In 1921 the international Red Cross movement passed a series of resolutions declaring they had a right and duty to intervene in civil wars, ‘social and revolutionary troubles’. This article focuses on the specific historical origins of the resolutions. It argues that these resolutions were a direct response to the Russian Civil War and designed to enable humanitarian interventions against Soviet Russia and other communist revolutionaries. The ICRC followed through on these intentions with robust efforts to access political prisoners in Soviet Russia. However, other parties embraced these resolutions and applied them to nationalist and anti-colonial struggles, such as the Third Silesian Uprising, Irish Civil War and Rif War. These conflicts did not fit the template of the Russian Civil War, leading to reluctant, cautious and often ineffective interventions by the ICRC. The open-ended language of the resolutions hid a much more direct historical context that restricted its viable application.

The Centenary of the First World War saw unprecedent prominence given to the ‘colonial contribution’ in commemorative discourse. While this newfound public recognition sometimes relied on simplistic and sanitised narratives of the war, scholarship produced in the period has greatly enriched understandings of how conflict was experienced by colonised peoples. In this article, I explore the utility of one of the key conceptual innovations of the Centenary, the Greater War, for the analysis of colonial experiences of the conflict. I do this by considering three key questions: Can the Greater War framework facilitate new comparative histories of violence in the war? How do its expanded chronologies account for colonial contexts? Can we adapt its conceptual frameworks to better integrate colonial histories? Exploring the potential answers to these questions will point to new avenues of research that can ensure the colonial is effectively incorporated into our narratives of the global conflict.

This paper explores Italy’s perspective on West Germany’s evolving role in Europe in the 1970s, focusing on the interplay between leadership expectations and the fear of hegemony. In the context of the collapse of the Bretton Woods System, the oil crisis and transatlantic tensions, Italy viewed West Germany as both a potential leader and a dominant economic power. By examining political and public debates, this study delves into Italy’s complex ambivalence towards German leadership – admiring its economic strength while simultaneously fearing its influence over European integration and monetary policy – in a way that demonstrates a nuanced Italian reaction to German ‘reluctance’. The rejection of Germany’s hegemonic role was closely tied to an expectation of leadership. However, this expectation conflicted with the type of leadership Germany offered, revealing a sharp contrast between Italian and German conceptions of leadership.

This study focuses on women’s hunger demonstrations and lootings in occupied Antwerp in May 1941. These actions were not just expressions of social discontent but also political actions in the form of illegal propaganda against the occupier. Through specific cases of demonstrations and looting, the first part of this article explores the pattern of these actions and the involvement of participants, local and German police and mayors. The second part provides a general picture of women’s demonstrations and lootings in Belgium and Antwerp, discussing the chronology and repression of these actions and the social profile of the participants. This article tells the story of resistance by working-class women, a perspective still largely absent from resistance historiography. It shows how an explicit female perspective allows us to write a history of female resistance.

Jewish resistance to the destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has stirred many scholars; however, some areas of war-torn Europe remain neglected in this respect, for instance Italy and Italian-occupied territories. This article aims to unearth the Jewish history of Jewish resistance in the Italian province of Dalmatia between June 1941 and September 1943, emphasising longer evolution of political ideology, personal networks and social organisations that fostered and sustained resistance. Based on either as-yet unknown or rarely used testimonies of the Holocaust survivors who spent the war years in Dalmatia, this article argues that these are crucial to understand why and how Jewish politics in inter-war Yugoslavia enabled Jews to self-organise and to start and sustain open resistance to fascism.

Intelligence services have played pivotal and distinct roles in European political history since the Second World War, ranging from their position as a stronghold of authoritarian regimes to their role in protecting democracy from anti-democratic forces. Democratisation therefore requires the depoliticisation of intelligence services to prevent their reuse as tools of political oppression. Paradoxically, many examples show that the politicisation of intelligence often occurs in a context of democratisation. This article explains this paradox. It focuses on the persistent politicisation of the Greek intelligence service in the decades following the demise of the junta regime and its democratic consolidation (1974–2008). It shows that subsequent governments fought fire with fire in their efforts to democratise the service: they countered the junta heritage of the intelligence service by keeping it closely under their control and, consequently, aligning it with governing party interests. Moreover, a vibrant bottom-up, party-aligned labour union within the service became the main vehicle for the politicisation of the organisational culture. This research uses original oral history interviews with former service personnel, newspaper publications and parliamentary debates on the service between 1974 and 2008. This is the first research on the Greek intelligence service based on such large-scale, longitudinal and diverse empirical data collection. The results of this research are relevant beyond the specific case of Greece, as they point to the wider mechanisms of politicisation of intelligence services, especially in former authoritarian regimes in Southern and Eastern Europe.

Neoliberalism can be defined as the drive to shield capitalism from the scrutiny and accountability of democratic processes. This definition is particularly relevant to the creation of the euro, as it reflects some imbalances of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union (EU). The monetary union was designed to function with full independence, largely beyond the reach of democratic deliberations. This article investigates whether this outcome was intentional. It argues that the asymmetric structure of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was purposefully crafted, as the European policymakers involved in the negotiations were acutely aware of the imperfections of the system being developed. However, these shortcomings were not specifically aligned with a particular neoliberal ideology. Instead, this article shows they resulted from a broader set of concerns, primarily driven by a reluctance to centralise decision-making power at the EU level due to fears of losing aspects of national sovereignty. Understanding the unintentional nature of this outcome is crucial, as confusing what is accidental with what is deliberate can lead to misunderstandings about the motivations behind EMU and misconceive the paths for its reform.

In 1920, the League of Nations implemented the first modern international zones in Europe. While historians have largely presented international zones as unworkable peace-making solutions devoid of resident support, this article draws attention to those figures who saw in zones an opportunity to cash in on the end of empire. It follows the case of Ludwig Noé–a preeminent industrialist in the Free City of Danzig–who was employed to run the city’s imperial shipyard. Noé’s transformation of the Danzig shipyard into a successful international concern demonstrated the economic advantages that internationalisation could facilitate and chimed with calls to exploit the zone further by converting it into a manufacturing free port. The article contributes, therefore, to a growing literature concerned with how abstract international visions were realized locally and independently, and who, ultimately, made internationalism work in the 1920s.

This article focuses on Jewish political stances in early post-war and post-Holocaust Poland and explores why so many Polish Jews supported the new communist-dominated regime after 1945, despite the fact that only a small minority held communist political views. While acknowledging the impact of Holocaust experiences, the weakness of the Polish Jewish community after the war and the widespread perception that the communist regime was the only possible bulwark against post-war anti-Jewish violence, this article offers a different perspective in foregrounding the inter-war experiences of Polish Jews. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English, this article argues that inter-war experiences shaped Polish Jews’ understandings of the emerging post-war social and political system, as well as their political stances towards the new state.

This article argues that the 1918 flu appeared so suddenly, spread so rapidly, killed so quickly and disappeared so swiftly that Europeans’ focus on their immediate circumstances led them to experience and interpret it as a local health crisis rather than as a global or continental pandemic. It also demonstrates that Europeans were so inured to privation and death; so isolated by anaemic and dysfunctional media and medical regimes; and so distracted by economic, political and social chaos that they were either unaware of or unconcerned with the flu’s origin. It takes as its source base nearly 1,000 memories of the 1918 flu collected from individuals across ten European countries and archival materials from federal, municipal, religious and diary archives in France (an Allied power in the First World War), Germany (a Central power in the First World War) and Switzerland (a neutral power in the First World War).

The article examines efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerised, post-Fordist ‘flexible’ production. Focusing on the enterprise level, this article demonstrates that the Communist Party inaugurated its own variation of flexible production; in doing so, it inadvertently created the conditions of possibility for the transition from state socialism to capitalism on the factory floor.

This article takes the fate of industrial wealth in East-Central and Southeast Europe through the ruptures of the twentieth century as a case study. It compares post-imperial transitions in East-Central Europe to regime changes in the 1940s and after 1989. It maintains that the peculiarities of post-imperial transitions and the uniquely high leverage available to Austro-Hungarian industrialists to preserve their assets despite geopolitical transformations after 1918 come to the fore especially clearly when we compare them to the ruptures by the Holocaust and subsequently by the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Industrialist Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964), a Hungarian of Jewish origins with major investments in Transylvania's coal mines, was among those key industrialists who lived through both world wars, passing away in 1964 in New York. The article uses his life as a thread to show how the fate of a business family can influence mainstream narratives of modern European history, usually driven by a concentration on political ruptures.

This article discusses the development of lifestyle and value studies in the market research industry in relation to changing understandings of the consumer in late twentieth-century Sweden. It uses the analytical notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ to argue that the market research industry both exploited and reinforced this perception of consumers through lifestyles as a means for categorisation. The analysis draws on material from the leading Swedish market research company at the time, Sifo, including its connections to the European industry. The results show how the industry sought to break up the supposedly homogenous postwar Swedish consumption landscape by constructing new consumer types that suited a more market-oriented society, and it was the confident, individualised consumer who sought self-fulfilment that was portrayed as the most attractive type. The article argues that the politics of marketing and advertising played an important part in shaping Swedish consumer culture during the market turn.

In West German law, selling sex was held to be legal but ‘immoral’, a definition that prevented its recognition or protection as a profession. Despite this categorisation, however, women (and men) sold sex in streets, bars and backrooms across the country. They developed routines and relationships to manage their trade, while being excluded from many welfare state provisions and targeted by local police, health or welfare departments. Rising prosperity and the loosening of social norms in West Germany between 1949 and 1974 provide the backdrop to an exploration of how older notions of prostitution as ‘work-shy’ were confronted with the changing circumstances of urban commercial sex in this period. The article examines how politicians, police and welfare workers interpreted the continued existence of commercial sex in the context of rising security. It also highlights the disparate working practices of women who sold sex across the period.

Norway is celebrated for its successful management of petroleum resources. This success is often attributed to Norway's institutions and to key Norwegian policymaking figures. However, the roles of foreign experts in shaping early Norwegian oil policy have been overlooked. This article explores the roles of two Iraqi oil experts, Farouk Al-Kasim and Hasan Zakariya, and finds that they contributed to shaping the Norwegian petroleum management system at a crucial stage in its development. The article reveals the interconnectedness of global oil policies and challenges conventional North-South diffusion narratives, broadening our understanding of the impact of decolonisation on contemporary Europe.

After the Second World War, lawmakers in the re-established democracies of Western and Central Europe set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These were highly controversial as they had to manage two conflicting demands: the desire to purge former Nazis, fascists and collaborators as a means of re-democratisation, and to keep them away from power through a series of democratic restrictions such as temporary disenfranchisement. In this article, I investigate how postwar elites in France, Austria and West Germany dealt with this democratic conundrum and how their opponents used the concept of democracy in order to discredit postwar purges and achieve their revision through amnesty laws. I put forward the notion of democratic revisionism and I try to define its role within the wider framework of postwar transition and democracy.

Especially as regards Commonwealth restrictions, Ireland's immigration policy has been seen as (surreptitiously) dependent on UK policy. Although the Common Travel Area imposed serious limits, Irish discretion was in fact significant and restrictive. In 1948–9 the United Kingdom secured Ireland's public commitment to extend reciprocal citizenship rights to all the Commonwealth, notwithstanding its secession, but Ireland avoided this vis-à-vis the ‘new’ Commonwealth and left its aliens exemption law deliberately opaque. Whilst broadly mirroring the UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Ireland retained apartheid South Africa as partially privileged and only comprehensively exempted British citizens born within the United Kingdom. From 1973, the United Kingdom largely abandoned any privileged treatment but, in entirely removing this in 1975 and selectively imposing visas from 1976, Ireland went beyond even this. These divergences reflected that, compared to the United Kingdom, it had left an increasingly diverse Commonwealth in 1949 and had a stronger homogenous nationalism.

This article examines the work habits of saleswomen in West Germany's retail and describes the amorphous yet evolving boundaries of working and non-working time. During the 1960s, women employed in retail began to work part-time to combine their domestic duties and a career. In their non-working hours, these women attended to childcare and household duties. This much is known, but this article shows that, in addition, female workers in retail often had to face irregular extensions of their working hours. This enabled companies to reduce the paid time of their employees. Moreover, some employment qualifications associated with women (smiling, engaging in conversation, displaying fine motor skills) were not properly appreciated, much less financially rewarded, but were instead regarded as natural traits and not subject to compensation. All these micro mechanisms led to women being held back from full work life participation, and therefore reinforced gender inequalities in general.

When considering the ideas behind economic and monetary union, most of the scholarly attention has focused on Germany and its ordoliberal tradition. The role of smaller countries such as the Netherlands, however, has yet to be considered. The Netherlands has long been one of Europe's staunchest fiscal hawks. To explain Dutch hawkishness, the international business press has reverted to the cultural trope of Calvinism. In contrast, this article traces this hawkish stance to the Dutch neoliberal turn of the 1980s, in particular the rise of public choice theory. In early 2012, during a meeting in Brussels, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described the need for fiscal discipline as ‘the lesson of the 1980s’. Building on institutional analysis and intellectual history, this article shows how Dutch policymaking elites conceived of EMU as a response to that lesson.

In the 2000s, Estonia’s self-avowedly neoliberal government institutionalised voting over the internet, becoming the only country in the world to use online voting in national elections. This innovation was branded as a key component of Estonia’s ‘digital republic’, articulated as an alternative to the bulky welfare state as well as to Soviet authoritarianism. This article suggests that by focusing on the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpinned the e-voting project, specifically the Estonian digital ID, we can reframe the history of post-Cold War development. It argues that reforms of post-Soviet state institutions were driven by a fragile coalition of civil servants, looking for ways to accomplish new challenges under serious budgetary constraints, computer engineers, who shared an ethos of experimentation developed at the Soviet-era Institute of Cybernetics, and banks, who offloaded their R&D initiatives to the state. This coalition was fraught with conflict, did not last long and had no singular goal – and thus could later be framed as a victory for democratic reform as well as another example of state capture by private interests. Further, the infrastructural basis of e-voting helps explain how Estonian policymakers could defend the institutions against criticisms that prevented its widespread adoption elsewhere.