As Central and East Europeans (including Germans) strive to build new democracies on the ruins of old dictatorships, they seek to establish democratic values as well as democratic institutions. They know that democratic institutions alone were not able to save democracy in Germany's Weimar Republic, which had also risen out of the collapse of an authoritarian regime. West Germans, though, later built a viable democracy, the Federal Republic, from even more devastated and authoritarian remnants. To help explain such differing outcomes, historians have posited changes in political values, arguing that West Germans developed a democratic political culture to replace the authoritarian values many Germans had held earlier. As illuminating as such arguments could be, historians have had great difficulty finding evidence on just what political values Germans, especially common citizens, have in fact held at various times.

The part played by economists in the Second World War has been little studied but was of an importance not appreciated by the public then or since. Equally, wartime experience had an influence on the development of economics as a discipline that has been given little attention. It was in the Second World War that economists in any number entered government service, discovered government, exercised a major influence on policy and left behind an expanding demand for economic advice from professional economists. This article seeks to provide a sketch of some of their activities.

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have come to a turning point, perhaps the most important turning point, in the short but complex history of nuclear strategy. The Cold War is now history, albeit the sort of history that we will be living with for a long time yet. It is therefore time to review the policies and strategies of the Cold War in a historical perspective. In this essay, it is NATO's nuclear strategy during the Cold War that will be the subject of such a review.2

‘King takes Queen’. This is how John Sweeney summed up his view of the state visit by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu to Britain in June 1978, an event which marked the high point of what the Times referred to as ‘Britain's political romance with Romania’ in the 1970s. Sweeney's book, in common with other post-revolutionary writing on Romania, roundly condemns Britain's foreign policy-makers for supporting a repressive regime.1 However, in the 1970s the situation was not viewed in such clear-cut terms. In the early part of the decade, books by British writers praised Ceausescu, and Romania often received favourable coverage in the British press.2 It was almost universally seen as a country which, although internally rigidly communist, pursued an independent foreign policy and was consequently a thorn in the flesh of the Soviet Union. It was keen to industrialise and to expand its economic ties with the West in order to do so. Apologists for British policy would argue that it was therefore both politically and economically beneficial to support Ceausescu. Politically it would weaken Moscow's control over the Eastern Bloc, and economically it would benefit British industry. Indeed, the two were related – the more economic ties Ceausescu had with the West, the stronger his political independence from Moscow would become.