The formation of the civil militias (burgerwachten) in 1918 across a range of Dutch cities, in response to the threat of revolution, has received extremely limited attention in both Dutch and international historiography. They have never been studied in their own right, having been considered a largely local and politically irrelevant phenomenon. In fact this large voluntary organisation existed both locally and nationally, and recruited over 100,000 men and women, and had ties to state and fringe groups abroad. Reconstructing the formation and development of the militias, and analysing its character as a paramilitary and strikebreaking organisation, this article demonstrates that the militias were an important ideological formation. The militia institutionalised anti-Bolshevism and radical right paramilitarism in the Netherlands, and as such had a role to play in the counter-revolutionary network that was developed across Europe.

What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances? This article focuses on and advocates for further analysis of an unstudied discrete phenomenon: ‘the moment of discovery’ in early twentieth century Germany and Austria. The article's four empirical sections analyse various facets of this moment: the clues which pointed towards the Jewish ancestral secret, missed by many non-Jewish ‘Jews’; the reaction of antisemites to becoming the object of their own hatred complex; the deep despair felt during the moment of discovery; the mitigatory actions which could ameliorate the latter; and the minority who reacted positively to the news. Collectively, the piece displays the terror associated with being ‘Jewish’ at the time, the extent to which non-Jewish ‘Jews’ were truly separated from the Jewish community and, crucially, the radicalisation of moments of discovery under Nazism, when they became more devastating than ever.

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 itself as the representative body of Muslims in Austria; however, due to a lack of commitment from its members and the rise of fascism in Austria, this early attempt to establish a unified Muslim community in Austria eventually failed. By incorporating unofficial sources in various languages, including private letters, oral history interviews, and newspapers, alongside official archival material, the article amplifies the voice, perspective and agency of key Muslim figures involved, allowing for a more fully developed understanding of the internal and external dynamics of Muslim activism in interwar Vienna.

This article examines how a former Ottoman bureaucrat claimed his retirement pension in interactions with state officials in post-Ottoman Turkey, Syria–Lebanon and Cyprus in the 1920s. Born in Cyprus in 1856 and in Ottoman state service for more than three decades until 1916, Mehmed Ziya had to make renewed efforts to continue receiving his pension until he died in 1936. His troubles were largely due to the need to reconfigure enduring links to the Ottoman state amidst state succession after the First World War. I focus mainly on the diplomatic and administrative correspondence generated by Ziya's initiatives to examine how he sought to address a pressing, quotidian problem. I stress that nationality, as a pivotal category in the reconfiguration of state–subject relations in former imperial domains, played a key role in shaping how Ziya outlived his empire.

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 their states offer protection from such risks. These men contributed to public awareness of radiation health risk and to ambivalence about safe ‘peaceful nuclear technology’ in the late 1950s and 1960s, earlier than is usually assumed. They further inspired concrete policy changes, especially in occupational health protection, illustrating that post-war responses to nuclear technology emerged from the intersection of longer historical experience, specialised local knowledge and grassroots activism, as well as from post-war scientific and political developments. It further shows long-lasting expellee influence in unexpected areas of West German policy.

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 of a ‘backwards’ region of the Italian South and to overcome Italian reluctance to serve as a country of permanent resettlement for the displaced. The history of this project reveals the contradictory impulses of early Cold War refugee relief and humanitarianism: the competition between intergovernmental and voluntary agencies, of secular and spiritual enterprises, and of images of refugees as dependent and difficult to settle and yet capable of self-sufficiency. Many of the ideas piloted in Sardinia, notably the linking of self-sufficiency and development, later became prominent in the UNHCR's work in the Global South.

Situating itself at the intersection of colonial history, global history and business history, this article highlights the overlooked history of German colonial companies post-First World War. It argues for an ‘imperial afterlife’ through continued German corporate interests in African markets, emphasising the economic dimension of imperialism. Using C. Woermann as an example, it shows how the company adapted to the post-First World War global order, underwent organisational changes, and merged with National Socialist policies in Eastern Europe after 1939, revealing the adaptability of imperial enterprises.

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 disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.

The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusing on the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning of tourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to national security in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange and human contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

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 and the German government as an essential part of a ‘Europe of the regions’, the British government hoped to use it to achieve a renationalisation of the European Community. The French government was much more sceptical towards subsidiarity, pointing to the paradox that subsidiarity actually required a strong central authority to achieve its decentralising ends. The article concludes by arguing that the debate on subsidiarity reveals how ambitious and yet contested European integration had become by the early 1990s.

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 received attention from historians. This is mainly due to the lack of sources on him, apart from his memoirs, published in 2002. The unprecedented access to his personal archive reveals that Primo de Rivera had a crucial role in the transition: although apparently an outright Francoist, he dedicated all of his efforts to accomplishing the succession of Juan Carlos and the eventual restoration of democracy. This paper rediscovers his figure, revealing him to be a convinced democrat and a crucial member of the strategy that brought down Francoism.

This article examines the Young Socialists, a left-wing dissident circle of intellectuals from the last Soviet generation, and focuses on their contacts with Solidarność during 1980–81. These dissidents, located in Moscow and Minsk, interpreted the Polish strikes as the possible beginnings of a wider move to socialist reform in the Eastern Bloc. Using oral history and samizdat materials from the Russian and Polish archives and the former archives of Radio Free Europe, the article demonstrates how the Young Socialists’ interactions with Poland developed in the wider context of the transnational history of dissent in the Eastern Bloc at the turn of the 1980s. It argues that a combination of internationalist values and bloc-wide dissident solidarities caused socialist dissidents to view nationalist movements on the Soviet periphery and Eastern Europe as potential drivers of socialist reform on the eve of Perestroika.

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 of the postwar years that emphasises friendship and contains social conflicts, political tensions, and ambivalent affects. They draw on iconic tropes and powerful narratives – ranging from the GI handing out chewing gum to CARE packages and the ‘gift’ of democracy – which have cast German-American relations in terms of generosity, gift-giving, and gratitude. This article traces the roots of this discourse to (the popular memory of) the postwar moment and situates it vis-à-vis the multifaceted affective landscape of early postwar Germany with a specific focus on its gender logics and with an eye to its benefits and the risks it entails.

Four weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US Senator John Kennedy accused the Biden administration of indirectly providing over $17 billion to Moscow as Putin was gearing up for war. In August 2021, the International Monetary Fund had indeed approved a historic $650 billion allocation of Special Drawing Rights to help member countries struggling with the Covid crisis. Russia benefited from these money transfers, as did Iran, China, and Myanmar, notwithstanding the authoritarian consolidation of these regimes. Kennedy's op-ed sparked a debate about the lack of transparency in the use of crisis resources and led to the adoption in the United States of the ‘Russia and Belarus SDR Exchange Prohibition Act’, which bans currency transactions with these countries through the IMF, following the imposition of 2,500 sanctions by the US Treasury since February 2022. The op-ed also reignited a decades-old debate over whether international organisations such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) should be held accountable for supporting authoritarian and corrupt governments or interfering in the politics of sovereign nations.

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 date, the series has included profiles of Ukrainian, Norwegian, Albanian, Hungarian, Italian, Serbian and French history, as well as insightful overviews of right-wing populism, migration history, and environmental and global history.

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 cities, or did the construction of barricades set in motion more general dynamics that influenced protest dynamics? This paper warns against overestimating the influence of transnational activist networks. Although the conflicts unfolded in similar ways while squatters fostered international contacts, the latter alone do not suffice to explain the former. Instead, this paper highlights the ‘social function’ of the barricade and the inherent conflict dynamics that barricade building set in motion.

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 ideology. However, the analysis will also reveal how the SS courts during the war (2) gradually climbed down from a position of ideological purity when faced with realities at the front; and (3) despite their ideological core features, in several ways operated as a legal-rational bureaucracy. Towards the end of the article, the ramifications of these findings will be discussed in light of literature concerning the role of law and ideology in the Nazi state and the Third Reich's complicated relationship with modernism.

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 when and under what circumstances such diplomatic actors can influence government foreign policy formulation. The case explored here is that of Miriam Camps (1916–94), a scholar, former US diplomat and senior researcher at Chatham House. Camps utilised her Chatham House contacts, including key Foreign Office officials as well as her wider transnational network, to influence the Foreign Office's stance on the so-called ‘empty chair’ crisis of the European Economic Community in 1965/6. The article argues that during the crisis Camps acted as a policy entrepreneur with the aim of advancing her own ideas and changing the UK government's position towards the European Economic Community. Besides demonstrating the influence of unofficial diplomats on policy formulation, the article also contributes to the growing literature on the varied roles of women in international relations and diplomacy.

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 problem’. Irritated, he added that it is talked about ‘only for the Turks . . . [in spite of the fact that there were only] a million [Turkish] people living in this country’. He followed up with apocalyptic predictions that Yugoslavia wanted Pirin (or Bulgarian) Macedonia, Romania longed for Dobrodja (which is split between Bulgaria and Romania), the Turks claimed secession, and therefore only the ‘hard chest of the Balkan’ remained.