This article argues that syndicalist trade union organizations, viewed internationally, were unique in First World War Europe in not supporting the war efforts or defensive efforts of their respective governments. The support for the war of the important French organisation has obscured the fact that the remaining five national syndicalist organisations – in belligerent Germany and Italy, and in neutral Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands – remained faithful to their professed workers' internationalism. The article argues that forces tending to integrate the labour movement in pre-1914 Europe had less effect on syndicalists than on other trade unions, and that syndicalist resistance to both integration and war in the non-Gallic countries was also influenced by their rivalry with social-democratic organisations.

‘Certain things go inevitably with war and are war. The main thing is fighting, winning, killing and being killed, being masculine and aggressive and abnormally vigorous, violent and physical.’

The experience of total war dominated the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did the First World War inaugurate a new era in warfare, but its memory, commemoration and image was also incorporated in a profound sense into the culture of the interwar period. Combatants' memories and cinematic images contributed to keeping the war ever-present, as much in the pacifist desires of those who abhorred it as in the militarist ambitions of those intoxicated by it. The spirit of the trenches was to be reborn in the new fascist man of the 1920s and 1930s. As the opening quotation suggests, soldiering was the quintessential masculine experience. Military service – repackaged as national service during peacetime – was a school for forging men from callow boys, a cultural supposition which spanned the political divides of left and right, democracies and dictatorships. The experience of war restated and exaggerated conventional expectations of men and women. Indeed, for some theorists, war in the twentieth century was men's equivalent to women's experience of child-bearing. The front was an heroic, male arena, explicitly contrasted to the home front where women, children and those ‘unmanned’ by age or injury provided support and succour for the soldiers.

Little has been written about collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in eastern Europe. Using new material from former Soviet archives, the issue of the security police in Estonia is presented as a case study. The commander of the German security police deliberately set up a structure whereby German and Estonian police officers worked closely together, thereby minimising the need for German personnel. Although the security police dealt with the issues which were politically and ideologically the most important, non-Germans like Estonians were accepted as collaborators.

In the crisis of the First World War, the vast expansion of military control over civil society included women's work. Women contributed not only directly to war production but also to maintaining the entire socioeconomic structure in jobs such as trolley conductor or farm worker. Hundreds and thousands of women volunteered for war work in social and relief organisations. If their work under wartime conditions did not differ radically from the centuries-old tradition of nursing and other forms of care-giving, the considerable human force they now brought to military support work raised to a new level the debate over the proper role of women in modern democratic society. And whether members of the armed forces, employees or civilian volunteers, they all wore uniforms.

Enthusiastic youth volunteers were a common sight on Poland's ‘great building site of socialism’ of the Stalin era, the steelworks and new town of Nowa Huta. Paradoxically, however, the succesful mobilisation of youthful labour in Nowa Huta was accompanied by failure to socialise volunteers in their attitudes and behaviours after hours. Preferring jazz to mass songs and speak-easies to ‘red corners’, brigade members gained notoriety as ‘hooligans’, and many encountered difficulties adapting to ‘civilian’ life in the new town. The regime's inability to bridge the gulf between itself and Nowa Huta's youth volunteers, the author argues, reflects Polish Stalinism's critical failure to secure legitimacy among its potentially strongest supporters.

At the end of the Weimar Republic, German business people, socialists, and communists used images of unemployed workers to define the boundaries of what they each considered acceptable and unacceptable in German Society. While concerns over Jews, homosexuals, and so on stayed within narrow discursive boundaries in the Weimar Republic, the public discourse on the unemployed ranged across a number of discursive boundaries and became a nodal point of social critique and commentary. Despite the marginal social status of unemployed workers, discussions about them became central to the self-understanding of different social groups in Weimar's political economy. In defining the unemployed, these communities also defined themselves and laid bare their existential concerns.

The article argues that the democratic international trade union federations developed a keen interest in European economic co-operation after 1922, at first rejecting economic nationalism and advocating free trade; then, from the late 1920s onwards, stressing the need for an organised European economy. Remarkably, however, when discussing social issues, unions emphasised the national or universal level, as opposed to the regional one.

This paper first looks briefly at the connections – personal, political, practical and philosophical – between pre-First World War British and European women's suffrage and feminist pacifism as it emerged after 1914. Two feminist approaches to postwar peacemaking are compared, and the underlying assumptions of the Paris Peace Conference of the Allied and Associated Powers are compared with those of the women gathered at Zurich in May 1919. The aspirations and achievement of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom between 1919 and 1930 are analysed less in terms of what the organisation did for women than in terms of the women's own intent, and what they hoped to do for the world. The article considers how they confronted the political disabilities they faced as women, and on occasion turned them to their advantage, and shall show how they saw their pacifism as integral to their feminism, although it frequently took them out of gender stereotypes, particularly in their insistence on moving into that most male preserve, international relations.

This paper presents a comparative study of the development of national and regional identities in three different border regions of France: the Basses-Alpes, the Moselle and French Flanders. It demonstrates that in spite of political, economic and social differences between the regions, the presence of the border and interaction with foreigners in specifically border regions similarly influenced identity formation in interwar France. In each case hierarchies or degrees of foreignness were developed, and a specific form of national identity came to be dominant which was determined more by a differentiation from ‘others’ than through an identification with shared, centre-generated national images.

This article examines and analyses the discussion over ‘the Spanish Problem’ taking place between the leaders of the three great Allied powers during the Postdam Conference of July–August 1945. It argues that the approved condemnation of the Franco regime was a bald rhetorical declaration which contained no effective sanctions, be they diplomatic, economic or military. The reference to Spain was the result of a minimal agreement reached with great difficulty after arduous negotiations which resulted in the imposition of a toothless international ostracism. Consequently, aided by the disintegration of the Grand Alliance and its replacement by the Cold War, the Francoist dictatorship cautiously inched its way to post-war survival.

When at Christmas 1933 the Belgian Workers' Party adopted the Plan de Man to guide its forward march to socialism, European critics of unfettered capitalist development listened carefully. Deeply worried by Hitler's legal rise to power, socialist activists and intellectuals were then searching for new answers to the crises of their day, and many believed that they had found a blueprint in the Plan. Inspired by the activist politician Hendrik de Man, a series of international plan conferences, assembling the entire spectrum of western European pro-socialist, non-Stalinist economists, met between September 1934 and October 1937. The changing nature of these debates exemplify the fate of European socialism in the mid-1930s, descending from optimistic belief in a democratic socialist future towards technocratic pragmatism in the space of thirty-seven months.

The psychiatric study of women prisoners in the city of Málaga during the Spanish Civil War provides a starting point for a two-part analysis of the gendered tension between biology and morality. First, the relationship of organic psychiatry and bio-typologies to, in turn, liberalism and neo-Thomist Catholicism is discussed. The supposedly ‘biological’ roots of conditions such as hysteria and their link to women's revolutionary behaviour are examined. Second, prison records are used to examine the material conditions of women in the city and the gendered construction of their moral culpability during the revolution. Both medical science and Catholic doctrine could be exploited in declaring the indissolubility of gendered morality.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the individuals who enrolled in Vichy fighting units at the end of the German occupation. Those groups were mostly created in late 1943 and early 1944, and acted as effective subsidiaries to German troops, treating civilians and partisans with extreme violence. The enrolment of those men was a consequence of their political beliefs, notably strong anti-communism. But the fact that their behaviour seems born of desperation (some were recruited after D-Day) is a hint that it was shaped according to other cultural patterns, especially an image of masculinity rooted in the memory of the First World War and developed, among others, according to fascist and Nazi ideologies: a manhood based on strength, the violence of warfare and the image of the soldier. This article provides an analysis based on judiciary documents from the time of the purge, with a careful reconstruction of personal trajectories and self discourse in order to understand the masculine identity these sometimes very young men tried to realise through political engagement in the guise of warriors.

In the decade after 1952 France faced sustained United Nations criticism of its colonial policies in north Africa. As membership of the UN General Assembly expanded, support for the non-aligned states of the Afro-Asian bloc increased. North African nationalist parties established their permanent offices in New York to press their case for independence. Tracing UN consideration of French North Africa from the first major General Assembly discussion of Tunisia in 1952 to the end of the Algerian war in 1962, this article considers the tactics employed on both sides of the colonial/anti-colonial divide to manipulate the UN Charter's ambiguities over the rights of colonial powers and the jurisdiction of the General Assembly in colonial disputes.

Dominique Barjot, Rémi Baudouï and Danièle Voldman, eds., Les Reconstructions en Europe (1945–1949) (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1997), 342 pp., FF175, ISBN 2-870-27693-1. Matthias Kipping and Ove Bjarnar, eds., The Americanisation of European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of US Management Models (London: Routledge, 1998), 235 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0-415-17191-1. Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn and Hermann-Josef Rupieper, eds., American Policy and the Reconstruction of Western Germany, 1945–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 1993), 537 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-521-43120-4. Hans-Herbert Holzamer and Marc Hoch, eds., Der Marshall-Plan: Geschichte und Zukunft (Landsberg/Lech: Olzog, 1997), 214 pp., ISBN 3-789-29349-0. Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 50 Jahre Marshall-Plan (Berlin: Argon Verlag, Berlin, 1997), 140 pp., ISBN 3-870-24387-2. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka and Dieter Stiefel, eds., The Marshall Plan in Austria (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 588 pp., ISBN 0-765-80679-7. Michael Kennedy and Joseph Morrison Skelly, eds., Irish Foreign Policy 1919–1966: From Independence to Internationalism (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 352 pp., £39.50, ISBN 1-851-82404-9. Bernadette Whelan, Ireland and the Marshall Plan 1947–1957 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 426 pp., £39.50, ISBN 1-851-82517-7. Charles Silva, Keep Them Strong, Keep them Friendly: Swedish–American Relations and the Pax Americana, 1948–1952 (Stockholm: Akademitryck AB, 1999), 376 pp., Kl.10.00, ISBN 9-171-53974-3. Chiarello Esposito, America's Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948–1950 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 226 pp., £49.50, ISBN 0-313-29340-6. Fernando Guirao, Spain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–57 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 240 pp., ISBN 0-312-21291-7. Martin A. Schain, Marshall Plan Fifty Years After (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), £30.00, ISBN 0-333-92983-7 was published after this article went to press.

During the Second World War, the Nazi regime sent thousands of German women to occupied Poland to work with the ethnic German population, comprising native ethnic Germans and resettlers from the Baltic states, eastern Poland and Romania. They were to be trained to act as model colonisers for the newly conquered territories. Meanwhile the non-German population was subjugated and terrorised. This article examines what German women witnessed in Poland and how far they can be seen as complicit in acts of violence and injustice committed against Poles and Jews. To what extent did a gendered division of labour prevent women actively being involved in or witnessing acts committed against the Polish and Jewish populations? Did a construct of ‘womanly work’ help women to ‘look away’ from the evidence of oppression and persecution?

Gerald Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit. Staatsvertrag, Neutralität und das Ende der Ost-West-Besetzung Österreichs 1945–1955 (4. völlig überarbeitete und wesentlich erweiterte Auflage), Studien zu Politik und Verwaltung 62 (Vienna/Cologne/Graz: Böhlau, 1998), 834 pp., ISBN 3-205-98383-1. Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55. The Leverage of the Weak (Basingstoke/London: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 1999), 237 pp., ISBN 0-333-72547-6. Lothar Höbelt, Von der vierten Partei zur Dritten Kraft. Die Geschichte des VdU (Graz/Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1999), 303 pp., ISBN 3-702-00866-7. Anton Pelinka, Austria. Out of the Shadow of the Past, Nations of the Modern World: Europe (Boulder/Oxford: Westview, 1998), 256 pp., ISBN 0-813-32918-3.