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 monetary objectives such as price stability, fixed exchange rates and balance of payment equilibrium over Keynesian policy goals. A short-lived Keynesian intermezzo of countercyclical demand-management commenced in March 1974, after which rules-based, stability- and supply-side economic, financial and monetary policies started to regain the upper hand in 1976.

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 a rumour, the ambiguous racialisation of the Japanese historically seemingly legitimised demands by Japanese Germans that the regime should recognise their rights as members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (national community). This article traces how the Japanese Germans were able to negotiate concessions enabling them to function as a protected minority, albeit in contingent and arbitrarily defined ways. In effect, the Japanese Germans were able to exploit the ambiguities of Nazi racial thinking in order to carve out a place for themselves within the margins of the racial state.

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 Germans into severing ties with Jewish neighbours . Contrary to what most historical scholarship has implied, photographic denunciation lasted well into the 1930s in Germany and even transcended German borders. Ultimately, photographic denunciation was among the Nazis’ most successful tools to turn non-Jewish Germans against Jews, a key precursor to the ability of the Nazi regime to perpetrate the Holocaust.

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 of Rozendwarsstraat to fraudulently buy coupons for bread or wheat cake on the black market. Anyone with seven guilders could buy a slice. Considering that some people only earned twenty-two guilders a week, not everyone could afford to go to the black market for extra calories. Both of these stories were told by women who survived the Dutch Hunger Winter, and are included in Ingrid de Zwarte's recent monograph. They illustrate some of the important contributions that have emerged from recent historical works in the related fields of Hunger and Food Studies. They demonstrate the agency of ordinary and marginalised subjects, particularly women, in the face of scarcity. They reveal the importance of the coping strategies people developed, which allows us to think of these individuals beyond their traditional status as passive victims of scarcity. And they show us how, in the context of hunger and famine, ideas of what was normal or acceptable behaviour could be transformed.

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, and constitutional law in the context of interwar Romania. I ask how the ideology – that is, the doctrinal body of Romanian ultranationalism, as well as political practice – related to core constitutional concepts such as sovereign power and popular sovereignty. Accordingly, I map the nexus between law and politics within the ideology of the Romanian main ultranationalist movement – the Legion of Archangel Michael and its paramilitary branch, the Iron Guard.

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 that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

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 better understanding, interest and ultimately engagement by the EU to support peacebuilding efforts in Northern Ireland. Local political shifts would prove decisive in creating the peace process that emerged in the region in the 1990s, but the article argues that Hume's efforts, stretching as far back as the 1970s, both encouraged these shifts and then provided the basis for much greater EU engagement in support of the peace process. This deepens our understanding of the EU role in aiding political change in Northern Ireland.

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 receive emergency care.2 Under no circumstances should children who came with their families be separated, and everything should be done to protect children from exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence.3 However, since then, countless children from Ukraine who have crossed the borders unaccompanied have become victims of human trafficking and exploitation. Tens of thousands of children in Ukrainian state institutions or who had been orphaned prior to the war could not be protected. They were deported to Russia, many were interned in reeducation camps, and many were forcefully adopted by Russian families or moved into foster care.4 Since the war started, children have again become a means of warfare. The current war against Ukraine once more demonstrates how vulnerable children can become when they are separated from their families. Children have, once again, become targets of massive human rights violations and of crimes against humanity.

Ideology and state ownership are supposed to have characterised socialist housing. This article argues that economic and monetary constraints were also dominant in shaping housing policy in early socialist Hungary. These factors increasingly compelled the regime to promote private home ownership through state-subsidised credits. Despite high public interest in the programme, however, neither wealth, personal connections nor ideology alone could condition the outcome of home-build applications due to severe shortages. This impasse put the regime at a crossroads of whether to pursue needs-based housing or to introduce ‘profitability’ considerations in credit checks for self-build. This article argues that the Nagy government's pursuit of the latter option increasingly undermined the ideological basis of communism. The scheme's failure not only made citizens receptive to radical change in 1956 but also put the regime on a new trajectory where private wealth accumulation and self-provisioning became inseparable from the economic legitimacy of communism in Hungary.

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 village leaders made their own territorial and sovereignty claims. Rather than whole nations, it was small communities that first defined self-determination. Here I present a loose typology of such localities (ethno-linguistic republics, non-Bolshevik workers’ councils, and radical agrarians), and show that conflicts between mini-states and burgeoning nation-states shaped the development of the latter.

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 had any political role. He represented the spearhead of that bureaucratic and managerial class that neither joined the Fascist Party nor opposed it, yet chose to cooperate with the regime once it was established. In political terms, the figure of Beneduce has remained in a twilight zone. This article takes into account the vision of Alberto Beneduce throughout his career, focusing particularly on the fascist period when he played a major role as gatekeeper between financial, industrial and political power.

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 right from which all others flowed, were pronounced. The article examines the values and principles informing the Complément to address why a declaration of new rights was seen as a proper response to these crises. Aspirations for a radical transformation of the social, political and economic order were expressed in a genre and a language of rights deeply embedded in French history. The Complément continued the work of 1789, assuming a form through which this transformation could be imagined.

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, the author both highlights the self-indulgence of the well-known story about the largely emancipatory motivations of Westerners who became involved with Eastern European affairs in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the resulting patterns of interactions are only tangentially related to Cold War political struggles. Instead, the article shows that these encounters are best seen in the context of a relationship between Westerners and East Europeans that spans decades, and even centuries, and that involved encounters fraught with contestation over economic power and cultural dominance.

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 the limits of America's germinal public diplomacy. The author's argument is that, in spite of its numerous attempts, the CPI's activities in Italy resulted in a substantial failure, which was mostly due to an inter-institutional conflict of interests and competences between the CPI and the US embassy in Rome. Such a short-circuit prevented US propagandists from developing a genuine understanding of the Italian public's preferences and resulted in what people in the Peninsula perceived as a general lack of empathy.

This article evaluates intellectual debates on antisemitism in Germany in 1932, the last year before the establishment of Nazi dictatorship. The focus is on understudied cases of journals and books, in which both Jewish and National Socialist authors published right next to each other and on the same pages. In this context, the article makes three arguments: first, it analyses apologetic themes by right-wing authors and shows that a significant number of National Socialists still pretended that they were not actually antisemitic in 1932. Second, it reflects on the problem that Jewish intellectuals often disagreed on how to respond to the rise of antisemitism and thus entered into very different forms of debate with the German right. Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, the article also demonstrates that Weimar media had simultaneously developed an acute awareness of future threats and the possibility of large-scale atrocities on German territory.