This article investigates the creation and workings of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations Secretariat. It shows that the Disarmament Section was an outlier of the Secretariat: supressed by the Great Powers, it had less autonomy than other parts of the administration, which from an early stage limited its bureaucratic practice to the production of information. This bureaucratic production created unreliable factual foundations for negotiations and unrealistic public expectations. Thus, the article argues that the troubled birth and administrative strangling of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat should play a significant role in our understanding of the broader collapse of general disarmament. By making this argument, the article breaks new ground by introducing failure as an analytical category to understand the role and practices of international public administrations.

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.

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.

Under the Salazar regime, many Portuguese citizens spontaneously interacted with the secret police (PIDE), sending it letters of denunciation, prospective applications and petitions. The historians of the Estado Novo, by reducing the nature of the relations between the PIDE and society to its mechanisms of top-down repression, have overlooked the significance of the phenomenon. Drawing on the inputs of the international bibliography on accusatory practices and ‘everyday life’ under dictatorship, this article looks at the PIDE through the subjective perspectives of the individual citizens who approached it ‘from below’, thereby nuancing and complementing the established narrative of violence and repression. It focuses on the instrumentalisation of the PIDE by ordinary citizens as: an influential sponsor; an appropriable device of coercion; an instrument of private conflict resolution; a platform for collaborative interaction with the regime; an economic opportunity. The article also puts forward an interpretation of these ‘everyday’ interactions as part of a broader system of governance used by the authorities of the New State.

This article examines a previously un-researched aspect of nationalist politics, borderland contestation, national indifference and the politicisation of youth and cultural diplomacy in interwar Central Europe: the German–Polish ‘summer vacation exchange for children’ (Ferienkinderaustausch). The Versailles territorial settlement, which left nationalists in both countries in discontent about territories and minority groups remaining in the hands of the neighbour, formed the basis for this venture in cultural diplomacy. Each party gave the other the right to rally ‘its youth’ living on the other side of the border to travel to its ‘motherland’ for summer camp. Focusing on the case study of the heatedly contested industrial borderland of Upper Silesia, this article examines the German–Polish children's exchange on two levels. On the local level it examines how youth were rallied and transported to their ‘motherland’ for the summer and what treatment and experience they received. On the international level it explores the paradox of German–Polish cooperation and the conflict that was an inherent aspect of this venture.

While recent scholarship has highlighted how participating countries at the interwar world's fairs competed by displaying ideological versions of modernity, the alternative national projections of smaller states have received less attention. This study of the Swedish national pavilions from Brussels 1935 via Paris 1937 to New York 1939 analyses how a loose but well-connected network of communicators over the course of three fairs responded to, and used, the evolving trends at these international mega-events. In the threatening international atmosphere of the late 1930s, the network convinced the Swedish government to seize the opportunities opened up by the crises of capitalism and democracy. The 1937 and 1939 pavilions showcased Sweden at the world's fairs as an example of the successful handling of economic and socio-political crisis, and the experience had a formative impact on the post-war institutionalisation of Swedish cultural diplomacy.

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.

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.

This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy's middle- and upper-class households during fascism's twenty years in power. Due to significant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country's popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy's typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage's downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By promoting the beverage's hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moderate consumption of the peninsula's standardised wines with the dictatorship's nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine's honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country's typical wines as Italy's wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’.

This article considers the significant increase in wine consumption in Britain in the period 1965–85. It explores the social and cultural meanings attached to wine through a case study analysis of Good Housekeeping, a women's magazine aimed at a mainly middle-class readership. The vast majority of wine consumed in Britain at this time was European, the appeal of which was, for many, rooted in an idealised evocation of continental sophistication. In illuminating the development of new socio-cultural habits, this article reveals the influence of continental tourism is bolstering enthusiasm for wine, as well as the impact of greater availability and affordability in popularising consumption.

This article explores wine production, consumption and trade in the context of late socialist Bulgaria and the wider Eastern Bloc. In particular, it connects wine to the process of building legitimacy in Bulgaria, as part of post-Stalinist culture of consumer abundance and even connoisseurship that was steeped in nationalist narratives and meanings, as well as utopian visions of the future. To complicate such narratives, it also delves into the contradictory ways in which late-socialist anti-alcohol narratives and campaigns similarly looked to local, if not national, precursors to ground their counter model of a sober socialist present and communist future.

This article examines the French role in creating an integrated wine policy at the European level and demonstrates that political negotiations over the policy revealed competing European conceptions of agriculture and identity. Drawing on research in EEC and French historical archives, this article argues that in spite of the risks involved in relinquishing sovereignty over a key national industry with deep cultural resonance, the French government was determined to transfer responsibility for much of the sector to the European Community due to continued domestic pressure. Further, it suggests that common values around the centrality of agriculture in the European project meant that countries were persistent in realising a wine policy even though wine was not a natural fit in the pantheon of other goods for which common markets were created.

Uprooting productive vines transformed the landscape of the wine growing Languedoc as part of a coordinated European effort to reduce agricultural overproduction, most notably after 1984. The demographic shifts caused by this transformation upset regional political alliances, coinciding with a socialist presidency and electoral gains for the far-right Front National (FN). More traditional syndical bodies lost their ability to accent national change, floundering in the face of supra-national reform. This left space for political parties to politicise this gap between agency and power, and the FN retooled regional rhetoric emerging from wine protests on the left in service of local campaigns. Contextualising the election of Robert Ménard in Béziers in 2014, this article looks at how sectoral and economic transformation was passed over in favour of populist language borrowed from the vineyards only decades earlier, in which the uprooting of vines explains the perceived uprooting of identity.

This article examines the politics of wine making in Alsace in the two decades after the region returned to French rule in 1918. During these years Alsatian wine makers worked to transform their wines to meet the tastes of French drinkers, following five decades of producing wine for German consumption. As wine makers grappled with the question of how to secure the future of their industry, Alsatian wine became emblematic of the most contentious aspects of Alsace's reintegration into France. The introduction of new laws on viticulture raised the question of what was French about wine, the wine industry's woes symbolised the difficulties of Alsace's economic reintegration and wine became an emblem for often fierce wrangling over identity and belonging in the recovered region. This article traces this process and argues that while wine became a symbol of the complications of reintegration, its importance in understandings of French national culture equally allowed it to offer a solution to the problems that return to France caused for Alsace's wine industry in the interwar years. In this way, this case study of the politics of wine making in Alsace is suggestive of wine's broader power as a symbol of national belonging.

Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War much contemporary commentary about the International Brigades was consistent with the view that what was taking place on the Iberian Peninsula was part of a larger struggle between democracy and fascism. Sympathetic reporting highlighted their positive military contribution and the selfless sacrifices in what later was tagged as the ‘curtain-raiser’ to the Second World War. From the 1980s scholarship about these foreign fighters for the republic was framed quite differently. In these cases the volunteers’ war experiences tended to be placed within the contextual narratives of their own national groupings or were applied in relation to the impact of the returned veterans from Spain on the post-war politics in their own home states. In several current analyses of the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the unexamined historical figure of the Spanish International Brigadier has been utilised as a foil against which to catalogue the pernicious and destabilising role of foreign fighters in these on-going civil wars.

Eighty years after both the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of a new war on European soil, we are facing a situation of both accelerated information and of reductionism in the stories about the past, often for very ‘presentist’ motivations. In such a context, it is even more difficult than usual to anticipate the place that the Spanish conflict will occupy in academic study and social debate in the next two decades, the period remaining until the conflict's 100-year anniversary. But historians seeking to re-evaluate or ‘re-size’ the Spanish war face two primary tasks: to place Spain back at the heart of our understanding of the interwar European crisis and to develop a robust interpretation of the war, one which can challenge presentist distortions of its history and help Spain build a healthier society around a fairly shared understanding of the past.

In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.

While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.