This article addresses the divided memory and contested meaning of the Great War in interwar Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the legacy of a loose and short-lived movement of army deserters called ‘Green Cadres’ that appeared in 1918, it suggests that the Czechoslovak nation building project faced challenges not only from sizable ethnic minorities within the fledgling state, but also from the restive Czech peasantry. As elsewhere in East Central Europe, many peasants regarded the Green Cadres as liberators and representatives of a more radical, rural oriented national revolution. These unfulfilled hopes resonated through the interwar period. This article thus sheds light on an important social and cultural fault line that has been neglected in histories of the world wars in Europe.

This article explores how two of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906–2006) and Józef Obrębski (1905–67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars’ correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obrębski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica, it examines the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods first cultivated in interwar Poland to new soil. Arguing that Gross and Obrębski approached exile as a chance to ‘go global’ with Polish social science, it emphasises the role of both place and displacement in intellectual history. In particular, it looks at how the scholars drew on pre-war experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.

This article examines the contested presence of Vichy administrators in high positions of the French administration of occupied Germany after the Second World War. In occupied Germany, where many of Pétain’s officials pursued their careers, resisters and collaborators negotiated their new positions in the wake of the German occupation of France. Key to understanding this settlement are the notions of expertise and merit as well as the role of the inherited French social order untouched by the collaboration.

The Durkheimian School of sociology was one of the most comprehensive programmes ever developed in the social sciences. This article contributes to those accounts of the School that discuss its intergenerational, interdisciplinary and international transformations after the Great War. From this perspective, the article presents the case of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), whose early work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland became one of the Durkheimian classics on social integration. In the interwar period Czarnowski argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture and called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the notions of class and work. More generally, Czarnowski’s reconfiguration of Durkheimian universal principles in the specific location of East Central Europe calls for a deeper historicisation of the Durkheimian School as a movement in international social sciences.

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.

The interwar period was a time when the rural world gained new prominence in visions of modernity and modernisation across the world. The newly reconfigured countries of Eastern Europe played a key role in focusing attention on the countryside as an important area of state intervention. This coincided with a greater involvement of the social sciences in debates and in projects of development and modernisation, both nationally and internationally. This article examines the contribution of the Bucharest School of Sociology to the creation of an idea of ‘the global countryside’ that emerged in the interwar years and only matured in the post-war period.

While the Viennese origins of key neoliberal intellectuals is well known, the formative influence of the Habsburg Empire on their thought is surprisingly understudied. This article argues that the empire was a silent and open partner in the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises on international order, especially on questions of migration and the management of a polyglot population. After 1918 Mises conceived of robust forms of multinational governance capable of protecting a world of what he called ‘perfect capitalism’ with total global mobility of labour, capital and commodities. Yet, by 1945 he had scaled back his proposals to the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire. I show that Mises’s international theory was cleft by a faultline between a normative theory of an open borders world and the empirical reality of a closed borders world, underwritten by what he saw as the stubborn obstacles of human ignorance and racial animus.

A new and important model for international health originated in the 1920s as a rural health project in the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia. Thus, the involvement of international organisations in social stability and human security did not follow the Great Depression of the 1930s, as has been argued. In fact, the redefinition of the League of Nations’ mandate began with its Health Organisation in the 1920s, growing from local health projects. These initiatives adapted principles of social medicine to address the challenges of constructing egalitarian democratic states in the agrarian peripheries of post-imperial Europe.

This article examines the Scandinavian countries’ response to extreme political movements in the interwar period. Historians have considered the crisis agreements of the 1930s as pivotal to Scandinavian resistance to fascism. The present article revises this explanation by conducting a comparative empirical study of political practice and rhetoric. The comparison makes it clear that the socio-economic measures were primarily aimed at combating the economic crisis. However, the social democratic labour parties conceptualised their social and economic policy as a defence of democracy after Hitler seized power in Germany. The findings indicate that the social democratic solution to the depression in Scandinavia left no political space for either communism or fascism.

This article discusses the main lessons of the Marshall Plan's Technical Assistance Programme. The point of departure is the Danish case, but the perspective is wider, and the article aims at broadening the somewhat narrow chronology and geography often applied in studies on the history of the Marshall Plan. When following the Technical Assistance up until the mid-1950s in a Scandinavian country it becomes clear that American diplomats didn't just want the Europeans to work harder, but that their drive for productivity also promoted Americanisation in the form of an US-style business and consumer culture. The ‘American Way’ presented through the Technical Assistance Programme, though not uncontested, was a powerful and appealing model for prosperity applicable to all areas of the economy, from agriculture to retail.

Using a wide variety of European archival sources, this article analyses the development of financial policies after the First World War. Through studying French politics it demonstrates how, following the significant increase in direct fiscal charges in order to cover the costs of the conflict, international fiscal competition exercised strong pressure on the tax systems of large European countries and, as a result, contributed over the course of the 1920s to a process of lowering the taxes levied on high revenues and fortunes. Significantly, the stabilisation of the French franc in 1926 was supported by a simultaneous alignment of the French tax system and neutral tax havens which in turn enabled the return of previously exported assets.

Both Sheila Fitzpatrick and Anne Applebaum are fine historians who have made important contributions to the historiography of the Soviet Union. Applebaum works as a journalist and writer. But that is no reason to sniff at her contributions as ‘popular history’ or ‘history light’. In the books I have read, Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain (2012) and Red Famine (2017), she has always strived to document her assertions, present logical and well-honed arguments and use archival and other documentary material where possible to forge new paths. One might not always agree with her conclusions, but that is a different question. If only more of our colleagues could write as well as Applebaum, think as clearly and attack important subjects the way she does, we would have a richer historiography as a result.

Between academic writing of history – what professional historians, usually employed by universities, do – and popular history – what journalists, celebrities and independent writers usually with some claim on fame do – there is a growing intermediate genre, which I will call ‘history light’. While popular history is produced rather quickly and often with armies of researchers working for the celebrity author, history light is artisanal. It takes more time and bears the mark of the scholar/journalist author. Such writers, smart people with a flair for fluid prose, have turned out bestsellers and prizewinners that have found a broad reading public. They can be read with enjoyment and profit by the general public and scholars alike. History light may not be as sensationalist or prurient as many popular histories, but neither is it as thickly evidenced or balanced as the best academic histories. Such books usually have a strong point of view, often supportive of the liberal/conservative status quo in the United States, and in the case of those that deal with Russia or the Soviet Union, usually condemnatory of the Soviet Union, communism and extremes of left and right. They often tend to be indictments rather than historically empathetic; that is, they shape evidence to a particular conviction instead of allowing a more complex, perhaps even ambiguous, reading.

In German historiography, the Ukrainian famine has not received adequate attention. A few exceptions exist, such as the 2004 special issue of the journal Osteuropa edited by Gerhard Simon and Rudolf Mark, but no single monograph in the German language nor any research project deals with the Holodomor. Moreover, amongst the broader German public, the Soviet famine of 1932–3 is relatively unknown, despite being one of the great catastrophes in twentieth-century European history and (in terms of its death toll) one of the biggest single crimes of Stalinism. How can this obvious omission on the part of German academic researchers of Stalinism be explained?

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

Ten or more years ago I informally proposed to a friend sitting in the editorial board of a major historical journal to organise a forum on Soviet famines in the light of the new sources and interpretations that were emerging. The answer I received struck me: it was a good idea and the topic was indeed important, but times weren't yet ripe. At first I was reminded of what Mikhail Suslov supposedly told Vasily Grossman: people weren't yet ready for Life and Destiny, whose essential ‘truth’ he did not therefore question. Then, I came to the conclusion that the answer was in itself a sign of the relevance of the topic and of its potential impact upon our reading of the past century. In fact, as I will try to briefly show in my conclusions, within Soviet famines keys can be found that open doors to an array of new, conceptual questions which force us to reconsider many of our basic ideas and representations. This is for historians a fascinating opportunity, but it can also prove a harrowing personal experience, so that in a way my colleague – being unquestionably wrong – was also unquestionably right: big questions have their times, and we can ‘force’ these times only up to a point, and at a risk, as is often the case with ‘forcing’.

My research has been about repression within the Soviet Communist Party, so the Ukrainian famine has been on the periphery of my interests. I therefore come to it as a bit of an outsider. But some aspects of the debate are dismayingly familiar. These include wild accusations of defending Stalin and an interpretive consensus that is resistant to the anomalies of new evidence and, sometimes, of logic.

Dictatorships, autocracies and authoritarian political systems must adapt if they wish to survive. The long-lasting dictatorship of Franco's Spain (1939–75) underwent a series of internal adaptations during its almost forty years of existence. The initial project of the Franco regime, which included the destruction of its social and political enemies, lasted until the end of the Second World War. The second phase, marked by a failed autarkic experiment, ended in 1959. The economic change that followed entailed a moderate opening in political terms, whilst maintaining a dictatorial apparatus. This article examines a further feature in the evolution of the Franco regime which initially sought to impose a monolithic national identity (Spanish) by means of the repression of its national minorities (Basque, Catalan, Galician and so on). Due to the absence of a violent political movement as existed in the Basque Country in the form of ETA, Catalonia is a particularly fruitful source to examine the shifts that took place in the Franco regime's policy towards Spain's historic nationalities. This article focuses on the intermediate spaces that appeared between overt opposition on the one hand and active collaboration on the other. This article assesses the evolving policy towards Catalan culture and identity during the dictatorship. I find three main phases in the regime's strategy: repression, followed by comparative tolerance with a final phase of the co-option of Catalan culture, for the purposes of regime legitimation.

The collectivisation famines of the 1930s are one of the darkest and most contested chapters in Soviet history. Carried out in the name of agricultural modernisation, Stalin's policy of forced collectivisation led to immense human suffering. Somewhere between 5 to 9 million people are believed to have perished in these famines, with the burden falling disproportionately on several major food-producing regions, including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Volga Basin and the Don and Kuban regions of the North Caucasus. Those who survived these terrifying events found their lives transformed, and collectivisation and the accompanying famines played a crucial role in integrating the Soviet Union's vast rural population into the institutions of a ‘workers’ state’.