withdrawal of life support. For Enrique Moradiellos in Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator, the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition within this deathbed scene was emblematic of the countless paradoxes which characterised the Francoist dictatorship in its later years. Since the dictator's death scholars have continued to grapple with such paradoxes, struggling over how best to define a regime which has come to occupy a notoriously contentious space within contemporary Spanish politics and society. Like a fairground hall of mirrors, historical representations of Francoism have been stretched or squashed by different analytical frames, shaped in many cases by the political and social legacies of the dictatorship. Despite dubious claims to ‘objectivity’, the regime's apologists depict Francoism as a stabilising antidote to the ‘chaos’ of republicanism, conveniently overlooking the destruction and misery which followed the coup of 18 July 1936. Meanwhile, those who seek justice for the regime's victims continue to emphasise the repressive nature of the dictatorship. Though an important component of Francoism's modus operandi, repression does not, by itself, help us to fully understand Francoism's long-term survival or the consent it secured from millions of ordinary Spaniards. The titles under review reflect an increasing willingness to confront Francoism's many contradictions head-on, and to regard the paradoxical nature of the regime not as a conceptual knot to be disentangled, but as a historiographical problem in itself. Historians exploring the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people have proved particularly adept at addressing such complexities, as have scholars adopting comparative or transnational frameworks which reach beyond traditional emphasis on fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The titles surveyed in this article offer a snapshot of recent developments in the field, while signposting potential avenues through which historians of Francoism might contribute to broader discussions within the historiography of modern Europe.