Few countries in Europe have witnessed as much turbulence during the past quarter century as the seven states which emerged from socialist Yugoslavia after it dissolved amidst a catastrophic series of wars of succession. Although actual armed conflict only took place in Serbia (then still including Kosovo in the rump state Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1998 and 1999, Serbia directly participated in the wars of Yugoslav succession beginning in 1991 in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then finally in Kosovo. For nearly a decade from 1992 until 2001 Serbia's economy languished under the combination of a kleptocratic regime, expensive and protracted military engagements and international sanctions. The long Serbian transition entered a new phase in October 2000, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was ousted by a very heterogeneous political coalition whose leaders shared only an intense antipathy for Milošević. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was transformed into the short-lived state union of Serbia and Montenegro, which disappeared when Montenegro declared its independence in 2006, followed by Kosovo in 2008.

This article examines maternalism in the Czech Republic by exploring how waged and unwaged forms of caring work were framed through discourses of women's innately caring nature in the late twentieth century. Present-day hospital volunteering programmes, which bring female, lay volunteers onto hospital wards to provide unwaged care to patients, are inscribed by maternalist tropes historically associated with domestic work and family care, rather than the neutral expertise associated with female waged care workers in public, institutional settings. The article assesses the contemporary reinvention of maternalist discourses and their capacity to mobilise unwaged caring labour.

The 1960s was the moment when NGOs established their role within the professional world of international development. There were new networks emerging and new approaches to development – but there were also longer-term trends and challenges that resurfaced about the role of charity, activism and social justice. Previous research has shown how Christian networks were instrumental in establishing local fair trade campaigns. This article investigates the extent to which Christian Aid contributed to fair trade campaigns by providing a moral social force in public debates about social justice, international development and global trade.

The article explores the influence of ‘1968’ on the West German fair trade movement. It argues that 1968 constituted an ambivalent legacy for the perception of mass consumerism: while the 1960s student movement radically criticised modern consumer society, it also put new emphasis on consumer products as markers of individual identity. The article analyses this relationship by focusing on the design, representation and advertising of fair trade products by the German fair trade organation GEPA. The first two case studies examine the politicisation of fair trade products in its early campaigns in the 1970s and the subsequent attempts to use everyday products like coffee, tea and honey to educate consumers about their individual lifestyles. The third case study looks at the GEPA's first mail-order catalogues and asks how the GEPA tried to transform an icon of modern mass consumerism into a tool to communicate its fair trade approach.

This article examines popular opinion about women's wage work in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Poland, using letters to institutions and sociological research from this period. It introduces the notion of female breadwinning as a useful category to describe the understanding of women's wage work under state socialism. Opinions on women's wage work varied, but all of them were based on gender assumptions. Women's and men's work were valued differently. Men's work had an indisputable, independent position. Women's work was evaluated in the context of family. Women could be breadwinners, but not equal to male ones; their wage work was perceived as secondary.

In 1968 Dutch activists launched a campaign focused on cane sugar as a symbol of unfair trading conditions for the global South. The history of the cane sugar campaign from 1968 to 1974 highlights how European integration provided hope for large-scale change and a common target. This led activists to establish European networks and campaigns. Its demise sheds new light on the new social movements’ shift from ‘grand politics’, aimed at a sudden and drastic transformation through global and European politics, towards incremental change by locally targeting specific companies and countries.

This article examines men's valuing of women's work in the post-1945 period. It considers men's perspectives on female labour in and outside the home in the context of women's wartime work, the increase in married women working and the greater involvement of men in family life. I argue that men saw their wives’ and partners’ work as of lesser value than their own, in various ways, even if the money women's paid work brought in could significantly improve living standards. This was true even in the most caring, loving relationships. The article employs a broad definition of value, considering the social and cultural value of work alongside its economic outcomes. It places subjective accounts from interviews within a wider cultural and political context and contributes a new perspective to post-war British historiography by focusing on both paid labour and domestic work, and the negotiation of value between men and women.

The article presents an in-depth analysis of the struggle for gender equality in hiring, as well as campaigns for parental leave and demands for improved work conditions, by female workers in manufacturing industry in 1970s–80s Italy. The case study is focused on Fiat in Turin, a highly significant site given its economic role in Italy and Europe, and its history of social conflict and radical workforce. Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in gender relations since the 1960s, ongoing industrial unrest since 1968 and the introduction of new gender-equality legislation, fatefully coinciding with the onset of deindustrialisation and the rise of unemployment in manufacturing, trade union feminism presented an original and, viewed in hindsight, highly significant agenda. The events in Fiat demonstrate the extent to which new demands and ideas regarding the value of women's work became acceptable in the workers’ movement and in society at large, but also reveal the obstacles which the feminist politics of work encountered, and the persistence of gender-based prejudice in understandings of the value of work in all its forms. The analysis is based on archive material, press and original interviews.

Taking up Frank Trentmann's suggestion of ‘widening the historical frame’ in which we analyse the fair trade movement, this article explores the entangled history of violent and peaceful tactics in two transnational solidarity campaigns in West Germany the 1980s: the German anti-Apartheid movement and a campaign for women workers in a South Korean garment factory. Both campaigns had the aim to improve the living and working conditions of producers in the Global South and were characterised by a complex interplay of peaceful and militant tactics ranging from boycott calls to arson attacks and bombings. Although more research into the impact of violent protest is needed, the two case studies suggest that the use of violent protest tactics can contribute towards the success of protest movements if it attracts considerable media attention, the targeted companies face significant social and political pressure and the cumulative disruption costs clearly exceed the concession costs.

This article highlights the contribution of East Central Europe to interwar internationalism by showing how solutions to regional challenges gave birth to the Union internationale des associations d'alpinisme (UIAA), a permanent international organisation for mountaineering. The territorial fragmentation caused by the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire required alpine clubs to lobby for the softening of new political borders while simultaneously contributing to state building efforts. Successful experiences with bilateral agreements in the Tatras and re-emerging Neo-Slavist ideas led to the founding of the Association of Slavic Tourist Organization in 1924, which in turn motivated the establishment of the UIAA. The leading figures in this process were alpinists with a distinct internationalist profile who navigated seamlessly between their role as agents of the state and private citizens.

Based on analysis of Lord Ismay's private papers and on documents from the NATO archives and the Foreign Office archives, this article examines the role of Lord Ismay as the first Secretary General of NATO. As the first person to occupy the role, with little guidance from the national governments and no previous examples to use as a guiding light, Ismay had the opportunity – and the challenge – to shape the new role and to lay the basis for the long-term development of the International Staff. This article argues that Ismay's careful approach was essential in cementing political consensus within the North Atlantic Council at a time in which the members of the Alliance were still learning to work together.

The main aim of this article is to show how the political evolution of Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without analysing the political experiences of countries like Spain, which were not at the centre of the period's political decisions but whose evolution was inspired and suggested by strategies outside the political mainstream. In this respect, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s portrays a peculiar political situation demonstrating the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. A minority of influential sectors linked to the Single Spanish Party, the Falange, pursued its own third way, ignoring the Cold War models. They instead looked to what was happening in Eastern Bloc countries, especially after the events in Hungary in 1956, as well as to the political experiments in Latin America, especially the Cuban revolution.

This article discusses the relations between the French, Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties during the transitions to democracy in the Iberian Peninsula (1974–7). It focuses on the attempt of these parties to establish a distinctive ideological trend, Southern European socialism. The main argument is that the French socialists attempted to promote their ideological line – and predominantly the union between socialists and communists – in the Iberian Peninsula during the transitions to democracy. The Portuguese Socialist Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party initially considered following this line. However, the radicalisation of the Portuguese revolution in the sensitive context of Cold War détente, as well as the involvement of the European social democrats in both Portugal and Spain against the union of the left, prevented this model from being further considered by the Spanish and Portuguese socialist parties. Nevertheless, all these parties showed interest in promoting a common Southern European Socialist identity that differed from European social democracy as well as from Soviet communism, considering it useful in the struggle for hegemony within the left.

This article discusses the public violence that occurred in the Bohemian lands after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918. It follows the tension between the self-empowered people, who expected a profound change in their daily lives, and the state, which sought stabilisation through the continuity of institutions. Using the examples of the Železná Ruda mutiny in July 1919 and the workers’ general strike in December 1920, the article shows that public violence was relatively easily manageable by a combination of negotiations and force, for it did not pursue a clear vision opposing Czechoslovakia but rather tried to participate in its formation.

This article examines the effects of the 1974 child allowance reform on guest worker families in West Germany. As part of a wider reform, West Germany implemented a two-tiered system of child allowances whereby migrant parents received more money for children who lived in the European Economic Community (EEC) than for children who lived outside the EEC. Migrants protested the reform and with it the assumptions of the guest worker programme. However, these parents had to contend with a popular narrative whereby foreign parents who brought their children to West Germany after the reform were in fact irresponsible ‘welfare migrants’ who placed their desire for financial gain over their children's need for a stable environment. The idea that this specific welfare reform had been the trigger for large-scale family migration not only discouraged further investigation of the causes of family migration but was also used to support new restrictions on that migration.

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state.