The first volume under review is the outcome of a five-day conference held in Italy in July 1989. It was the first gathering of representatives of national historians’ associations affiliated to the International Federation for Research in Women's History/Federation International pour la Recherche de l'Histoire des Femmes (IFR WH/FIRHF), or rather of those associations which could afford to send representatives. IFR WH/FIRHF is an Internal Commission of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences. Its purpose, obviously, is to promote the serious study of women in history and the role of women within the profession.

Historical research into the petite bourgeoisie in Belgium did not begin until quite a bit later than it did abroad. On closer inspection, that was no bad thing. Because of the late start by Belgian historians, they were more open-minded and less inclined towards the research into the roots of Fascism which was largely based on pre-war sociological theories. Beginning in 1980, pioneering research was carried out at the Université Libre de Bruxelles – for the most part on the period before the First World War. The research group under the direction of Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk systematically analysed several important series of sources and produced interesting detailed studies. In 1993 Serge Jaumain published a comprehensive study on Belgian retail trade in the period from 1880 to 1914.

This account of how the two major Churches responded to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, namely the mass murder of the mentally ill and mentally or physically deficient between 1939 and 1945, deals with the responses of their hierarchies and the stratagems adopted by the asylums which were part of their respective charitable networks. It is based upon both original archival sources and a large variety of secondary literature dealing with the two Churches and the individual asylums. Before considering how the Churches conducted themselves during the Nazi period, it is necessary to establish the broader context of their response to eugenics in general.

Since the end of the war itself, research on the German economy during the Second World War has focused – explicitly or implicitly – on the search for an explanation of the disparities in armaments and output between the first and second halves of the war. In the first half of the war, up until the winter of 1941–2, the development of armaments production was characterised by more or less stable levels of output against the background of the series of swift and successful military campaigns in Poland and in the West. This stands in stark contrast to the second half, which witnessed a radical increase in aggregate armaments output which lasted well into the summer of 1944, and which saw tank production reach 589 per cent of the level at which it had stood in January 1942, weapons production reach 382 per cent of its January 1942 level, and aircraft production 367 per cent of its January 1942 level over the same period, to name some of the most obvious successes. These increases were all the more astonishing for the fact that they were achieved against the background of a massive war of attrition on the Eastern Front which placed demands on German resources and drew male labour from German factories into the Wehrmacht on a scale out of all proportion to that experienced in the first half of the war.

During the Second World War, the black market was an integral part of daily life in all parts of wartime Europe – occupied, collaborationist, neutral – and beyond, in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Wherever nations had shifted to a controlled economy, in which supply and distribution were regulated by the government through rationing and quota systems and demand exceeded the regulated supply, the black market flourished. It was the free market at its most brutal. Prices were determined by the laws of supply and demand, adjusted to recognise and reward the enormous risks taken by suppliers in trading on the black market. It was no different in northern France.

The Bolsheviks considered the family to be a minor matter. The ABC of Communism, a popular exposition of Bolshevik Marxism published shortly after the October Revolution, detailed the economic and political institutions of Soviet Russia with only a passing reference to the public services that would emancipate women in the future society.1 Its authors, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, understood the revolutionary process chiefly as the by-product of economic development and expected socialism to come through the manipulation of economic mechanisms by central government, and in this they echoed the views of their party. The Bolshevik scenario did not preclude the ‘participation of the masses’ to use the vocabulary of the times. Individuals, women as well as men, were to enjoy unprecedented access to the political process, and as masters of the nation's resources would decide matters of state, each acting as part of the whole, or more exactly as part of a number of collectivities, first and foremost as members of the proletariat, but also as members of other groups including nationality, youth and women. While families in the past had played a crucial role in the creation and transmission of private property, with the overthrow of the exploitative capitalist system they would cease to function as providers of economic and psychological welfare. Instead the individual's social place and action would be determined by class and, to a lesser extent, by ethnicity, age and gender. Families belonged to the superstructure and were symptom rather than cause; they adapted to the needs of society, changing in response to the transformation of economic relations. Families, in other words, could look after themselves, and appropriate forms of private life would evolve without much outside intervention.

Early in 1978 the Federal German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, decided to propose the creation in Europe of a zone of monetary stability. He was offended by the neglect of the United States dollar by the administration of President Carter and by the effect on German competitiveness. He resented the pressure brought to bear on the German Government by countries such as the USA and the UK. They, unable to manage their own economies successfully, were seeking relief from their problems in the expansion of the German economy. This, he considered, would be inflationary. Germany's enormous reserves and its current account surplus were evidence of successful economic management. The USA and the UK should try to emulate Germany, not attempt to persuade it to become a ‘locomotive’ and thereby follow their primrose path. The zone of monetary stability in Europe was to be his answer to American neglect and American pressure. How exactly it would fulfil the role of an answer was never explained. But politics has its own rationale not always fit for frank exposition. The zone would be created by the linking of European exchange rates in a fixed but adjustable relationship. If, as expected, the yoking of weaker currencies acted as lead in the Deutschmark's balloon and thereby safeguarded German competitiveness, that would be a bonus, for the Chancellor if not for the Bundesbank. The now defunct Bretton Woods system had had the same objective of monetary stability and, indeed, had succeeded in it for many years. One of the surviving Bretton Woods institutions was the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the same way the European zone of monetary stability would have its Fund, a European Monetary Fund (EMF), equipped with reserves subscribed by member states. Its activities would no doubt resemble those of the IMF, strengthening the resolve of governments in embracing the paths of economic prudence, thereby helping to calm markets when they turned against one currency or another. No doubt it would also, like the IMF, give governments advice which would not always be welcome.

(The Melians to the Athenians, 416/15 BC)

We see that you have come prepared to judge the arguments yourselves.… If we surrender, then all our hope is lost at once, whereas, so long as we remain in action, there is still a hope that we may yet stand upright.… We put our trust … in the help of men – that is of the Spartans.

‘King takes Queen’. This is how John Sweeney summed up his view of the state visit by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu to Britain in June 1978, an event which marked the high point of what the Times referred to as ‘Britain's political romance with Romania’ in the 1970s. Sweeney's book, in common with other post-revolutionary writing on Romania, roundly condemns Britain's foreign policy-makers for supporting a repressive regime.1 However, in the 1970s the situation was not viewed in such clear-cut terms. In the early part of the decade, books by British writers praised Ceausescu, and Romania often received favourable coverage in the British press.2 It was almost universally seen as a country which, although internally rigidly communist, pursued an independent foreign policy and was consequently a thorn in the flesh of the Soviet Union. It was keen to industrialise and to expand its economic ties with the West in order to do so. Apologists for British policy would argue that it was therefore both politically and economically beneficial to support Ceausescu. Politically it would weaken Moscow's control over the Eastern Bloc, and economically it would benefit British industry. Indeed, the two were related – the more economic ties Ceausescu had with the West, the stronger his political independence from Moscow would become.

The military coup of July 1936 against the Republican government of Spain, which rapidly developed into civil war, required an urgent response from the authorities of the United Kingdom. This was as much on account of its effects on British interests in Spain as due to its repercussions on the unstable situation in Europe. During the nearly three years of war, the Conservative-dominated Cabinet adhered to the Non-Intervention pact signed by all European governments in August 1936, which prescribed an arms embargo towards the combatants without a parallel recognition of their rights as belligerents. This peculiar neutrality, which combined respect for the legal status of the recognized government with de facto equal status for the rebels, was defended by British officialdom on the grounds of the over-riding need to restrict the war and avoid its escalation into a general European conflict. The argument served to deflect accusations of hidden antagonism towards the Republic and to justify the continuation of this policy of neutrality despite the support of Italy and Germany for the insurgent forces, so tolerating in practice the sabotage of the policy of non-intervention by the fascist powers. In the face of these official explanations, which have been accepted at face value by many historians, this article will attempt to show that British non-intervention had its origins in antirevolutionary pre-occupations rather than in strictly diplomatic considerations. Furthermore, it will be argued that during the first six months of the war it adhered consistently to a political strategy based on the expectation that the war would be short lived.

Historians of Europe need to take into account these two new books of general business history, as they throw new light on the European economy and society. Their approach, however, is different: Chandler, an historian of America, ventures into two European countries; Lazonick, an historian of Britain, now deals also with the US; Chandler's ambitions are to attempt a comparative history of industrial organisations, whereas Lazonick focuses on the workplace.

Indeed, much of the tension in relations between Paris and Washington, Paris and Bonn, and Bonn and London is that none of Germany's former enemies and present allies want to be left behind when the moment comes to make a new European order with the Russians. The Germans do not wish to be left out either…. The basis of the problem…is what to do about the Germans….

It was less than a year since the Second Spanish Republic had been founded. In early December 1931 parliament, which had become the focal point of national politics with the elections to the Constituent Assembly, accepted the new constitution by an overwhelming majority after three months of lively debate, and elected the first democratic state president. In mid-December the right-wing Radical Party withdrew from the Republican/Socialist coalition, which was an advantage for the reform programme advocated by premier Manuel Azaña, and seemed to pave the way for reforms to be forced through. These were aimed, above all, at modernising the economy, establishing social justice in rural areas, continuing the process of democratisation and developing federal, decentralised structures. However, the first parliamentary session of the new year, with the new government, was certainly not dominated by the reform measures fought for with such determination. Rather the central theme of the opening session was a bloody incident in a small place in the south-west region of Extremadura which stirred up public opinion to an extreme degree in Spain during the first days of January 1932.

In the history of interwar international monetary and financial affairs one could hardly find any other single figure than Montagu Norman whose ideas and ambitions proved so influential in the process of Europe's monetary stabilisation.

Writing in 1965 in Britain Looks to Germany, Donald Cameron Watt concluded:

Perhaps the biggest successes scored by the Education Branch lay in the programme of exchange visits at all levels, in the discovery and encouragement of a new generation of teachers in Germany.…and most imaginatively of all in the opening up of the Wilton Park Centre to which leaders of opinion in Germany came for short residential courses on British democratic practice. Politicians, journalists, teachers, academics, trades unionists mingle together in these courses, and so valuable did the centre appear to German opinion that it was German initiative and German financial contribution which helped to preserve it in its present form when a niggardly Treasury and a disastrously unimaginative Foreign Secretary threatened to abolish it. Its impact on German life and on the political elites of West Germany has been incalculable.

Ever since the end of the Second World War, the connection between the horrors of the ‘classic’ fascism of the interwar years and contemporary movements of the European radical right has seemed obvious. In the later 1940s and 1950s any extreme nationalist groups were naturally identified as neo-fascist or proto-Nazi, not least because they harboured so many old henchmen of the fascist regimes. But even today, news of violent acts or electoral successes of radical right organisations in Europe raise the spectre of fascism in the minds of observers everywhere. There is hardly a popular or scholarly article that does not refer to this link at least indirectly, above all in analyses of German politics. Thus one German weekly, in a report on nationalist activities in the new eastern Länder, asked forebodingly: ‘Is the ex-GDR sinking into a brown [Nazi] morass? Is the SA marching again, is the Fourth Reich imminent?’2 A recent scholarly article on the German Republikaner made the same obligatory references in a more veiled manner: ‘Against the background of the course of twentieth-century European history, right-wing radical tendencies any where in Europe warrant special attention.’3 No doubt, this will hold true for decades to come. The link of all present-day right-wing movements with the interwar years remains inescapable. The catastrophes associated with fascism are the kind of historical experience that shapes the political consciousness of several generations. Both for the adherents of extreme nationalism and for their enemies, interwar fascism thus provides a basic paradigm through which contemporary rightist groups are defined or define themselves.

Some years ago, Edward Thompson famously scolded historians for their ‘enormous condescension’ towards working people of the past. His message and example struck a responsive chord, and over the past thirty years a lively historiography has rescued these and other ‘invisible’ figures from their former obscurity. However, while many among history's silent masses have thus received their ‘voices’, this has not been the case for that vast and mediocre mass, the middle classes.

Despite the neat treaties of diplomats and precise agreements of generals, wars like the Second World War end untidily. Amidst the ruins of cities and the wash of refugees, the cessation of international hostilities gives way to the settling of domestic accounts, which in 1944–5 was called the purge of collaborators. As common and as compelling as the purge was, historians have paid relatively little attention to it. The French purge, for instance, remains somewhat of an historical enigma, in part because of the archival laws that shield the judicial records, but also in part because of the apparently obvious nature of the purge. Who cannot sympathise, even if reluctantly, with the bereaved survivors who took vengeance on the collaborator who murdered their husbands or wives, fathers, daughters or beloved friends? But such easy sympathy has misled scholarly analysis into dividing the French purge into a legal purge of court action and a popular purge of vigilante violence.

This article tries to outline the relevance of NATO for domestic Italian politics by looking both at some of the important foreign policy decisions that the Italian government took in relation to the Alliance, and at the role that NATO may have had as an active player in Italian politics.

Except for a small number of recent studies existing literature on the contemporary extreme right tends to follow a quite rigid country by country-based approach which fails to develop common theoretical perspectives. The key weakness of these specialised multi-country studies is neglect of a genuine comparative framework which often results in collections of ‘descriptive’ essays. The primary intention of this paper is to move beyond this approach and to offer a study of the extreme right in contemporary France and Britain in comparative context. This study transcends the limitations of country-specific accounts to answer the following research question: why has the contemporary extreme right in France enjoyed much more political success than the contemporary extreme right in Britain? A common conjunctural model of extreme-right political success will be constructed at the outset. This is intended to serve as a theoretical base for framing the comparison and will act as the mechanism through which the primary research question will be addressed.