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.

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.