In the 1920s various French elites argued that the nation state was not viable in an increasingly interdependent world economy dominated by ‘continental blocs’ such as the United States and the Soviet Union; instead, they hoped to expand French economic power through larger political structures, whether France's existing empire or a federal Europe. French foreign minister Aristide Briand called for the organisation of Europe at the same time that other elites advocated the consolidation of the French empire. Although imperial rivalry would trump European cooperation in the interwar years, the 1920s created a framework for post-1945 debates about whether France would achieve economic growth and maintain political independence through colonial development, continental cooperation or some combination of the two. Conventional narratives locate the origins of European integration in the devastations of the Second World War and the crisis of empire. This article argues that integration was conceived within and in tension with, not outside of, an imperial framework.

Visions of Europe belong to a particular time. They carry with them the hallmark, the dominant patterns of thought, of their birth. But there also exist substantial continuities between three of these crucial moments: 1848, 1945 and 1989. At these times the process of building nation states also reached a peculiar moment of crisis – or a turning point. The idea of Europe, reformulated at these times of political collapse, existential angst and an explosion of the imagination, stands in an intricate relationship – Hegelians might like to call it a dialectic – with the conception of national cultures and national politics.

This paper argues that crosstown traffic in the East and West German punk subculture was an essential aspect of how popular music helped to challenge the political legitimacy of the East German government. West German punks frequently crossed the border to attend Eastern punk concerts, meet with friends and trade stories and experiences, connections that helped to foster a transnational community of alternative youths. These interactions denied official claims that punk was the result of capitalist decadence while undermining the East German government's efforts at cultivating a distinctive socialist identity. Nor were border crossings unidirectional, as Eastern punks made daring attempts to connect with their Western cousins. Writing for West German fanzines, appearing in the Western press and even managing to release Eastern recordings smuggled westwards, Eastern punks crossed the Iron Curtain and in so doing, worked to present an alternative vision of Eastern youth to the world and join the global punk scene.

This article explores Nazi visions for a new monetary order in 1940 and compares these plans with European monetary integration after 1945. It shows how Nazi experts identified the same core monetary challenges facing Europe as Allied planners did during and after the Second World War, above all challenges stemming from the Great Depression and associated with the gold standard, international debts, capital scarcity and bilateral treaties. This comparison suggests a certain logic was inherent to reconstructing European monetary relations after the depression, insofar as few viable alternatives seemed open – either in 1940 or after 1945 – to some form of multilateral payment system that was divorced from gold, yet that still fixed Europe's currencies to one another. Ultimately, it argues that 1940 marks an important step in a longer process in which Europe moved away from territorial currencies toward a monetary union, and in doing so expanded the framework of fiat currency beyond national markets to encompass the continent.

This article traces the deep cultural and experiential foundations that animated Christian Democratic Europeanism between the mid-1940s and the birth of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s. It shows how the language of Europeanness, generated in a period of multiple and intense crisis, congealed around symbolisms of Christianity and spirituality. More specifically, it connects the post-Second World War Christian Democratic vision of Europe to the 1920s German-Catholic articulation of the Abendland (the Christian West), understood as a supranational and symbolic space alternative to the Soviet Union and the United States and imbued with anti-materialist, anti-socialist and anti-liberal principles. The argument here is that, in mutated form and in context of the Cold War, this view sustained the political reconstruction of Western Europe after the horrors of the Second World War, the ‘European’ thought and language of Christian Democracy and the commitment to the project of European integration.

This article reassesses Willy Brandt's Neue Ostpolitik of the 1970s. It does so by linking Brandt's policy initiative to earlier German Social Democratic plans to integrate Europe that had existed since the 1920s. The analysis suggests that Brandt's attempt to mediate between the West and the East in the 1970s revived earlier SPD policies to integrate Central European societies that had been divided after the world wars. Continuities between Social Democratic thought and practice are therefore highlighted – continuities that are usually overlooked in narratives that have stressed how dramatically German Social Democracy shifted from the interwar to the Cold War eras.

This article explores the comparative history of violence in European civil wars from 1917 to 1949, beginning with the war in Russia and ending with the one in Greece. Its main goal is to prepare a framework for a transnational comparative debate on the category of ‘civil war’ and its historical and analytical elements in order to better understand why internal conflicts are universally assumed to be particularly violent and cruel. Responding to the need for an inclusive approach in determining the nature of civil war, I discuss the theory of violence in connection with civil wars and conclude that if civil wars are, and are perceived as, especially violent, this is due to many and multidirectional elements, including the importance of symbolic conflicts, the juxtaposition of different conflicts within any civil struggle and, in the case of Europe between the world wars, the presence of radicalising elements such as fascism.

Rock'n'roll emerged in Hamburg in the unique spatial context of St. Pauli's entertainment district during a new phase of capitalist modernity around 1960 that granted youth unprecedented access to commercial venues catering to their new economic power. Crossing class, regional and national lines, young people used spaces free of parental supervision to create alternatives to the era's sexual conservatism and social conformity. This new youth presence worried local authorities: minors had to be shielded from the commercialised vice that was St. Pauli's stock in trade. This set up clashes between police, city officials, business leaders and social welfare agents on the one side, and club entrepreneurs and music fans on the other. Confrontations between these two camps constituted struggles over social discipline, youths’ right to public and commercial space, the meanings of democracy and the sexual morality of youth in a place known for license and excess.

This article studies the Italian contribution to shaping the ideas and practices of development in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Italy changed from a case study for social scientists dealing with the problems of development into a model, and finally into a reluctant donor to less developed countries. It describes Italian thinking regarding economic and social development in the underdeveloped areas of the South. It also discusses the effectiveness of expert networks in promoting the Mezzogiorno as a case study of development practices in the 1950s. It then focuses on development aid to Somalia and shows how this could hardly be construed as a replication of the Mezzogiorno model in an underdeveloped post-colonial setting. Finally, through an analysis of Italian strategy within the DAC, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, it argues that the Italian authorities were incapable of building on Italy's economic miracle or making any significant contribution to Western development aid, squandering the trust acquired throughout the 1950s.

‘In Search of Space’ explores the history of Krautrock, a futuristic musical genre that began in Germany in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s. Not usually explicitly political, Krautrock bore the unmistakable imprint of the revolt of 1968. Groups arose out of the same milieux and shared many of the same concerns as anti-authoritarian radicals. Their rebellion expressed, in an artistic way, key themes of the broader countercultural moment of which they were a part. A central theme, the article argues, was escape – escape from the situation of Germany in the 1960s in general, and from the specific conditions of the anti-authoritarian revolt in the Federal Republic in the wake of 1968. Mapping Krautrock's relationship to key locations and routes (both real and imaginary), the article situates Krautrock in relationship to the political and cultural upheavals of its historical context.

This article examines how the ‘moral panic’ about sex trafficking during the interwar years manifested itself in Le Havre, a French port which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had become synonymous with the illegal trade. Interrogating hitherto neglected material in departmental archives, it explores how the problem of the trafficking of women (la traite des femmes) changed after 1919, how the administrative consequences of directives by the League of Nations could influence behaviours in everyday life and how an episode of female migration from Eastern Europe interacted with French political agendas to magnify and, in some cases, generate a problem.

The ‘scientisation of the political’, understood as the increasing influence of social science within twentieth century (party) politics, provides insight into politicians’ conceptions of political representation and the shifts in those conceptions over time. Social science based knowledge exerted a profound effect on how parties approached political identity formation and on their perceptions of the electorate. Based on a Dutch case study, this article tracks the impact of electoral geography and mass psychology and, from the 1940s onwards, electoral research and polling data on party strategies, showing the important role played by party political think tanks which acted as hubs of social-scientific knowledge. Comparisons with British and West German political parties reveal the complex reception and negotiation of social scientific insights regarding the nature and behaviour of the electorate, as well as the persistence of ingrained stereotypes.

This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality of the family was not a retreat from ideology, as is often argued, but was in fact a reinstatement of interwar ideologies in a new key: social Catholicism in the former case, National Socialism in the latter. These divergent trajectories explain why Würmeling and Schelsky, despite being two central defenders of the family in the 1950s, could not work together. The essay follows their careers into the 1960s, suggesting that the fractious state of familialism in the 1950s helps us to understand its collapse in the face of the sexual revolution.

German intervention in the Spanish Civil War was decisive for its development and result. Traditionally scholars have focused their attention on the support given by the Third Reich to the military rebels; however, they have widely neglected the study of the relationship between Germany and the Spanish Republic during the first four months of the war, when both countries maintained diplomatic relations. This paper aims at exploring a crucial aspect of that historical period, namely the circumstances of the Spanish diplomats in Berlin during those first four months, and the strategies that the German and the Spanish governments carried out in the harsh diplomatic battle that they ended up fighting. The author explains the difficult working conditions of the Spanish diplomats who were loyal to the Republic and stayed in Berlin in July 1936, when most of their colleagues deserted. Finally, he explores how the German Foreign Affairs Department, in collaboration with the Gestapo, managed to restrain the Spanish Republic diplomatic action in Germany.

Far too little academic attention has been paid to more contemporary forms of transnational anti-fascist militancy. Yet this study supports the idea that this field of anti-fascist activity has remained important. This article examines transnational anti-fascist militancy in the 1990s through a case study of Britain's Anti-Fascist Action (AFA). In doing so it offers an in-depth account of AFA's attempts to establish an international militant anti-fascist network in conjunction with Germany's Autonome Antifa (M). The article identifies the common interests, challenges and limitations of this network. The final part of his article reflects on the cross-border importation of AFA to the Irish Republic.

The quotation in this title expresses a dilemma, as the ‘dark millions’ were likely to remain ‘unavenged’ so long as authors were asked to take sides on the Spanish Civil War rather than colonial oppression. Indeed, anti-fascism might well be thought of as, in a sense, antithetical to anti-imperialism. This article explores the relationship between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, focusing on Britain and France. The first part looks at anti-imperialism in the era of the Popular Front; the second looks at how the tensions between anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were played out in the case of the major conflicts of the later 1930s in Abyssinia, Spain and China; the third discusses the imperialist assumptions of many anti-fascists. The article concludes by looking at the early phase of the Second World War.

Conventionally, the starting point of socialist and communist resistance to fascism in Europe and the creation of a European ‘culture of anti-fascism’ is dated to the 1930s in the context of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The hypothesis of the article is that the initiatives and debates of 1923 played a pivotal role in the creation of the transnational anti-fascist movement that transferred cultures of anti-fascism across borders in Europe and the world. The aim of the article is to analyse the first, but hitherto forgotten, efforts to make anti-fascism a transnational phenomenon in the early 1920s. Further, the article will discuss whether there are clear continuities or discontinuities in the anti-fascist articulations of 1923 and the ones created after 1933.

Between the late 1930s and early 1940s Mexico City and Buenos Aires became the centres of activity for the two most relevant anti-fascist organisations of German-speaking exiles in Latin America: the communist-inspired Free German Movement (Bewegung Freies Deutschland; BFD) and the social-democratic oriented The Other Germany (Das Andere Deutschland; DAD). Both organisations envisaged the creation of an anti-fascist front within Latin America, one which would allow for greater unity of action, and thus carried out extensive congresses at Mexico City and Montevideo in 1943. Due to crucial ideological and tactical differences, this dream of anti-fascist unity led to a power struggle between BFD and DAD, well illustrated in the impact it had on Bolivia. This article seeks a new perspective on how, thanks to the establishment of transnational networks, a continental debate on the meaning and methods of anti-fascism then took place, while also shedding light on the influence the Latin American context had in shaping the exiles’ plans for a new Germany.

Anti-fascism – a hallmark of the left since the 1930s, and a vague term for active opposition to Italian fascism, German Nazism and similar movements in the interwar period – used to be studied as a brief episode in the history of European nation states. The available syntheses read like collections of national studies with a clear European or Western focus. However, methodological nationalism may soon become a thing of the past – the last few years have brought a transnational turn in anti-fascist studies, which this special issue tries both to illustrate and to discuss.

Ethno-nationalist exiles in the interwar period were a unique species. While some of them relied on their own diasporic networks and waited for a chance, others established agitation platforms and regarded themselves as an alternative International of the ‘oppressed peoples’. Most of these alliances ended in failure, as it proved extremely difficult to reconcile the demands stemming from divergent national claims, such as those of autonomist factions versus irredentist or pro-independence groups, or those of national minorities seeking reintegration into their motherland as opposed to groups seeking independence. This article explores the relationship between minority nationalist exiles and anti-fascism by focusing on three issues: the emergence and evolution of ‘international alliances’ of minority activists in interwar Europe; contacts and ideological exchanges between ethno-nationalist exiles and liberal and anti-fascist segments of European public opinion and, finally, the emergence of a transnational anti-fascist nationality theory.