These days, the institutions of the European Community, and especially the Commission, are criticised for being, if anything, too effective and for submerging the sovereignty of member states in the interests of a concept of European union not universally shared. In the late 1970s the perceived problem was very different. The economic crisis following the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the oil price hike had caused a resurgence of nationalism within the Community and the reemergence of barriers to trade. ‘[S]ince about 1973, trade integration among the original six members has largely stagnated, as new market barriers outweighed new liberalising action, and economic growth was cut in half.’2 The one recent achievement, the European Monetary System (EMS), had been largely created outside the machinery of the Treaty of Rome. There was resentment within the Community at its failure to protect member states against the onset of crisis or to help them to find a way out of it. There was resentment at the way in which, at a time of crisis, France, Germany and the UK tended to ignore the Community, and their obligations under the Treaty of Rome, and to enter into consultations with the USA and Japan about matters which affected all member states.

As Central and East Europeans (including Germans) strive to build new democracies on the ruins of old dictatorships, they seek to establish democratic values as well as democratic institutions. They know that democratic institutions alone were not able to save democracy in Germany's Weimar Republic, which had also risen out of the collapse of an authoritarian regime. West Germans, though, later built a viable democracy, the Federal Republic, from even more devastated and authoritarian remnants. To help explain such differing outcomes, historians have posited changes in political values, arguing that West Germans developed a democratic political culture to replace the authoritarian values many Germans had held earlier. As illuminating as such arguments could be, historians have had great difficulty finding evidence on just what political values Germans, especially common citizens, have in fact held at various times.

In 1926 the Fascist regime instituted a restrictive shop-licensing system which accounts for the continued prominence of small shopkeepers in Italy today. Retailers' interests were represented on the licensing panels by the Fascist Confederation for Commercial Traders in an apparently genuine grant of corporate authority. The confederation swiftly reconstituted itself after the fall of the regime and retained its power within the post-war licensing structure. This article will analyse the background to the introduction of the system as a way into debates about the relationship between the Fascist state and the petite bourgeoisie.

The events of 1989, the annus mirabilis, have led to a great demand for new research and a re-thinking of the history of Eastern Europe. Those sources which were kept from us for years are now available, at least in part. As part of this process political scientists and historians of Eastern Europe are now concerned to fill in the gaps in our knowledge and provide the answers to urgent questions. A consequence of this situation has been a veritable flood of publications, of which eight have been chosen for review here. With two exceptions these studies have deepened our understanding of the issues involved. There are clear differences between the historians on the one hand and the political scientists on the other in terms of their starting-point and the questions they ask. Whereas the historians deal descriptively with the origins, trends and structures of the last centuries and place the revolutions of 1989/90 in their historical context, the political scientists proceed analytically and place greater emphasis on social, ethnic and economic factors. This dichotomy is demonstrated in the different problematics of the books under review.

Perhaps the most cherished prerogative of French intellectuals is the right to take a position, to have a public opinion on any and every matter. This power to pronounce judgement has crumbled somewhat in the electronic age before the pressures of the public opinion poll and the occasionally surreal media star syndrome, but generally intellectual and cultural leaders in France have retained highly visible and respected roles within national life.

The First World War had engendered in 1917 the first communist state and, following this, in 1919, an international communist movement. With the exception of the People's Republic of Mongolia no new communist states emerged between the wars. The Second World War provided European communism with a second chance to establish itself as a significant political force. In its aftermath the Soviet model was extended to much of the eastern part of Europe while, in the West, communism reached, in 1945–6, the zenith of its influence and power. When the dust had settled, Europe, and with it socialism, had become effectively divided. In Eastern, and in parts of Central Europe a form of socialist society was created, only to be bitterly denounced by the (social-democratic) majority of the Western labour movement. It lasted until 1989–90, when, as each of these socialist states collapsed under the weight of internal dissent following the revocation of Soviet control, it became apparent that no novel socialist phoenix would arise from the ashes of over forty years of authoritarian left-wing rule – at least for the foreseeable future.

When the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party came to power in 1932, Sweden experienced a turning point in its history. For the first time the role of the Social Democratic Party in the construction of the welfare state became significant. Until the end of the 1910s the Social Democrats had concentrated their primary efforts on the problems of trade union recognition and the struggle for parliamentary democracy. After 1920 the Social Democrats became the largest party, but did not gain political power except for a brief interlude. The concept of the ‘Swedish Model’ has often been used in Sweden and abroad to describe the unique development of Swedish society in the twentieth century. However, historians and social scientists have tended to analyse Swedish society without a clear definition of the very concept, the ‘Swedish Model’.

The 1980s proved to be a tough decade for European welfare states. The post-war ‘welfare consensus’, which perhaps had never been quite so strong or coherent as many contemporary historians and commentators had assumed, was finally laid to rest. The five great spectres identified by Beveridge want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness had not been humbled by public welfare provision despite its ever growing scale and cost. At the beginning of the 1980s the OECD published a report on The Welfare State in Crisis which pointed out that as welfare state expenditure had roughly doubled as a percentage of national income in most west European countries since the late 1950s, so economic growth rates had plummeted. The European welfare states appeared to produce few positive welfare benefits, and this minimal achievement was produced at enormous cost which was to the detriment of overall economic growth and societal well-being.

The significance of the Locarno treaties remains one of the central issues of the interwar period. Did they mark, as Austen Chamberlain claimed, ‘the real dividing line between the years of war and the years of peace’ or were they, at best, a truce masking the incompatible ambitions of France and Germany and, at worst, a first act of appeasement by which France and Britain obtained security for the Rhineland at the expense of Poland and Czechoslovakia? A different approach is offered by economic history: from this perspective the significant events are seen as the defeat of the French occupation of the Ruhr and the acceptance of the Dawes Plan in July 1924. France had to abandon its attempt to break the power of German industry and had to accept the British and American view that European peace required German economic recovery. The Locarno treaties may be seen simply as the best arrangements that France could make for its security following this decisive defeat.

During the Cold War era the smaller states in Western Europe were confronted with numerous external pressures. These included most of all the need for closer economic co-operation within Western Europe to sustain the process of post-war economic and political reconstruction and the impact on Europe of the confrontation between the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The responses of the smaller states to these external pressures varied considerably between two poles: on the one hand, a policy of active integration, with common policies and the transfer of at least some degree of national sovereignty to common institutions, and, on the other, a policy of neutrality, either chosen freely or initially forced upon, to retain as much decision-making autonomy as possible, while safeguarding core economic interests through intergovernmental co-operation. The choice of strategy depended not only on the character and degree of the external political pressures, but also on the respective historical preconditions and on what domestic and external aims the smaller states hoped to achieve with their policies.

The historiography of Italian fascism has reached a curious pass. Once, especially in the English-language world, all was dominated by the study of politics, diplomacy and war. Moreover, these studies were automatically ‘intentionalist’ in their interpretation. For Denis Mack Smith as, ironically, for Renzo De Felice, it did not seem possible to think of the period from 1922 to 1945 except as ‘Mussolini's Italy’; any analysis of fascist Italy could not depart far from the dominant and dominating figure of the Duce.

Since the so-called ‘Change’ of 10 November 1989, Bulgarian historiography has been, with its society as a whole, ‘in transition’. That phrase, it should be noted, has acquired what is at best a desultory connotation in the harsh realities of contemporary Bulgaria. Blocked by protracted economic crisis and failed political leadership, the road to reform has been uncertain, its destination obscure. The same situation has held true for practically all of the institutions of Bulgarian life, including the profession of history. Some welcome changes and positive achievements have been so much accompanied by problematic trends as to preclude any definitively favourable prognosis.

Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956 threw the moral and political world of East Central Europe's intellectuals into turmoil. One of the most secure belief systems ever devised was suddenly revealed to be the ideological justification for crimes of a massive scale. Several generations of Communists groped for orientation, and radical change seemed inevitable. East Germany's intellectuals were no exception in their expectations and desires for change. Students of the GDR have always understood 1956 as one of formidable intellectual challenge to the Ulbricht regime, and the opening of SED and Stasi archives has strengthened this view, revealing an unrest that pervaded the ranks of students, writers, teachers, and much of the Party cadre.

A question that haunted critical minds in the West throughout the Cold War was whether the evolution of two opposing military blocs in Europe meant that the blocs, their ideologies and their strategies, were actually mirror images of one another.

With the advent of Gorbachev, two new words, perestroika (reform) and glasnost' (openness), entered the Western vocabulary. They also served as the bywords for economic and social change that continues to this day. Simultaneously, the search for a solution to the economic ills of the former USSR has led to a rediscovery and a re-examination of the past. In this context, scholars of the successor states to the Soviet Union will find much of interest in the works reviewed here which take us chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the late 1980s.

For the first two years after the Berlin Wall came down and, as Jacques Delors put it, while the speed of history accelerated, most scholars confined themselves to journalism. Some books that did appear were rapidly overtaken by the heady pace of history, and the books under review here do not entirely escape being dated by the relentless progress of events on the European continent. Indeed, it can hardly be said that the dust has settled on German unification and the seismic events that we call the end of the Cold War. Both in the East (predictably) and in the West, unscrambling the elaborate territorial, strategic and ideological Cold War structures is bringing a re-examination of the nation state and its democratic practices; international governmental organisations; ‘Western’ values; and security issues. At one level, debate has been raging among some historians between two unsatisfactory notions: the ‘end of history’, and ‘real’ history being on the move again. At another level the German question has been returning unsteadily into focus, as historians start to pick at issues of national identity, nationalism and the nation-state. Other analysts have been trying to fit the European structures and assumptions we inherit from the Cold War years into a post-Cold War security and economic architecture. The close relationship between these strands of European history is obvious.

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked, than that of Stalinism (and by implication of communism in general).1 The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler's regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’.2 Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’ and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’.

This article focuses on the early years of the cold war in Italy in the form of an analysis of the Catholic press from 1947 to the eve of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. In so doing it attempts to answer key questions for Italian Catholicism relating to peace building that arose from total war in the age of mass democracy.

On 31 December 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President François Mitterrand of France called for the creation of ‘a European confederation’ designed to ‘associate all states of [the] continent in a common and permanent organisation for exchanges, peace and security’. Yet less than eighteen months later the Confederation project, a major initiative for post-Yalta Europe, had collapsed. What were Mitterrand's objectives? What were the modalities of the project, and how was it conducted? And why did it fail in the end, after having raised much hope?

Any definition of peace is also a definition of war. The two cannot be described other than in each other's image. In the twentieth century there have been four roughly separate periods of warfare. Their character and consequences tell us much about how peace was defined.