This article examines the activism of British women's organisations to establish peaceful internationalism built on women's roles as mothers, while simultaneously opposing the rise of European fascism in the interwar period. It considers the maternalist arguments made by women's organisations in their work for disarmament, which coincided with the increasing militarism of fascist governments and their promotion of the idea that women's roles were primarily as mothers to create future soldiers for the state. These campaigns were also connected to debates about the birth rate, and women's organisations promoted the idea that women were actively refusing biological motherhood until policy makers heeded women's demands. This article demonstrates how feminist activists in interwar Britain fought to claim and mobilise their own gendered and politicised understandings of women's roles as mothers at a time when they feared fascism would strip women of the political rights they had worked for decades to achieve.

This article discusses the relation between state violence and public disorder under authoritarian rule in Poland. Focusing on the major crises and protests of the communist era, it examines regime violence through a double perspective – on the one hand, the way the regime resorted to physical violence to uphold its survival and, on the other hand, as a generational experience of those who suffered from it. Despite the state's use of physical violence until 1989 becoming more rationalised, modernised and efficient, it also turned less effective over time. This evolution contributed to a decreasing risk factor for protesters vis-à-vis the state. Since the bulk of those who participated in protests and riots were young people, the focus lies on the youthful dimension of public disorder and in particular the activity and experience of then students and young workers.

Building on original research and dialoguing with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, this article argues that decolonisation and migrations from the (former) colonies triggered and moulded a new, post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe. Analysing the highly significant but hitherto much-neglected case of Portugal in its broader Western European context, this claim is substantiated by surveying how these migrations affected citizenship and notions of the national community, the welfare state and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white ‘returnees’ from Portugal's African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white ‘immigrants’, arguing that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonised territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire.

Studies of interwar travels from Europe to Russia tend to prioritise reactions to the Soviet Union. This article, in contrast, examines how travellers reflected on Europe in the mirror of Russia and focuses on the little-studied writing and reception of narratives by Andrée Viollis, Luc Durtain, Georges Duhamel and Alfred Fabre-Luce in the late 1920s. Through a comparative analysis shaped by recent histories of temporality, the article explores how encounters between Europe and Russia challenged assumptions on borders, time and history. Although Europeans are generally associated with a model of linear, evolutionary time, this case study reveals their engagement with competing models of time as linear, cyclical and salvational.

The Dublin Convention (1990) was the first binding agreement on asylum between the member states of the European Community. It defined the criteria that determined responsibility for the examination of asylum applications lodged in their territories. Given the contemporary discussions about the system that derived from it, the paper reflects on one of its main criteria: the first entry principle. Drawing on archival research in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, the essay shows how the inclusion of the first entry principle was far more than a matter of course. It was influenced by the Schengen process and the establishment of the single market, previous North-South tensions over migratory issues, and governments’ (in)capacity to predict future developments. The inclusion of the first entry principle contributed to assimilating asylum policy with migration control, creating the premises for the subsequent burden-sharing problems and readmission agreement practices.

After the end of communism, foreign direct investment in Eastern Europe increased dramatically. In December 1990, the Austrian chain BILLA opened the first foreign-owned supermarket in Poland. I examine foreign-owned supermarkets as key spaces of encounter between West and East in which neoliberal ideas about urban space, everyday life, material consumption and retail were promulgated, contested and routinised. Examining coverage of the Warsaw BILLA shops in Gazeta Stołeczna, the local edition of the widely read and arguably most trusted daily newspaper in Poland, I draw from literature in consumer history as well as economic and urban geography alongside concepts from business and marketing to argue that local actors, and in particular the emerging independent press, helped naturalise neoliberal values about consumption and retail in early post-communism.

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.

Rural modernisation was at the core of postwar development programmes, not least in the Mediterranean. The notion of ‘modernisation’ inherited a number of assumptions about the nexus between economic and social development from experiences in Western and Central European ‘internal colonisation’ projects. The Turkish case reveals how such concepts travelled alongside exiled scholars in the Nazi period. However, they were also renegotiated at the local and regional levels, in particular after the Second World War. Kemalist conceptions of a ‘modern’ countryside came into conflict with international policies. This article analyses these expert encounters through the prism of the German model farm of Tahirova. Zooming in on a particular breeding project of the Tahirova sheep, it seeks to untie the rationales of different actors and the ways in which they shaped Turkey's role in postwar Europe, deeply influenced by cryptocolonial representations of the Mediterranean as Europe's agricultural (and demographic) reservoir.

The article sheds light on the significant and understudied bond between West German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Laureate Willy Brandt and Spanish President Felipe González. It is based on interviews with senior policy makers; archival material from the Ebert Foundation in Bonn; fresh material from Austria, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and the United States, and exclusive additional private papers. Drawing on these sources, the article identifies the three key political-intellectual pillars – democracy, social democracy and internationalism – that sustained their special ‘father–son’ relationship and discusses their shared desire to project their brand of socialism across Europe and the world. In doing so, it also sheds light on how personal guidance, assistance and exchange, linked with institutional support, contributed to the expansion of democracy and social democracy in the late Cold War.

This article examines how Soviet Ukrainian cultural artefacts acquired anti-Soviet meanings between the 1970s and the 1990s. It explores the life and posthumous commemoration of the pop composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk through the prism of the history of emotion. Although Ivasiuk promoted his Ukrainian-language music on Soviet radio and television in the 1970s, he turned into a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule after his premature death. The article frames this anti-Soviet turn in Ukrainian popular culture as a rebellion against state-sponsored emotional norms. In contrast to the more widely studied nonconformist circles, Ivasiuk's life and afterlives illuminate the experiences of misfits who tried but failed to find happiness and self-fulfilment within the boundaries of mainstream Soviet society. For a brief moment in the late 1980s, memories of Ivasiuk fuelled new visions of Ukrainian identity which underpinned attempts to push the limits of permissible emotional expression in the Soviet Union.

Through a systematic analysis of 500 Jewish testimonies, this article seeks to expand the social and cultural history of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Shifting the focus away from heated debates about ‘knowledge’ of the Holocaust towards wartime social interactions, it argues that prevailing notions of ‘resistance/collaboration’ and ‘rescue/betrayal’ do not fully account for the civilian obstruction of Nazi policies and many small gestures of support towards Jews. Ultimately, as a crucial addition to German and non-Jewish Dutch sources, Jewish accounts invite further perspectives on the broader landscape of Jews’ perceptions and memories of non-Jews, acts of disobedience and the effects of polarisation across Nazi-occupied Western Europe.

It is a little-known fact that the Italian Communist Party invested vast financial resources in the establishment of a network of local television stations. By 1980, there were as many as twenty of these stations. This article examines how the PCI's ‘free television’ experiment developed within the context of private broadcasting in Italy, and why it was eventually abandoned. A discussion of some of the programmes produced by communist television stations, complemented by interviews with some of the experiment's protagonists, will frame the experience of communist broadcasting within the PCI's history and television policy.

In the early 1960s, the US President's Commission on the Status of Women analysed Swedish gender policies with an interest in securing social and economic justice for American women. This largely overlooked investigation ultimately led to the integration of Swedish policy goals and strategies into the commission's recommendations, extending the impact of a Swedish model beyond mere rhetorical functions. This case indicates how, in the context of Cold War bipolarisation, transnational labour networks facilitated ‘modellisation’ by bolstering the trendiness of Swedish examples and the receptivity of American actors. Crucial was Esther Peterson of the US Women's Bureau, who served as a proselytiser of Swedish ideas, thereby driving a spontaneous and highly contingent translation of these policies into US-compatible proposals. The role of Peterson suggests a need for a greater recognition of the agendas of specific interest groups when historicising the creation and international circulation of a Swedish model.

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.

The role of market-oriented tourist policies in the planned economies of socialist Eastern Europe has been long overlooked. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ideological rhetoric to commercialism and market-driven strategies when promoting Romania as a tourist destination in the ‘West’ between the 1960s and the 1980s. It argues that there was a continual shifting between using tourism as an ideological tool and a certain pragmatism that was needed to turn socialist Romania into a desirable tourist destination.

Morocco and Catalonia are often mentioned as key elements in the crisis of Spanish liberalism, but little attention has been paid to the relation of these conflicts with the global developments of the 1920s. In their effort to break from Spain, Rifi rebels and Catalan separatists resorted to the League of Nations and were supported by sympathisers in British India, the United States, Latin America and Europe. Both separatist attempts utterly failed, but their campaigns provide new insights into the global connections (and dis-connections) of anti-imperialist and sub-national movements during the ‘Wilsonian moment’, and the strategies they developed to project their domestic agendas to the international sphere.

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 explores the representation of alcohol on East German television, radio and film in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the state media's attempts to strike a balance between preaching moderation in the name of public health and co-opting the cultural legacy of beer, particularly for working-class men. The attempt to accomplish both goals simultaneously resulted in a seemingly contradictory programme of public messaging that reveals efforts by the socialist leadership to calibrate their vision of a modern socialist future to accommodate the persistent power of a cultural commodity in Germany.

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.

This article investigates the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State (Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa dello Stato; TSDS) in the colonial territories that constitute present-day Libya at the time of fascist rule. This court acted as the judicial arm of the fascist regime in the so-called Italian ‘fourth shore’. As a tool of the repressive apparatus of the regime, it persecuted the ‘anti-national enemies’ outside the metropolitan area, striking against those who opposed the fascist dictatorship and the fascist occupation in the colony by de-legitimising the defendants on juridical, political and moral grounds. The TSDS in Libya shows that the fight against the ‘anti-nationals’ was a primary concern of Mussolini's ultranationalist regime not only in the peninsular territory but also within the colonial administration.