This article examines transnational appeals for humanitarian intervention to the League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the aftermath of the First World War, focusing on conflicts in Ireland, Montenegro and the Rif (Morocco). It analyses how participants and international organisations strategically framed these conflicts, often shifting between designations of ‘civil war’ and ‘imperial war’ to solicit or deflect intervention on humanitarian grounds. Despite public expectations placed on the ICRC and League both organisations were reluctant to intervene against imperial powers, prioritising maintaining the international order over investigating insurgents’ claims. Though insurgents appealed through the rhetoric of ‘humanity’, this was a selective category, reinforcing existing racial and religious hierarchies in Europe. By analysing these conflicts together this article demonstrates that ‘civil war’ was not a fixed category but a fluid and contested concept, instrumentally deployed in the dialogue between belligerents, international organisations and imperial powers.

Despite the burgeoning literature on historical humanitarianism and transnational history, little work has sought to explain the humanitarian intervention in the ‘first battleground’ of the Cold War, namely the Greek Civil War (1945–9). This paper casts light on the intricate relationship between civilians’ forced displacement and humanitarian aid during the late phases of this conflict. It also questions the extent to which humanitarianism was embedded into liberal and conservative politics of the early Cold War.

From 1941, multiple humanitarian organisations distributed aid to famine-stricken Greek areas, while the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) intervened in Greece in 1943. As the civil strife intensified, more than 700,000 civilians were displaced during the royalist counterinsurgency operations against the communist rebels, while humanitarian groups received the mandate by the royalist government to feed, accommodate and rehabilitate these populations. Most of these relief workers had grappled with wartime famine and relied on the restoration of the pre-war political system to solidify their presence in Greece.

Drawing on archival material from UNRRA and the personal records of humanitarian workers Charles Schermerhorn and Ewan John Christian Hare, I scrutinise how humanitarian logistics became embedded into the conflict, and how the distribution or withholding, of aid determined the forced displacement of civilians. On a second level, I focus on the antagonism between the aid distributed by ‘purely’ humanitarian organisations, such as UNRRA, the NEF and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the so-called ‘development’ aid, as institutionalised by the European Recovery Program in 1948.

This article explores how staff at the UN Regional Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) tried, with mixed success, to incorporate Soviet knowledge and experts into their activities and how these challenging efforts, paradoxically, created a space in which economics could be a shared language of communication across the Cold War divide, both within UN spaces and in adjacent academic networks. This conceptual move allowed economics knowledge to pool between East and West, even though the divide between the blocs was originally expressed in economic terms. In the 1960s, with the global transformations of decolonisation, the ECE’s experts, including those embedded in British academic networks, worked to export their shared knowledge beyond Europe, using the triangulated international space of the UN to promote – and continue gathering – economic information from the Soviet Union.

This article contends that the humanitarianism that developed in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and, in particular, because of the Spanish Civil War, was shaped by a transnational network that was fundamentally female. Within this network, women with diverse political experiences converged; however, suffragism, pacifism and anti-fascism occupied a central place. Humanitarianism became for them a favourable space from which to intervene politically. To demonstrate this, we focus on the CAEERF, an aid organisation formed in 1939 in response to the arrival of Spanish refugees in France. It was created, led by and composed mainly of women from different backgrounds. The first part of this article concerns anti-fascist and humanitarian women’s networks that emerged during the Spanish Civil War. The second traces the journey of the British Quaker Edith Mary Pye, the driving force behind the CAEERF. The third and fourth parts discuss its creation and the work that it carried out on the ground.

The Western European prison reforms of the 1960s and 1970s were based, among other things, on the claim that prison labour should match the conditions of free labour as closely as possible. In reality, prison labour remained forced labour and thus followed its own logic, within which social security and remuneration did not correspond to the free labour market conditions. Prisoners were not and are not workers in the true sense of the word; rather, they oscillate between forced labour and non-work. This article deals with this contradiction, which is still inherent in prison labour in many Western democracies today. Using the example of West Germany, it historicises the relationship between work and punishment behind bars and attempts to show that although the punitive nature of prison work has changed since the late 1960s, it has ultimately never been lost – despite criminal policy objectives to the contrary. It was a normative question of values: how much equality did prisoners deserve?

This article examines the development and transformation of Ukrainian scientific terminology during the early 20th century, particularly under Soviet rule. It traces the roots of terminological efforts in the 19th century, when language planning in Galicia and Ukraine reflected competing imperial influences and nationalist aspirations. The study underscores the nexus of cultural, political and epistemic interests in the shaping of scientific language, noting the transition from vernacular-focused Romantic ideals to the evolving policies of the Soviet korenizatsiia period.

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Institute for Scientific Language led the effort to standardise terminology, aligning with Soviet policies of Ukrainisation/korenizatsiia. However, by the 1930s, Stalinist policies reversed earlier gains, replacing national vocabularies with Russified terms and persecuting many language policymakers and scholars that the Soviet regime had supported only a few years earlier.

The article, as an afterword to the special issue Navigating Post-Imperial Transitions, uses the story of a Transylvanian Romanian and Greek Catholic family, the Pordeas, as an example of several key themes of the articles: managing difference within and after the empire, concrete consequences of international arrangements, agency of individuals in the transition. The Pordeas’ extremely intense engagement and entanglement with the empire highlights that a key feature of imperial biographies, the skill of connecting milieus as a way of differentiated rule, was not limited to the high-ranking imperial bureaucrats; it was rather a knowledge important in lower educated strata of society. After 1918, within nation states that often consciously used techniques of imperial rule for their own consolidation, it opened upward mobility and sometimes global horizon for these people. However, the ability to create connections is just as important for any state facing internal difference as it was for empires, showing how much empire was created from below.

The dividing line between work and non-work structures all contemporary European societies. Decisions on what work is done, by whom, at what price, and under which conditions, shape individual lives and underpin economic, political and social institutions through the production of wealth and inequality. If the dualism of work and non-work invests activities and interaction with meaning and value, producing cultural and social status along the way, it is historically highly contingent. Neither ‘work’ nor ‘non-work’ means the same thing across time and space. Yet, while dialectically dependent on one another, non-work has received far less attention by contemporary historians, who have by and large followed a pattern of identifying work with labour, whether in capitalist or socialist configurations. In contrast, the present forum suggests an integrative perspective in which both the practices and habits of not-working while at work and forms of wageless life beyond unemployment figure prominently.

In 1921 the international Red Cross movement passed a series of resolutions declaring they had a right and duty to intervene in civil wars, ‘social and revolutionary troubles’. This article focuses on the specific historical origins of the resolutions. It argues that these resolutions were a direct response to the Russian Civil War and designed to enable humanitarian interventions against Soviet Russia and other communist revolutionaries. The ICRC followed through on these intentions with robust efforts to access political prisoners in Soviet Russia. However, other parties embraced these resolutions and applied them to nationalist and anti-colonial struggles, such as the Third Silesian Uprising, Irish Civil War and Rif War. These conflicts did not fit the template of the Russian Civil War, leading to reluctant, cautious and often ineffective interventions by the ICRC. The open-ended language of the resolutions hid a much more direct historical context that restricted its viable application.

The Centenary of the First World War saw unprecedent prominence given to the ‘colonial contribution’ in commemorative discourse. While this newfound public recognition sometimes relied on simplistic and sanitised narratives of the war, scholarship produced in the period has greatly enriched understandings of how conflict was experienced by colonised peoples. In this article, I explore the utility of one of the key conceptual innovations of the Centenary, the Greater War, for the analysis of colonial experiences of the conflict. I do this by considering three key questions: Can the Greater War framework facilitate new comparative histories of violence in the war? How do its expanded chronologies account for colonial contexts? Can we adapt its conceptual frameworks to better integrate colonial histories? Exploring the potential answers to these questions will point to new avenues of research that can ensure the colonial is effectively incorporated into our narratives of the global conflict.

This paper explores Italy’s perspective on West Germany’s evolving role in Europe in the 1970s, focusing on the interplay between leadership expectations and the fear of hegemony. In the context of the collapse of the Bretton Woods System, the oil crisis and transatlantic tensions, Italy viewed West Germany as both a potential leader and a dominant economic power. By examining political and public debates, this study delves into Italy’s complex ambivalence towards German leadership – admiring its economic strength while simultaneously fearing its influence over European integration and monetary policy – in a way that demonstrates a nuanced Italian reaction to German ‘reluctance’. The rejection of Germany’s hegemonic role was closely tied to an expectation of leadership. However, this expectation conflicted with the type of leadership Germany offered, revealing a sharp contrast between Italian and German conceptions of leadership.

This study focuses on women’s hunger demonstrations and lootings in occupied Antwerp in May 1941. These actions were not just expressions of social discontent but also political actions in the form of illegal propaganda against the occupier. Through specific cases of demonstrations and looting, the first part of this article explores the pattern of these actions and the involvement of participants, local and German police and mayors. The second part provides a general picture of women’s demonstrations and lootings in Belgium and Antwerp, discussing the chronology and repression of these actions and the social profile of the participants. This article tells the story of resistance by working-class women, a perspective still largely absent from resistance historiography. It shows how an explicit female perspective allows us to write a history of female resistance.

Jewish resistance to the destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi era has stirred many scholars; however, some areas of war-torn Europe remain neglected in this respect, for instance Italy and Italian-occupied territories. This article aims to unearth the Jewish history of Jewish resistance in the Italian province of Dalmatia between June 1941 and September 1943, emphasising longer evolution of political ideology, personal networks and social organisations that fostered and sustained resistance. Based on either as-yet unknown or rarely used testimonies of the Holocaust survivors who spent the war years in Dalmatia, this article argues that these are crucial to understand why and how Jewish politics in inter-war Yugoslavia enabled Jews to self-organise and to start and sustain open resistance to fascism.

Intelligence services have played pivotal and distinct roles in European political history since the Second World War, ranging from their position as a stronghold of authoritarian regimes to their role in protecting democracy from anti-democratic forces. Democratisation therefore requires the depoliticisation of intelligence services to prevent their reuse as tools of political oppression. Paradoxically, many examples show that the politicisation of intelligence often occurs in a context of democratisation. This article explains this paradox. It focuses on the persistent politicisation of the Greek intelligence service in the decades following the demise of the junta regime and its democratic consolidation (1974–2008). It shows that subsequent governments fought fire with fire in their efforts to democratise the service: they countered the junta heritage of the intelligence service by keeping it closely under their control and, consequently, aligning it with governing party interests. Moreover, a vibrant bottom-up, party-aligned labour union within the service became the main vehicle for the politicisation of the organisational culture. This research uses original oral history interviews with former service personnel, newspaper publications and parliamentary debates on the service between 1974 and 2008. This is the first research on the Greek intelligence service based on such large-scale, longitudinal and diverse empirical data collection. The results of this research are relevant beyond the specific case of Greece, as they point to the wider mechanisms of politicisation of intelligence services, especially in former authoritarian regimes in Southern and Eastern Europe.

Neoliberalism can be defined as the drive to shield capitalism from the scrutiny and accountability of democratic processes. This definition is particularly relevant to the creation of the euro, as it reflects some imbalances of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union (EU). The monetary union was designed to function with full independence, largely beyond the reach of democratic deliberations. This article investigates whether this outcome was intentional. It argues that the asymmetric structure of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was purposefully crafted, as the European policymakers involved in the negotiations were acutely aware of the imperfections of the system being developed. However, these shortcomings were not specifically aligned with a particular neoliberal ideology. Instead, this article shows they resulted from a broader set of concerns, primarily driven by a reluctance to centralise decision-making power at the EU level due to fears of losing aspects of national sovereignty. Understanding the unintentional nature of this outcome is crucial, as confusing what is accidental with what is deliberate can lead to misunderstandings about the motivations behind EMU and misconceive the paths for its reform.

In 1920, the League of Nations implemented the first modern international zones in Europe. While historians have largely presented international zones as unworkable peace-making solutions devoid of resident support, this article draws attention to those figures who saw in zones an opportunity to cash in on the end of empire. It follows the case of Ludwig Noé–a preeminent industrialist in the Free City of Danzig–who was employed to run the city’s imperial shipyard. Noé’s transformation of the Danzig shipyard into a successful international concern demonstrated the economic advantages that internationalisation could facilitate and chimed with calls to exploit the zone further by converting it into a manufacturing free port. The article contributes, therefore, to a growing literature concerned with how abstract international visions were realized locally and independently, and who, ultimately, made internationalism work in the 1920s.

This article focuses on Jewish political stances in early post-war and post-Holocaust Poland and explores why so many Polish Jews supported the new communist-dominated regime after 1945, despite the fact that only a small minority held communist political views. While acknowledging the impact of Holocaust experiences, the weakness of the Polish Jewish community after the war and the widespread perception that the communist regime was the only possible bulwark against post-war anti-Jewish violence, this article offers a different perspective in foregrounding the inter-war experiences of Polish Jews. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English, this article argues that inter-war experiences shaped Polish Jews’ understandings of the emerging post-war social and political system, as well as their political stances towards the new state.

This article argues that the 1918 flu appeared so suddenly, spread so rapidly, killed so quickly and disappeared so swiftly that Europeans’ focus on their immediate circumstances led them to experience and interpret it as a local health crisis rather than as a global or continental pandemic. It also demonstrates that Europeans were so inured to privation and death; so isolated by anaemic and dysfunctional media and medical regimes; and so distracted by economic, political and social chaos that they were either unaware of or unconcerned with the flu’s origin. It takes as its source base nearly 1,000 memories of the 1918 flu collected from individuals across ten European countries and archival materials from federal, municipal, religious and diary archives in France (an Allied power in the First World War), Germany (a Central power in the First World War) and Switzerland (a neutral power in the First World War).

The article examines efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerised, post-Fordist ‘flexible’ production. Focusing on the enterprise level, this article demonstrates that the Communist Party inaugurated its own variation of flexible production; in doing so, it inadvertently created the conditions of possibility for the transition from state socialism to capitalism on the factory floor.

This article takes the fate of industrial wealth in East-Central and Southeast Europe through the ruptures of the twentieth century as a case study. It compares post-imperial transitions in East-Central Europe to regime changes in the 1940s and after 1989. It maintains that the peculiarities of post-imperial transitions and the uniquely high leverage available to Austro-Hungarian industrialists to preserve their assets despite geopolitical transformations after 1918 come to the fore especially clearly when we compare them to the ruptures by the Holocaust and subsequently by the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Industrialist Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964), a Hungarian of Jewish origins with major investments in Transylvania's coal mines, was among those key industrialists who lived through both world wars, passing away in 1964 in New York. The article uses his life as a thread to show how the fate of a business family can influence mainstream narratives of modern European history, usually driven by a concentration on political ruptures.