Marian devotion has long been a central component of Catholic spirituality, in part because the image of the Virgin has been accommodated effectively within so many diverse cultural contexts. In modern Poland, Marianism gained much of its power from the way it linked seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a national (or even nationalist) worldview. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualising the feminine within the nation, a model which is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant, protector of Poland; on the other, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She provides an image of authority and power which ultimately (perhaps paradoxically) poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity – indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining conservative gender relations and the other on attaining victory in the international realm.

This article details the year 1989 in the East German District Perleberg up to the fall of the Wall as reflected in the documents of the Ministry for State Security – the Stasi. It seeks to introduce empirical evidence on the course of the revolution in the towns of East Germany, an area which has received much less scholarly attention than larger centres. The article argues that in this particular outlying district, the generally accepted key factors behind the revolution (regime implosion, the changing international situation and popular pressure) are valid, but would best be weighted away from the changing international situation to the advantage of the other two. Furthermore, the evidence from District Perleberg suggests that pervasive state control, rather than accommodation and limited spheres for manoeuvre, was the dominant feature in 1989 in East Germany

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that ‘revolutionary’ Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new ‘political religion’ – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and ‘friends’ conditioned Fascist militancy and framed ‘ordinary life’, all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.

The aim of this case study of the two Antalls, father and son (the latter became the first Hungarian prime minister after the free elections in 1990) is to present and analyse the period that coincided with the post-1956 development of the Kádár system. Its apparent success, efficiency and partial, surrogate, legitimacy has often been explained by the so-called ‘compromise’ of the Kádárist leadership with Hungarian society after 1956, particularly the ‘old intelligentsia’ or ‘old middle classes’. In fact, while there was an obvious continuity in institutions and ideology between the classic Stalinist regime and that of Kádár, the societal and political practice of the system gradually changed. The Antalls were representative of the inter-war upper middle class (the father) and the participants in the 1956 revolution (the son). Discrimination according to their social background, prevalent in the early 1950s, diminished at the turn of the 1960s, so that someone descended from the former Christian middle class, like the younger József Antall, could be recruited into the intelligentsia.

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

Scholarly research to date has analysed the Cyprus issue from the perspective of Greek–Turkish relations, suggesting that the United States was attempting to strike a balance between them in order to safeguard the cohesion of NATO's southern flank during the cold war. This article, without undermining the validity of previous historical findings on the issue, nevertheless constitutes an attempt to move towards a differing research agenda: it locates Cyprus in the Middle Eastern theatre and suggests that the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 may have more linkages to the Cyprus crisis of summer 1974 than one may at first sight discern.

The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.

The history of France's defeat, occupation and subsequent liberation may be read, and written, as a constant struggle for legitimacy. Here the diverse candidates for legitimacy are analysed (Pétain, de Gaulle and the internal Resistance) as well as the agents of legitimation, and the arbiters of that process of legitimation (French society, the German occupier, Britain and the United States). Four successive configurations are distinguished within that struggle for legitimacy: summer 1940 to spring 1941, the time of the defeat; summer and autumn 1941, when French society called into question the legitimacy of the Vichy French State; the crossroads of greatest legitimacy between late 1942 and mid-1943, which also marked the period of greatest fragility for de Gaulle; and spring to autumn 1944, when the key question was which state should be rebuilt.

The Nazi occupation of northern Italy led to the creation of the Adriatisches Küstenland operations zone, a Nazi civil administration led by Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Although this was supposedly a temporary measure, the article argues that the intention was to separate the zone from the Italian state and incorporate it into an economic and political sphere directly controlled by the Reich. The article explores the legitimising strategies exploited by the Nazi civil administration and its organs of propaganda, which focused on the political, social and economical failures of the Italian Fascist government. Rainer strove hard to find ways of encouraging each of the zone's diverse ethnic and social groups to look to the Reich – and hence to the local Nazi administration – as the promoter of its national destiny, the guarantor of its socio-political security and the harbinger of its economic prosperity, safeguarding this against the social revolution advocated by the strong local communist Resistance. Rainer's administration, in trying to eradicate the region's Italian roots, established a new ethnic hierarchy, which favoured Slovenes over Italian nationals.

The inefficient operation of state institutions – including municipal administration – lay at the heart of Belgium's crisis of legitimacy in the 1930s. In 1940, the German military occupation government opted to keep many of the existing administrative institutions and personnel in place. The collaborating political parties, Rex and the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), possessed little legitimacy with either the Germans or the Belgian population. However, this article argues that both parties turned this to their advantage, infiltrating the Flemish municipal apparatus (especially mayors). Yet, as their political programme and legitimation was completely derived from the Germans, their legal position as administrators (especially mayors) was very weak. Both collaborating parties compensated for this with the theory of ‘good government’. Their takeover of power was an administrative operation which, the article argues, would bring them legitimacy through everyday ‘good government’. The entire ‘Neuordnung’ in Belgium in 1940–2 was strongly legitimised on administrative, not political grounds. The failure of this tactic lay in the open politicisation of collaborationist local government. As the article shows, the post-liberation authority also faced a problem of legitimacy. Generally speaking, the trauma of occupation had seemed to strengthen Belgians' wishes for the restoration of stability rather than reforms.

This article presents a re-examination of Hungary's postwar transition from the perspective of the politics of legitimacy that were deployed by the various significant political actors. It argues that postwar state formation following Soviet occupation and legitimacy were closely connected. Hungary's communists and their allies aimed to create a state based on the ideological formula of ‘people's democracy’, which in the Hungarian context led them to build a state based on the restricted social base of the industrial working class. They ignored or antagonised alternative political traditions, particularly those associated with the rural majority and middle classes, which were instead mobilised by an alternative project that rested on a democratised conservatism. This created two visions of a potential postwar political order. The contest between these two visions generated the bitter political struggles that characterised the late 1940s and shaped the social roots of dictatorship in the country.

This article considers the postwar Czechoslovak regime's attempt to employ the courts to gain political legitimacy. In particular, it examines four retribution trials of prominent Czech collaborators and German Nazis and the role these cases played in the development of the contemporary power struggle. The article argues that the postwar regime's manipulation of the judicial system for political ends was fraught with contradictions and ultimately met with only limited success.

This article explores the meaning and impact of the Nazi concept of a ‘New Order’ for Europe on German-occupied Denmark. The first German civil authority in power in Denmark was the Foreign Ministry, which struggled to conclude an economic union with Denmark in summer 1940. Then Goering's Four-Year Plan and the Reich Economics Ministry took command and economic union was abandoned by Berlin, since a pragmatic, day-to-day approach now prevailed. Other initiatives were taken in order to facilitate Denmark's incorporation in the European New Order, such as the setting up of a ministerial Eastern Committee with the purpose of re-establishing Danish industry in the occupied USSR. The article shows how, in Denmark, German short-term politics actually coincided with long-term plans. Germany's ideas of becoming the economic centre of a self-sufficient continental Europe were closely connected to the idea of securing foodstuffs from its neighbours, and this idea, too, was implemented in spring and early summer 1940, when, after the swift occupation of Denmark and the subsequent severance of its trade with Britain, agricultural exports were diverted to the German market.

After 1950, at least 23,000 German POWs remained in Soviet captivity as ‘war criminals’, and they were pardoned and released in several amnesties from 1950 to 1956. This article examines the political and propagandistic reactions of the ruling SED to the return of those prisoners. It analyses how the SED's attempts to reintegrate ‘war criminals’ into a socialist society related to the official politics of the past (Vergangenheitspolitik) and the construction of a memory of the Nazi past in East Germany. The SED's key strategy in dealing with these returnees – avoiding the question of individual and collective responsibility – is put into the context of the party's central ideological objective, namely to dissociate the socialist GDR from the legacy of Nazi Germany. On the basis of newly accessible documents from the archives of the former Ministry for State Security, the article also describes the intensive involvement of the Stasi in repatriation and reintegration matters at all levels of society.

Although almost all of Europe was under royal rule for most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, very little effort has so far been dedicated to explaining this phenomenon. By examining royal photographs the author is able to shed light on some of the central mechanisms leading to this remarkable royal success. By analysing the production, distribution and perception of royal photographs in a variety of European countries, this article shows that these images were a crucial means by which royal families were turned into powerful symbols of modern nations. Regularly made by the most renowned portrait photographers and widely distributed via the press and as postcards and personal commemorative gifts, royal photographs allowed monarchies to acquire an absolutely vital asset for their survival at the head of modern European societies, namely strong emotional bonds between individual members of the general public and royal families.

This article considers the role of music among German, Polish and Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp. It focuses primarily on the songs that were composed and sung in the camp, of which at least 350 are known. The article uses song as a lens through which to examine the diversity of the camp's social landscape, and places particular emphasis on the distinctive ways in which prisoner groups chose to interpret and respond to the experience of incarceration.

With the outbreak of war in Ethiopia in late 1935 Italian Fascism shifted into a new phase, which can be called imperial-colonialist-racial. Until 1935 Italy had invested little in the colonies and maintained a relatively small presence in Africa beyond a few cities in Libya. Yet from 1935 to 1940 the Fascist regime shifted enormous amounts of money and effort to create a new Fascist colonial society. This article attempts to explain how this happened by linking the shift to imperial politics to a new totalitarian drive to re-educate Italians and to the adoption of official racism.

The constitutional debate around the establishment of the Union Française (1946) is examined here as part of a long-term debate between two competing definitions of the nation and the republic: an integrating and ‘jacobin’ one, which aimed at moulding the colonial empire along the lines of the ‘one and indivisible’ republic, and another, ‘Girondin’ and contextual one, that saw the Union Française as a possible means of carving out a diverse, possibly divisible, republic. Two different ways of considering both French citizenship and the hybrid citizenship of the Union Française as put together in the Constitution of 1946 developed out of those two conceptions.

The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police.