This introductory article situates the study of gratitude within the historiography on emotions and transatlantic relations, particularly in relation to the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. It also sets out the common goals of the articles: inviting historians to take gratitude seriously by defining its relationship to ongoing work in memory, humanitarian and international studies. By identifying a diplomacy of gratitude, it centres on emotional practices and performances and illustrates how this draws in new actors, behaviours and processes to our overall understanding of European–United States relations. Finally, it argues how the contributions to this special issue collectively reveal the historical development of repertoires and processes of gratitude throughout the ‘Transatlantic Century’.1

Based on new archival material, mainly police and judicial records and court sentences from the late 1940s, this article examines the legal and political background of the trials against homosexuals in post-revolutionary and early socialist Yugoslavia. During those years, at least two hundred men were convicted on prison terms for ‘unnatural fornication’ and some four hundred more were arrested and detained in police stations with their names entered into police registries. The year 1949 was particularly harsh for homosexuals in Yugoslavia. Two major anti-homosexual trials were held in Dubrovnik and Zagreb, when groups of homosexual men were accused of creating hotbeds of vice and debauchery. Perceived as a threat to the youth and their socialist upbringing, homosexuals were condemned as not only criminals but also renegades of the new socialist order and in some cases even as its saboteurs. Verdicts expressed a glaring ideological prejudice rooted in the notion that homosexuality was an expression of class exploitation, petty-bourgeois individualism and a visible sign of degeneration inherited from the old regime. The proper moral and sexual development of the youth, the first generation of the new socialist men and women, was consistently at the forefront of the reasoning behind guilty verdicts. This paper offers new insights into the legal history of homosexuality in Yugoslavia and contributes to the historiographical interpretation of ideological and political underpinnings surrounding homosexuality in early socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe.

This article examines the development and transformation of Ukrainian scientific terminology during the early 20th century, particularly under Soviet rule. It traces the roots of terminological efforts in the 19th century, when language planning in Galicia and Ukraine reflected competing imperial influences and nationalist aspirations. The study underscores the nexus of cultural, political and epistemic interests in the shaping of scientific language, noting the transition from vernacular-focused Romantic ideals to the evolving policies of the Soviet korenizatsiia period.

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Institute for Scientific Language led the effort to standardise terminology, aligning with Soviet policies of Ukrainisation/korenizatsiia. However, by the 1930s, Stalinist policies reversed earlier gains, replacing national vocabularies with Russified terms and persecuting many language policymakers and scholars that the Soviet regime had supported only a few years earlier.

This article explores how staff at the UN Regional Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) tried, with mixed success, to incorporate Soviet knowledge and experts into their activities and how these challenging efforts, paradoxically, created a space in which economics could be a shared language of communication across the Cold War divide, both within UN spaces and in adjacent academic networks. This conceptual move allowed economics knowledge to pool between East and West, even though the divide between the blocs was originally expressed in economic terms. In the 1960s, with the global transformations of decolonisation, the ECE’s experts, including those embedded in British academic networks, worked to export their shared knowledge beyond Europe, using the triangulated international space of the UN to promote – and continue gathering – economic information from the Soviet Union.

Tuberculosis was one of the leading causes of death in France at the turn of the twentieth century. During the First World War, increasing death tolls on the front lines heightened concerns over the future of the French nation and galvanised health reformers to take action to bolster the health of France’s future citizens. In cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Red Cross, French public health officials developed educational propaganda programmes designed to teach good health and hygiene practices to France’s youth. Navigating between gendered conceptions of citizenship, national identities and cultural norms, French and American health officials introduced programmes to encourage French schoolchildren to view themselves as key agents in preventing the spread of tuberculosis and protecting France’s demographic future. Through these public health programmes, children could begin to see themselves as active future citizens working to improve public health and hygiene in their schools and local communities.

In this paper I discuss the fundamental reorganisation of Swedish scientific publication in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of ‘internationalisation’ and, in particular, the elimination of periodicals, which was deemed necessary to achieve visibility in a crowded international landscape of publication. In this context, publication language was not so much a matter of choice on the part of individual scientists as a result of explicit policies implemented by government agencies. Investigating the shift towards English as a dominant publication language in Swedish science requires focusing on research councils and policymakers as crucial actors in this process. I discuss the history of the languages of science in the context of the history of scientific publication and the history of information management, specifically in the context of the ‘information explosion’ of the 1960s.

Focusing on the Šamac–Sarajevo railway project, this article examines how Yugoslavia’s Youth Labour Actions (Omladinska radna akcija; ORAs) served as incipient attempts by the Yugoslav state to develop its cultural diplomacy. Adopting a bottom-up perspective, it explores British volunteers’ participation in Yugoslavia’s post-war reconstruction, situating their mobilisation within broader contexts of international reconstruction, idealism and solidarity. Targeting enthusiastic leftist youth, the Yugoslav government strategically employed the ORAs to promote its image in Britain, turning an economic development project into a vehicle for cultural branding. This article argues that Yugoslavia’s attempt to promote its image through the inclusion of British youth was only partially successful. Despite the seemingly idealistic narratives offered by the brigadists, practical challenges and contradictions remained. It examines the complexities of the British youth brigades’ experiences and how their intended propagandistic role was met with scepticism in Britain.

This article explores the evolution and shifting interpretations of the dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary and the creation of its successor states as reflected in the historiographies of Central European nations. It analyses the complex interaction between politics and the socio-cultural milieu, on the one hand, and historiography, on the other. A palpable tension exists between the national narratives and the efforts to construct a commonly accepted story. Inspired by the entangled history approach, the paper identifies common features within these historiographies, which exist despite ostensibly distinct points of departure. Additionally, major interpretative trends in the area up to the present day are characterised, and the impact of the socio-cultural turn and the recent centenary of the First World War critically assessed. The article argues for the practicality of moderate national narratives, which should take into consideration recent developments in the discipline and can help bridge the divide between nation-states on sensitive issues.

This article explores the formation of public perceptions and the evolving historical reputation of Eleftherios Venizelos, arguably the most prominent Greek statesman of the twentieth century. While Venizelos actively cultivated his legacy during his lifetime, the article argues that it was the interplay of posthumous socio-political developments, cross-partisan commemorations and deliberate memory work that gradually solidified his image as a national figure. Focusing on the period from his death in 1936 until the imposition of the military dictatorship in 1967, the article shows how the overlap between Greece’s two major twentieth-century divides – the National Schism and the Civil War – shaped the trajectories of his memory. Tracing these shifts across political uses, historiographical portrayals and public commemorations, the article also engages broader debates on charismatic leadership, political myth and the making of national heroic figures, situating the Greek case within a wider comparative framework.

This article examines one of thousands of reports describing murder trials that are stored in the archives of the Habsburg ruler in Vienna. The monarch was required to evaluate every civilian death sentence in his realm, including the Kingdom of Hungary, and he alone could decide if the execution should proceed or be commuted. But it was the relevant justice minister who composed the reports and framed the decision for the monarch. Through these reports, the minister shaped what would happen through persuasive narrative and expert advice. After evaluating seven hundred reports, we selected one specific case: a murder conviction in Budapest in 1915. We show how the justice minister, an expert in criminal justice reform and an opponent of the death penalty, directed the emperor towards clemency and contributed to the steady decrease in the use of capital punishment.

Scholarship on minorities in the inter-war period have largely ignored the Flemish question. One obvious reason is that the Flemish accounted for a majority of Belgium’s population. This article, however, argues that the domestic and international historiography would benefit from considering the Flemish a minority, albeit a peculiar one. I suggest that the Flemish question embodies the contradictions of an age in which the nationality question ‘morphed into the minority question’ (as Holly Case has pointed out) without disappearing altogether. The article traces the evolution of different understandings of Flanders in the Belgo-Dutch-German transnational space and shows how such understandings challenge traditional conceptions of minorities, majorities, nationalities and kin states. The article further contributes to a broader shift in historiographies of nationalism and diversity in inter-war Europe by moving focus from East to West and considering minority questions as a pan-European phenomenon.

Cold War historiography has long assumed an interruption of most pan-European, West–East economic relations between 1945 and 1989, before the circulation paradigm imposed the idea of a porosity of the ‘iron curtain’. This article offers a double displacement in the analysis of pan-European economic connections during the Cold War. It first highlights the legacy, up to the late 1950s, of pan-European economic debates about socialist economics that have been developed in the interwar period within the communist parties’ network in Europe. Second, it shows how these networks created opportunities in the people’s democracies for challenging the implementation of the Soviet economic model. A clear Cold War divide in the field of economic ideas was delayed, at least until the beginning of the 1960s. A pan-European discussion about the limits of the equation between central planning and socialist economics, developed in capitalist interwar Germany, lived on.

Since the 1970s, Japan has occupied a position of political, economic, and technological power. The article argues that Japan’s rise during this period resulted in increased European East-West cooperation. Firstly, it demonstrates the threat posed by Japanese competition in sectors such as automobiles and electronics encouraged the expansion of Western European companies into Eastern Europe. Secondly, by examining the case of Poland, it shows how Japan’s rise served as a model for opening socialist economies. Viewing the increase in East-West European cooperation through Japan’s ascent offers a fresh perspective on this phenomenon. It illustrates how the emergence of new global powers facilitated the fragmentation of Cold War divisions, enabling a more balanced understanding of the political and economic motivations behind this cooperation in capitalist and socialist countries. It also suggests that East-West European cooperation was shaped by a broader global transformation that escapes a purely Cold War logic.

The paper analyses the creation of socialist Poland’s foreign and foreign economic policies from 1957 to 1967, focusing on the country’s involvement with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the European Economic Community (EEC). It argues that for the Polish policymakers, the interest in accession to GATT went beyond economic benefits such as alleviating the EEC’s protectionism and securing better terms for exports to the Common Market. Joining the Agreement was also important for the political goals of Polish diplomacy and was considered a part of a general drive for rapprochement with the West and implementation of the principle of peaceful coexistence. Redefining the scope of foreign policy, Polish diplomats attempted to embed Poland in a network of international interdependency and wanted to see the country as a pioneer of the East–West détente.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.

This article explores the role of the Vatican and Catholic aid agencies in resettling European displaced victims of war in the aftermath of the Second World War, contributing to the field of refugee history and humanitarian studies. Focusing on the entanglements between Catholic humanitarians and UN agencies such as UNRRA and IRO, it shows how controlling mobility and managing population movements became a central part of the Vatican’s agenda and paved the way to greater involvement of the Catholic Church in the post-war reconstruction. In doing so, the essay intersects primary sources (predominantly from the Vatican and US Catholic archives) and different historiographical debates, with the aim of nuancing our understanding of post-war ‘refugeedom’ and the emergence of the ‘Cold War West’.