When considering the importance of France in Neruda’s life and works, scholars have chronicled up to nine separate visits, from the anecdotes of amorous adventures to a desperate search for political asylum, friendships and romances, forged and dissolved. This chapter studies the importance of France and its impact on the evolution of Neruda’s artistic values and production through the literary lens of key poems associated with five particular visits to France. Among other poems related to Neruda’s stay in France, this chapter focuses on references to Picasso in Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind, 1952) and their collaboration in Toros (Bulls, 1960), where they express their shared love for and faith in Spain.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

A targeted European welfare state emerged between 1950 and 1992, one that was referred to in the late 1980s as the ‘social flank to the internal market’. This chapter will begin with a chronological overview, including a first section on the slow development of this European social policy between 1945 and 1985, and a second one its heights under Jacques Delors (1985–1995). It will then proceed with a topical exploration of European measures in this area (protecting the weak, environmental policy, regional solidarity), before concluding with an analysis of the two most important alternatives that were later abandoned: planning, and comprehensive social and fiscal harmonisation. This relative weakness of social Europe can be explained by its late development, by the sheer difficulty of organising a transnational social movement, as well as by divisions among its supporters. Besides, Thatcher was a formidable obstacle, one that Delors sought to circumvent through greater use of qualified majority voting. Other important actors were European trade unions, gender and environmental activists, as well as members of the European Parliament.

In an exceptional phenomenon in world history, eleven European countries, among the richest in the world, freely decided to create a monetary union in 1992, doing so during a powerful neoliberal shift. How to explain this, and what connection is there between European monetary integration and neoliberalism? This chapter argues that monetary union cannot be reduced exclusively to its neoliberal dimension, as forging such a union was devised by European leaders before the neoliberal turn, and had numerous justifications including ones more consistent with the solidarity and the community governance of capitalism. While the literature on the history of the European Monetary Union is extensive, additional archival research conducted for this book has shed new light on two neglected factors: the importance of projects for monetary cooperation devised in the 1950s and 1960s within the framework of the EEC (before the neoliberal turn); and the crucial importance of concerted stimulus in 1978, followed by German balance of payment difficulties in 1980–1981, which explain the convergence towards stability-oriented policy.

Building on the previous chapter, this one zooms in on the role of psychiatry in stimulating the discourse of homosexuality. Comparing developments in France to those in Belgium, it demonstrates how, in the former, a rising psychiatric profession latched onto sexual psychopathology to help establish medical control over the largely Catholic system of insane asylums in close alliance with an anticlerical state. The homosexual ‘invert’ thus served as an emblem of secularism. Belgium’s political culture, by contrast, was dominated by Catholics and laissez-faire liberals, neither of whom could support state expansion in the realm of mental health care, which the former dominated and the latter approached as a business. The country’s insane asylums would remain firmly in the hands of religious congregations and private entrepreneurs, stunting the development of an independent, confident, and militant psychiatry. Dominated by Catholics, the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine was hostile to new-fangled ideas about ‘sexual inversion.’ This is shown through the growing skepticism of its members to the work of the pioneering Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who increasingly came to see ‘contrary sexual feeling’ as an innate and morally innocent ‘condition.’

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

This chapter discusses the renewed interest in the Arthurian matter in Europe in the nineteenth century with a focus on Germany, Spain, France and Italy. Tracing its reception from the Romantic period through to the emergence of modernism, we explore how the content,  values and aesthetic of Arthurian literature infused the cultural landscape. The form of reception ranges from the use of actual Arthurian material and chronotypes to the secondary influence exerted by the contemporary reception of Arthurian legend through Scott, Tennyson and later Wagner. The pattern of reception echoes that of earlier periods in its transnational character and, as the century progresses, it possible to see waves of interest with a ripple effect spreading out across Europe from Britain and the German-speaking lands as the material is incrementally absorbed into the contemporary cultural matrix of the Continent.

So deep was Aotearoa in the watery world of the Pacific that it remained for a long time unknown to Europeans, other than as a part of the mythical great southern land, Terra Australis. Surely there had to be a continent in the South Pacific to balance the weight of land in the Northern Hemisphere? As it proved, there was not. New Zealand is immersed in the Pacific, surrounded by 2000 kilometres of ocean, a fact that is reflected in Māori waka (canoe) traditions. Only in the late eighteenth century did its full outline register in European consciousness through the process of physical discovery.

The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

Rights, in the Early Modern era, were conceived in terms of divine and natural law. They were understood to be powers, or faculties, belonging to an individual, or to communities, that had existed from the beginnings of time. The intellectual underpinnings of rights theory were derived from the moral theology of the scholastics, and lay in the idea that rights were a God-given power of the soul, and an expression of active virtue. This was true in the Medieval era, and it remained so in the Early Modern, when the origins of ideas about natural rights lay in the poverty controversies of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The appeal to the concept of a natural right was first and foremost a moral endeavour.

The expression ‘divine right’ might sound obsolete to modern ears; indeed, it might recall images of an archaic and irrational society. In early modern Europe, things were far from it. As we shall see, divine right represented a systematically argued philosophical theory at the centre of which stood the justification for strong, earthly, power. Divine right is here understood in a specific political sense since it mainly concerns the authority of monarchs (not of bishops and not of republican governors). Such theory argued that God had given power ‘directly and immediately’ to kings, not to the people. Hence the ruler was accountable to none but God; had always to be obeyed; and held unlimited power (consequently, no form of resistance was legitimate). Divine right theory had at its core the idea, and the practice, of the individuality of kingly right, not of people’s individual rights. It expounded a subjective right, not an individual one.