The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.

When urban planners Marcello Piacentini and Antonio Muñoz looked at the Rome they helped create through their participation in the Master Plan of 1931, they saw a metaphor for Fascism's transformation of Rome, a metaphor that captured the ‘effect’ of the Master Plan but not its ‘intention’. The Fascist regime aimed to build a modern capital on the nineteenth-century models of Paris and Vienna, but created instead a modernist city which challenged, on many levels, the neo-classicist rationalism of the previous century's urban planning. This article explores the reasons for such a disjuncture between intention and effect and finds them within Fascist ideology and experience.

With the outbreak of war in Ethiopia in late 1935 Italian Fascism shifted into a new phase, which can be called imperial-colonialist-racial. Until 1935 Italy had invested little in the colonies and maintained a relatively small presence in Africa beyond a few cities in Libya. Yet from 1935 to 1940 the Fascist regime shifted enormous amounts of money and effort to create a new Fascist colonial society. This article attempts to explain how this happened by linking the shift to imperial politics to a new totalitarian drive to re-educate Italians and to the adoption of official racism.

Although almost all of Europe was under royal rule for most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, very little effort has so far been dedicated to explaining this phenomenon. By examining royal photographs the author is able to shed light on some of the central mechanisms leading to this remarkable royal success. By analysing the production, distribution and perception of royal photographs in a variety of European countries, this article shows that these images were a crucial means by which royal families were turned into powerful symbols of modern nations. Regularly made by the most renowned portrait photographers and widely distributed via the press and as postcards and personal commemorative gifts, royal photographs allowed monarchies to acquire an absolutely vital asset for their survival at the head of modern European societies, namely strong emotional bonds between individual members of the general public and royal families.

The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police.

The inefficient operation of state institutions – including municipal administration – lay at the heart of Belgium's crisis of legitimacy in the 1930s. In 1940, the German military occupation government opted to keep many of the existing administrative institutions and personnel in place. The collaborating political parties, Rex and the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), possessed little legitimacy with either the Germans or the Belgian population. However, this article argues that both parties turned this to their advantage, infiltrating the Flemish municipal apparatus (especially mayors). Yet, as their political programme and legitimation was completely derived from the Germans, their legal position as administrators (especially mayors) was very weak. Both collaborating parties compensated for this with the theory of ‘good government’. Their takeover of power was an administrative operation which, the article argues, would bring them legitimacy through everyday ‘good government’. The entire ‘Neuordnung’ in Belgium in 1940–2 was strongly legitimised on administrative, not political grounds. The failure of this tactic lay in the open politicisation of collaborationist local government. As the article shows, the post-liberation authority also faced a problem of legitimacy. Generally speaking, the trauma of occupation had seemed to strengthen Belgians' wishes for the restoration of stability rather than reforms.

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.

This article considers the role of music among German, Polish and Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp. It focuses primarily on the songs that were composed and sung in the camp, of which at least 350 are known. The article uses song as a lens through which to examine the diversity of the camp's social landscape, and places particular emphasis on the distinctive ways in which prisoner groups chose to interpret and respond to the experience of incarceration.

The history of France's defeat, occupation and subsequent liberation may be read, and written, as a constant struggle for legitimacy. Here the diverse candidates for legitimacy are analysed (Pétain, de Gaulle and the internal Resistance) as well as the agents of legitimation, and the arbiters of that process of legitimation (French society, the German occupier, Britain and the United States). Four successive configurations are distinguished within that struggle for legitimacy: summer 1940 to spring 1941, the time of the defeat; summer and autumn 1941, when French society called into question the legitimacy of the Vichy French State; the crossroads of greatest legitimacy between late 1942 and mid-1943, which also marked the period of greatest fragility for de Gaulle; and spring to autumn 1944, when the key question was which state should be rebuilt.

The constitutional debate around the establishment of the Union Française (1946) is examined here as part of a long-term debate between two competing definitions of the nation and the republic: an integrating and ‘jacobin’ one, which aimed at moulding the colonial empire along the lines of the ‘one and indivisible’ republic, and another, ‘Girondin’ and contextual one, that saw the Union Française as a possible means of carving out a diverse, possibly divisible, republic. Two different ways of considering both French citizenship and the hybrid citizenship of the Union Française as put together in the Constitution of 1946 developed out of those two conceptions.

This article explores the meaning and impact of the Nazi concept of a ‘New Order’ for Europe on German-occupied Denmark. The first German civil authority in power in Denmark was the Foreign Ministry, which struggled to conclude an economic union with Denmark in summer 1940. Then Goering's Four-Year Plan and the Reich Economics Ministry took command and economic union was abandoned by Berlin, since a pragmatic, day-to-day approach now prevailed. Other initiatives were taken in order to facilitate Denmark's incorporation in the European New Order, such as the setting up of a ministerial Eastern Committee with the purpose of re-establishing Danish industry in the occupied USSR. The article shows how, in Denmark, German short-term politics actually coincided with long-term plans. Germany's ideas of becoming the economic centre of a self-sufficient continental Europe were closely connected to the idea of securing foodstuffs from its neighbours, and this idea, too, was implemented in spring and early summer 1940, when, after the swift occupation of Denmark and the subsequent severance of its trade with Britain, agricultural exports were diverted to the German market.

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.

The Nazi occupation of northern Italy led to the creation of the Adriatisches Küstenland operations zone, a Nazi civil administration led by Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Although this was supposedly a temporary measure, the article argues that the intention was to separate the zone from the Italian state and incorporate it into an economic and political sphere directly controlled by the Reich. The article explores the legitimising strategies exploited by the Nazi civil administration and its organs of propaganda, which focused on the political, social and economical failures of the Italian Fascist government. Rainer strove hard to find ways of encouraging each of the zone's diverse ethnic and social groups to look to the Reich – and hence to the local Nazi administration – as the promoter of its national destiny, the guarantor of its socio-political security and the harbinger of its economic prosperity, safeguarding this against the social revolution advocated by the strong local communist Resistance. Rainer's administration, in trying to eradicate the region's Italian roots, established a new ethnic hierarchy, which favoured Slovenes over Italian nationals.

After 1950, at least 23,000 German POWs remained in Soviet captivity as ‘war criminals’, and they were pardoned and released in several amnesties from 1950 to 1956. This article examines the political and propagandistic reactions of the ruling SED to the return of those prisoners. It analyses how the SED's attempts to reintegrate ‘war criminals’ into a socialist society related to the official politics of the past (Vergangenheitspolitik) and the construction of a memory of the Nazi past in East Germany. The SED's key strategy in dealing with these returnees – avoiding the question of individual and collective responsibility – is put into the context of the party's central ideological objective, namely to dissociate the socialist GDR from the legacy of Nazi Germany. On the basis of newly accessible documents from the archives of the former Ministry for State Security, the article also describes the intensive involvement of the Stasi in repatriation and reintegration matters at all levels of society.

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.

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.

This article presents a re-examination of Hungary's postwar transition from the perspective of the politics of legitimacy that were deployed by the various significant political actors. It argues that postwar state formation following Soviet occupation and legitimacy were closely connected. Hungary's communists and their allies aimed to create a state based on the ideological formula of ‘people's democracy’, which in the Hungarian context led them to build a state based on the restricted social base of the industrial working class. They ignored or antagonised alternative political traditions, particularly those associated with the rural majority and middle classes, which were instead mobilised by an alternative project that rested on a democratised conservatism. This created two visions of a potential postwar political order. The contest between these two visions generated the bitter political struggles that characterised the late 1940s and shaped the social roots of dictatorship in the country.

The article compares the careers of two men, Dobrica Ćosić and Vojislav Koštunica, who gained prominence as dissident intellectuals in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and later served as presidents of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After outlining the main features of each man's dissident career, the article traces how one aspect of each's thought – his conception of the Serbian national interest – evolved during his transition from intellectual to political engagement. While highlighting differences in Ćosić's and Koštunica's political careers, the article emphasises similarities in their national thought. In conclusion, it considers some general aspects of the dominant Serbian response to Yugoslavia's dissolution.

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

Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism. Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 311 pp., $60.00 (hb), ISBN 0–393–730484.

Hélène Jannière, Politiques éditoriales et architecture ‘moderne’. L'émergence de nouvelles revues en France et en Italie (1923–1939) (Paris: Éditions Arguments, 2002), 377 pp., €24.50 (pb), ISBN 2–909109–26–7.

Paolo Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini. Scuole e sindacato, architetti e massoni, professori e politici negli anni del regime (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1999), 239 pp., €19.63 (pb), ISBN 88–464–1305–9.