The 1975 World Conference on Women marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Women. The conference report, written soon afterwards, underlined that ‘the issue of inequality that affects the vast majority of women of the world is closely linked with the problem of under-development which exists as a result not only of unsuitable internal structures but also of a profoundly unjust world economic system’. This type of holistic and more radical understanding of (under)development has usually been lost in mainstream accounts of the history of development as a colonial endeavour or as a Western-imposed set of values and templates rooted in modernisation theory. A recent wave of scholarship, however, has sought to recover the agency of the ‘Global South’ in the history of internationalism and development, uncovering the plurality of internationalisms and the variety of political imaginaries that shaped twentieth-century ideas of development.

Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.

In the era of the Schengen Area (at least in the days before Covid-19), travel from Munich to Bozen/Bolzano or Ljubljana to Trst/Trieste is a decidedly unremarkable, albeit beautiful, adventure. Just as meaningful as the lack of border controls, travellers find all public signage in both Italian and German (and sometimes Ladin, too) upon arrival in Bozen/Bolzano. Signs in the streets of Trst/Trieste less reliably have Slovene alongside the Italian, but assistance with translation can be found with little difficulty. The Italian autonomous regions ‘with special statutes’ in which these cities reside – Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol) and Friuli Venezia Giulia (the Julian March) – are multilingual territories that, at least on an official level, embrace a multiethnic heritage and reality. In fact, Trentino-Alto Adige's consociational democracy is widely regarded among political scientists as an international role model for how states can successfully protect and give voice to minority populations. Those unfamiliar with the more recent history of these regions might be surprised to learn of these avowedly multiethnic political and cultural structures. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the regions’ two states – Austria-Hungary until 1919 and thereafter Italy – employed the ‘nationality principle’ to define policies and populations in these territories. As in most of Europe at the time, sovereignty was increasingly predicated on the contemporary ideal of the nation state, in which borders, ethnicity, language and citizenship were all bound together. Of course, as a multiethnic empire, Austria-Hungary was much more concerned about centralising state authority (and then fighting a world war) than national homogeneity, while Italy's nationalisation campaign in the interwar period became fundamental to its presence in the new provinces. Still, both states sought to classify and ultimately to control their border populations by privileging ethnolinguistic categories of citizenship.

On 19 November 1975 Francisco Franco lay dying in Madrid's La Paz hospital. Clutching the cloak of the Virgin del Pilar, and with the ill-gotten relic of St Teresa of Ávila's hand at his bedside, the ailing dictator would soon depart this existence following the withdrawal of life support. For Enrique Moradiellos in Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator, the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition within this deathbed scene was emblematic of the countless paradoxes which characterised the Francoist dictatorship in its later years. Since the dictator's death scholars have continued to grapple with such paradoxes, struggling over how best to define a regime which has come to occupy a notoriously contentious space within contemporary Spanish politics and society. Like a fairground hall of mirrors, historical representations of Francoism have been stretched or squashed by different analytical frames, shaped in many cases by the political and social legacies of the dictatorship. Despite dubious claims to ‘objectivity’, the regime's apologists depict Francoism as a stabilising antidote to the ‘chaos’ of republicanism, conveniently overlooking the destruction and misery which followed the coup of 18 July 1936. Meanwhile, those who seek justice for the regime's victims continue to emphasise the repressive nature of the dictatorship. Though an important component of Francoism's modus operandi, repression does not, by itself, help us to fully understand Francoism's long-term survival or the consent it secured from millions of ordinary Spaniards. The titles under review reflect an increasing willingness to confront Francoism's many contradictions head-on, and to regard the paradoxical nature of the regime not as a conceptual knot to be disentangled, but as a historiographical problem in itself. Historians exploring the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people have proved particularly adept at addressing such complexities, as have scholars adopting comparative or transnational frameworks which reach beyond traditional emphasis on fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The titles surveyed in this article offer a snapshot of recent developments in the field, while signposting potential avenues through which historians of Francoism might contribute to broader discussions within the historiography of modern Europe.

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

In November 2018 eight people, including a mother from the Comoros and residents from Tunisia and Algeria, died when two buildings collapsed in the run down area of Noailles in the old port area of Marseille. A 2015 government report had already warned that 40,000 dilapidated and dangerous homes put 100,000 people at risk in France's second city, but campaigners say little was done. The tragedy occasioned widespread anger about run down and exploitative housing in the Mediterranean city. It also refocused public attention on housing and the concept of the home. In turn this raised questions about how housing and the home connect to space and social justice, the division of labour between national and local government, citizenship and ‘the right to the city’.

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.

In August 1902 the British Conservative MP for East London, William Evans-Gordon, spent two months in Eastern Europe surveying the living conditions of Jewish populations across the Russian Pale of Settlement. His reflections – and photographs – morphed into a booklet published the following year in London, entitled The Alien Immigrant. Abstracts from the manuscript were read in the commission hearings that led to the adoption of the Aliens Act in 1905, a milestone in the introduction of immigration controls across the United Kingdom and the codification of the legal right to asylum. Among the places that Evans-Gordon visited was Vilna, also known in Polish as Wilno – today's Vilnius. The city was ‘one of the most congested cities of the Jewish pale’; it lay in ‘the centre of the great Jewish drama’. Facing the misery of the Jewish ghetto Evans-Gordon ruminated on the conditions of life in the slums of east London which were populated by Jewish families during the period of the ‘Great Departure’. Eerily anticipating present-day debates across Europe, The Alien Immigrant framed the migration crisis as a ‘national question’ and warned prospective migrants that the United Kingdom could not offer them a better future. Evans-Gordon's arguments gave popular anti-Semitism a progressive veneer. ‘When altruism towards aliens leaves some of our poorest folk without homes and without work’, he noted, ‘it is time to say that the burden of solving the problems of Eastern Europe is not to be laid on them’.

On the still divided Joseon peninsula, a united Korean women's ice hockey team competed at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. Only a few months later, the French, Croatian and Russian heads of state quite literally invited themselves on to the winners’ podium at the 2018 FIFA men's World Cup in Moscow. Such conspicuous examples are emblematic of the role of modern sport in the realm of international relations.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the global dimensions of twentieth-century imperialism and anti-imperialism. Historians, themselves part of an increasingly interconnected world, have been drawn to investigate the links between anti-colonial activists working in different parts of the globe. After a period in which most studies had focused either on the perspective of imperial decision makers in Europe or on that of nationalist activists within the framework of one single colony, more recently scholars have argued that the first of these approaches underrates the agency of anti-imperialists in interactions with the imperial rulers, while the second makes it difficult to explain broader, global trends, including the surprising near-simultaneity of decolonisation in large parts of the world between 1945 and 1970. Instead, historians now argue that we need to take into account the inherently internationalist visions of many activists in this period, which led them to travel the world, interact with their counterparts from other colonies, develop shared views of anti-imperialism and provide each other with practical and ideological support. This review article examines some of the most successful monographs to be published in this field between 2014 and 2018.

Over the last twenty years or so several new waves of research on the history of liberalism have emerged. The novelty of this should not be exaggerated as broad scholarly interest in liberalism has in fact been increasing at a remarkable rate since the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is clear that the historiography of liberalism has broken much new ground since around the turn of the century. This has been driven partly by the influence of larger developments in the humanities and social sciences. The global and post-colonial turns, for instance, have helped to reshape the historiography of liberalism by provoking debates over the extent of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, while also drawing attention to the contribution of theorists from the global south. But even much of this ‘normal’ innovation has been driven at least indirectly by a growing sense that liberalism is in crisis. The War on Terror, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the global rise of populist authoritarianism are the obvious staging posts in liberalism's journey from post-Cold War triumphalism to contemporary fears for its imminent demise. And it is not a coincidence that the end of the end of history has seen the beginning of a new historiography of liberalism. Since the early 2000s the emergence of new sub-fields like the histories of ‘Cold War liberalism’, human rights and neoliberalism can all be seen in different ways as responding to liberalism's unfolding crisis.

Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of secular modernity and progress. In a 1991 review article David Blackbourn pointed out that ‘historians in the mainstream have commonly considered Catholicism, if they considered it at all, as a hopelessly obscurantist force at odds with the more serious isms that have shaped the modern age’. Within the same review, however, Blackbourn signaled the emergence of timid but nevertheless clear ‘signs of a change’ in the historiographical direction and a new interest in Catholic history.

The extensive attention that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin has attracted since its publication in 2010 has raised our overall awareness of the structural might that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany displayed as they reshaped the territories that had separated the two states during the interwar period. In addition to earning widespread acclaim, the volume has been widely criticised by scholars who have exposed the extent to which non-German populations in Eastern Europe participated in the violent persecution of unwanted minority communities during the Second World War. Jan Gross, whose Neighbors unearthed that the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours without significant prompting from the German occupiers, has argued that Snyder deprives the inhabitants of his ‘bloodlands’ of agency by blaming wartime violence in the region almost exclusively on Hitler, Stalin and their overlapping policies of state destruction. The evident tensions between micro-historical approaches that stress the importance of local agency and macro-level analyses of larger geographical spaces have obscured how profoundly the interplay of broader structural factors and local variables shaped the course of the Second World War in different locations. Four recent micro-historical works help to partially reconcile the two seemingly oppositional approaches by providing new frameworks for thinking about the complex interactions that occurred between smaller groups of people and the broader forces that shaped their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The four volumes show that global, national, regional and local agendas overlapped to make ordinary people reconfigure how they saw themselves and how they interpreted the world around them. The identities and perceptions that emerged from these interactions enhance our understanding of the multiple factors that determined people’s actions during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The inhabitants of the overseas departments and collectivities of France have, of late, been reconsidering their relationships both to each other and to the former imperial metropole. In 2011 Mayotte, previously classified as an overseas collectivity, acceded to full French and European status as an overseas department of France following a referendum. This decision to, in the words of the social scientist François Taglioni, further ‘anchor’ the island in the republic has commonly been understood as a pragmatic decision as much as an ideological one. It was a way of distancing Mayotte from the political turmoil in neighbouring independent Comoros, as well as an indicator of the improbability of a small island nation achieving full sovereignty in a multipolar, resource hungry world. The narrative that self-determination must necessarily be obtained through national independence is still prevalent in the language of certain independence movements, including that of the Kanak people of New Caledonia. But it has been repeatedly tested at the ballot box, not least in November 2018 when New Caledonians voted in a referendum on their constitutional future. This referendum – and the further two due to follow it before 2022 – will be observed with interest by other self declared nations in waiting. Some anticipate, not a reclaiming of local sovereignty in the event of independence, but rather a transferral of economic hegemony from France to China, a prospect hinted at by Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Nouméa in 2018. However, the demographic minority status of the Kanak people whom the independentist Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste; FLNKS) claims to represent, coupled with divisions within the movement, means it is very hard to predict the contours of a future independent New Caledonian state.

The actions, attitudes and experiences of German society between 1939 and 1945 played a crucial role in ensuring that the Second World War was not only ‘the most immense and costly ever fought’ but also a conflict which uniquely resembled the ideal type of a ‘total war’. The Nazi regime mobilised German society on an unprecedented scale: over 18 million men served in the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, and compulsory Volkssturm duty, initiated as Allied forces approached Germany's borders in September 1944, embraced further millions of the young and middle-aged. The German war effort, above all in occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, claimed the lives of millions of Jewish and gentile civilians and served explicitly genocidal ends. In this most ‘total’ of conflicts, the sheer scale of the Third Reich's ultimate defeat stands out, even in comparison with that of Imperial Japan, which surrendered to the Allies prior to an invasion of its Home Islands. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 Allied forces had occupied almost all of Germany, with its state and economic structures lying in ruins. Some 4.8 million German soldiers and 300,000 Waffen SS troops lost their lives during the Second World War, including 40 per cent of German men born in 1920. According to recent estimates Allied bombing claimed approximately 350,000 to 380,000 victims and inflicted untold damage on the urban fabric of towns and cities across the Reich. As Nicholas Stargardt notes, this was truly ‘a German war like no other’.