Since 2008, growing scepticism about the ability of market forces to ensure financial stability and environmental sustainability has revived interest in credit controls. Credit controls were common in Europe before the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1980s. However, the decline in support for these policies in the 1970s is not well understood. This article examines Italy's shift away from credit controls, focusing on the role of central bank economists and the Bank of Italy's monetary policy ideas. By analysing the discourse and research of central bankers from 1973 to 1983, the article shows that persistent fiscal deficits were the main driving force behind both the introduction and the subsequent abolition of credit controls. It also highlights the influence of a new generation of economists, such as Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Mario Monti, on Italian economic policy, providing a case study that contextualises the economic ideas shaping policy making in the European Monetary Union.

Historiographical accounts generally explain Belgian technocracy as a short-lived phenomenon of the 1930s, when the politicians Hendrik de Man and Paul van Zeeland unsuccessfully tried to reinforce state power by strengthening the role of experts (at the expense of the parliament). This article focuses on the overlooked ideas and activities of the political scientist Louis Camu, who, also during the 1930s, pushed for technocratic governance – with more success than van Zeeland and de Man. As ‘Royal Commissioner’ for civil service reform, Camu sought to transform Belgian politics and even the morality of the population at large. Yet despite his public prominence, Camu was far from a transparent political operator. While defending a Montesquieuan democracy in public, he covertly became involved in extreme-right politics during the latter years of the 1930s, culminating in his 1940 membership of a wartime reform committee that sought to abolish the liberal democracy.

This article introduces the notion of Europe's ‘long 1989’. It does so in order to connect the remarkable events in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 to a wider set of transformations that have reshaped Europe as a whole. The article focuses on three sets of transformation. Firstly, the dismantling of political systems forged in the earlier era of ideological polarisation. Secondly, the ‘modernisation’ of national economies that entailed the disappearance of the institutional expressions of class compromise after 1945 (in the Stalinist and social democratic forms). Thirdly, the unravelling of those collective identities – class, religion, gender and sexuality – that had come to shape individual experiences so forcefully across the twentieth century. The article explores the liberating effects of these transformations whilst arguing that the principle dynamic has been that of implosion. The resulting sense of loss has shaped contemporary Europe in multiple ways.

Drawing on declassified reports from the KGB and Komsomol, this paper offers a new picture of dissenting activity among young people in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia between Stalin's death in 1953 and the end of the 1960s. In contrast to existing depictions of this period as a time of relative quiescence across the region, the article highlights key themes and forms of protest behaviour, ranging from political graffiti and vandalism through to mass public disorders and participation in clandestine underground groups. Further, while such actions remained well outside of the norm, we also see evidence of a wider social milieu in which ordinary citizens time and again declined to confront or report on those instances of dissenting activity that they encountered.

This article looks at the everyday experiences of rural communities in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, during the first years of Italian fascism. Following an approach that borrows from Alltagsgeschichte and microstoria, the article uses diaries, memoirs, local newspapers, and fascist reports to analyse the phenomenon of village parochialism, or campanilismo, in the context of fascist paramilitary violence. Firstly, it reassesses the role of campanilismo in provincial society, showing that parochialism was a function of community expression that contributed to the making of webs of ‘thin trust’ across rural communities. Secondly, the paper distinguishes the types of parochial conflict inherent to campanilismo from the violent conflicts generated by the fascist movement. Ultimately, the paper claims that fascist violence destroyed the functional mechanisms of campanilismo, replacing these with dysfunctional and terroristic violence that made the successful implementation of the fascist programme impossible in the provincial space.

In the second half of the twentieth century, West Germany was one of the largest pesticide producers and exporters worldwide. Among these exports were substances that were unpopular, obsolete, or entirely banned due to their health risks. The country case adds to our knowledge of global pesticide politics in three ways: First, politicians and industry used hunger in the Global South as an argument to justify export practices in the 1970s. Second, public criticism against this export was only successful when the health of German citizens was perceived to be under threat. Third, industry arguments led to creative and legal ways to export substances that have been problematised in the Global North. In view of this, the current EU initiative to regulate banned pesticide trade, though important, appears to remain tentative or ineffective.

This article proposes to connect the history of European integration with that of protest movements. Drawing on a transnational approach, it highlights a double link between the protest movements of spring 1968 in France and autumn 1969 in West Germany and the rise of the European Economic Community. Firstly, the completion of the common market on 1 July 1968 increased competition between European economies, fostering social demands on the eve of the protest. Secondly, the economic consequences of May 1968, both in France and in West Germany, underlined the new interdependencies of French and German societies within the common market. The need for convergence towards a ‘community of stability’ paved the way for negotiations on an economic and monetary union after the relaunch at the Congress of The Hague in December 1969.

This article focuses on the early history of Northwestern European opinion polling (1940s–1950s), specifically the cases of the Netherlands and Sweden. The evolution of opinion polling and its influence on post-war politics and society should be understood in light of processes of international transfer and entanglement. The Dutch-Swedish comparison brings into focus the ways in which the national experiences of the Second World War influenced how opinion pollsters discursively linked the practice to ideas about democracy. Furthermore, the article highlights entanglements across the boundaries of science, as commercial survey methods were picked up by social scientists, and across national borders, as opinion pollsters across Western Europe were in frequent contact with each other.

Critiques of police brutality and dire warnings about public safety are a seemingly inescapable topic of controversy today, saturating headlines and political campaigns all over the world. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted huge protests across the United States, with activists denouncing yet another episode of excessive police violence against a Black man. As Covid-19 lockdowns kept people tethered to their homes, protests echoed globally, affirming solidarity in the value of Black lives and critiques of police violence. In Europe, marchers filled the streets everywhere from the United Kingdom to Poland, and, notably for this essay, in France. France, of course, did not need an American example to reckon with police misconduct. Since at least the 1970s, French activists have been calling attention to the way that police violence is directed disproportionately at economically marginalised banlieues and socially marginalised immigrant populations. In 2018, French citizens witnessed the brutal policing of the gilets jaunes, a populist movement that criticised economic inequality and President Macron's neoliberal policies. With horror, they read stories of protestors battered by police batons, grenades, and tear gas, losing hands and eyes in the fray. More recently, in June 2023, the police murder of Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, following a routine traffic stop, reopened old wounds. ‘Who, exactly, do the police serve?’, protestors asked. Certainly not Nahel.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe did not bring about widespread destruction of the material heritage of communist dictatorships in the region. In fact, given that – on the whole – public acceptance of the regime change has been high, the process of de-commemoration has been more contested than anticipated. This paper focuses on the process of de-commemoration after the fall of communism in Poland. It examines urban residents’ responses to the renaming of streets, paying close attention to the practices and discursive strategies they adopted to resist change. Investigating these responses provides a means of understanding the multifaceted aspects of the contested nature of de-commemoration and sheds light on the ways in which the top-down remaking of urban streetscapes affected local residents. It also enables us to better understand the nature of the post-communist transition in the region and provides insights into the everyday conflicts that underlie symbolic change.

This article discusses the Swedish Business Fund (Näringslivets fond) from its creation in 1940, over the postwar decades of welfare state consensus and the radicalised 1970s into the privatisation drive of the 1980s. The article shows that the Fund was created to break the business interest out of the corporatist model and establish it as a market liberal voice in Swedish politics. In doing so, a main ambition of the Fund was to act as a battle instrument for business, and the article shows that it demonstrates a continuous presence of Hayekian thinking with the welfare state. The article revisits the story of the so-called wage earner funds debate (1976–83) and argues that the Fund saw anti-funds mobilisation in view of the preparation of a larger programme of privatisation.

Jacob Lorenz (1883–1946) was a pathbreaking Swiss statistician and sociologist turned right-wing intellectual who promoted a revision of Swiss society and politics. In 1938, the Turkish government invited Lorenz to conduct fieldwork and submit a report on the country's high cost of living. Recent studies of transnational corporatism might lead us to assume that this invitation was the result of a shared corporatist ideology. Using Lorenz's report and travel writings alongside archival documents, however, this article argues against the hypothesis that Lorenz's mission served as a conduit of transnational corporatist interaction and influence. Instead, Lorenz's mission is best understood in its Turkish domestic political context, while its findings were shaped by Lorenz's personal ideological ambivalence. By highlighting the ideological tensions inherent in Lorenz's mission, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on ‘illiberal internationalism’.

In 1916, a Russian contingent of 24,000 men landed in Salonika to fight alongside the French, Serbian and British armies on the Front d'Orient. Until December 1917, these troops fought against the Bulgarian troops, occupied Greek territory, and helped to bring Greece into line with the Entente. This article explains the reasons that prompted the Russian command to send such a contingent to a distant theatre, at a time when the Russian army was facing a manpower crisis. It reassesses the meaning that the imperial elites gave to the conflict and the role they attributed to Russia in the Balkans.

The memory of the early-1940s Greek famine has rarely been researched. A narrative attributing full responsibility to the Axis occupying forces, mostly Germans, and focusing almost exclusively on the 1941–2 ordeal of Athens was shaped by 1950. This became the official collective (cultural) memory and remained largely unchanged until the early twenty-first century. The financial crisis that Greece experienced since 2009 further enhanced this memory, bringing the focus exclusively on the German responsibility. This article interrogates the adult fiction works that dealt with this famine in the period 1950–2019, exploring whether these reflect the official collective memory and its changes. Furthermore, it explores how fiction has dealt with two aspects of the famine that are not included in the official collective memory: the black market and famine prostitution. The selected fiction works are utilised as ‘archives’ of the collective memory that prevailed at the time of their writing.

One of the most famous catchphrases to describe the First World War was H.G. Well's ‘war to end all wars’. Once an idealistic slogan, it is now mainly used sardonically as a tragic depiction of what felt at the time to be the longest and bloodiest war of the age. But Wells described what in 1914 seemed a plausible outcome of the war: this was expected to be the last great conflict between nations before an international order was finally established. This view was later shared by another well-known liberal internationalist, Alfred Zimmern, who advocated for a treaty that made war a crime in any circumstance and a covenant to substitute the old order of ‘power-politics’ with ‘responsibility-polities’. As one of the chief interpreters of the League of Nations (LON), Zimmern remains a symbol of the contradictions of the institution in its quest to establish a ‘new order’ through the rule of law. However, this new order was not destined to last, as the League's life was short, eventful and ultimately tragic.

The collapse of the three empires governing divided Poland after the First World War left thousands of imperial civil servants out of work and forced to recalibrate their political affiliations. Those who did not flee with retreating armies faced a rigorous filtration process that screened them for loyalty, stressing their commitment to ‘Polishness’. This article argues that despite what has been characterised as a nationalising state, the early years of the Polish Second Republic witnessed a negotiated filtration process, in which functionaries demonstrated their commitment to Poland by appealing to a combination of non-national characteristics, including ties to locale, to professional acumen, and to the civil service in general. Officials who were not ethnically Polish thus succeeded in retaining their positions in the government hierarchy. This surprising outcome of post-imperial vetting suggests that lingering elements of respect for national difference continued to resonate in postwar Poland and that pressure for an ethnically pure nation-state was far from universal.

This article conceptualises a transatlantic diplomacy of gratitude that developed in the context of the Marshall Plan as a case of emotional diplomacy by focusing on a Dutch commemorative tradition that celebrates the US aid programme. It shows that US Marshall Planners carefully refrained from explicit demands of gratitude and that it was the Dutch government, rather, that initiated a discourse of gratitude for US aid. Through the ways in which they invoked and embodied expressions of gratitude, the Dutch mediated and reframed their country's post-war demotion from a global empire to an aid-dependent country. This case, then, allows us to understand how the Netherlands strategically reconceptualised its position in a post-Second World War power structure dominated by the United States, while demonstrating how the careful navigation of the international emotional landscape played an important but as yet underexplored role in the diplomatic interactions of the post-war years.

This essay discusses how the European Community used its relations with the Third World to leverage increased power in the Cold War. It argues that resuscitating the interwar concept of Eurafrica to emerge as a credible alternative to Cold War superpowers went hand in hand with the systematic effort to distance themselves from the colonial legacy and the American strategy. It claims that it took a dynamic leader – Claude Cheysson – to make the Common Market a pivotal actor of globalism, with regional partnership and support of the new international economic order, until its transformative potential waned with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s.

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.