When urban planners Marcello Piacentini and Antonio Muñoz looked at the Rome they helped create through their participation in the Master Plan of 1931, they saw a metaphor for Fascism's transformation of Rome, a metaphor that captured the ‘effect’ of the Master Plan but not its ‘intention’. The Fascist regime aimed to build a modern capital on the nineteenth-century models of Paris and Vienna, but created instead a modernist city which challenged, on many levels, the neo-classicist rationalism of the previous century's urban planning. This article explores the reasons for such a disjuncture between intention and effect and finds them within Fascist ideology and experience.

The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police.

The constitutional debate around the establishment of the Union Française (1946) is examined here as part of a long-term debate between two competing definitions of the nation and the republic: an integrating and ‘jacobin’ one, which aimed at moulding the colonial empire along the lines of the ‘one and indivisible’ republic, and another, ‘Girondin’ and contextual one, that saw the Union Française as a possible means of carving out a diverse, possibly divisible, republic. Two different ways of considering both French citizenship and the hybrid citizenship of the Union Française as put together in the Constitution of 1946 developed out of those two conceptions.

Why did western Europe become so suddenly democratic after 1945? After the upheavals of the previous decade the rather placid politics that follows the war is at first sight difficult to explain. This article seeks to go beyond the tendency of much historical writing to see the hegemonic parliamentary democracy of the roughly twenty-five years after 1945 as the product of exhaustion, economic prosperity or the constraints imposed by the Cold War. Instead, it argues that a path towards democracy can be detected within the events of the war years which then came to fruition in the rather conservative and limited democratic structures of the postwar decades. This Democratic Age then came to a conclusion in the renewed contestation of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Put briefly, the phenomenon that historians need to address is the uniformity and stability of western Europe in the period 1948–73.

Historians are from Mars and political scientists are from Venus (or was it the other way round?). The most striking feature of Erik Jones's stimulating and generous response to my article is the way in which it highlights the divergent approaches to the postwar era adopted by historians and political scientists. In many respects, this is a very good thing. We need the stimuli provided by those rooted in different traditions bringing their distinctive approaches to the same subject matter, just as, for the early medieval period, historians, archaeologists and literary scholars confront the fragmentary evidence of post-Roman Europe in contrasting but often mutually enriching ways.

Dietrich Beyrau, ed., Im Dschungel der Macht. Intellektuelle Professionen unter Stalin und Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 399 pp., €52.00 (hb.), ISBN 3-525-36244-7.

Corine Defrance, Les alliés occidentaux et les universités allemandes, 1945–1949 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000), 406 pp., €27.50, ISBN 2-271-05768-X.

Ralph Jessen, Akademische Elite und kommunistische Diktatur. Die ostdeutsche Hochschullehrerschaft in der Ulbricht-Ära (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 552 pp., €52.00, ISBN 3-525-35797-4.

Brian Pullan with Michele Abendstern, A History of the University of Manchester, 1951–73 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 281 pp., €32.95, ISBN 0-7190-5670-5.

Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 308 pp., €55.00, ISBN 0-8047-2383-4.

Craig Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 255pp., $39.95 (hb), ISBN 0-8014-4086-6.

David J. Howarth, The French Road to European Monetary Union (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), 256pp., £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-92096-1.

Mairi MacLean, Economic Management and French Business from de Gaulle to Chirac (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), 256pp., £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-76148-0.