This article focuses on humanitarians by studying the interactions between the International Committee of the Red Cross and one of his delegates, George Montandon, between 1919 and 1922. Montandon was charged with a fact-finding mission in Siberia that set the basis for larger repatriation plans on behalf of prisoners of war from the Central Powers. This article explores the nature and circulation of expertise – formal and informal – in connection with Montandon's private and professional life before the mission, during the mission itself and once the mission was over. Being a delegate for the ICRC was not a profession but rather a break from established professions as doctors, military officers and scholars in Switzerland. However, experts associated with the work of the Geneva organisation at the headquarters and at the ground level brought a vast set of skills to international humanitarianism. Through a spectrum of transnational connections and networks, at the end of the First World War the ICRC experienced processes of specialisation and standardisation of tasks which had already started in wartime. This article argues that the impulse towards an increasing professionalisation of humanitarianism ‘clashed’ with the ambiguities of the ICRC's mandate, on the one hand, and the tensions between the agency of individual relief workers and the institutions they represented, on the other.

This article examines how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the European Community to become one of the fundamental tenets of European political identity – and in the process influenced how decision-makers approached the question of enlargement. Building on multiple archival sources, the article traces how all three Community institutions (Commission, Council and European Parliament) legitimised the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of democracy. It focuses on the debates elicited by the attempts of southern European countries to accede to the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s.

In May 1951 the Women's International Democratic Federation – a communist-sponsored non-governmental organisation – sent an all-female international commission to investigate the war crimes and atrocities allegedly committed by United Nations forces against civilians during the military occupation of North Korea in late 1950. Communist internationalism has been relatively marginalised in the recent wave of scholarship on internationalism and international organisations. This article uses the Women's International Democratic Federation mission to Korea to analyse how the shifting relationship between communist internationalism, human rights and feminism played out in the ‘Third World’ during the early Cold War.

The article analyses forms of international scientific exchange practised by Polish medical experts around 1900. Applying a transnational historiographical approach it asks whether and how the Polish nation mattered to Polish bacteriologists and epidemiologists travelling abroad or communicating with colleagues internationally. It shows that in the 1880s and 1890s the Warsaw bacteriologist Odo Bujwid rarely connected his scientific knowledge to Polish national causes but rather benefited from imperial structures. What was more, he transcended the borders between the two nationalised bacteriological thought styles of Louis Pasteur on the one hand and Robert Koch on the other. Bujwid thus eluded a clear link between science and nationalism. His practices of international scientific exchange can be called ‘transnational’. When a Polish state was re-established in 1918 bacteriology and epidemiology became closely entwined with Polish state- and nation-building. Polish medical scientists now worked for Polish state institutions and acted as state representatives in the international arena. International exchange and border-crossing scientific mobility now served, first of all, to underline Polish statehood and to present it as a modern and civilised country. These practices of international scientific exchange can be described as ‘Olympic Internationalism’.

The long-running BBC sitcom, ’Allo ’Allo!, has been thoroughly criticised for its use of various racial, gendered and sexualised tropes, not to mention its cynical view of the French experience of the Second World War. This article, however, reassesses the programme in light of what it highlights about the lived experience of Anglo-American airmen who were forced to bale from their planes over Occupied France. It uses the comedic aspects of the programme to investigate escape and evasion training, the use of language, ‘fitting in’ and the prominence of peasants in the wartime lives of Anglo-American aircrews in France. The programme, rather than being just another example of Gaullophobia, accurately represents some elements of the Second World War in France. In addition, changes in the plot over its nine seasons suggest that the sitcom reflects broader British concerns, as well as the Anglo-French relationship.

This article examines the officers who led the Habsburg Army during the First World War. It highlights the complexity of their identities, demonstrating that this went well beyond the a-national – nationalist dichotomy in much historiography. It also argues that these officers' identities had a profound impact on how their army functioned in the field. The article first studies the senior command in 1914–16, showing how its wartime learning processes were shaped by transnational attitudes. These officers had belonged in peace to an international military professional network. When disaster befell their army at the outset of the First World War, it was natural for them to seek lessons from foreign armies, at first from their major enemies, the Russians, and later their German allies. The second half of the article explores the changing loyalties of the reserve officers tasked with frontline command in the later war years. It contends that the officer corps' focus on maintaining social and educational standards resulted in an influx of middle-class junior leaders whose conditional commitment to the Empire and limited language skills greatly influenced the Habsburg Army's record of longevity but mediocre combat performance.

This paper focuses on how the International Federation of University Women, founded in 1919, sought to reconcile its mission of fostering internationalism with the interests of its over thirty national member organisations. Nowhere was the challenge to its internationalist ethos greater than in post–First World War Germany. Being one of the last European member associations to join the IFUW in 1926, the Germans immediately requested their language to be used alongside English and French. The article reconstructs the struggles preceding the admission of Germany to the IFUW and the subsequent disputes over the ‘language question’ to explain why and on what terms the Germans first contested and eventually agreed in 1932 to accept the new Anglo-American and French dominance as world languages.

This article studies the political ideology of the Italian political movement Fronte dell'Uomo Qualunque in the light of the problems of party democracy in Italy. The movement existed only for a few years in the aftermath of the Second World War, but the impact of its ideology on post-war Italy was large. The article argues that the party's ideology should be studied beyond the anti-fascist–fascist divide and that it provides a window onto the contestation of party politics in republican Italy. It contextualises the movement in the political transition from fascism to republic and highlights key elements of the Front's ideology. The article then proceeds to demonstrate how the movement distinguished itself from the parties of the Italian resistance and advocated a radical break with the way in which the relationship between the Italian state and citizens had been practiced through subsequent regimes. The way in which the movement aimed to highlight the alleged similarities between the fascist and republican political order, and its own claim to democratic legitimacy, constitute a distinct political tradition which resurfaced in the political crisis of the 1990s.

The Nordic Economic Community (Nordek) was a short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to strengthen cooperation between the four Nordic states. While the importance of the project to Britain has often been overlooked, this article suggests that Whitehall took considerable interest from the start. It demonstrates how, although officially neutral, London sought first to mitigate the effects of Nordek, then to undermine its establishment and, finally, in the wake of Nordek's collapse, to guard against its re-emergence. The aim throughout was to protect three central tenets of British foreign policy: EFTA unity in light of the second veto, Britain's own application for EEC membership and a cohesive Western Europe militarily integrated in NATO. However, the article highlights the absence of a coherent strategy towards tentative Nordic integration and the mixed success this brought, the interdependency of Anglo-Nordic relations in the pursuit and success of British foreign policy goals and the relative decline of the Britain's influence in the Nordic region.

Launched with considerable fanfare in 1969, the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) was supposed to bring new life to NATO by both re-energising public support and engaging with a variety of themes, issues and partners well beyond the alliance's traditional scope. The first aim of this article is to go beyond the careful media operation that surrounded the launch of the CCMS and to examine the scepticism and resistance of some European partners, particularly the British. The second aim is to demonstrate that NATO started to think in terms of crisis management, disaster relief and environmental disasters well before 1989. The sheer military strength of the alliance and of its partners did remain central – and notably came back to the forefront in 1979 – but the alliance did start to see itself as a geopolitical player and to consider engagement beyond its strictly defined geographical area as early as 1969.

Seventeen-year-old Sicilian Franca Viola was abducted and raped in 1965, with the intention of forcing her into marriage. She came to prominence in 1966 as the first Sicilian woman to refuse a so-called reparatory marriage – which would have legally absolved her rapist of his crime – resulting in his prosecution in a high profile trial in December 1966. Through an examination of the media coverage, and by making use of history of the emotions, this article examines the trial as a crucial moment for post-war Italy, when gender, sexuality and marriage were being redefined in a rapidly changing society. Different emotional styles could be connected to debates about national identity and regional character, as well as to broader anxieties about ‘modernity’ and ‘backwardness’.

This article explores the activities of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Spain during the transition to democracy. It describes the financial, logistical and training support with which this German Foundation contributed to the unexpected rebirth of the Spanish Socialist Party after Franco and its meteoric emergence as the leading left-wing party. It also assesses its cooperation with the Socialist trade union, which moved from irrelevance to a position of importance greater than the powerful Communist union. Finally, the article examines how the Foundation diversified its activities in order to meet the growing needs of and challenges faced by the Spanish Socialists in their path towards power.

Sweden's relationship with the United Nations fluctuated considerably between 1941 and 1946. This article examines how the Nordic country's own security interests were sometimes viewed as compatible and sometimes at odds with membership of the United Nations. The discussions surrounding Sweden's accession to the United Nations and actions of its first delegates to the international organisation are explored at length. So too is the discrepancy between Sweden's reputation for neutrality and its enthusiastic support for the United Nations, on the one hand, and its internal debates and policy decisions during the 1940s, on the other. Finally, the article explores the ways in which Sweden used the United Nations as an arena in which to manifest both its indifference to security alignment and its exceptionalism in world affairs.

During the 1970s opposition to nuclear energy was present in countries around the world and thus eminently ‘transnational’. But what did it mean to participate at the grassroots of such a transnational movement and (how) did cross-border connections change protest? This article answers these questions by differentiating three categories of transnational engagement that were accessible to grassroots activists. ‘Thinking transnationally’ involved extrapolating from, decontextualising and recontextualising limited information in order to rethink one's own situation. ‘Acting transnationally’ entailed accessing transnational spaces; it therefore required more mobility, but could be useful as a means of challenging and deconstructing state power. Intermediaries at the grassroots engaged in ‘being transnational’, which affected their personal and political identities as well as life histories. These examples of transnational agency illustrate how grassroots activists, including some without vast wealth or institutional resources, participated in transnational processes in ways that enriched, but also complicated protest.

Established in 1933 by Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese New State was a civil, nationalist, conservative and corporatist dictatorship. A concordat was established between the New State and the Holy See in 1940, yet the treaty did not favour the Catholic Church to the degree one might expect from a Catholic interwar dictator. The fact that the political legitimacy of the Portuguese regime was not dependent on sanctioning by the Holy See justifies this apparent inconsistency. The distinctive features of the Portuguese concordat were enhanced by the authoritarian, rather than totalitarian, nature of the regime. Salazar, more so than Mussolini or Franco, was constrained by political forces not in favour of Catholic privileges. In addition, the dictator himself defended a strict separation of church and state as prescribed by the Portuguese constitution. Nonetheless, Salazar regarded the concordat as an important propaganda instrument that, in association with the 1940 Exhibition of the Portuguese World, would allow the internal and external prestige of the regime to be increased.

This article shows how one can read political history from evidence on corporate corruption. The study exploits newly discovered archival material from Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, a politically connected investment bank. We contribute to current research by replacing existing conjectures with precise qualitative and quantitative evidence. After reviewing previous works and providing a sketch of information repression and media control in France during the interwar period, we argue that the study of patterns of ‘informational criminality’ provides an original entry to the writing of political history and the history of information.

This article recounts a little-known episode in which Yugoslav partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, rescued some 2,500 Jews from the former Italian camp for Jews in the northern Adriatic in the autumn of 1943. By focusing on this historical event, the article argues for broadening the notion of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Rather than locating ‘rescue’ in the motivations of individuals, the article takes as a point of departure the collective aspect of rescue and investigates the importance of the ideological considerations of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in its decision to rescue the Jews. Rather than in abstract ethical notions, the partisan rescue of the Jews was rooted in their political vision of the future socialist federation, of which the Jews were part.

This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing one's surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, but came under pressure by New Left activists, whose emphatically different elective affinities led them to create alternative spaces such as communal apartments and squatted houses. In so doing, they reinvigorated urban life, but also diluted their initial political project and triggered a conservative counter-reaction.

This article explores the divisions created by the Great Patriotic War, its aftermath and the reconstruction of Russian cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It examines the conflicts created by rebuilding housing, infrastructure, restoring communities and allocating resources in cities where war's painful legacy continued to be felt. The war's impact varied enormously between cities on the frontlines and in the rear. Contrary to official propaganda rebuilding was a protracted process, which created divisions rather than unity.

The current historiography of the Dutch urban renewal order focuses on an elite of audacious planners and technocratic civil servants, who allegedly embraced the comprehensive redevelopment of inner cities along functionalist lines. However, professional pamphlets and minutes from the 1950s and 1960s reveal a much more ambivalent and uncertain state of mind in the field of urban renewal, especially in the views put forward by local administrators. This article will demonstrate that insecurity about the dawn of the modern age was crucial for the swiftness with which Dutch planning and political elites abandoned comprehensive redevelopment in the early 1970s.