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.

The Romanian government encountered unexpected difficulties after the First World War with the increase of religious minorities, particularly evangelicals in the newly acquired border region of Bessarabia. International affiliations and increasing success in rural areas led government officials and the Romanian Orthodox Church to label these groups as foreign pawns or socially deviant sectarians. The Baptist Church in Chișinău proved a special case of concern as its leadership included a Jewish man, Lev Averbuch. Averbuch's congregation was a diverse religious community, filled with Romanians, Russians, Bulgarians, Jews, Greeks, and others. Their multi-ethnic composition, multi-lingual services, ties to international organisations, and controversial sermons speaking out against nationalism and antisemitism were used by police and Orthodox Church authorities to paint them as a threat to national security. The analysis of Averbuch's interwar community of Jewish Christians in Chișinău shows the region was not a homogenous religious space and that religious identity was of greater value than national identity. It provides insight into the fluidity of religious, ethnic, and even geographic borders, and how policies of national consolidation were challenged at the local level by religious minorities during Europe's tumultuous interwar years.

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

This paper presents a case study of German ‘Nazi internationalism’ as part of a broader, transnational counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism in the 1930s. It offers an analysis of the activities and main ideas of the Nationalist International (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten; IAdN), headed by the German jurist Hans Keller and active from 1934 to 1941. The IAdN promoted concepts such as Volk nationalism and a Third Europe as a solution to the European crisis, and attempted to establish an alternative law of nations to replace the post-1919 liberal order. The IAdN illustrates an early attempt to reconcile völkisch ideas with international cooperation, thus foreshadowing ‘ethno-pluralist’ concepts of the New Right in the post-war period.

The article demonstrates how the transnational flows of sexual knowledge created a consensus among medical and legal experts for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the Polish Criminal Code of 1932. This happened despite the absence of any significant activism that would demand such a reform in Poland. The German movement's goal to repeal the notorious anti-homosexual paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code was ultimately brought to fruition in Poland but not in Germany. The medical and legal knowledge spread through imperial networks and became useful for the new Polish nation-state in its search for identity and distinctiveness. The novelty of the reform ideas created in German-speaking countries led Polish legal experts to consider their adoption a perfect opportunity for the new nation-state to prove its modernity. Additionally, an authoritarian setting in Poland after 1926 allowed the decision makers to shut out the Church and parliament from the legislative process.

This article examines an overlooked group of participants within 1970s housing occupation movements in Western Europe – migrants. More specifically, I analyse Italian migrants’ participation in housing occupations in the city of Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, from 1970–3. By engaging in visible protest, Italian migrant occupiers performed ‘acts of urban citizenship’ that ruptured understandings of localised citizenship and belonging. This case study thus illuminates two interrelated historic phenomena: (1) how social rights became de-territorialised and attached to the individual rather than the nation-state; and (2) how the city became a crucial site of citizenship formation, even across national borders.

The divergence concerning the treatment of autism in France developed out of the different narratives within autism literature. Psychoanalytic texts defined the treatment of autism beginning in the 1950s, with the participation of parents in the treatment of their children a central aspect of the narrative. These examples identified the parents as culprits in the appearance of autism, which was an accepted convention. However, by the late 1960s, new examples of autism literature reformulated assumptions, putting parents at odds with the medical establishment. The parent-centred examples inaugurated a new era of conflict between families and the French medical establishment, manifest in a changed approach of advocacy from associations. In each of these examples, the role of parents in their children's disability came into question, with analysts emphasising their participation in its origins and parents suggesting their role in mitigating the impact of disability for their children. This article examines the development of autism literature to show a shift in the role of families, from one of collaboration with medical professionals, to one of resistance against them.

The recent Final Report of the Commission into Mother and Baby Homes (January 2021) has received considerable criticism for suggesting that the Irish family was as responsible as the churches and state for the mistreatment of single mothers and their children. This article explores a case of two dead babies in mid-1980s Ireland, one single mother, and a rural family that found itself at the centre of an official inquiry. This case provides a prism through which to explore family agency and the official framing of the Irish family as culpable of moral erosion and social destabilisation. In this analysis agency in the familial context emerges as a complex mix of individual and relational exertions comprising conformity and resistance.

The Locarno Film Festival (LFF), founded in 1946 by film industry professionals and local tourism promoters, is reputed as an international hub for emerging cinema. Built apart from, or in opposition to, traditional commercial cinema, the Swiss event gave particular attention to Eastern European movies, to the point that the LFF has frequently been presented as the place where ‘Westerners discovered the talents of Eastern Europe’. However, the presence of these films in Locarno, whose characteristic was the absence of official support from the state, exacerbated Switzerland's anti-communism and led to the creation of a ‘national’ selection committee in 1962 to limit the programming of movies coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This article analyses how Swiss politics and ideological tensions conditioned the construction of the Locarno Festival's identity through the prism of the (non-)interventions of the federal state.

Foreigners’ right to family migration in West Germany was grounded on the idea that said migration could unburden the welfare state. The state actively recruited both foreign men and women as guest workers, often as married couples, creating the problem of providing childcare within a welfare state that assumed that families could provide their own childcare. Some migrant workers responded to these expectations by bringing extended family members, such as the family that brought a ‘Spanish grandmother’ and subsequently fought for her residence permit in court. When the Federal Administrative Court heard her case in 1973, it concluded that extended family members had a right to migrate if they made the family more ‘functional’, which the grandmother in question did by caring for her grandchildren. The conservative welfare state incorporated foreigners according to a logic of ‘market conformity’ that guided its migration policy and shaped its approach to social welfare.

This article focuses on how middle-class families created during the second half of the Francoist dictatorship in Spain decisively contributed to improving the educational level of the biggest generation in Spanish society, born between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. Mothers played a particularly important role in this ‘educational shift’. Even though under Francoism legislation and moral habits implied female subordination in virtually all spheres of life, many of those mothers were willing and able to promote their children's education irrespective of their gender. Making use of oral history, the article offers an account of how mothers of the Spanish baby boom generation entered into marriage, organised their daily lives at home and took decisions regarding their children's welfare and education. Today in their old age, these women deserve to be considered important agents of the remarkable social change Spain has experienced during the last decades.

Family reunion had a deeply practical and symbolic significance in post-war Europe. Through the case study of British military families living in Germany, this article examines both official discourse and families’ own experiences of reunion and life overseas in the first decades of the Cold War, through the three national but also international visions of the family: as emblems of familial and domestic stability, as ‘unofficial ambassadors’ promoting European unity and as friendly faces of Western democracy. In all cases, the article shows the ways that official messages were embraced, subverted or ignored by families, highlighting the value of exploring context-specific agency. Military families seemingly lived in a world of limited choices, but a range of life narratives show how they came to see aspects of their family life as resolutely theirs.

From the mid-1950s, industrial food manufacturing has become a key priority of the Soviet economy. Increasing the production of agricultural and manufactured foodstuffs was a matter of improving living standards, which from 1961 the Soviet leadership declared as a crucial step in achieving the aims of communism. At the same time, since the 1950s and 1960s, the role of science and technology in making food products has significantly increased, promising improvements in both the quantity and quality of nutrition. Specialists played a key role in incorporating traditional foods into the complex nexus of modern science and technologies of production and they developed new qualities of food they called ‘modern’. Food modernity was based on the strong belief in the power of chemical elements, microbiology and modern technologies of production to make healthier, tastier and more sustainable food products. By the 1970s, hygiene also became a crucial element of production, incorporated into the system of labour incentives at Soviet enterprises. These attempts, however, co-existed with food shortages, infrastructural problems and a low production culture that became especially obvious by the 1980s. This paper demonstrates the controversy of Soviet industrial food-making: strong beliefs in food science as the trigger for increasing living standards co-existed with backward industrial infrastructures which left ‘modern food’ a matter of experiment rather than real production. This reveals a pivotal problem in the Soviet economy, where intensive research met insufficient infrastructures for implementation.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Swiss government initially refused to become diplomatically involved, arguing that as a small, permanently neutral state, Switzerland was unable to make a difference in the Afghan crisis. The present article shows that between 1982 and 1986, the Swiss authorities began to identify the transfer of eleven Soviet prisoners of war from Afghanistan to Switzerland as an opportunity to demonstrate Switzerland's neutral good offices in situations of armed conflict. It also shows that Switzerland's involvement came about primarily through direct and indirect exchanges with non-state actors in the Afghan crisis.

In recent years, school strikes and street protests for climate justice have drawn international attention to young people's mobilisation and activism on global issues. This article addresses the need to map the history of global awareness among young people by exploring the origins of the Operation Dagsverke (Operation Day's Work) campaign in Sweden during the early 1960s. Drawing primarily on material from the student-led school council organisation SECO, the aim is to show how young people mobilised support for addressing global issues. The results show that the campaign format was initially developed by university students in 1960, after which it was adapted by students in secondary education. It is argued that the campaign was successful in transforming time, a resource that young students possessed, into economic contributions. On the organisational level, the structure of the student council organisation SECO was important for the campaign's initial success.

In 1963 the West Berlin mayor proposed a joint bid from West and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games. West Germany's closest allies sought to persuade the West German and Berlin governments to stop the bid, which both supported but had largely kept secret from their allies. This episode demonstrates not only the significance which foreign ministries have long attributed to international sport, but also their clear involvement to actively end another country's Olympic aspirations because of the diplomatic ramifications, particularly the potential to challenge the four-power control of Berlin, and their own self-serving interests in hosting the same event.

This article narrates the history of two high-profile West German-Turkish toxic waste scandals in 1988. It argues that they marked a watershed moment between two ‘waste regimes’. The first scandal showcased to the Turkish and West German publics how waste dealers and policy makers misleadingly packaged hazardous waste exports as a substitute for traditional forms of debt and as a vehicle for economic development. The opposition it fuelled hastened the demise of this waste regime by prompting the Turkish government to enact a ban on toxic waste imports. The second scandal revealed the new regime that emerged in its aftermath – one in which waste dealers and policy makers sought to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space.

This article investigates how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), left-wing British, Dutch and German-language newspapers ‘recruited’ their readers to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Recruitment could consist of donating time, money, social and political capital, or, in extreme cases, actually joining the fighting in Spain. It employs a double comparative approach, analysing recruitment messages attuned to readers in three different national political contexts and cultures produced on behalf of socialist and communist organisations. It argues that different ‘sketches of Spain’ co-existed, aligned to different domestic political and popular cultures and through different ideological lenses. These different sketches, in turn, were vital in shaping people's expectations of the Civil War, circumscribed the scope for and content of anti-fascist transnational connections made in Spain, and helped foster new understandings of social and political circumstances at home.

This article provides a perspective on liberal political thought in post-Cold War Finland by examining the small Young Finns party. Their political philosophy emphasised individualism against collectivism and criticised Finland's state-centred political culture. Special focus is on the party's ideas of reforming the Finnish welfare state. The Young Finns wanted to retain universal education and healthcare services but pursued radical tax, social security and labour market reforms with ideas inspired by neoliberal thinkers. The article argues that the Young Finns represented a Finnish variant of neoliberalism in their goal of retasking the welfare state into a slimmer enabler of individual freedom.

French price controls and rationing after the Second World War sparked opposition from a broad range of economic actors – farmers, shopkeepers, manufacturers and consumers. Towns rang their church bells to mobilise residents against controllers, whom they attacked with verbal abuse and physical violence. They associated the controllers with Vichy and collaboration with the Nazis, and rejected controls as ‘economic tyranny’. Implicitly, they accepted moderate inflation as the path to economic recovery. This article explains the development of hostility, from wartime frustrations to the violent conflicts that forced the state to retreat and relax controls in 1947.