This article examines in a comparative perspective the regulations to contain the process of family reunification implemented by the French and British governments in the early 1970s. The comparative analysis highlights how, despite their stemming from different legal systems, these rules repeatedly attempted to deny any right to family reunification, and shows that social and legal definitions aimed at measuring the extent of the family became more than once a source of many difficulties in the admission process. The comparison also allows for an evaluation of the way these controls were administered at points of departure and ports of entry and, more significantly, examines the predominance of governmental and administrative structures to demonstrate how in both cases these rules led to numerous infringements of immigrants' fundamental rights.

The institutional and intellectual transition of German academe from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic required a measure of self-denazification and intellectual realignment which combined a deliberate ‘politics of the past’ with the safeguards of professorial status. Against the background of the re-established civil service culture in postwar Germany this ‘moratorium of the mandarins’ can be seen as a social and intellectual process which required a re-evaluation of academic style and substance within the bounds of professorial collegiality. This process was exemplified in cases from history, theology and physics at the University of Göttingen.

Throughout the 1960s the international monetary system crumbled in a gradual process which was punctuated by a series of crises. The international community proposed, debated and ultimately procrastinated over major reforms, and opted instead for ad hoc ‘plumbing’ solutions such as the Gold Pool and bilateral currency swaps. While this turmoil unfolded, Britain made repeated attempts to join the European Economic Community. This article shows that while monetary issues were not as often publicly discussed, they were a crucial factor in the negotiations for British membership. It also aims to bring together the discussions on the reform of the international monetary system in the 1960s with those on the enlargement of the EC.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the growth of towns was accompanied by the birth of a European and international municipal movement. In 1913 the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA) was founded in Ghent. This combined two approaches, one political and utopian, the other technical and professional. The former focused on turning cities into promoters of a project for co-operation at European and worldwide level; the latter on solving the problems caused by urbanisation. They shared a determination to pursue their objectives regardless of the barriers of culture and national boundaries, and of the administrative hierarchy between local and national government. Between the two world wars the UIV/IULA gradually lost its original utopian inspiration, which was taken up by the Conseil des Communes d'Europe/Council of European Municipalities, founded in Geneva in 1951 with the aim of using the municipalities as a starting point to promote a federation of European states.

Town twinning can be seen as the first activity to involve municipal institutions as such in wide-ranging and long-term international action. Twinning fits Eric Hobsbawm's definition of an ‘invented tradition’. The French federalists played a decisive part in this process of invention, bringing European municipalities together in order to ensure an eventual European political union. Before long, however, the so-called bilingualist movement also turned to twinning as a way to further a universal mutual understanding that transcended the East–West divide. This resulted in a big clash between the French twinning organisations. Thus, the invention of town twinning needs to be studied alongside the dynamic political tensions that emerged on the French political scene during the Cold War

This article analyses the contribution of European socialism to the building of a variegated network of reformers in municipal politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Unsuccessful as a network inside the Second International, a broader international federation of cities, the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA), was proposed in 1913. Belgian, French, Dutch and English socialist leaders remained strongly influential in this federation between the two world wars, working in connection with co-operative movements and the International Labour Office based in Geneva. The fifty years of debates and projects animated by the international journal Les Annales de la Régie Directe founded by the French socialist Edgard Milhaud allows us to follow the development of a generation of local reformers from the beginnings of municipalist thought and praxis up to the idea of building a decentralised European Community of cities and regional authorities.

Attempts to develop a ‘municipal science’ bear witness to the challenges posed by the city to methods of government in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in France. Both in France and on the international scene, reformers sought new ways of thinking ‘scientifically’ about towns and their government. This article takes a serious look at ‘municipal science’, a fragile development which was never fully accepted in academic circles. It studies the endeavours to provide a scientific clothing for the reforming discourse developed by associations of town councillors and disseminated by teaching institutions or journals devoted to municipal administration. It also examines the contribution made by this crusade – at once political and scientific – to the renewal of public action through local authorities.

Globalisation, the buzzword of the late twentieth century, calls for the attention of historians. As others have already suggested, one way to contribute to the historicisation of the phenomena encapsulated in this idiom is to pay attention to connections over long periods. Connections between municipal governments and exchanges about the subject have both been neglected by historical scholarship for various reasons, but they can contribute to the history of the ‘construction of the universal’. Indeed, the information systems of municipal connections – their vectors, actors and structures – have defined, intersected with, nourished or undergone a series of would-be universalist ‘transboundary formations’. These formations are shifting combinations of values, collective actions, practices, rules, organisations and individuals, all of which are advanced as possible futures for mankind. By examining some of these discourses of ‘social order’ and ‘world order’ and the way in which they combine with municipal connections, this article attempts to produce the ‘municipal contribution’ announced in its title.

The new Polish state was founded more than 100 years after Poland's partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria. The partitioned Polish lands had been included one way or another in the administrative structure of the ocupying powers, and the individuals who became active in urban issues in the new state were socialised by associations established by the partitioners. Poland became not only a arena for a meeting of Prussian, Russian and Austrian imaginations about local government but also a place with a great variety of municipal praxises as well. The author analyses different meanings of local government with special attention to those employed by municipal officers from Warsaw and Cracow within the Union of Polish Cities. There were strong regional cleavages in the Union, but the political development of the Polish state strengthened centralisation and the Union itself remained united.

Salazar's Portugal, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany were roughly contemporaneous departures from what had come to seem the progressive democratic mainstream. Seeking greater authority and effectiveness, each revolved around a strong leader and a single party. So there was unquestionably a family resemblance among them, and comparison surely illuminates each. Moreover, it is useful to pinpoint the variables that account for the differences among them. By doing so, in fact, we can devise a comparative array, a scale of radicalisation, understood in the neutral sense as the extent of departure from the norm and/or the prior situation.

This article considers four dictatorships that have each been associated with European fascism: Portuguese Salazarism, Spanish Francoism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. It seeks to ascertain the ‘locus’ of political decision-making authority, the composition and the recruitment channels of the dictatorships' ministerial elites during the fascist era. The interaction between the single party, the government, the state apparatus and civil society appears fundamental if we are to achieve an understanding of the different ways in which the various dictatorships of the fascist era functioned. The party and its ancillary organisations were not simply parallel institutions: they attempted to gain control of the bureaucracy and select the governing elite – forcing some dictatorships towards an unstable equilibrium in the process, even while they were the central agents for the creation and maintenance of the leader's charismatic authority. The article focuses on an analysis of the gradations of these tensions that may be illustrated by the eventual emergence of a weaker or stronger ‘dualism of power’. This ‘dualism of power’ appears to be the determining factor in explanations for the typological and classificatory variations used to qualify those dictatorships that have been historically associated with fascism, and which have been variously defined as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’, or as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘fascist’.

The French police during the Second World War were used both as a tool of collaboration between the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier and to enforce an internal political reform, known as the National Revolution. The police initially responded enthusiastically, since an input of new resources was promised and the regime's main opponents – communists and foreigners – were also traditional police targets. A fierce repression ensued, police actions including the handing over of communists to the Nazis and playing an important role in deporting foreign Jews to their deaths. However, after two years police support began to falter, and by mid-1943 many police forces were at collapsing point. The police were suffering from an acute patriotic identity crisis and were the target of Resistance propaganda. The promised new resources had largely failed to materialise, which both demoralised the police and further undermined their efficiency.

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Portugal and its regime, Salazar's New State, were presented to the Irish public as a model of a new, socially just and Catholic brand of politics. Deliberately ignoring the repressive nature of the New State, Irish defenders of corporativism benefited from the lack of impartial information concerning it. This lack of information, at least in official circles, was overcome through the establishment of a legation in Lisbon in early 1942. Irish diplomats were able to provide a truer account of life in Portugal, countering the earlier propaganda and providing an interesting picture of the New State at work.

This reply to Professor David D. Roberts' comments must begin with a methodological note. My critic quite correctly states that several of the points discussed in my article have little ‘explanatory value’. Within the history and social sciences disciplines typologies and classifications are of inestimable utility, as Roberts will almost certainly point out to his students. However, they cannot be confused with explanatory models. For this latter purpose there exist models of causality and other analytical instruments for use by those who believe that history is a discipline that is much closer to the social sciences than it is to literature – which is in itself a belief that remains far from consensual. The typologies applied to modern political regimes are, fundamentally, descriptive ideal-types that tell us little about why these regimes were institutionalised and consolidated. Put briefly, these typologies serve more to explain the how rather than the why. It just so happens that why fascism ascended to power does not explain very many of the characteristics of its use of power once it was consolidated.

The idea of an Italian Sonderweg is interesting, but it is not exactly a new interpretation of the Giolittian era. Gaetano Salvemini was very clear in blaming Giolitti for distorting Italy's path to democracy. I agree with Paul Corner's cautionary remark that nothing before the First World War made fascism inevitable. Still, we should look closely at the fifteen years before the Great War, if for no other reason than the fact that the great hopes for reform that marked the period gave rise to little structural reform. Giolitti simply did not bring about the modernisation of the liberal parliamentary system. However, I have my doubts that this adds up to a Sonderweg. Nowhere on the Continent did a modern mass party of the bourgeoisie emerge before 1914. Moreover, in no country did the middle-class movement for reform develop solid links with the growing socialist movement. It is curious in this regard that Corner never mentions France. Certainly the Giolittian era resembles the post-Dreyfus period in French politics more than anything that happened in Germany. It would be interesting for Professor Corner to expand on the viability of the British Lib–Lab pact of 1906; it is implied that this was a model that worked elsewhere on the Continent (p. 286). I also find it surprising that he finds the roots of the Weimar coalition in prewar imperial Germany (p. 294).

This article traces the early contacts between the Spanish anti-Republican conspirators and Germany prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936. It offers new insights into the role played by General Sanjurjo in the run-up to the coup d'état and highlights the importance of chance and personality in the process which led to the Nazi intervention in Spain. The activities of Admiral Canaris' Abwehr as well as of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party prior to the coup are also reassessed. The article uses new Spanish archival evidence to identify how Franco's emissaries met with Hitler, while General Mola's emissaries followed in the wake of the contacts established by Sanjurjo. It challenges the role attributed to the German businessman Johannes Bernhardt enshrined in existing literature. Its conclusions also challenge existing military and economic interpretations of Hitler's decision to assist Franco by asserting the importance of large strategic motives behind the Führer's move.

Between 1942 and 1945, 5,300 Organisation Todt workers were brought to Jersey to build the defensive fortifications ordered by Hitler. A small number of Russian slave labourers escaped from island camps and were sheltered by Jersey residents until the liberation. The article describes the activities of these helpers and the rudimentary network of safe houses they created, as well as comparing their motives with those of the rescuers of Jews in occupied Europe. It ends by outlining reasons for the neglect of this episode of British wartime history and suggests the adoption of a comparative approach as the best way towards an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of resistance in the Channel Islands.

I am indebted to Alexander De Grand for taking the time and trouble to comment on my article, although I am sorry that he seems to have read it principally as an attack on Giolitti and Giolittian policies. While I can see that it is possible to read this into the paper, it was certainly not my intention to lay the responsibility for the development of Fascism at Giolitti's door. My concern was rather to seek to identify some of the reasons for the dramatic clash between left and right in 1920 and 1921 which led to the affirmation of Fascism; it was in this light that I attempted to assess the Giolittian period, which has always seemed to me the great moment of democratic possibilities between one form of repressive government and another. I agree, of course, that the great radicalising and polarising event in Italy was the First World War. My point – put very simply – was that the experience of the war might have been much less devastating for Italy if the political situation in 1914–15 had not already been characterised by profound lacerations within Italian society. To put it another way, I was interested in seeing why, as De Grand himself says, ‘the great hopes for reform that marked that [Giolittian] period gave rise to little structural reform’ and in assessing the consequences of that lack of reform for the subsequent period. The central question of the article, therefore, is that of Fascism as breach or continuity rather than the culpability of Giolitti.

In November 1962 the British and French governments signed an irreversible agreement to build together the Western world's first civil supersonic aeroplane: Concorde. This article explores the background to the agreement, looking in particular at why Britain and France co-operated with each other rather than with the United States or West Germany, the other possible partners. The central argument is that the agreement was driven not by technological convergence in the aircraft industry but by a weakening of Britain's position in 1961 caused by American unwillingness to partner Britain in the supersonic adventure and Britain's decision to apply for membership of the Common Market. The French government was then able to exploit that weakness in order to acquire technological expertise particularly in the field of aircraft engine construction.