When urban planners Marcello Piacentini and Antonio Muñoz looked at the Rome they helped create through their participation in the Master Plan of 1931, they saw a metaphor for Fascism's transformation of Rome, a metaphor that captured the ‘effect’ of the Master Plan but not its ‘intention’. The Fascist regime aimed to build a modern capital on the nineteenth-century models of Paris and Vienna, but created instead a modernist city which challenged, on many levels, the neo-classicist rationalism of the previous century's urban planning. This article explores the reasons for such a disjuncture between intention and effect and finds them within Fascist ideology and experience.

This article examines the origins of Norwegian development aid in the early 1950s and the institutional structure, the geographic spread and the goals of the Norwegian aid effort until the early 1970s. The article argues that Norwegian aid must be seen as the outcome of broad set of considerations of an altruistic, geopolitical and domestic political nature. Both domestic and international pressures from within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development contributed to substantially increasing Norwegian foreign economic assistance from modest beginnings. It is argued that oil wealth played a minor role in this transition.

Leisure and tourism are not just pervasive social and cultural practices, they are also big business, with tourism now being the world's largest industry. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2001 tourism generated $462.2 billion in international receipts, despite declining from the previous year owing to the 11 September terrorist attacks. Thus, leisure and leisure travel have long been vital subjects for a variety of disciplines; economics, sociology, geography, anthropology and literary criticism, among them. Yet if leisure in general has in recent years drawn the attention of historians, tourism is just now coming into its own as an engaging historical subject. The works reviewed here indicate that leisure and tourism thrive as fields of interdisciplinary inquiries. They also demonstrate a new appreciation of tourism among historians, as an expression of individual and collective ‘experience’, as well as for its contributions to major developments, such as nationalism and regional development, class formation, and the rise of modern consumer cultures.

Development aid became a significant feature of British foreign and economic policy from the late 1950s. While giving a chronological account of policy developments in this field down to the publication of the Pearson report of 1971, this article is organised around three predominant themes. First, aid has to be seen in the context of Commonwealth relations, with the Commonwealth as both the major recipient of British aid and the main context in which it was organised and discussed. Second, policies on aid were closely tied to developments in policy on the balance of payments, the perceived state of which consistently influenced the volume of aid-giving. Finally, aid policy was part of a complex international debate about the concept of ‘need’, which at least in part shaped who were to be the recipients of aid, and at the same time about the proper measure of the ‘burden’ of aid which helped to shape the policy of the main givers.I am grateful to Astrid Ringe, Roger Middleton and Neil Rollings for allowing me pre-publication sight of their forthcoming handbook on Public Record Office documents on economic policy in the 1951–64 period. This article has benefited from the comments of Catherine Schenk and participants in the international symposium on aid at the University of Bochum, March 2003.

Development policies are commonly regarded as a phenomenon of the post-Second World War era. This essay looks at the historical antecedents of European development efforts and analyses the determining interests that motivated development policy in the twentieth century. The regional focus on south-east Asia allows for a differentiated appreciation of national approaches to European development policies. It shows that the legitimation of control and the securing of interests–security and economic interests, as well as notions of national prestige–are among the driving forces behind development policies. It also suggests that development policies were multifunctional from their inception.The author wishes to thank Heide-Irene Schmidt and Helge Pharo, the contributors to a workshop on early European development aid (held in Bochum, March 2003), as well as Jost Dülffer, Ruth Jachertz and Philipp Janssen for invaluable comments.

As ever, the Third Reich and its aftermath are still proving a fertile ground for historians. The Nazi dictatorship and its review and reappraisal during the post-war years continue to fascinate historians. The books discussed in the following review highlight the cultural, political, economic and judicial consequences of the Third Reich for postwar Germany.

In the 1960s France's policy on development aid and co-operation had developed to a point where over 1.5 per cent of French gross national product was devoted to supporting growth and stability in African countries. Aid then became ‘global’ and encompassed private ‘aid’ from commercial sources; as such it helped France in its ambition to wield influence in international affairs. Its noblest aim was to create an area in which French culture, borne by thousands of volunteers and experts, would be mixed with the values of the host countries, but its impact was not great enough to prevent corruption or to save development from taking the wrong course.

The history of the foreign assistance policy of European countries has received comparatively little attention from economic, political or diplomatic historians. There is a remarkable lack of archive-based historical studies of intergovernmental and intra-governmental discussions about the aims, methods and priorities of foreign aid and its compatibility with national interests and capabilities. This is the more surprising since the ‘aid question’ constituted the third major field of international relations during the Cold War, and was tightly interlinked with the fields of security, finance and economics. In short, the Europeans' positions on development policy in relation to themselves, the United States and the Third World and between themselves have yet to be analysed. The only significant analysis so far of the inducements offered by the West to the Third World is the book by David K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World.

In 1959, while it was struggling to modernise its economy and to tackle the internal north–south gap, Italy joined Western initiatives to increase the quality and quantity of assistance to developing countries. Politically, this was part of an effort to upgrade Italy's standing in the international arena and to develop a regional role in the Mediterranean. Economically, it could increase exports, but this had to be accommodated to a tight state bugdet and a small private capital market. Therefore in the Development Assistance Group/Development Assistance Committee Italy opposed both narrow definitions and automatic criteria for burden sharing. The 1962–63 structural crisis required a new policy and a limit to foreign aid commitments. Export credits remained the key instrument of Italy's development assistance, while ‘soft loans’ as requested by DAC resolutions were considered incompatible with Italy's capabilities and financial resources and had to be restricted to the multilateral level.

By the end of the 1950s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had established its global approach in Dutch development policy, with the United Nations regarded as the ideal platform. This article argues that in the course of the following decade Dutch business interests succeeded in challenging the multilateral approach, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs shaping the legal instruments of foreign aid, such as tied aid and investment guarantees. The article further argues that despite this economic pragmatism the Minister for Development Co-operation managed to represent the Netherlands as a distinterested worldwide actor by the end of the 1960s.

The article argues that although the Federal Republic of Germany had a genuine interest in the development of the ‘Third World’, it was the pressure of the United States that urged West Germany to become a major donor country during the first development decade. Its economic and financial strength made West Germany the primary target of burden-sharing claims. Having accepted the position as a major contributor of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries, West Germany at first tried to pursue a development policy based on its own postwar experiences and economic concepts in reconstructing its economy. It operated within the framework developed by Western donor countries in the Development Assistance Committee and agreed to soften the terms of its foreign aid-giving during the second part of the 1960s. Its substantial and effective foreign economic assistance policy gave West Germany some leverage in pursuing its own political interests in other fields and in gaining political status in the international community.

Does the turn of the twenty-first century set a new frontier in the writing of urban history? According to demographers we are advancing towards a fully urbanised world where for the first time the majority of the planet's population will live in cities, but for a European urban historian it is difficult to discern a period in contemporary history when this has not been the main trend. In fact, it has been precisely the overwhelming presence of cities in recent European history which has made it so difficult to define urban history as a distinct branch of knowledge. To some extent, the complexity of the urban fabric and the diversity of events which define an urban environment have often constrained the work of urban historians and the heuristic value of their research in comparison with the work of more established disciplines such as social and economic history, the history of planning and architecture or, even more recently, environmental history.

British policy during the Spanish Civil War was seen by many at the time as dishonest and dishonourable, and this is a criticism that has survived the opening of the official records to historical scrutiny. Research by Jill Edwards, Douglas Little and, most recently, by Enrique Moradiellos has presented the policy pursued by the British government as cynical, callous and objectively pro-Franco. Understandably, however, the literature on this subject, exemplified in the work of these scholars, has focused primarily on establishing how policy decisions were reached within the Foreign Office and other interested branches of government. What has tended to be neglected by historians (with some notable exceptions) has been the experience of British diplomatic and consular officials in the field. These were the men who carried the triple burden not only of being the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office in Spain, but also of negotiating with government and local authorities and of protecting British lives and interests amidst the chaos of civil war. This article seeks to redress the balance by placing the focus on these ‘front-line diplomats’. It concentrates on the experiences of those British diplomatic and consular staff in the main Republican zone who were most directly exposed to the war, although reference will also be made to officials in the Nationalist zone and in the relative tranquillity of the British embassy in exile at Hendaye. The article is concerned more specifically, although not exclusively, with George Ogilvie-Forbes's tenure as chargé d'affaires in Madrid and Valencia (August 1936–March 1937). For this period Ogilvie-Forbes's own papers offer an unparalleled insight into the private opinions of British diplomats in the front line of civil war, and provide a new perspective on their relationships both with each other and with the Foreign Office. The article concludes with the recasting of the British diplomatic presence in Spain in autumn 1937, with the relocation of the British embassy from Valencia to Caldetas, outside Barcelona, and the appointment of an agent to represent British interests in Nationalist territory. The first part of the article describes the development of the British diplomatic presence in Spain during this period, while the second examines the civil war's impact on individual British diplomats, and how their experiences affected their relationship with their superiors in London.

Historians' views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, which traded US financial help for a continuation of the United Kingdom's world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, and is often taken for granted in historical writing. There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact. However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which Britain was able to manipulate the relationship to its own ends. The United States still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain in a number of fields – diplomatic, economic and military.

The perennial struggle to fix the meaning of fascism has recently entered a phase which might best be described as, if I dare, palingenetic, one of rebirth after a period of crisis or decline. If there is any consensus to be reached from this debate, recently relaunched by Roger Griffin, it might be that fascism is more than simply a variety of political ideology or a category of state system. As recent scholarship has increasingly emphasised, not least Griffin himself, the cultural dimensions of fascist movements, in their many European manifestations, are as significant as their organizational development, their electoral successes and failures or their political programmes. Some have attributed this shift towards considering fascism as a cultural system to George Mosse's anthropologically informed interpretation of fascism. A closer reading of these ‘culturalist’ studies reveals that the euphemistically described ‘linguistic turn’ and social anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, have played a far more significant role in reconceptualising the problem of fascism than has Mosse's work.

This article presents an historical analysis of the European Union's educational policy from the inception of the European Community to the establishment of a directorate for education in the European Commission in 1993. It tells the story of a policy that was not anticipated in the original EEC programme but which developed as a result of the Single Market plan and the gradual acknowledgement that educational issues were related to common economic concerns.For a recent discussion of education, economic integration and the Single Market plan see Brad K. Blitz, ‘Professional Mobility and the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications in the European Union: Two Institutional Approaches’, Comparative Education Review, 43, 3 (August 1999), 311–31. The story turns on the ideas and efforts of key individuals working within the Commission and in national ministries. These functionaries took the lead in formulating a limited European educational policy based on co-operation, the sharing of information and, much later, the creation of specific action programmes that sought to increase the mobility of students, teachers and skilled professionals across the Community. During the political uncertainty that characterised the Community in the early 1970s, the functionaries identified education – which was understood to include any formal instruction that prepared the student for a qualification in a particular profession, skill or trade – as a potential policy area that could provide the floundering Community with direction at supposedly low cost to member states. From vague discussions about the value of a skilled and mobile workforce that were enshrined in intergovernmental resolutions, the idea of a European educational policy was eventually seized upon by officials within the Commission and institutionalised in trans-European programmes and Commission-sponsored organisations. Assisted by the European Court of Justice, the Commission was able to initiate educational programmes that received the blessing of the member states and later secured a place for education in a new directorate. Although education never because a supranational policy, it raised the Commission's standing and supported claims that the Community was actively creating a ‘people's Europe’.

In a recent collection of essays on Germany's relations with Latin America Natalja Karthaus argued that ‘Latin America was never a priority area for German foreign policy’.Natalja Karthaus, ‘Lateinamerika als Bezugsfeld der (bundes-) deutschen Außenpolitik’, in Manfred Mols and Christoph Wagner, eds., Deutschland-Lateinamerika: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven (Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 1994), 53. Karthaus's verdict can, in fact, be extended to the Luso-Hispanic world as a whole, thus including Portugal and also, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain.On aspects of the history of German – Spanish relations see now Conrad Kent, Thomas K. Wolber and Cameron M. K. Hewitt, eds., The Lion and the Eagle; Interdisciplinary Essays on German – Spanish Relations over the Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000). Even Hitler's foreign policy, despite its global aspirations, is included in Karthaus's assessment.The focus of this article is largely on Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Portugal. These four countries were of comparatively greater importance to the Nazi regime than the other Latin American countries. On the latter see, inter alia, Jobst-H. Floto, Die Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Venezuela 1933 bis 1958 (Frankfurt/Main, Vervuert, 1991); María M. Camou, Los vaivenes de la politica exterior uruguaya ante la pugna de las potencias; las relaciones con el Tercer Reich (1933–1942) (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1990); Klaus Volland, Das Dritte Reich und Mexiko. Studien zur Entwicklung des deutsch-mexikanischen Verhältnisses 1933–1942 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Ölpolitik (Frankfurt/Main, Berr: Peter Lang, 1976). To Hitler, both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (with the exception of Spain during the first year of that country's civil war and again in 1940/41) were of marginal relevance to his foreign policy objectives. This verdict notwithstanding Nazi Germany maintained regular, indeed in some areas close, relations to the countries of Latin America and the Iberian peninsula which warrant closer examination.

‘History, more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a stopped up toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.’Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002), 116. All translations from the German are my own. Since February 2002 Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Günter Grass's latest book, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Walking like a crab: a novella), has offered these words of wisdom to several hundred thousand readers who have made Grass's book an immediate bestseller in Germany. With plans for the book to be translated into no fewer than thirty-one languages, Pokriefke's insights will soon be available to an international audience.Eva-Maria Mester, ‘Deutschstunde in Lübeck: Übersetzer trafen sich mit Günter Grass’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)-Europadienst, 2 April 2002.

By challenging prevalent ‘realist’ interpretations, this article seeks to open up a new perspective on Anglo-US efforts to create a viable Euro-Atlantic peace system after 1918. Its main thesis is that significant advances to this end did not result from enforcing the Versailles system but rather from a qualitatively new process of peaceful change: the making of the ‘unfinished transatlantic peace order’ of the 1920s. Initiated by Anglo-US policy makers, this process led to the first ‘real’ peace settlements after 1918, the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno pact of 1925. Crucially, these settlements fostered Germany's international reintegration on terms acceptable for France. They thus prefigured the terms on which more permanent stability was achieved after 1945.

This article argues that foreign-exchange transactions were one of the most effective forms of leverage that the Nazi regime had for controlling German business. Using the example of Schering AG, the article traces some of the mechanisms of control and shows how important these transactions were to international firms such as Schering. It further argues that corporate resistance to Nazi efforts to control international German firms was hardly an option because of the vulnerability of those firms to the foreign-exchange decisions of the state. Many of the financial decisions taken by businesses in the 1920s and 30s – coupled with businessmen's own predilection to mix national with private interests – left them highly dependent on the state and quasi-governmental solutions to private commercial problems even before the Machtergreifung.