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.

Any civil war leaves a legacy of partisanship. Divisions persist over time and may be particularly bitter when, as in Spain, a culture of victory survives long after the end of hostilities. Any attempt at reconciliation was postponed, leading to an unusually bifurcated historiography, framed by a perennial interest into who, at base, was responsible for the outbreak of the civil war. The parameters of this debate were set in the 1970s, most notably in works by Stanley Payne and Paul Preston. It has continued in various guises since then, most recently revived by a generation of Spanish scholars, such as Fernando del Rey Reguillo, who have added case studies and new levels of detail, while leaving the terms of the debate more or less unchanged. Of course the historiographical panorama can change, often in tandem with the historical context, as several contributions to this roundtable make clear, notably those of Vjeran Pavlaković, Helen Graham and Giuliana Chamedes. However, the framing of the Spanish Civil War is still essentially moral: who bore responsibility for the outbreak of war, who was to blame for the defeat of the republic and, as a consequence, the conduct of the repression. One result has been to assimilate the history of the civil war with that of the Second Republic; another is a historiography that is largely political in tone and focus.

Recent research into the Moroccan troops who fought in the Spanish Civil War has both drawn from and contributed to insights gained from new historiographical developments in the field of the Spanish conflict as well as other European twentieth-century conflicts. Studies examining the experiences and choices of low-level participants of the war, whether soldiers or civilians – on both the Francoist and republican sides – have increasingly shown that they were players in possession of a certain degree of agency, however limited. That agency allowed these low-level players, whether Spanish or Moroccan, to influence war events to a higher degree than previously thought possible, and has shown that mobilisation for and maintenance of the war effort depended on a certain mixture of coercion and negotiation, even within the more authoritarian Francoist camp. In the European context, the Moroccan participation in the 1936–9 war has its special characteristics, one of which is that its military significance weighed heavier than other colonial contributions to European battlefields between 1914 and 1945, and therefore the agency of Moroccans was more consequential. Nevertheless, it has much in common with other European experiences. A recent collaborative volume on British, French, Spanish and Dutch colonial armies in the first half of the twentieth century, Colonial Soldiers in Europe (2016), edited by Eric Storm and myself, has helped put the Moroccan–Spanish experience in European perspective. Similarities abound, not only in colonial soldiers’ experiences of fighting in foreign lands, but also between the various Western European attempts at controlling, i.e. limiting, the cultural and human consequences of this massive irruption of male warriors into the continent.

The recent evolution of both the historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and even the general population's perception of the conflict, cannot be separated from the changes in the political and cultural paradigms in Europe since the end of the Cold War. By this I mean that Europeans, but not only them, have been evolving from a mostly ideological view of the past to an increasingly humanistic one.

This article shows how corporatism in the Nordic countries helped shape the ‘ecological turn’ as governments and conservationist associations co-organised the Council of Europe's ‘European Conservation Year 1970’. The national programmes came to present highly diverging levels of discord, as this nascent policy field channeled challenges to the premise of economic growth. Cross-national comparisons highlight the importance of variations in the institutional maturity of environmental administrations as well as in the power afforded to industrial representatives. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian archival sources illuminate negotiations between governments and private associations, contributing to an in-depth analysis of a rarely researched transnational event.

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.

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.

As a result of the nationwide strike wave in August 1980 that gave birth to the Solidarity trade union, the Polish state authorities conceded to the reform of state censorship and to Solidarity creating union bulletins that were not subject to preventative censorship. This article analyses the Solidarity press to explore its censoring through direct state censorship and self-censorship in 1980–1. It argues that Solidarity's dual commitment to truth and legality were irreconcilable and that the state cultivated this conflict, contributing to the undermining of Solidarity's moderate leaders and the treatment of history as an arena for politicisation and state control. It posits that these conflicts have contributed to the current Polish government's frontal assault on the legacy of the Solidarity leadership.

In 1936 Mussolini's fascist regime embarked upon an ambitious plan to hold the 1942 World's Fair in a newly built city south of Rome. At the peak of construction in 1939–40 an army of 5,000 workers laboured to complete the city in ‘record time’. The labour utilised to build the new city became a critical public spectacle in the final years of fascist rule, highlighted in films, covered by the press and featured on the itineraries of Rome's most important visitors. This activity was guided not just by the construction of buildings but also the purported fabrication of a distinct Italian fascist worker subjectivity. With the aim of fashioning pliant workers lacking in proverbial ‘class consciousness’, fascist thinkers publicly exhibited Italian workers as fixed within a ‘natural’ hierarchy of ancient Roman origin. In these renderings of the ‘new’ worker, class antagonisms in the modern division of labour were replaced with illustrations of exemplary sacrifice to familial and interpersonal authority with the function of subsuming ‘class interests’ to both employers and the state. In spite of these narratives, fascist aims regularly encountered limits when confronted by real workers, as yielded by an examination of responses to the regime's mandates within the built environment. Although workers never fully embodied this new ‘interiority’, the regime was successful in grounding cultural norms in a constrained field of practice, generating a framework for the domination of labour.

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 1987 a recreational centre called the Bowlingtreff arose at the centre of East German Leipzig without knowledge from central authorities thanks to 40,050 hours of volunteer labour. What can this incident of apparent optimism tell us about state–citizen relations as they had evolved on the eve of revolution? Rather than ‘ostalgic’ evidence of socialist paradise lost, this article shows how, overcoming years of bureaucratic proscriptions, dedicated local authorities built ‘off the record’ to prove to the people that they could attain something; and residents disillusioned with communism were eager to build a piece of the ‘imaginary West’ in their dying city. Ultimately, however, the bowling palace demonstrated system dysfunction and whetted Leipzigers’ appetite for the ‘real’ West.

This article argues that the topos of dialogue between Christians and Marxists fulfilled a key role in the creation and maintenance of power relations in religious politics in East Germany. Three case studies illustrate the topos of dialogue as a strategy of struggle: 1. the campaign against ‘revisionism’ and ‘politicised religion’; 2. the church policy strategy of ‘differentiation’; 3. the critique of the phenomena commonly associated with the Christian–Marxist dialogue outside East Germany in the mid-1960s. These instances of socialist religious politics, while having their own dynamics, were closely related through specific actors and argumentative strategies.

This article examines the ideological and political transformations that allowed dialogue between Catholics and socialists to bear fruit in the Federal Republic of Germany in the immediate post-war era. It focuses on the role played by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, the prominent Catholic intellectual, constitutional theorist, historian and future Constitutional Court justice.

In the 1960s a shift occured in how shamanism was represented in Soviet anti-religious journals, in which shamanism was transformed from an ethnographically documented cultural practice peculiar to Siberian indigenous populations, into an – albeit ‘primitive’ – form of a universal human capacity for altered states of consciousness and a precursor of various forms of mysticism. The article argues that this shift coincided with a shift in the Soviet atheist project, as well as a point of comparison that reveals similarities and differences between Soviet and Western modernist projects.

This article explores a major shift in European Protestant thought about socialism during the mid-twentieth century, from intense hostility to acceptance. During the twentieth century's early decades it was common for European Protestant theologians, church leaders and thinkers to condemn socialism as a threat to Christianity. Socialist ideology, many believed, was inherently secular, and its triumph would spell anarchy and violence. In the decades after the Second World War, however, this hostility began to wane, as European Protestant elites increasingly joined Christian-socialist associations and organisations. By focusing on the Protestant ecumenical movement, this article argues that one of the forces in this change was decolonisation, and in particular the rise of Christian and socialist thinkers in the Global South. It shows how concerns about Christianity's future in Asia and Africa helped some European Protestants to rethink their long-held suspicion towards state-led economic management and distribution.

This article analyses the relationship of mutual benefit that formed between West Berlin's local government and experimental artists in the 1980s. In 1978 the West Berlin parliament established a grant programme to support independent artists operating in what was referred to as the ‘free scene’. The grants were intended to support the goal of restoring the city's status as a capital of artistic innovation. Soon after, the local tourism office also featured these independent artists within a new place marketing strategy focused on raising the ‘experiential value’ of the city's cultural offerings. But as this article shows, experimental artists were also using city grants to pursue alternative agendas focused on engaging with local populations in urban space. Through these projects, experimental artists extended the spirit of participatory democracy flourishing within the city's counter-cultural enclaves to broader areas of the city.

In 1947 the liberal Protestant minister Willem Banning drafted a new programme for the Labour Party, in which the party dropped the Marxist view of history and class struggle. New Labour in the Netherlands was envisioned as a party that strove for a democratic and just society. Banning's role in reforming the Labour Party was part of his broader project of breaking down structures of socio-political segregation that had existed since the end of the nineteenth century. Banning argued that the Labour Party had to abandon its atheist ideology to open up to Protestants and Catholics. This article will examine Banning's views and ideals and show how he contributed to the transformation of Labour into a social democratic party and seek answer to the question: how could a liberal Protestant minister become the main ideologue of the Labour Party?

This article examines the violent imaginaries and practices of squadrismo in the period preceding the establishment of the Italian fascist dictatorship. Based on the examination of newly accessible documentary sources at provincial state archives, the article sheds light upon the ways in which squadristi imagined, performed, justified and ascribed meanings to their violent actions and the disintegrative impact of violence on local communities. The article concludes with a reflection on Blackshirt violence in the aftermath of the March on Rome and the persistence of the ideological and cultural fabric of squadrismo in the years of the dictatorship.

The Soviet dissident and human rights movement, emerging publicly in the mid-1960s, became known globally through various supportive actions of Moscow foreign correspondents and Western intellectuals. For instance, Pavel Litvinov, a well-known dissident, had close relationships with foreigners, especially Karel van het Reve, a Dutch correspondent in Moscow, and Stephen Spender, a British poet, both formerly communists. This article attempts to elucidate aspects of the personal and ethical interactions among these three figures, focusing on van het Reve's and Spender's support activities and projects, particularly the Alexander Herzen Foundation and Writers and Scholars International, founded in 1969 and 1971, respectively, to understand how a transnational moral community was formed.

This article examines three case studies between 1951 and 1960 to illustrate how the 1956 Revolution and mass defection of Hungarian Olympic athletes following the Melbourne Games impacted the relations between Hungarian sport leaders and athletes. While sport leaders recognised the need to soften their policies towards athletes, athletes learned that socialist Hungary, and not the capitalist West, oftentimes offered them the best opportunities for their sport career and desired lifestyle. These changes shaped the emerging politics of cooperation in the post-1956 Hungarian sport community, in which cooperative members of both groups could achieve their respective diplomatic, career and lifestyle goals.