More than 20 years ago, Philip Windsor proposed a succinct explanation of the East–West divide: ‘… the Cold War began with the deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’ For the following two decades from 1969 to 1989, the formula ‘Peace and stability through partition” (U. Nerlich;J. Joffe) reflected widespread satisfaction with the territorial status quo in Europe. However, substantial disagreements (as L. Freedman observes p. 5) with established security policies, defence doctrines and armed forces' structures both in NATO and the Warsaw Pact (WP) might be taken as evidence that ‘Europe was on the verge of an historic change’. In respect of the state of public opinion, NATO ministers in early March 1988 declared the need gradually to overcome the unnatural division of Europe

In 1953 Hans Rothfels gave a definition of what he understood as contemporary history which rapidly became a classic: ‘the era of those living and its treatment by academics’. In so doing he opened up a field of enquiry to historical scholarship in Germany which had had a long tradition, but which had been almost completely excluded from the discipline since the nineteenth century. In 1821 Wilhelm von Humboldt had declared that ‘chronicling the present’ furnished the ‘necessary basis of history’, but was not ‘history itself’. This paved the way for criticism which, with Leopold von Ranke, increasingly excluded contemporary history from the sphere of academic consideration on the grounds that its typical ‘lack of reliable knowledge’ and ‘conflicts between contemporaries’ impeded objective judgement. Heinrich von Treitschke's dismissive assertion that the most recent past could only be looked at through the biased glasses of a ‘dual partiality’ was only confirmed by a new flourishing of historia sui temporis after 1914. Thus, as early as the third year of the First World War, the Historische Zeitschrift (HZ) was talking about the ‘pre-history of the World War’, thereby justifying the verdict that ‘it was practically patriotic rather than academically legitimate’. The same could be said of the notions the historical discipline put forward after 1918 against the ‘Versailles lies about war guilt’.

Thirty years after its adoption in December 1967, the Harmel report can be seen as a turning point in the history of the Alliance. By postulating NATO's compatibility with the changing nature of international relations, the report's conceptual framework provided an answer to the political dimension of the Alliance's mid-1960s crisis – which, fundamentally, was a crisis of legitimacy. From then on, NATO's increasingly active role in East–West relations would complement its original rationale – the defence of its members in the narrow sense – with a new one – the management of European security writ large, thus enhancing, for at least two decades, the Alliance's raison d'être as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, the long-term significance of the Harmel report is, in fact, indisputable: how could NATO have survived the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the end of East–West conflict had it not been for the post-Cold War expansion of its ‘new tasks’ along the lines of the Harmel report?

Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, was above all a politician. In his frame of mind, his mentality and his actions, he largely conformed to the archetype of a ‘functionary’ that typified leading figures in the Communist movement at the time. The two main features of this mentality were belief in the infallibility of the Communist Party, and belief in the role, mission and vocation of the Party and its functionaries to redeem the world, according to András Hegedüs (member of the Hungarian Politburo 1951–6, and Prime Minister 1955–6 and a dissident sociologist in the 1960s). Another important trait of functionaries in East-central Europe was to see themselves as local representatives of a worldwide Soviet empire, not just of the Party. Although the life and personality of Nagy resembled this pattern, it departed from it in a number of ways that became dramatically manifest, most of all in his final years. One explanation for this departure lies in the ‘intellectual attributes’ or leanings of Nagy as a leading Party functionary. This side of his character prompted him to undertake an intellectual appraisal of political problems on several occasions in his life. In the period leading up to the Hungarian revolution, it made him the leading figure in an expressly intellectual movement: the opposition among the Party intelligentsia. This study is an attempt to trace the specific intellectual path taken by Nagy as a politician.

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have come to a turning point, perhaps the most important turning point, in the short but complex history of nuclear strategy. The Cold War is now history, albeit the sort of history that we will be living with for a long time yet. It is therefore time to review the policies and strategies of the Cold War in a historical perspective. In this essay, it is NATO's nuclear strategy during the Cold War that will be the subject of such a review.2

At the height of the Second World War, in November 1942, the Embassy of the USSR in Washington DC issued an Information Bulletin condemning the Nazi cultural atrocities and looting that were taking place on the Eastern Front. In conclusion, it reminded the world.

The era of cold wars and the two divisions – of Europe and of Germany – ran parallel: ‘The Cold War began with a deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two, and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’

In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.

The conflict between East and West had its origins in diverging views of how society should be organised which emerged in the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialisation: the contrast between the pluralism of ‘Western’ civilisation, which in principle permitted a multiplicity of ways of life and patterns of power, and the centralised all-powerful state with its ‘Asiatic’ imprint; the contrast between capitalist means of production and socialist planning; the contrast between a parliamentary state under the rule of law and a totalitarian state. Such contrasting attitudes appeared to be irreconcilable, but they were indissolubly linked, at the latest, from the time of the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution of 1917. Furthermore, the Bolshevik's seizure of power in Russia turned these conflicting views into an international political problem. By claiming to be the vanguard of an historically necessary world revolutionary movement the leadership of the Soviet Union tied a particular combination of socialist and anti-Western attitudes to the advancement of Soviet national interests, thus introducing into the international system a specific conflict between ‘Western’ industrialised nations and the Soviet state.

Monetary policy since the Second World War has always been a politically and socially sensitive issue in France. It reflected the peculiar strength of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the unions and working class. Postwar governments relied upon monetary inflation, devaluation and administered credit to sustain growth and guarantee social peace. With the exception of the period following General de Gaulle's seizure of power in 1958, there was little choice for governments faced with weak, divided and conflicting unions, a volatile work force, and a united left threatening radical change. Where German governments responded to union challenges and the oil shock of 1974 with deflation, the French expanded the money supply. The divergence of French policy from German after 1968 made European economic and monetary union impossible.

A survey of the economic problems in East–West relations during the era of the Cold War is of particular interest from the German perspective. First, no other Western industrial country played a comparable role in the economic relations with East European countries; and secondly, East–West trade, especially the economic contacts with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), became an outstanding feature of German Ostpolitik under the conditions of the divided country. It appears to be an acceptable proposition to say that this form of West Germany economic and trade policy was the equivalent of the militarily defined US policy towards the Soviet Union, in so far as the famous dictum of the former Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was ‘an economic giant and a political dwarf only partly corresponded to reality. It therefore seems appropriate to discuss the economic dimension of the East–West conflict in the context of German interests and policies – not to the exclusion of all else, but with a certain priority.

The part played by economists in the Second World War has been little studied but was of an importance not appreciated by the public then or since. Equally, wartime experience had an influence on the development of economics as a discipline that has been given little attention. It was in the Second World War that economists in any number entered government service, discovered government, exercised a major influence on policy and left behind an expanding demand for economic advice from professional economists. This article seeks to provide a sketch of some of their activities.

In mid-July 1961 the Conservative government in Britain, headed by Harold Macmillan, decided to apply for full membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). Successive British governments had persistently opted for intergovernmental co-operation instead of supranational integration as in the case of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the EEC. Thus the application, which implied the intent to join a supranational structure and a customs union, marked an unexpected and somewhat surprising break with the well-established British post-war policy.

Based on the international colloquium held in Florence in September 1987, which involved more than a hundred British, French, German and Italian historians, Power in Europe? is part of a larger collaborative research project designed to investigate perceptions of power in Western Europe over the period 1938 to 1958. Although collections of this kind are bound to be uneven in quality, most of the contributions to Di Nolfo's book reach a high standard, and it will be an important source of information and ideas for scholars working on Western European history in the 1950s.

Traditional histories of the Italian ‘Economic Miracle’ have concentrated on two phenomena: the factory and migration. The family has occupied a position of secondary importance, being treated as of lesser interest than ‘other’ arenas of everyday life, in particular the workplace. Those who have eulogised the miracle have underlined the massive effort and sacrifice of millions of workers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Those who oppose the ‘ideology’ behind the boom have looked to the latent conflicts (and problems) produced by unplanned economic development – frictions which were to explode in 1968. The reality was a complicated combination of both these interpretations. Some took the road of opposition to the system, many millions lapped up the values of the boom, most were affected in some way by both ‘world-views’. The relationship between the family and the boom was a two-way one. The Italian family had as much effect on the ‘miracle’ as the ‘miracle’ did on the family (in much the same way that mass internal migration was both a cause and a consequence of the boom). Each shaped and moulded the other in various and crucial ways. The family was Janus-faced, ‘both a custodian of tradition and an agent of change’.2

Over the past two decades, the rapid development of historical studies on the family has tended to neglect almost completely the relationship between the family and politics. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Family History in 1987, Louise Tilly analysed the content of articles published on the family in eight historical journals (including the Journal of Family History) between 1976 and 1985. Of 233 articles on the family, just two were listed under the heading ‘Politics–Institutions’.2 Family history has made great strides in a whole number of areas: in the understanding of the origins of the modern family, an enquiry launched by the path-breaking work of Philippe Ariès in i960; in the development of family reconstruction technique, initiated in the post-war period by Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert, and pursued with signal distinction by the Cambridge Group, founded in 1964; in the critiques and further refinement of the findings of the Cambridge Group, with the development, in particular, of studies on the life course; in the area of intra-family relations, especially in the analysis of the historic subordination of women within the family; in the study, finally, of the interaction between the family and major socio-economic transformation, especially industrialisation, emigration and urbanisation.3

The de-legitimisation of the Italian political system that culminated in the upheavals of the late 1980s has permitted a very public re-examination of the meaning and significance of both the Fascist regime and the Resistance to it. Although debates between historians had already begun over these issues, they have been thrust into the media spotlight now that the political consensus surrounding their interpretation has collapsed. The following two articles examine both the content and conduct of these debates, and consider the extent to which they have contributed to a reassessment of the history of these periods. Naturally the opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the authors themselves: Contemporary European History would welcome further comments and contributions concerning this rethinking of the contemporary Italian experience.

On 17 January 1936 Winston S. Churchill, the back-bench bête noire of the Conservative Party, wrote to his wife Clemmie from Marrakesh, where he was on holiday, about the frightful international situation. Japan had ruptured the conference on naval aramaments, and Nazi Germany was rearming at break-neck speed. The ‘two predatory military dictatorships’, it seemed to Churchill, were now working together. ‘No wonder’, he said, ‘the Russian bear is quaking for his skin and seeking protectors among the capitalist powers he deserted in the war and sought to destroy at the close of it. What – to quote a famous phrase – “What a fearful concatenation of circumstances”.’2

With his sharp denunciation of the ‘old fetishes of so-called international bankers’ for fixed exchange rates on the gold-exchange standard, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly consigned the World Economic and Monetary Conference to failure.1 The conference had been convened in June 1933 to tackle the crippling levels of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ economic policies which were strangling the international economy during the Great Depression; its brief was so appealing and its concerns so broad, that sixty-five nations came to London that summer. But from the outset of conference preparations, which began in the autumn of 1932, the issue of central banking co-operation was to highlight many of the difficulties which plagued not only co-operative central bank efforts to revive the international economy but also dilemmas which faced central banks in their relations with their domestic governments.

Over the past decade there has been a great flowering of writings concerned with financial and monetary history, and the present four volumes are each excellent examples of the particular sub-species that now flourish in this bed of historical specialism. That edited by Eichengreen and Lindert is a conference volume, that of Wheelock is a revised doctoral thesis and Williamson's is in the classic mould of the historical monograph, whereas Fforde's is a commissioned history.