The editors of Contemporary European History are delighted to present this roundtable on the Soviet famines of the 1930s, which brings into conversation leading scholars from around the world working in the field of Soviet history.

Can we distinguish between those historical events – wars, revolutions or man-made catastrophes – that were intentional and those that were not? Does this distinction matter, and in what way? Somehow the issue of intention has become central in the debates about the Ukrainian Famine. Writing her review in The Guardian, Sheila Fitzpatrick puts the question in the title: ‘Did Stalin Deliberately let Ukraine Starve?’. In this forum J. Arch Getty pronounces that ‘the question of Holodomor is a question of intention’. Since ‘we still do not have a single document directly stating [Stalin's] motivations and intentions’ – we cannot blame him of this catastrophe. The historians of the Soviet Union cannot use the concept of genocide because the Soviet leaders did not articulate their intention to kill the millions of their compatriots.

Anne Appelbaum's work is a very readable and accessible story about the famine. In her own words, her objective was to tell ‘what actually happened. . . . What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible?’ (xv). Right from the beginning she indicates that she thinks that the famine was the result of someone's mentality, and that her objective is to find who should be blamed for it. Her's is a very simple story. It conforms to an increasingly popular trend in Soviet history to ignore or oversimplify complex economic explanations and to reduce everything to moral judgements.

Anne Applebaum is one of the most prominent public intellectuals and opinion makers battling the on-going authoritarian and populist drive on both sides of the Atlantic. Her public commitment to denouncing Putin's authoritarian regime and its aggression against Ukraine is closely related to the pages of Red Famine, which tackles the most contentious historical event dividing the Russian and Ukrainian political classes.

This article examines post-war (West) Germany's attempt to address national stigma and gain international acceptance. It surveys three domains: public relations, Foreign Cultural Policy (Auswärtige Kultur Politik) and bilateral relations with France and the United States. By the 1970s, although some images of ‘Germany’ were still negative, on a global scale its underlying reputation was remarkably positive. The complex of political actions involved was a pioneering example of ‘nation branding’.

This article adds to an on-going conceptual discussion on the usefulness of the ‘bystander’ term when applied to the Holocaust and its aftermath. This catch-all concept, mostly associated with Raul Hilberg, has been the subject of fierce criticism, leading some to apply it only with adjectives (‘innocent’, ‘active’ or ‘passive’) and others to dismiss the concept altogether. Taking the Jewish–Gentile relations in Topoľčany as a case study, it becomes clear that the concept has many shortcomings when applied to the microcosm of a particular event. On the basis of Giovanni Sartori's writings on concept formation and the ‘ladder of abstraction’, we argue against dismissing the concept altogether in exchange for limiting its degree of applicability. As shown, the ‘bystander’ concept can be useful when approached with discipline and while being aware of the level of its generalisation.

Since the 1960s in Italy and Germany the notion has prevailed that ‘the state’ has given support to right-wing terrorism. This article challenges such views by examining the internal dynamics of right-wing terrorism in both countries with reference to Ehud Sprinzak's theory of ‘split delegitimisation’. To explain the different scale of Italian and West German terrorism one must analyse personnel continuities, the nature of the perceived ‘communist threat’, as well as the national political culture. Thus, without neglecting state support for the far right, this article emphasises how the internal dynamics of terrorist groups respond to political and social frameworks. Only if we acknowledge that right-wing terrorist groups possess their own agency can we fully understand their development. This is even more urgent in a time when – once again – the far right is on the rise in Europe.

This article examines debates between Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia concerning the post-Second World War Balkan borders in preparation for the Paris Peace Conference of 1946. While for most of the twentieth century Greece and Yugoslavia were close allies united in their position against revisionist Bulgaria, after 1944 the communist affiliations of the new Bulgarian and Yugoslav governments determined the rapprochement between the latter two states. As various proposals for border revisions and the possibility of a Balkan Federation were discussed, the Balkans became a prime battlefield in the emerging Cold War split between the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States. By examining a period of extreme political fluidity between 1944 and 1947, this article explores how the legacy of long-standing national tensions combined with the new political realities after the Second World War created the current borders of Bulgaria, Greece and the (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia.

This article demonstrates the connection between the ideology and activities of the Jewish Territorialist Movement and broader geopolitical trends and discourses during the late interwar and immediate post-war period. The Territorialists, active from 1934 within the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, were representative of such contemporary trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Freelanders relied on accepted notions and practices such as colonialism and colonisation, ‘whiteness’, race, biopolitics and agro-industrial science, as well as (empty) spaces and un(der)developed territories. The Territorialists’ alignment with geopolitics makes the movement's little studied history a relevant chapter in the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, the continuities in Territorialism's aspired social engineering project help to problematise the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.

Infrastructures in the transport and communication sectors were high on the agenda of supranational European integration after 1945. Nevertheless, European cooperation continued on well-trodden paths. New European organisations were established with an institutional design that built on established governance structures from the interwar period or even earlier. This article seeks to explore continuities in the governance of cross-border infrastructures from the interwar to the post-war period. It argues that transnational expert communities and cultures of standardisation emerged, which the infrastructure experts were keen to protect and persist. The article compares transport and communication to isolate common patterns and differences.

To sign the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands met in Paris in April 1951. In a solemn Joint Declaration they stressed that through the newly created organisation, ‘the Contracting Parties have given their determination to set up the first supranational institution and thus lay the real foundations of an organised Europe’. The ministers represented the ECSC as a radical rupture with history, as if Europe had been completely disorganised until the new organisation's creation. In a similar vein, the ECSC Treaty emphasised the member states’ resolution ‘to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential interests; to establish, by creating an economic community, the foundation of a broad and independent community amongst peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’. Since 1951 official European Union (EU) documents and other sources have forged a similar image, one which has been undergirded by assumptions about the creation of the ‘core Europe’ of the ECSC as a collective ‘supranational’ break with a past characterised by severe ideological divisions and extreme nationalism.

This article sets out why and how plans to build Europe on mail, both commercially (rates) and symbolically (stamps), were discussed from the end of the 1920s and have failed up to today. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication Administrations (CEPT) was created during the intense phase of European integration in the 1950s. In the 1980s it was a key resource for the European Commission for building a Single Market in the telecommunication sector. As this article argues, however, the CEPT did not emerge from the multiple plans for postal integration. Rather, it was a new envelope hiding governance practices inherited from the nineteenth century.

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, this article traces the long lineage of the notion of European electricity network. Since the 1930s engineers and policy makers conceived of a geographical conception for rationalising and optimising electricity supply: a European one. This article purports that three vectors undergirded threads of continuity: institutional, intellectual and physical (technological networks). These vectors, and the actors involved in them, created strong path dependencies that kept the idea of a European system firmly on the agenda. Today's international electricity market of the European Union should be seen as an extension of this legacy.

The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood. Existing scholarship emphasises short-term considerations in explaining why the French Socialist and German Social Democratic Parties supported a European Common Market in 1956–7. This article offers a new perspective by placing these parties’ decisions within a longer context of socialist views on free trade, tariffs and regional economic organisation. Based on fresh archival materials, this article explores how socialist proposals for securing an economic peace after the First World War continued to influence socialist policies on European economic integration in the 1950s.

Since their foundation, the European Communities were characterised by a specific recipe for the labour market, centred on the promotion of labour mobility and a marked focus on vocational training and social dialogue. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources, this article retraces the roots of that recipe in the reformist thinking of the interwar years, with a special point of reference in the International Labour Office. Identified within that body since the 1920s, the recipe evolved through the experiences of the great crisis and post-war demobilisation. It was then adapted to the needs of European economic integration.

Scholars generally agree that ‘independent’ institutions such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and European Central Bank have created a space and role for themselves that has no equivalent in national political settings. However, we still lack a better understanding of the importance of this independent branch in the EU polity. This article contends that the central relevance of independence is connected to the historically rooted connection between ‘independence’ and ‘international government’ – a relationship the history of which can be traced back to the League of Nations’ foundational period as the inaugural scene for the nexus between power and knowledge in international politics. Ultimately, this article questions the extent to which this specific grammar of international government has been constitutive of the EC polity in terms of valued modes of legitimacy and types of authority.

The European Coal and Steel Community was marked by institutional innovations. They have masked strong continuities in administrative and business communities and their governance practices, however, which persisted after 1945. Based on fresh research in national and international organisation archives, this article explores the origins before, during and after the First World War of two key elements of these practices, their evolution over time and their influence on post-war Western European governance of the steel sector: the struggle for executive autonomy and close transnational industry cooperation. Both practices clashed in the ECSC, became amalgamated and had lasting impact on the present-day European Union and its democratic deficit.

This article challenges the idea that the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 was a break with ideologies of the past. It traces the political economy of the declaration from the interwar to the post-war period. It reconstructs the conceptions of economics and politics that underlay the proposal, tracing them back to the once influential corporatist and communitarian ‘third way’ ideology. It then shows that the original intent of the declaration was nevertheless crushed by a powerful dynamic of institutionalisation of transnational parliamentarianism. Thus, the article demonstrates the effects of long-lasting cleavages on the institutionalisation of European organisations.

This article analyses West German foreign policy towards state terrorism in Chile and Argentina and towards political refugees fleeing these regimes. Pressured by grassroots activists, Willy Brandt's government took a hard stance against the Chilean military junta and established an asylum programme for refugees from Chile. Under Helmut Schmidt, however, the official attitude towards state terrorism changed. West Germany welcomed the military coup in Buenos Aires, accepted the Argentinean junta's position that repressive measures were necessary to fight ‘subversion’, flatly refused to accept any Argentinean political prisoners and approved billions of Deutschmarks worth of weapons sales to the junta. This article argues that Bonn's ambivalence towards state terrorism and uneven interest in human rights was due to the different attitudes of both Social Democratic Chancellors towards economic strategising, grassroots activism and, most importantly, the threat of left-wing terrorism.

When Ireland became independent in 1922 there was widespread support for the imposition of a moral order that reflected Catholic teaching. This was remarkably successful: divorce was outlawed while contraception was prohibited as part of this process. The consensus on moral issues was challenged for the first time during the 1970s. The legalisation of contraception became the main battlefield between conservatives and liberals. This article analyses successive attempts to change policy and discusses the impact of social and political change in a homogeneous Catholic state. Ireland remained a predominantly religious country and the Roman Catholic Church wielded considerable influence. The controversy over contraception challenged the Church's authority and the society's deeply embedded moral values. For the first time, Irish politics was divided on matters of church and state. Resolution came in 1979, however the legislation reflected the continuing influence of the bishops on policy making. It also highlighted the caution of politicians who remained reluctant to act. In contrast to elsewhere in Western Europe, the legislation was not a turning point but an example of conservative retrenchment. The legislation generated a conservative backlash that successfully imposed traditional Catholic values on Irish society during the 1980s. The main sources used are the archives of the Departments of Justice and Health.