This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that ‘revolutionary’ Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new ‘political religion’ – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and ‘friends’ conditioned Fascist militancy and framed ‘ordinary life’, all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.

Scholarly research to date has analysed the Cyprus issue from the perspective of Greek–Turkish relations, suggesting that the United States was attempting to strike a balance between them in order to safeguard the cohesion of NATO's southern flank during the cold war. This article, without undermining the validity of previous historical findings on the issue, nevertheless constitutes an attempt to move towards a differing research agenda: it locates Cyprus in the Middle Eastern theatre and suggests that the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 may have more linkages to the Cyprus crisis of summer 1974 than one may at first sight discern.

The aim of this case study of the two Antalls, father and son (the latter became the first Hungarian prime minister after the free elections in 1990) is to present and analyse the period that coincided with the post-1956 development of the Kádár system. Its apparent success, efficiency and partial, surrogate, legitimacy has often been explained by the so-called ‘compromise’ of the Kádárist leadership with Hungarian society after 1956, particularly the ‘old intelligentsia’ or ‘old middle classes’. In fact, while there was an obvious continuity in institutions and ideology between the classic Stalinist regime and that of Kádár, the societal and political practice of the system gradually changed. The Antalls were representative of the inter-war upper middle class (the father) and the participants in the 1956 revolution (the son). Discrimination according to their social background, prevalent in the early 1950s, diminished at the turn of the 1960s, so that someone descended from the former Christian middle class, like the younger József Antall, could be recruited into the intelligentsia.

This article takes the obvious link between war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe to ask three questions. Did the cause of such a massive upsurge in violence have roots extending beyond the technologies of modern warfare? What shapes the relative propensity of states and societies towards violence? And what is specifically ‘modern’ (other than the technology of destruction) about mass killing in the twentieth century? It finds answers in the use of popular sovereignty to justify unprecedented ethnic conflict, in a mix of ingredients linked to political culture and contested state legitimacy, and in the role of bureaucracy and technology in the orchestration of large-scale and state-sponsored violence.

In his wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis of war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe, Ian Kershaw contrasts the immense violence wrought in Europe in the first half of the century with its relatively pacific history in the second half. Resisting the temptation to think of the violence of the first half of the century as a dysfunctional interruption to an underlying tale of economic, social and political progress, the author poses three astute questions concerning: (i) the causes of state-sponsored violence; (ii) the reasons why some states presided over low levels of violence while others presided over levels that ‘soared into the stratosphere’; and (iii) whether there was something qualitatively new – or ‘modern’ – about that violence. Kershaw describes his piece as ‘thinking aloud’ and I read it in that spirit. I find myself in broad agreement with what he has to say, although we probably disagree over matters of emphasis – for example in respect of the significance of violence perpetrated by European states in their colonies, or the propensity for violence of liberal democratic states. I suspect that there is more principled disagreement about the salience of ‘ideology’ in fomenting the mass violence of the twentieth century. I have organised my responses according to the three stages of his argument; I end by considering the nature of ‘peace’ in Europe in the second half of the century and by offering a few reflections on the conceptualisation of political violence.

I thank Steve Smith for his characteristically thoughtful and shrewd comments on my piece. And I am glad to note that he finds himself ‘in broad agreement’ with what I wrote.

-Your mother is a judge. It's her job to put a line through the past by passing sentence. I'm a historian. For me the past is a gold mine of surprises and possibilities.

-A gold mine?…A dunghill is more like it.

-Dunghills have their surprises too.

President Ion Iliescu [of Romania] has just announced the formation of an international expert commission charged with studying the history of the Holocaust in Romania between 1937 and 1951.

Historians are not judges. A historical commission is not a court of law.