The global politics of sovereignty that developed after the Cold War, together with the catastrophic United States led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, have furnished international, imperial and diplomatic historians with good, grim reasons to return to the interlocked histories of empire, internationalism and international institutions. A torrent of work on the Geneva based League of Nations (LON) has been one result, alongside writing on the United Nations (UN). In particular, scholars such as Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga, already well versed in the archives and literature of European empires and their gender and economic politics, have led a systematic reappraisal of internationalism and international institutions after the First World War. They brought to this campaign heuristic tools sharpened in the 1990s, in the cultural historiography of empire, and they aimed broadly to understand the League's workings and variety, rather than to reassert its political failures. The parallel – and often intersecting – rise of historiographies on the modern and contemporary histories of economic development, human rights and humanitarianism, with their frequent attention to the role of international institutions, has further catalysed this renewal.

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the self became important for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions.

This review essay explores recent scholarship on the history of Jews in the post-Habsburg territories, before and after the Second World War. The impressive wave of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on European Jewish history shortly before, during and, increasingly, after the Holocaust, has only made historians more aware of how much they have left to do to reconstruct, at least in text, the lives of European Jews – a multilingual and culturally, economically and politically heterogeneous group – that the Holocaust so systematically and brutally destroyed. Aiming to overcome reductionist attempts that either subsume the history of Jews under a national narrative or parcel it into separate national units without comparative or transnational agendas, a growing number of scholars aim to reconceptualise Jewish history as being crucial to European and global history.

In Norse mythology Fenrir, a wolf God born of the God of fire, possessed so much power that he horrified the other gods. Restrained by a chain forged from elements of the earth – such as the breath of fish and the roots of mountains – his power was held in check so that it could not be unleashed across the realms of gods and men. The chains of his captivity appeared to be fragile but were in fact supernaturally robust, though his eventual catastrophic escape was foretold by oracles of the age.

The question of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) has risen sharply up the French political agenda over the last twenty-five years. Ways in which it is defined and applied are hotly contested and lie at the nerve centre of wide debates about the nature of the Republic, French national identity and indeed of France's colonial past. According to an IFOP opinion poll in November 2015, 87 per cent of French people agreed that was important to respect laïcité at school, 84 per cent of respondents said that it was part of France's identity while 81 per cent thought that it was under threat in France. That said, they did not agree on what laïcité meant. For 32 per cent it meant separating religion from politics, for 27 per cent it meant ensuring liberty of conscience, while 17 per cent said it meant reducing the influence of religion in society. Historians, sociologists and political scientists as well as journalists and activists join battle on the question, and a selection of their recent contributions, from different angles and with different methodologies, are reviewed here.

The on-going military conflict in eastern Ukraine has revitalised historical discussion and history battles in the country rendering history more relevant than ever before. Since 2014 different sides in the conflict have used historical references, specifically to the Second World War, to validate their actions. Moscow most notably claimed to be protecting the population of eastern Ukraine from Ukrainian ‘fascists’: the story of a three-year Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian nationalists on Russian state television was enhanced by references to atrocities that Ukrainian nationalists allegedly perpetrated during the Second World War. It is not, of course, the first time a regime has used history as a justification for military aggression or territorial annexation. Across Europe in the twentieth century, history has been used to defend political goals, and politics has been used to write history. The bellicose politicisation of history became the norm in Ukraine in 2014.

A steady stream of creative new scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe has been arriving at the desks of reviews editors in Contemporary European History. Commissioning and editing essays on this scholarship has persuasively demonstrated its wider importance, not least in challenging the ambiguous and arbitrary line that continues to divide European historiography between East and West. We have therefore taken the decision to present the following five articles collectively, as a means of reflecting on and interrogating assumptions in European historiography. Why do Germany and France still dominate narratives of the Great War? Can we speak of urban continuities and similarities across the socialist and capitalist spheres? How does studying food offer new insights on the global phenomenon of socialism and socialist production?

In the introduction to their excellent survey of the First World War in Central Europe, Our War (Nasza wojna), Polish historians Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny begin by wondering why the name of Przasnysz, a small Polish town north of Warsaw, carries today no connotations of misery or horror. In late 1914 and early 1915, they note, the Germans and Russians fought several ferocious battles in its vicinity, battles that ultimately claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties. And yet its name never became a part of the shared historical memory of the First World War. Przasnysz and its battles are long forgotten, not only, as might be expected, in Belgium, France and Great Britain, but also in Germany, Russia and the rest of Poland. This, Borodziej and Górny note, is symptomatic of the hold that the war's Western Front has exercised for generations on the imaginations of scholars and the wider public alike – even within the states that now occupy the territory on which the titanic clashes of the Russian, Austrian and German empires claimed millions of lives. To schoolchildren in Warsaw no less than to scholars in Great Britain and the United States, the First World War is synonymous with the trenches of Belgium and France, and with the haunted names of Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But the evidence of Nasza wojna and the other three books under review here suggests that the Eastern Front is finally emerging as a subject of scholarly and popular interest. Moreover, these books illustrate that careful study of that Front has the potential to deepen our understanding of the war's complex dynamics and their impact on the states and societies that grappled with them. The sweeping conquests and extended occupations of ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse populations; the migration of ethnic hostilities from the front lines to the home fronts of multinational states; the profound divide between urban and rural experiences of the war; the ways in which military institutions adapted to the industrialised brutality of modern warfare and the ways that venerable but sprawling imperial state systems tried to come to grips with the war's demands are just a few of the themes addressed by the books under review here. The history of the period, and of modern European history in general, stands to be greatly enriched by a renewed interest in ‘the forgotten Great War’.

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet read The Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without reading Švejk. I did, and he was right.

One of the defining paradoxes of interwar France was the coexistence of a deep-rooted belief in national decadence with the development of a wide range of innovative organisations, cumulatively mobilising millions of people, as a means of fighting this supposed decline. While women played a key role in perpetuating the belief that the Republic was deteriorating, created numerous politically-oriented groups and entered into the government as ministers for the first time, these facts have barely entered into scholarly analysis of the state of France's political culture. Beginning in the 1960s a narrative of stagnation tended to dominate scholars’ interpretations of the interwar years. Reflective of the times, gender was absent from such analyses, as scholars defined ‘politics’ in certain ways and assumed that political actors were men. The influential political scientist Stanley Hoffman, for example, insisted that this was a period of stalemate, essentially the consequence of a failure to modernise during the Third Republic (1870–1940). Hoffman argued that peasants, small business and the bourgeoisie coalesced to advocate for protectionist measures and resist social and economic reforms. This conservative agenda was facilitated by governments that sought to limit economic change, which contributed to ministerial instability: during the interwar period, the French government changed forty-seven times, compared to thirty in Poland and Romania, nine in Great Britain and an average of one per year in Weimar Germany, Belgium and Sweden. For Anglophone and Francophone proponents of the idea of a systemic crisis, the Third Republic appears fundamentally flawed, crippled by an intrinsic defect rather than a democratic government that opened spaces for dynamic groups and movements to effect real change.

With a slight shrug of the shoulders, a middle-aged, middle-class man describes his teenage years as a member of the Hungarian punk scene: ‘we were right-wing punks. Because this was full communism’. This sentiment is echoed throughout Lucile Chaufour's documentary stroll down communist memory lane. We were angry teenagers, her interview partners tell the camera; we were unhappy, we hated communism, we hated the Soviet Union, but we loved Hungary, and anti-government sentiment in a left-wing regime turns a hard right.

The rapid industrialisation and electrification that characterises the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the revolutionary and irreversible technologisation of sound. The ability to send sound great distances, through time and space, amplified the instability of sonic presence both inside and outside the body. Sound reproduction technologies such as gramophone and radio emphasise the questionable materiality of sound. Scholarship in the emerging field of sound studies has tended to focus on sound technologies that emerge in this period, promoting the axiom that the ear epitomises modern sensibility. Even before technological developments revolutionised sound, discourses surrounding the ear anticipated the collapse of scientific certainty that marks the modern age. Developments in sound technology can mask the severing of scientific measurement from musical aesthetics that coincided with the age of recording. If the study of sound in modernity has tended to focus on technological changes and bracket aesthetic questions, it is perhaps because the relationships among the science, technology and aesthetics of sound have not yet been adequately parsed.

When the angry homeowners of a popular Seattle neighbourhood recently decided to rise in protest against the impending changes in the urban development code, they claimed that their chief goal was to protect the district from turning into an ‘Eastern Bloc city’. If the City Council allowed the new legislation to pass, reported The Seattle Times, Seattle was ‘in danger of becoming the Soviet Warsaw or East Berlin of the Pacific Northwest’. ‘I've been to Poland’, one protester said, ‘I know what they [Polish cities] look like. They're bleak. They're dead.’

It is a historiographical commonplace to portray France during the so-called Trente Glorieuses of economic expansion after the Liberation, especially during the last of those three decades ending in the 1973 oil crisis, as engaged heart and soul in a project of full-throttle modernisation. The Fifth Republic under Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou rolled up its sleeves and set to work tackling the country's multifarious examples of historical backwardness. France ceased to be a nation of peasants, small-minded small business owners and bolshie workers, and instead dreamed of becoming one of confident technocrats, technicians and world-beating industrialists. Only after the end of the Trente Glorieuses, it is often assumed, did that dream of technologically based progress give way to greater scepticism, pessimism and environmental concern, for modernisation swept all before it until its assumptions were rudely challenged by the end of growth in October 1973 - or at least until they were by the political crisis of May 1968. While more critical perspectives on post-war modernisation are evident in recent historiography, notably on issues around planning in general and housing and the grands ensembles in particular, transport policy and the set of social experiences which it sought to shape have been relatively more marginal to our understanding. This review article seeks to explore how issues around transport, and their broader implications about the very nature of modern growth-oriented capitalist society, are leading the debate onto new terrain. The underlying purpose of several of the books under review is to cast doubt on the accepted narrative of the Trente Glorieuses. They do so, however, in two defiantly opposite directions: some defending the distinctly pro-car orientation of the post-war elites and others offering a more radical critique of this perspective.

What role did consumption, the mass media and popular culture play in post-war Eastern Europe? Did they help ‘normalise’ state socialism or rather inspire outlooks and desires incongruent with communist regimes’ goals? These questions are central to recent scholarship which has departed from conventional Cold War studies centred on narrowly-conceived political elites and modes of Soviet domination. Instead, using the lens of social and cultural history, scholars have turned to exploring Eastern European societies as independent subjects in their own right. Looking at workers, middle classes, women, tourists, hippies, shoppers, television audiences and other groups, this new body of work has questioned the impenetrability of the Iron Curtain and has highlighted Eastern European participation in broader European and global trends. Instead of enumerating failures of the socialist system from ‘economics of shortage’ to the depressing ‘greyness’ of apartment blocks, scholars now explore ‘pleasures in socialism’, including leisure, fashion and consumer culture. In place of preponderant societal resistance against the controlling state, they expose complex ways of appropriation, accommodation and identification with elements of state socialism by individuals and groups.

Food in the former Soviet Union remains serious political business. In the summer of 2014, in retaliation against Western sanctions imposed in response to the annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin's government decreed an odd brand of ‘self-sanctions’ by forbidding the importation of many foodstuffs from the United States and the European Union. Conservative supporters of President Putin sprang into action, exhorting Russian consumers to embrace the opportunity to develop Russian agriculture while Putin's opponents raised the spectre of late Soviet food shortages. Though starvation does not seem like a genuine threat to modern Russia, the fact that these questions are raised at all requires scholars of food to pay attention to Russia and scholars of Russia to view food as an important aspect of the country's history. Serious studies of food in the Soviet Union and under other socialist regimes are particularly worthy of attention since these socio-economic systems, paradoxically, were best known both for proclaiming an end to hunger and for presiding over chronic shortages if not outright famines.

It is striking the extent to which many liberals have seen themselves as figures on the margins of politics. This is partly an ideological issue. Of all the great ‘isms’ of the modern age, liberalism has had neither the historical certainty of the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, nor the reassuring hierarchical logic of conservatism. Most liberals have agonised about how much humans can achieve and have repeatedly stressed the fallibility of rational or democratic solutions, at least in comparison with more revolutionary ideologies like communism. But liberals’ sense of living on the margins is also a consequence of the context in which liberalism was born. In Europe, the spectre of the French Revolution – and, later, the Bolshevik Revolution – gave liberalism a specific flavour. Liberals were often keen on reform, but they always feared social upheaval. Time and again, liberals found themselves in power only to lose control of the pace of social change. In the worst cases – 1815, 1848 or 1917 spring to mind – this put the liberal cause back by generations. For much of modern European history, to be a liberal was to be in a perpetual state of siege.

Recent empirical research into humour and memory attests to the fact that people remember better when they perceive a word, phrase or image to be humorous. When the proximity of multiple ethnic groups engenders jokes displaying diverse perspectives and what Henri Bergson described as ‘corrective’ satire, such jokes can help remedy racism and fear of the other. Taking a humorous or satirical stance allows artists and writers to explore alternatives to contemporary reality and to uncover truths overlooked or consciously elided by government and mass media discourse. Such is the case with the recent publications on humour discussed here. Although they vary widely by topic and time period, all focus on how power struggles, oppression and violence are represented by means of humour and satire, as well as by the not necessarily jocular but nevertheless related genres of comics and the graphic novel. Recent historical research demonstrates how these creative genres not only critique political events and figures but also preserve, in a sophisticated cultural format, their readers’ short-term everyday working memory and long-term cultural memory of prejudice, subjugation and mass murder. In these texts the authors spotlight how the primary source creators commented on historical events, incorporated historical artefacts in their works and generated countercultural memories that fill gaps in historical narratives from other sources.

Tucked away on the b-side of the Sex Pistols’ third single, ‘Pretty Vacant’ (1977), is a cover version of The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’. The song had long been a staple of the Pistols’ live set; on record, however, Johnny Rotten chose to open the track with a diatribe against those attempting to imbue the punk culture he helped instigate with broader socio-economic, cultural or political implications. ‘Here we go now’, he snarled, ‘a sociology lecture, with a bit of psychology, a bit of neurology, a bit of fuckology’.