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.

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.