Alan S. Milward, The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy 1945–1963 (The United Kingdom and The European Community, Vol. I) (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2002), 512 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5111-7.

Alex May, ed., Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe: The Commonwealth and Britain's Applications to Join the European Communities (Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 188 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-80013-3.

Oliver J. Daddow, ed., Harold Wilson and European Integration. Britain's Second Application to Join the EEC (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2003), 298 pp., £45.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5222-9, £17.50 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8207-1.

Sir Con O'Neill, Britain's Entry into the European Community. Report by Sir Con O'Neill on the Negotiations of 1970–1972, ed. and with a foreword by Sir David Hannay (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), 464 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5117-6.

Serbian nationalism has rarely been the subject of theoretical analysis. For the most part, recent work on Serbian history implicitly supports the ‘modernist’ position among nationalism theorists, which holds that nationalism is a modern phenomenon that serves the interests of the politically powerful. In this article, the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s will be examined in light of the major theoretical approaches to nationalism (modernism, perennialism and ethno-symbolism). Using a small group of nationalist intellectuals (Dobrica Ćosi, Borislav Mihajlovi Mihiz and Mića Popović) as its subject, it concludes that the restrictive modernist approach leads to misunderstandings of the nature of modern Serbian national identity.

This article examines the evolving concepts of the state among Serbian intellectuals since the nineteenth century, and then focuses on their final attempt at conceptualising a new and reformed Yugoslavia before the disintegration of the country in 1991. Three concepts of the state historically existed in Serbian national thought: a centralised Yugoslav state, a federal Yugoslav union and a ‘Greater Serbia’ acting as an alternative to South Slav unification. This article argues that the Serbian intellectuals' main platform of the 1980s, the ‘Contribution to the Public Debate on the Constitution’ of 1988, remained within the main ‘pro-Yugoslav’ tradition, but that its proposals were neither genuinely ‘centralist’ nor ‘decentralist’. Rather, they were shaped by exclusively Serbian concerns and were too incoherent to resuscitate Yugoslavia.

The role of Serbia's intellectuals in the post-Tito revival of Serbian nationalism and the eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia has been a subject of discussion and analysis by both scholars and journalists for more than a decade. The now infamous 1986 draft Memorandum of the Serbian Academy in Belgrade has been elevated by some observers to represent a coherent statement of Serbian national interests that was shared by most intellectuals and quickly captured the imagination of Serbia's political leaders and people alike. Unfortunately, such an interpretation appears too facile, and the relationship between Serbia's intellectuals and the national movement presents itself as a complex phenomenon without a coherent thread.

John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 363 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8047-3422-4.

Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 406 pp., $13.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8014-8784-6.

Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organizations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 224 pp., £47.50 (hb), ISBN 0-7190-5856-2.

Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 400 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8166-3907 8.

Gabriele Metzler, Internationale Wissenschaft und Nationale Kultur: Deutsche Physiker in der Internationalen Community, 1900–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 304 pp., €29.90 (pb), ISBN 3-525-36246-3.

Sarah E. Mendelson and John K. Glenn, eds., The Power and Limits of NGOs: A Critical Look at Building Democracy in Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 300 pp., $16.00 (pb), ISBN 0-231-12491-0.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The past few years have seen the publication of a number of important contributions to the historiography of the Prague Spring of 1968, the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August that year and the process of so-called ‘normalisation’ in the country and the wider communist world. The Czechoslovak crisis of 1968–9 has never really ceased to inspire either scholarly research or passionate public and political debate. It has attracted even more attention, though, since its thirtieth anniversary in 1998, and a state-of-the-art essay seems appropriate.

A number of recent events have shown that finance still has an important part to play in the modern economy: banks may take excessive risks; accounting and supervisory systems may prove inadequate; stock-market prices may collapse and leave rash undertakings perilously over-indebted. The stagnation of the Japanese economy from 1990 onwards is a stark reminder that such events may have a real impact. Can a knowledge of financial history help to make them better understood? The plethora of recent works in the field at least gives some background against which to measure the rapid changes now occurring. In this article I shall attempt an overview of the field, with particular attention to the recent works listed above. First I shall trace the evolution of the notion of ‘financial systems’ as a coherent and stable set of financial relationships and organisations, as it has emerged from cross-fertilisation of work by economists and historians. One difficulty about analysing such systems is that they can be long-lived (often forty years or more) and so change only slowly and in a way that can be hard to grasp. As a result, many historians tend to neglect the striking differences between countries, whereas economists like to compare snapshots of systems in different countries at a given moment. My object in this article is to alert the reader to the risk that recent advances in the study of the American financial system may become a stumbling block to the study of very different European models. On the other hand, some directions in the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history may throw fresh light both on contemporary European financial systems and on some dark corners in the financial history of the United States.

I read Professor Woolf's erudite and ambitious article with great interest. The central argument of the piece – that writing a history of Europe is an impossibly complicated, but still worthwhile, enterprise that would involve the interrelation of many different kinds of history – is one that we would probably all accept. I am more more sceptical about three subplots in Woolf's essay.

Histories of Europe have a long genealogy, whose origins can probably be found in the defence of Christian Europe, above all in humanist circles, against the threat of Muslim Ottoman expansion. In the course of the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic years, earlier elements that were regarded as characterising all Europe crystallised into a sense common to European elites – described as ‘civilisation’ – of the distinctiveness and superiority of Europeans and Europe from all other regions of the world. If we analyse what was understood by this ‘idea of Europe’, as I have argued elsewhere, we can identify a number of constituent elements of Europe's progress that, for their authors, explain its distinctiveness, particularly when compared with the historical experiences or contemporary condition of states and societies elsewhere in the world. These elements can be summarised as: (i) a secular cultural tradition, originating in classical antiquity, that revived (after the ‘barbarian’ interlude) with the Renaissance and culminated in contemporary France; (ii) individual entrepreneurship as the motor of European economic dynamism and strength; (iii) liberty as the defining quality of governance; (iv) the balance of power between a limited number of leading states; and (v) civilised manners, or civilités, understood (in Norbert Elias's sense) as publicly accepted regulatory mechanisms of the forms of social relationships. The Restoration, as Federico Chabod has clarified, extended this corpus of values attributed to Europe through a recovery of the Middle Ages and Christianity.

The history of intellectuals, as developed in France, is now venerable enough to have a history of its own. From the early 1980s its development signalled the end of the heroic age of the French intellectual and the beginning of a critical review of French intellectual practice, hitherto overshadowed by a ‘history of ideas’ stigmatised as inclining towards abstraction and idealism. Debray, Bourdieu, Hamon, Rotman and others have variously rhapsodised over the beauty of the intellectual ‘corpse’. At the beginning of the decade the tragic fading of the revolutionary adventure, the bitter retreat into a recrudescent professionalism and the surrender to the perceived invasion of mass culture were together bringing about fundamental changes in intellectual attitudes and created a new set of circumstances which the optimistic could interpret as a redefinition, and the pessimists as a laying to rest, of the function and figure of the intellectual.

It is possible, as Richard Vinen claims, that I arrange historians into categories that are too neat and selective. But I am puzzled by the relationship of his examples to the particular point that I was making. My argument was that the two world wars were experienced as a crisis that placed in doubt the assumptions underlying the interpretation of the long-term progress of European civilisation. I limited my illustration of this to historians who – during these thirty years – wrote histories of Europe that seemed to me to exemplify their responses, either through their vindication of what Europe had offered to humanity until its self-destruction, or, in Toynbee's case, through a comparative study of the cycle of civilisations. Marc Bloch was not included because his Strange Defeat was specific to France; whereas Braudel (whom I should have included) seems to me to strengthen my case, as his Mediterranean certainly carries the message of European civilisation. The fact that Pirenne's great work was only published posthumously is interesting, but it is when he wrote it that matters. His age, like Fisher's, seems to me irrelevant, or possibly even confirms the importance for historians of an earlier liberal period of the identification of Europe's history with progress.

‘The subject of identity, both personal and collective, is on the agenda in the West, as well as in post-Soviet Russia… The current intellectual climate encourages us to regard every expression of meaning and every assertion of identity as susceptible to reinterpretation’ (Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History, p. 4). And indeed, identity has become the focus of a great deal of theorising in contemporary social science. Whereas formerly the individual was characterised chiefly by his membership of a social class or group whose history could be reconstructed by a social historian, nowadays we prefer to stress the multiplicity, and especially the fluidity, of such groupings. A recent article by Rogers Brubaker acknowledges the importance of this concept of identity, while trying to show that it covers a multiplicity of uses and tends to blur the boundaries between a number of different notions.Rogers Brubaker, ‘Au delà de l'“identité”’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 139 (September 2001), 66–85. See also Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 1–47. Brubaker criticises this over-use and proposes its replacement by multiple concepts. It is true enough that social scientists have used the term somewhat indiscriminately: ‘attributed identity’, ‘acknowledged identity’, ‘group identity’, ‘individual identity’, and so on. On the other hand, David Kertzer and Dominique Arel are more positive: ‘The past decade has seen a great outpouring of interest in the nature of collective identities of various kinds.’ They see a close relationship between ‘state modernity and the impetus to categorize’, and hence stress the importance of ‘the official state certification of collective identities’.David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity. The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). They argue for the usefulness of a concept which may be broad, but does make it possible to group together various ways in which individuals and community relate to each other, or individuals to communities and states, or individuals to their own history. And indeed, this constant interaction between self and state, a relationship created through a multiplicity of categories constructed by administrators, individual perceptions and political authorities, builds up a multiplicity of collective and individual identities.

During the Second World War, countless individuals were robbed of their freedom, particularly their freedom of movement, and put into some form of captivity while being deprived, to a greater or lesser extent, of their rights. The most dramatic example by far, the concentration camps, does not concern us here. I shall be dealing in the first place with the fate of prisoners of war during and immediately after the conflict. Numbered in millions, their destinies were very different depending on when and where they were captured, and to which country and ‘race’ they belonged. But there was also another large group of people who lost their freedom, and most of their rights, during the Second World War: civilian internees. I shall be considering their fate here insofar as it is discussed in the works under review below. However, it should be noted here that internees, unlike prisoners of war, were not covered by international law; internment camps cannot be equated with prisoner of war camps.

As can be seen from the range of books reviewed here, there is considerable interest in studying European foreign policy. Numerous questions about European foreign policy merit attention: how and why has the European foreign policy system evolved? how does it operate? what does it produce? and what effects does it have on the outside world and on European Union (EU) member states? All of these books grapple with at least some of these questions.

Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleştirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000), 244 pp., TL 7,900,000 (approx. €6.76), ISBN 975-470-779-0.

Étienne Copeaux, Espace et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d'une historiographie nationaliste, 1934–1993 (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 1997), 369 pp., €28.97, ISBN 2-271-05465-6.

Metin Heper, İsmet İnönü: The Making of a Turkish Statesman (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 270 pp., €80.00, ISBN 90-04-09919-0.

Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2000), 666 pp., €39.95, ISBN 0-58567-011-1.

Esra Özyürek, ed., Hatırladıklarıyla ve Unuttuklarıyla Türkiye'nin Toplumsal Hafizası (Istanbul: İletişim, 2001), 349 pp., TL 7,200,000 (approx. €6.16), ISBN 975-470-919-X.

Ahmet Yıldız, ‘Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene’: Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları (1919–1938) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), 351 pp., TL 9,400,000 (approx. €6.88), ISBN 975-470-866-5.