This article explores a Portuguese town's latest market hall and adjoining new town square. Lourinhã, a town in the north of the District of Lisbon, introduced plans in 1966 to renovate its urban landscape, reorienting the town away from the cramped streets of the medieval centre to a new, open and manageable central square. Over the next forty years, and despite the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, Lourinhã’s municipal government, enjoying tacit support from its citizens, used tools such as electrical infrastructure and legislation to manage and develop what came to be called a ‘European’ landscape.

The article gives an overview of Finland's responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s. In particular, it focuses on public sector reforms that fall under the label New Public Management (NPM). These reforms are interpreted in the context of an overproduction crisis. The article contends that in the 1980s and 1990s power in Finland was centralised through the doctrines of NPM in order to reallocate public resources from welfare services to industrial policy and thus confront post-industrialism. In doing so, it provides a new explanation as to why NPM reforms were carried out. The main justification of NPM-reforms – ‘decentralisation’ – is analysed from different angles. In the late 1960s decentralisation referred to the autonomy of the municipalities. In the 1980s it referred to ‘efficient leadership’, which meant in practice more power over resources for the state. The idea was to reallocate public resources from welfare services to research and development and venture capital. In effect, NPM was part of a new kind of state interventionism not part of a neoliberal project to destroy or hollow out the state.

This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing one's surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, but came under pressure by New Left activists, whose emphatically different elective affinities led them to create alternative spaces such as communal apartments and squatted houses. In so doing, they reinvigorated urban life, but also diluted their initial political project and triggered a conservative counter-reaction.

After a drought of more than a decade, a substantial group of recent works has begun revisiting Weimar gender history. The fields of Weimar and Nazi gender history have been closely linked since the field was defined thirty years ago by the appearance of the anthology When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Following a flurry of pioneering work in the 1980s and early 1990s, few new monographs were dedicated to investigating the questions posed in that formative moment of gender history. Kathleen Canning, the current main commentator on Weimar gender historiography, in an essay first published shortly before the works under review, found that up to that point the ‘gender scholarship on the high-stakes histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany has not fundamentally challenged categories or temporalities’. Weimar gender, meanwhile, has been intensively analysed in the fields of cultural, film, and literary studies. The six books discussed in this essay reverse these trends, picking up on the central question of how gender contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. In addition, four of the books concentrate solely on reconstructing the dynamics of gender relations during the Weimar period itself in their discussions of prostitution, abortion and representations of femininity and masculinity. Is emerging gender scholarship now shaping larger questions of German early twentieth-century history? How are new scholars revising our view of the role of gender in this tumultuous time?

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? What made the 1989 revolutions in ‘Eastern Europe’ possible and why were they not crushed? What appeared as the logical consequence of Gorbachev's perestroika to many observers at the time – and has indeed been painted as such by quite a few historians – turns out on closer inspection to have been far more complex.

In the dispute over Norwegian EEC membership in 1972, a large number of economists in academic life and public administration took part in organised opposition against future membership. Their efforts to prevent economic and financial integration with the Common Market are important for understanding the depth and strength of Norwegian Euroscepticism. This article shows how this scepticism was rooted in the economic profession's reasoning about economic planning and economic policy making. Special attention is given to the opposition from economists within the government apparatus itself, as this both diminished the authority of the government's pro-membership arguments and challenged norms regulating civil servants’ conduct.

The provision of social welfare and the shape of the Soviet city profoundly influenced each other, especially in the post-Stalin period. This article explores the relationship between welfare and city in the USSR after 1953 by focusing on four particular urban or exurban spaces: the company town, the microdistrict, the pensions office and the city's rural hinterland. After the ideological visions of the Khrushchev era faded, welfare moved even closer to the heart of Soviet urban life. It determined some of the contours of urban form, while the resulting urban spaces contributed fundamentally to the way that people understood Soviet power and the nature of their citizenship.

Europe's history since 1945 has most commonly been seen through the prism of international politics and economic change, from post-war reconstruction to late twentieth-century deindustrialisation. Urban history has been tangential to these accounts. Hence Leif Jerram's call to arms in his book Streetlife, published in 2011: ‘it is time to put the where into the what and why of history’. The history of Europe's twentieth century, Jerram declared, happened ‘in the streets and factories, cinemas and nightclubs, housing estates and suburbs, offices and living rooms, shops and swimming baths of Europe's booming cities’.

In reply to Patrick Bernhard's critical review of my recent book I will make some brief general observations about the study of totalitarian and would-be totalitarian regimes.

Some preliminary remarks are necessary. Bernhard locates his review within the context of the debate over Italians' consensus for Fascism – a debate continuing in Italy, with highs and lows, since the mid-1970s. His own approach is clearly very much influenced by the methodologies of cultural history; he looks for emotions, sentiments, practices and experiences in order to form a picture of how Italians lived under the regime. He approves of the history that finds these. There is much to commend this approach, and I would certainly not argue against its value – cultural studies do, indeed, have a great deal to offer. But the methodology of cultural studies is not, and cannot be, the only approach, nor its absence the only criterion for criticism.

In his trenchant and stimulating review article Patrick Bernhard surveyed a series of English-language studies that focus in one way or another on the relationship between the fascist regime and the Italian people. Drawing on the historiography of Nazi Germany, Bernhard took these studies as his cue to argue that much of the historiography on Italian Fascism is outdated. In particular, he sees the approach adopted to assessing the regime's appeal as often old-fashioned, with the result that Italian historians have vastly underestimated ordinary Italians’ embrace of fascism and their complicity in its violence and war crimes. At the same time, he argues that histories of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy show far more parallels and intersections than have been acknowledged of late and calls on Italian historians to turn their attention to this entangled history.

In an article published in September 1939, in the very eye of the storm of twentieth-century Europe's ‘age of extremes’, the British historian Christopher Dawson attempted to get to grips with the temper of his times. Opining on what he saw as the failure of nineteenth-century liberal individualism and its deleterious encroachment on spiritual values, he wrote:

In many respects, and certainly with regard to his educational ideas, Rudolf Steiner was a child of his time. Trust in the natural goodness of the child that became more and more central, belief in an evolutionist development of both individuals and humanity as a whole, the emphasis on a holistic education realised through a community of teachers, parents and children; all of these were ideas that Steiner shared with other key figures of the progressive education movement, which began in the late nineteenth century. In line with the existing historiography on progressive education (Reformpädagogik) in general, historical research on the figure of Steiner, and particularly on the development of the schools and the educational system named after him, is characterised by paying considerable attention to the years of foundation in the interwar period on the one hand and to current practices on the other, in that way largely neglecting the developments during the second half of the twentieth century.

In a recent review of Christopher Duggan's latest book, Emilio Gentile notes that in the 1970s an ‘intimate history of fascist Italy’ would have met the opposition of ‘militant anti-fascist historiography’ because of its proneness to acknowledge the involvement of Italians in Fascism. Still, after criticising the book, Gentile stresses that the ‘question of consent’ – a topic on which he himself has provided some crucial contributions – is a ‘poorly posed question’.

As a non-specialist in the historiography of Fascism and Nazism, I enter this discussion with trepidation. Viewed from the outside, antagonism and rigidity have long characterised historical debate about the causes, nature and consequences of both regimes, although it is clear (and as the other contributions published here have pointed out) that some of this fierceness has attenuated of late with the rise of a new generation of historians. I don't propose to go over the various points of disagreement about fascist Italy – the problem of popular ‘consensus’ for the regime, the reasons for collective ‘amnesia’ after the fall of the regime, and the myth of ‘Italians as good people’ (Italiani brava gente) – as these have already been discussed by Bernhard in his review and in the contributions by Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher. Nor will I enter into related debates about the Italian Resistance, the issue of Italian war crimes and the broader controversy about ‘divided memory’ in post-war Italy, although these questions have also generated a significant literature in recent years. Instead I want simply to re-visit Paul Corner's The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy and to propose a rather different interpretation than the one offered by Patrick Bernhard.