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.

When the United Kingdom joined the European Community on 1 January 1973 it became entitled to send thirty-six representatives to the European Parliament. For the first six years of Britain's membership – from January 1973 to June 1979 – these members were nominated from the two Houses of Parliament and hence held a dual mandate. From January 1973 to June 1975 only twenty-one British members, Conservative, Liberal, Ulster Unionist and a cross-bench peer, attended the Parliament; Labour members attended from the first session after the referendum on British membership of the European Community in June 1975.

Without a doubt the Bundesbank, the German central bank, enjoys a formidable reputation in the United Kingdom. It is seen as a most important and powerful institution, as an independent, well-functioning and sometimes even stubborn player in the realm of German, European and international monetary affairs. Therefore it is not difficult to find British newspaper headlines dealing with it. Above all, in times of monetary upheaval, the Bundesbank is understood to be an institution which ‘allows a flicker of hope’ and on which markets ‘keep a nervous eye’. Probably even more telling is the fact that some years ago a book was published in the UK which presents the German central bank in its title as ‘the bank that rules Europe’ and which maintains that ‘the Bundesbank took the place of the Wehrmacht as the most known and most feared German institution’.

It can scarcely be said that François Mitterrand lacked reasons for despondency between September 1994 and May 1995: the oppression of imminent retirement, the ravages of illness, the loss of his dearest friends; the tide of scandals mounting towards the presidency; the disastrous Socialist performance in both the legislative elections of 1993 and the European elections of 1994; the political, intellectual and emotional collapse of the brand of left-wing magnanimity which he had made his own and which had borne him to power; the ingratitude of public opinion, anxious for change. Most of the books devoted to the last months of his ‘reign’ fail to go beyond a fairly mechanical rendering of a feeling of anti-climax. Something of an exception is L'Année des adieux (‘Year of Farewells’),1 a bitter-sweet chronicle of life in the President's entourage by Laura Adler, an adviser to the Elysée; but her comradely offering does little to stem the tide of hostile, regretful or frankly accusatory offerings. It is no coincidence that Jean Montaldo's Mitterrand et les 40 voleurs (‘Mitterrand and the Forty Thieves’),2 has become a long-term best-seller: Montaldo, a former police officer, mercilessly exposes the nexus of scandal and intrigue in the presidential entourage. Or that Thierry Pfister's novel Le Nègre (‘The Negro)3 uses a thinly disguised cast of characters to make a violent attack on the betrayal of socialist ideas, with a bitterness felt also in Daniel Rondeau's Mitterrand et nous (‘Mitterrand and Ourselves’),4 referring to the post-1968 generation which the author claims to represent. Or, again, that it should be the President's most consistently vitriolic radio critic, Philippe Alexandre, who in a tardy attack of pseudo-remorse has undertaken a Plaidoyer impossible pour un vieux président abandonné par les siens (‘Speech in defence of the indefensible, on behalf of an ageing president deserted by his followers’).5 All in all, a display of authorial individuality and ardour, as writers scramble to accomplish the finally rather banal task of presenting the departing President with History's bill for board and lodging.

A country's family policy reflects, either directly or indirectly, the attitude of government, parliament and society to the family as an institution. The way in which a government deals with families, whether it gives them financial support, and why and how it does so, reveals the objectives of its family policy, and also ultimately its population policy.

The problems of decolonisation in post-Second World War France have attracted renewed attention in recent years. A new generation of historians and political scientists has focused on why it was so difficult for the country's political and intellectual élites to accept the end of empire. This attention to the subjectivity of policy and opinion-makers has added a novel dimension to understanding how and why the end of the colonial era occurred with such difficulty and bloodshed for the French. This new orientation has largely displaced the old ‘Gaullist’ explanation for the failing of France's post-war regime, the Fourth Republic, in colonial policy. The older notion, articulated by General Charles de Gaulle himself during his twelve-year exile from political power between 1946 and 1958, blamed the unstable parliamentary coalitions and governing political parties of the era for the series of crises and disasters in colonial policy faced by a deeply fractured legislative regime. The rapid rise and fall of governments, the turnover of ministers, the constant governmental disputes on a range of questions, it was alleged, was the cause of inconsistent and weak policies incapable of meeting the succession of crises. The newer research, however, has demonstrated that the institutional problems of the Fourth Republic were not the key issue and that the essential problem lay with an inability of élites to recognise, accept and adapt to decolonisation worldwide. It has been shown that, far from having inconsistent or weak policies, the governing cadres of the Fourth Republic shared fundamentally similar concepts and goals in their determination to maintain the integrity of the French Empire. Yet this same historiography has focused on the political parties, pressure groups and shifting political landscape of French colonial policy while largely overlooking an important, though less obvious, player.

Why did fascism not succeed in France in the 1930s to the extent that itdid in Germany? Although the appeal of fascism increased dramatically in France between 1936 and 1938 as part of the backlash to the Popular Front, the fact remains that neither of France's two largest fascist movements – Colonel de La Rocque's Croix de feu/Parti social français and Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire française – came to power during this period. In French Fascism: the Second Wave, 1933–1939, one of the reasons (among several) that I gave for the relative failure of French fascism was the negative reaction of many French conservatives and Catholics to Hitler's repression of dissident German conservatives and Catholics in 1933 and 1934 – a reaction which indirectly diminished the potential appeal of homegrown fascism through guilt by association. Although I alluded to this reaction in my study, I did so without providing sufficient documentation. One of the purposes of this review of French press responses to Hitler's first two years in power is to correct that shortcoming.

Little more than a decade after having lost the Second World War, the society of the western part of Germany, the Federal Republic, had changed fundamentally in the eye of the observer. The economic expert Henry C. Wallich was not the only one to speak of the ‘German miracle’. Not only had the previously achieved industrial standards long been regained and surpassed, but also a boom had set in – as in all of Western Europe – which came to an end only in the 1970s. Simultaneously, both economy and society had been modernised in the process of reconstruction. The transition to a new stage of modernity, ‘society in affluence’, was discussed animatedly. The emergence of new leisure lifestyles in particular was considered a mark of present times. However, in current reviews it is often forgotten that the West German society of the 1950s was to a far greater extent determined by continuity with the interwar period and by the consequences of the war and post-war years than a first glance at the spectacular novelties suggests.

In the 1960s, when I was Head of the (UK) Government Economic Service, I kept a private diary of conversations and events which has just been published. The excerpts from the diary which appear below relate to what I learned in 1967–8 about French attitudes to issues of international importance in which the United Kingdom was involved. The diary deals with four such issues: (1) the British application to join the European Economic Community; (2) the proposals to add to international liquidity through the creation of a new unit or, alternatively, of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); (3) the British devaluation of 1967; and (4) the Bonn Conference in November 1968, at which it was widely expected that agreement would be reached to devalue the franc and revalue the mark.

Emerging from the Balkan wars and the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1913, the nation state of Albania frustrated the expansionist ambitions of Serbia and Greece which had planned to partition the area. Early indications suggested Albania would be, potentially, one of the most destabilising regions of the Balkans. This was primarily due to its geographical position vis à vis the Adriatic coast, and to the manner in which the Great Powers deemed Albanian independence an issue of international concern. For Britain, the proximity of the important military base of Malta and the existence of oil in Albania were further reasons why Italian domination had to be checked, and it is of little surprise that Albania quickly became the focus of attention for jealous and covetous eyes.

Polish higher education, like Poland as a whole, is in an exciting but perilous phase. The political changes of the last few years have brought new opportunities but also new expectations and constraints. Many university personnel are looking forward to a less insular, more fulfilling academic life, but there are plenty of others who feel nostalgia for a past which was ideologically inflexible but in some respects less demanding and more secure.

The Institute for Human Sciences (Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) was founded in Vienna in 1982 by a group of scholars from Eastern Europe and the West. The purpose of the Institute was to overcome the cultural and intellectual division of Europe by promoting conferences, seminars and research programmes. The latest report of the Institute stresses that the disappearance of the Iron Curtain has made the work of the Institute all the more important. As the authors of the report explain, ‘…the civil society which is reemerging in Eastern Europe will hardly be viable without living connections to the West and, equally, the Western world will be much poorer without the historical experiences of the East. The Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen views itself as a place where the experiences and perspectives of Eastern Europeans can be (re-) introduced into the Western discussion as a means of rousing, changing and broadening Western culture. Europe should be seen as a challenge: as a manifold, but also contradictory, intellectual and cultural unity.’

In 1930, the Romanian Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, numbered 756,930 members. Of these, about 150,000 lived in Northern Transylvania, which was occupied by Hungary in the summer of 1940; the remaining 600,000 Jews remained in territories ruled by Romania. In 1944, the Jews from Northern Transylvania shared the fate of the Hungarian Jews; only about 15,000 of them survived the deportations.