Differences in natural endowments, in geographical conditions and in per capita income set up an historical bifurcation between northern states, with abundant renewable hydrological resources, and less well-endowed southern states. While the first embraced a model of electricity adding, with the embodiment of this form of energy in capital goods and intermediate goods, the second followed a path of electricity substitution, with mixed strategies of replacing inputs in established sectors of industry, public utilities, transport and private consumption. This article examines the different plans for and achievements of economic nationalism in the twentieth century and its consequences, discussing the possibility of reproducing in Portugal the pattern of the stimulus to industrial manufacturing of cheap electricity.

In 1964 the West German government agreed to provide £1 million in financial compensation to British victims of National Socialism. The distribution of the money, organised by the British foreign office, turned into a major public scandal, as a number of British POWs, among them survivors of the ‘great escape’, had their claims rejected. By examining the refusal of several British POWs to accept their exclusion from the scheme, the article addresses the interplay of political pressure and public opinion that led to a parliamentary inquiry into what became known as ‘the Sachsenhausen affair’ in 1967. Given that provisions of the agreement with West Germany had precluded indemnification to mistreated POWs, the distribution of the money almost inevitably led to bitterness and discontent. From this perspective, the article explores the impact of the Great Escape on British memory of the war, the public reception of the film The Great Escape (1963), and the way in which public memory influenced the debate on compensation.

The Stasi continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the most effective espionage agencies in the world, especially in the area of foreign intelligence gathering. This article employs the case of Gerhardt Ronneberger, one of East Germany's most capable spies, to challenge assumptions about the Stasi's operational successes, economic relevance and methodological proficiency. In particular, it argues that East German intelligence gathering was undermined by an institutionalisd distinction between sight, or the work of observation, and vision, or the process of signification. In Ronneberger's case, the spy agency wasted considerable time and resources trying to make sense of his operational performance and political reliability. In the end, however, even his most spectacular successes, which included smuggling a laser-guided navigation system into the GDR and acquiring proscribed computer chip and microprocessor designs from Toshiba, did not matter, since they did not change East Germany's inability to narrow the technological gap with the West.

The 1967 devaluation of sterling has been the subject of considerable academic interest. However, its aftermath represents one of the great silences in the literature. This article aims to rectify this deficiency. The principal argument is that the devaluation was not a significant event in its own right; its real importance rests in its legacy and the way in which it altered the context in which sterling's managers operated. In the aftermath, the problem of sterling was actually far greater than it had ever been before and consequently the solutions proposed were far more radical.

Why has ‘development aid’ been donated by so-called developed to under-developed populations since the Second World War? Using discourse analysis, this article provides partial answers to this riddle. First, we suggest that donor motives may be rooted in an ideology of ‘being good’, which, paradoxically, motivates recipients to be helpless – that is, a Samaritan's dilemma. Second, drawing on journal articles published in 1960–70, we test this theory by tracing a global development discourse and ‘goodness ideology’ in a Western country such as Denmark – a process that was strongly influenced by the agricultural co-operative movement, which sought to export the ‘Danish co-operative model’.

In 1949, the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht opened his book The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (from which the title for this review article is borrowed) with the following lines:

The downfall and disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, and the unification in 1990 of the two German states into the Federal Republic of Germany, the FRG, marked the end of an era. Forty years of divided and non-simultaneous German history had been brought to an end, and the national or German question had at last been solved. Since 1990 German history has continued as the history of the Federal Republic. From this perspective 1990 marked not an absolute end, but the continuity of the Federal Republic and to some degree even the triumph of the political, economic and social system of the FRG, as the inhabitants of the socialist GDR, when they had the opportunity, voted for joining the successful and wealthy West German state. The end of divided history, however, has had another consequence. Even if the era of the GDR, because of the very favourable archive situation, attracted great attention among historians, the focus of historical research has turned more and more to the history of the Federal Republic in order to analyse and explain why the FRG ended as a success, while the socialist GDR failed in its ambitions and aspirations as an alternative Germany. History demonstrated that the GDR was no German option, although for some time it was a German reality.