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Muslims in Interwar Vienna: The Making and Failing of a Community Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Omar T. Nasr
This article explores the making of a unified Muslim community in interwar Austria and its ultimate failure. It argues that while the Islamischer Kulturbund Wien represented a visionary idea which aimed at establishing a Muslim community, rooted in both faith and Austrian society, it ultimately remained the dream of only a select few individuals. The association succeeded in strategically positioning
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‘Lab Rats for Science’: Uranium Mining, Expellees, Public Health, and Narratives of Radiation Danger in Cold War West Germany, 1955–1968 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-06-03 Caitlin E. Murdock
In 1955–6, three thousand German-speaking men were ‘repatriated’ from Czechoslovak forced labour camps, where they mined uranium, to West Germany, where they demanded benefits for health damage from radiation exposure. These men connected their group's experiences to the fears and developments of early Cold War West Germany, personifying the health risks of the Atomic Age and citizens’ demands that
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Refugees as Resources: A Post-War Experiment in European Refugee Relief Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-31 Pamela Ballinger
This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign refugees in post-Second World War Sardinia undertaken by two idealistic Americans with the support of the Brethren Service Committee and the fledgling UNHCR. Focusing on individuals rejected for immigration, the initiative aimed to integrate these ‘hard core’ refugees by rendering them agents of development
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Fall of a New Soviet-Jewish Person: The Unmasking of Anti-Antisemite Aleksandr Litinskii, aka American Spy Big Boss Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-13 Seth Bernstein
The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not
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Demobilising Opposition to European Integration: The Principle of Subsidiarity and the Creation of the European Union, 1988–1992 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-30 Victor Jaeschke
By analysing new archival evidence, this article reveals how in the late 1980s, the legal principle of subsidiarity came to be seen as a tool for demobilising opposition to further European integration. At the same time, it also became a projection screen for competing visions for Europe's future: while the European Commission saw subsidiarity as an important foundation for a future European federation
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Engineering the Economy through Austerity: The Influence of International Economic Expertise in Iceland after the First World War Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-30 Sveinn M. Jóhannesson
This essay explores how Iceland, a newly independent state on the northern European periphery, responded to the international agenda for post-war stabilisation set out by economic experts after the turmoil of the First World War. It shows that the government of the so-called Austerity Alliance, led by Jón Þorláksson, adopted austerity policies devised at the international financial conferences in Brussels
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Miguel Primo de Rivera y Urquijo: A Forgotten Protagonist of Spain's Transition to Democracy, 1964–1978 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-12 Alfonso Goizueta Alfaro
Historians have traditionally studied Spain's transition to democracy (1975–8) through the point of view of its protagonists, especially King Juan Carlos I and Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez. The figure of Miguel Primo de Rivera y Urquijo (1934–2018), who despite being José Antonio's nephew and Franco's protégé defended the Political Reform Act which restored democracy, is one that however has barely
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A Foot in the Door: The Colonial Section of the German Foreign Office and the Settlement of Germans in Interwar Tanganyika Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Willeke Sandler
After 1925, German settlers began to return to the former German East Africa, lost through the Treaty of Versailles and transformed into the British Mandate of Tanganyika. The German Foreign Office's Colonial Section took on a proactive role to facilitate these Germans’ settlement in their former colony, including working with German ministries to release funding and navigating the British administration
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Liberation, Re-Education, Democratisation: The Politics of Gratitude in German-American Relations after 1945 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Katharina Gerund
The US-American presence in postwar Germany and its role in West Germany's re-education and democratisation have fuelled a discourse of gratitude that has lastingly shaped the transatlantic alliance. German politicians and other policy actors continue to rely on proclamations of ‘thankfulness’ as a means of what Todd Hall has termed ‘emotional diplomacy’. In the process, they affirm a collective memory
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The Divorce Mill: Mercenary Citizenship in the Twilight of the Habsburg Empire Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Dominique Kirchner Reill
This article analyses how wealthy men and women manipulated citizenship regimes during and after the Habsburg Empire to access the family laws most convenient for their private lives. To do this, I compare migratory divorce practices in pre-1918 Habsburg Hungary and the post-1918 Free State of Fiume. This article shows that while before 1918 it was mercenary actors who utilised legal loopholes between
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Swiss Multinationals versus the French Welfare State? The Social Security Deficit, European Integration, and the Battle for ‘Fair’ Drug Prices (1970–1990) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Sabine Pitteloud, Pierre-Yves Donzé
Drawing on corporate and business association archives, this contribution investigates how Swiss multinational enterprises from the pharmaceutical industry (Ciba, Geigy, Hoffmann-La Roche, Sandoz) navigated governments’ interventions in France to preserve their profitability. Our analysis shows how diplomatic talks were crucial for Swiss firms having to cope with rising inflation and the freezing of
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Introduction: The Balkans Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Christian Axboe Nielsen
This journal has in recent years published the Spotlight series, consisting of articles which each attempt to provide an overview of the historiographical landscape in various European countries and major themes in European history. The articles have highlighted methodological developments, significant debates, and risks and challenges to historical scholarship from hostile political directions. To
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Travelling Barricades: Transnational Networks, Diffusion and the Dynamics of 1980s Squatter Conflicts in Western Europe Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Bart van der Steen
This paper reconstructs and compares four squatter conflicts in Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Copenhagen and Hamburg during the 1980s in which squatters defended themselves from eviction from occupied houses by barricading entire streets. Remarkable similarities can be observed in how these conflicts developed. Was this the result of international contacts between the squatters, of similarities between the
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Ideology and the Application of Law in SS Courts: A Case Study of Legal Practice in the Third Reich Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Peter Scharff Smith, Niels Bo Poulsen, Claus Bundgård Christensen
This article provides an empirical study of the inner workings of an institution at the ideological heart of the Nazi state, the SS courts, and analyses how they applied SS law in cases involving unlawful sexual conduct, and how they evaluated the racial characteristics of SS men standing trial. The article demonstrates (1) that the SS courts promoted what has been referred to as an ‘unlimited’, radical
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Slovenian Historiography in the Post-1989 Period Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Jernej Kosi
In 1999, a roundtable entitled ‘The Problems of Slovenian Historiography in the Twentieth Century’ took place at the Institute for Contemporary History (Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino) in Ljubljana. The event was envisioned as a moment where Slovenian historians could collectively confront the state of Slovenian historiography. The organisers asked the invited participants to reflect on the main shortcomings
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Setting the Agenda on the United Kingdom's Policy towards the European Community: Miriam Camps at Chatham House Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Katja Seidel
Historical analysis of the UK government's policy towards European integration is mostly confined to the ‘official’ sphere, that is government, civil service and professional diplomacy. Non-governmental actors within the wider field of para-diplomacy such as policy entrepreneurs or elite foreign policy think tanks have not yet been systematically incorporated in this history. This article explores
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Bulgarian Historiography after 1989 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Stefan Detchev
Speaking on a popular TV show in 1990, soon after the collapse of the previous regime, long-time dissident and doyen of Bulgarian historical science, former Dean of the Faculty of History at the University of Sofia, Nikolay Genchev, insisted on putting the ‘Bulgarian national interest’ ‘above all’. Genchev said with regret that ‘the Bulgarian national problem has recently appeared mainly as a Turkish
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The Unknown Infection, or ‘Rožňava Disease’ in Czechoslovakia in 1951 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Kristýna Kaucká
This article analyses the scientific and ideological impact of the 1951 tick-borne encephalitis epidemic in Rožňava (Czechoslovakia). Scientists in Rožňava discovered the possibility of transmission of the tick-borne encephalitis virus through non-pasteurised milk. The article focuses on both the outbreak in Rožňava, with its social and ideological implications, and the subsequent virological research
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(In)Gratitude, US Ascendancy and Transatlantic Relations after the First World War Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Elisabeth Piller
During and after the First World War, the United States provided very substantial amounts of humanitarian and economic aid to war-torn Europe. All compassion aside, international historians have long recognised the strategic and social expectations attached to such foreign aid. US generosity was to build trust, reverence and influence abroad and, by inspiring ‘gratitude’ among recipients, to translate
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Macedonian Historiography: The Question of Identity and Politics Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Petar Todorov
Historians are playing an important role in Macedonian society. Their understanding of history and their focus of research interest revolves around the national identity of Macedonians and differentiating them from Others. In recent decades, the political debates in the Republic of (North) Macedonia and its relations with Bulgaria and Greece have had important impact on historiographic production and
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Historiography in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Between Academic Discipline and Political Activism Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Husnija Kamberović
The wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s dramatically stimulated interest in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). To satisfy this interest from the outside world, many historical publications offered up various explanations for the outbreak of the wars.1 Yet the prior, and perhaps more significant, development occurred on the eve of the war, when historians in Bosnia and Herzegovina – although
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Arming Upstanding Citizens: Dynamics of Civilian Disarmament and Rearmament in Restoration Spain Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Assumpta Castillo Cañiz
This article examines the state's actions to arm and disarm the civilian population in Spain during the convulsive final years of the Bourbon Restoration period (1917–23). While this topic has received little attention in the abundant literature on the crisis of the liberal regime in Spain, it is crucial to fully understanding the inherent causes and nature of the high levels of political violence
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A Dual Entity: The European Investment Bank and Its Lending Policy from Its Origins to the Late 1970s Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Lucia Coppolaro
By reconstructing the lending policy of the European Investment Bank (EIB) from its inception in 1958 to the late 1970s, this article shows that, until the 1970s, the EIB did not pursue EEC (European Economic Community) policies but policy elaborated at the national level. The individual member states’ political priorities and preferences played a key role in shaping the loan operations and the bank's
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The Price of Isolation: Fascism, Vichy and the Holocaust in French History Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Christophe Farquet
The historiographical debate about France during the Second World War has long been dominated by two foreign historians. On the one hand, the Israeli intellectual Zeev Sternhell notoriously placed the origin of fascism in France's Belle Epoque and saw Vichy France as the paradigmatic example of a fascist regime in his book, Neither Right nor Left, four decades ago. Year after year, Sternhell, who had
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Archaeology of a Treasure Island: Actors and Practices of Holding Companies in Luxembourg (1929–1940) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Matteo Calabrese, Benoît Majerus
Tax avoidance has become a hotly discussed topic. These debates have been informed by academic research done by social scientists. Historians, relative latecomers in the field, argue for a greater consideration of the interwar period so as to understand the pathway dependencies of the infrastructures used for tax dodging practices today. This article explores the question of how Luxembourg became,
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Neighbors, the Jedwabne Massacre of Jews and the Controversy that Changed Poland Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-18 Paweł Machcewicz
There are not many other cases when one single book about history, written by an academic, not only provoked a massive and stormy nationwide debate involving mass media, political leaders and bishops, but also unleashed processes that strongly influenced the self-perceptions of a nation, opening the way for ground-breaking new historical research and, at the same time, for political responses which
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New Histories of and for Europe: Narrating the European Project Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-18 Félix Krawatzek, Friedemann Pestel
Approaching Europe's historical trajectories to explain its present condition is an ever-growing genre. More than 200 years after the Congress of Vienna, more than 100 years after the First World War, more than sixty years after the Treaty of Rome, more than half a decade after the Brexit referendum – and after more than a year of open warfare in Ukraine, the European project remains in constant flux
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How Transnational Exchanges Shaped Conceptions about Morality and Small Nations in Europe: Catalan (and Spanish) Readings of Václav Havel in the 1990s Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas
This paper deals with appraisals of Havel made in Spain in the 1990s. During this decade, the Czech politician's popularity reached a peak in Europe, and Spanish politicians approached his vision of morality in politics in different ways, taking advantage of it to support different political and national projects. In the first half of the decade, interpretations of Havel were especially productive
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Heroes or Outcasts? The Long Saga of the State's Recognition of the Greek Resistance (1944–2006) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Magdalini Fytili, Manos Avgeridis, Eleni Kouki
This article explores how the Greek state created and implemented the legislation relating to recognition of the National Resistance during three different transitional periods of the country's postwar history: civil war, dictatorship and democracy. The article's principal argument is that recognition served as the main tool for building consecutive national narratives not only of the resistance but
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Class Divisions in Use: The Swedish Social Group Taxonomy as Difference Technology, 1911–1970 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Carl-Filip Smedberg
This article investigates an important but understudied phenomenon: the bureaucratic class division, which is analysed as a difference technology for envisioning, studying and managing the population. I examine a long-lived and widely spread taxonomy of the Swedish population into three social groups (Socialgrupper). Specifically, I look at how it influenced the production of statistics and knowledge
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The Birth of the Finance Consumer: Feminists, Bankers and the Re-Gendering of Finance in Mid-Twentieth-Century Sweden Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Orsi Husz
This article examines a series of financial study courses for women in 1950s Sweden, jointly organised by commercial banks and an important non-partisan women's organisation, the Fredrika Bremer Association. The aim is to highlight and explain historical connections between feminism and financialisation. I argue that the feminist aspiration to emancipate women from the curtailments of ‘petty’ domestic
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Reverting to Restraint: A Keynesian Intermezzo and Neoliberalism in the Netherlands (1971–1977) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Jonne Harmsma
In line with recent studies revealing the role of neoliberalism in Dutch post-war history, this article highlights the influence of neoliberal ideas during the first half of the 1970s. In addition to a clear orientation towards supply-side economic policies and a firm tradition of fixed budgetary rules, the author emphasises the importance of Dutch monetarism in guiding Central Bank policies and prioritising
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Honorary Aryans? Japanese German Mischlinge and the Negotiation of Identity in Nazi Germany Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Sarah Panzer
Race is the black box at the centre of the German–Japanese alliance during the Second World War. Early Nazi racial legislation provoked speculation regarding its potential impact on Japanese German Mischlinge (individuals of mixed race), and the regime's reluctance to define its position helped to spread the rumour that they had been recognised as ‘honorary Aryans’. Although this was never more than
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Shaming Through Photographic Denunciation in Nazi Germany, 1933–1938 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Julie R. Keresztes
After seizing power in 1933, the Nazis added photographic denunciation to the repertoire of modern European public shaming practices to forge a new consensus about who belonged in German society. Photographic denunciation, in which Nazi functionaries took and displayed pictures of non-Jewish Germans shopping at Jewish-owned businesses advanced the Nazi dispossession of German Jews while coercing non-Jewish
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Introduction: New Histories of the Irish Revolution Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 James McConnel, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid
The centenary of the Irish Revolution has just concluded, with 2023 marking the hundredth anniversary of the ‘dump arms’ order which ended, albeit ambiguously, the civil war of 1922–3. European history has been accustomed to marking centenaries during the past ten years, from the First World War which overturned a global order, to the Russian Revolution which created a new one, to the post-war national
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‘Omelette Without Eggs’: Eating Under War and Dictatorship Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Gloria Román Ruiz
During the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–5), a woman sold ration cards on the Noordplein, one of the busiest streets in Rotterdam. She was paid twenty guilders for each ration card. Her buyers, in turn, resold the coupons for sugar, butter or bread separately in order to make a higher profit. They could make up to 150 guilders per ration card. Not far from there, in Amsterdam, people went to the corner
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Fascist Claims to Sovereign Power: Law, Politics and the Romanian Legionary Movement Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Cosmin Sebastian Cercel
This article aims to provide the basis for a theoretical framework conceptualising Romanian fascist ideology at work in relation to law and politics, by focusing on the way it operated within the movement's understanding of foundational concepts of state power, sovereignty and justice. In doing so, I investigate the relationship between fascism, understood here as both an ideology and a political movement
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‘Power is in the Streets’: Protest and Militancy in France, Italy and West Germany, 1968–1979 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Luca Provenzano
This article explores cultures of militancy in public space among currents of the revolutionary left in France, Italy and West Germany during the ‘red decade’. It shows how radicals embraced convergent strategic perspectives, discourses on violence and insubordinate practices for confronting the police. However, patterns of militancy subsequently diverged along national lines in the face of different
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Active Service and Environmental Damage in Revolutionary Ireland Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Justin Dolan Stover
The Irish Revolution inflicted significant damage to built-up and natural landscapes between 1916 and 1923. Destruction transcended national and ideological divisions and remained a fixture within Irish urban and rural landscapes years after independence, presenting an Ireland politically transformed yet physically disfigured. An environmental reading of this transformative period calls into question
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‘I Have Lost a Lot by Fighting for My Country’: Reckoning with the Irish Revolution Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Anne Dolan
Taking the lives of seven men with one act of violence in common, this article explores how the history of a whole life might reframe our sense of the ‘soldiers’ tale’. If violence stops being the only experience we seek, if, rather than isolated and sought out, it gets left in the muddle of getting older, of getting by, do we come closer to the marks that violence made, or begin to see them in the
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‘Our Own People’: The Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association in Interwar Britain and Ireland Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Brian Hughes
The Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association (SILRA) was originally founded in London in 1922 to aid ‘refugees’ in Britain. It also had an Irish sub-committee, and soon focussed its attention almost exclusively on those loyalists who remained in the Irish Free State (IFS). Populated by diehard Conservatives and Irish unionists, SILRA demonstrates the longevity of the afterlife of the Irish Revolution
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Patterns of Irish Civil War Memory in Later-Generation Oral Histories Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Gavin Foster
No phase of Ireland's 1913–23 revolution has proven as challenging for social remembrance as the 1922–3 civil war. While the conflict structured party politics and fuelled political agendas for decades, its toxic memory was widely regarded as best forgotten. Yet, as Beiner has argued, even ‘when communities try . . . to forget discomfiting historical episodes’, they still ‘retain muted recollections’
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The War that Didn't Happen: Waiting for Ambushes in the Irish War of Independence Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Máirtín Seán Ó Catháin
There is a widely held perception that the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence was a hard-fought series of guerrilla war engagements punctuated by larger and often spectacular events in Cork, Dublin and elsewhere. However, an examination of the conflict from the perspective of a search for an alternative war, where little if anything occurred, can yield interesting and counter-intuitive results
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Polish Experts in School-based Sex Education and the West: Exchanging Ideas through the IPPF (1956–1989) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Natalia Jarska
In this paper I examine the relationship between Polish experts on school-based sex education and international developments in the field during the post-war period. From 1956 onwards, Polish experts, hoping to introduce sex education to schools, drew on Western experience and knowledge. Using Polish sources, I focus on the ways in which this knowledge was transmitted, the role of the International
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Agents of Change? Families, Welfare and Democracy in Mid-to-Late Twentieth-Century Europe Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Jennifer Crane
Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above’. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views
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After the Colonial Past: Ambivalences of Assimilation in French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Edenz Maurice
Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues
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Exploring the Origins of EU Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland through the Role of John Hume and the European Parliament Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Giada Lagana, Peter McLoughlin
This article explores the origins of the European Union (EU) peacebuilding approach in Northern Ireland through the role of the long-serving MEP and Nobel Laureate, John Hume. It gives particular emphasis to the part played by the European Parliament (EP) in this endeavour, which has been neglected in existing studies of the EU influence on Northern Ireland. The article shows how Hume helped to create
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Rethinking Childhood and War in the Twentieth Century Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Friederike Kind-Kovács
On 7 March 2022, Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, and Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, demanded that ‘unaccompanied and separated children fleeing escalating conflict in Ukraine must be protected’.1 They insisted that children should, once they crossed Ukraine's borders, be immediately registered, offered safe spaces, reunified with their families, and
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Mini-States and Micro-Sovereignty: Local Democracies in East Central Europe, 1918–1923 Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Zachary Mazur
As recent scholarship has shown, most of East Central Europe remained at war for several years after the official armistice in November 1918, complicating the transition from empires into nation-states. This article addresses another aspect of the state-building process. As opposed to centralising power emanating from capitals such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, I argue that local politicians and
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Boundaries of Belonging: The Welfare State in the Wake of Decolonisation Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Giuliana Chamedes, Matthew Sohm
Over the course of the 1970s, Europe reckoned with the after-effects of decolonisation – a transformative process in world history that not only led to the movement of millions of people from the former colonies, but also threw into question European economic and cultural hegemony. The three articles in this forum investigate different ways Europe remade itself in response to the unmaking of European
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Time, Deindustrialisation and the Receding Horizon of Working-Class Activism in Late Twentieth-Century Italy (Fiat, 1979–1980) Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Matt Myers
This article seeks to understand how experiences of time change after influential social groups and institutions are disempowered. By analysing the response of a wide range of actors to key disputes at car manufacturer Fiat between 1979 and 1980, it suggests that changing conceptions of time came to register Fiat workers’ disempowerment within Italian society during the late twentieth century. A new
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Alberto Beneduce, a Technocrat in the Fascist Era Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Lorenzo Castellani
In the 1930s, Alberto Beneduce was considered ‘the dictator of the Italian economy’. He was the main financial advisor of the Duce; he founded many public entities, corporations and state-owned companies; and he mastered Italian banking and industrial policy between 1925 and 1940. Beneduce's career is particularly important for his position within the regime: he was very close to Mussolini but he never
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The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and the ‘Right to Life’ in the 1930s Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Greg Burgess
This article examines the debates within the French Ligue des Droits de l'Homme on the adoption in 1936 of a Complément (Complement) to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The Ligue questioned the relevance of the 1789 Declaration when social dislocation, economic distress and fascism challenged democracy. New rights, principally the ‘right to life’ (droit à la vie), the fundamental
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Westerners, Western Power and Polish Society in the Mid-Twentieth Century: The Poznań International Trade Fair as a Complex Frontier Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Patryk Babiracki
Drawing on Polish, US, French, British and German archival documents, this article examines the encounters between Western and Polish participants at the International Trade Fair in the Polish city of Poznań in the 1950s and 1960s. Challenging the predominant Cold War framework, it shows that Westerners who came to Poznań drew on power and privilege while pursuing personal interests. Consequently,
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Stability in Numbers: Central Banks, Expertise and the Use of Statistics in Interwar Europe Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Robert Yee
This research examines the central banks of interwar Europe through the lens of statistics. It focuses particularly on how the rise of economic and statistical expertise simultaneously supported the existing goals of central banks to retain national autonomy and the tenets of liberal internationalism espoused by the League of Nations. The institutionalised efforts to improve quantitative research culminated
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Tone-Deaf Propaganda: American Perceptions and Misperceptions of Italy during the Great War Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Dario Fazzi
One of the ways in which Wilsonianism permeated Europe during the Great War was through the activities of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Historians are still discussing the effectiveness of the CPI's propaganda abroad. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on and problematising the case of Italy. The Italian scenario confronted the CPI with a series of challenges that exposed
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Travelling to See, Reading to Believe: Being Fascists after the End of the Second World War Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Andrea Martini
This article focuses on two practices which, while neglected by historiography, played a fundamental role in the re-emergence of the fascist community after 1945, namely travel and reading. Travel allowed fascists to realise that the political cause they were fighting for had remained alive even outside their own borders, and to strengthen and renew their transnational network, while reading books
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The Un-‘Common Sense’ of National Identity: Luigi Molina, Trentini and the Fascist Italianisation Campaign in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Eden K. McLean
This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly ‘common-sense’ understandings of ‘Italian-ness’ (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular
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New Histories of Law and Rights in Twentieth-Century Germany Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Sebastian Gehrig
On 1 March 2022, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin's government of waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she drew explicit links to the Nazi war of aggression in order to legitimise sanctions against Russia as she stressed the UN's mission to work for peace enshrined in the UN charter
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A Deceptive Stability: New Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Society Contemporary European History (IF 0.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-23 Simon Huxtable
In an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay