This discussion of Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe (2011) continues our new series of book fora. Herzog's new overview of changing European sexual mores and behaviour offers a jumping-off point for our panellists to discuss recent trends and future directions in the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, East and West. Jeffrey Weeks (London South Bank University), Franz Eder (University of Vienna), Daniel Healey (University of Reading) and Victoria Harris (University of Birmingham) give their responses, and Herzog replies.

This article examines the relations between the Turkish State Planning Organisation (SPO) and the Western economic system during the first two decades of national planning in Turkey (1960–1980). It traces how the SPO, established with the guidance and full endorsement of international economic institutions came to vehemently oppose Turkish participation in one of their pillars: the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor of the European Union. It argues that the shift in the SPO's world-view was founded upon two distinct understandings of the Turkish nation and its development, situates these understandings within the intellectual history of Turkey's past ambivalence towards the West, and, in doing so, provides a historical case-study of the ideological clash between modernisation and dependency theories of development.

At one time, plastics were claimed to be the material that would not only boost West Germany's economy but also its consumer democracy. However, in the 1970s plastics were redefined as an environmental and consumer hazard. Based on protest letters and other sources, this article explores why plastic came to be redefined and traces how it became an issue of public concern. Now, this iconic material had become symbolic once more, but for negative reasons. I argue that the issue of plastics gained considerable momentum due to their crucial role in creating modern mass consumption. I further argue that the shifting significance of plastics highlights a substantial change in West Germany's political culture. While the early social market economists based citizens’ social belonging around access to economic security and affluence rather than overtly political notions of participation, people started insisting on the political aspects of their group identity as consumers; they defined both consumer information and protection as rights of citizenship.

This article argues for a less EU-centric form of writing European integration history. More specifically, it scrutinises the ways in which the interconnections with other international organisations have energised, complemented or rivalled the efforts of the European Communities/EU. This approach also allows for a reassessment of the alleged sui generis character of European integration. It demonstrates that it was not the precise competences, its effects or its institutional uniqueness that made the EC stand out, but rather the way in which it self-fashioned and surrounded itself with a great sense of expectancy.

This article investigates the making of the Norwegian recycling consumer-citizen by discussing recycling as both a cultural activity – an expression of environmentalist sentiment, an everyday habit and a social expectation – and a technological infrastructure consisting of disposal stations, legal frameworks, transportation systems and the recycling technologies themselves. Using a concept of ‘recycling junctions’ as a means of understanding historical recycling processes, the article focuses on beverage packaging to argue that effective recycling in the modern green state depends on a combination of technologically mediated convenience and green consumer-citizenship, involving a wide range of actors.

Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the ‘twentieth century’ provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.

What can we expect from Dagmar Herzog's book on Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, published in a series on ‘new approaches to European history’? First, the series title suggests new approaches to this booming historical subdiscipline. There are plenty of burning questions about the history of sexuality waiting to be answered: the specificity of European sexuality or, perhaps better, sexualities, during the twentieth century, in comparison to the US, in a global context, and even the differences between the twentieth century and earlier periods. On our wish list we also have a comparative view of regional and national sexual cultures during the ‘century of sex’. A range of studies has been published on the history of sexuality in Europe during the last two decades, which could be used for reference and as templates. According to the mission statement of the Cambridge book series Herzog has to write about all these complex questions at the level of undergraduates. Therefore the bar is set really high for a historian of sexuality. To get straight to the point, Herzog has managed most of these requirements well over most passages of her book. It presents a successful combination of general introduction and historical explanation richly illustrated with numerous examples and historical images. The volume therefore offers an easy entrance into this up till now fairly confusing topic. But, as will be shown, she gives only a rather one-sided insight into the state of the art of recent historical research on European sexuality in the twentieth century.

This article offers reflections on the scholarship in the special issue. It proposes that the formation of an overall narrative of twentieth-century European recycling is a complex matter, depending on issues of gender, age, class, nationality and representation. It suggests the further complications of writing histories of everyday life, points out the various meanings of ‘recycling’ and interrogates waste as an element of consumer culture.

Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History is an astonishingly rich synthesis for a work just short of 225 pages. Its vigorous narrative and energetic arguments never flag, and the wider contours of the continent's twentieth-century history are always in view. This is a book that has the lucidity, and the sophistication, to instruct students and tutors alike.

For Dagmar Herzog, writing the history of sexuality is an act of rebalancing. Sexuality becomes neither positive nor negative, but ambivalent. Herzog destabilises a dominant ‘narrative of gradual progress’, which misunderstands ‘how profoundly complicated the sexual politics of the twentieth century in Europe actually were’ (p. 2). Instead of a linear chronology, Herzog reveals a twentieth century of cyclical change – revolutionary liberalisations and conservative backlashes occur in quick succession, or even concomitantly. Repression appears even within developments considered liberalising by contemporaries. The ambivalences within ‘progress’ and ‘change’ shape sexuality and its history. A third ambivalence is no less important – happiness. Despite being an act inextricably connected with pleasure, sex does not consistently give rise to happiness.