This work links the western Allies’ policy of denazification in occupied Germany to efforts to repatriate German intelligence agents and Nazi Party officials – so-called ‘obnoxious’ Germans – from the neutral states of Europe after the Second World War. Once on German soil, these individuals would be subject to internment and investigation as outlined in occupation policy. Using the situation in Franco's Spain as a case study, the article argues that new ideas of neutrality following the war and a strong commitment to the concept of denazification led to the creation of the repatriation policy, especially within the United States. Repatriation was also a way to measure the extent to which Franco's Spain accepted the Allied victory and the defeat of Nazism and fascism. The US perception was that the continued presence of individual Nazis meant the continued influence of Nazism itself. Spain responded half-heartedly, at best. Despite the fact that in terms of numbers repatriated the policy was a failure, the Spanish example demonstrates that the attempted repatriation of ‘obnoxious’ Germans from neutral Europe, although overlooked, was significant not only as part of the immediate post-war settlement but also in its bearing on US ideas about Nazism, security and perceived collaboration of neutral states like Spain.

Despite the present-day attraction of ‘security’ as an attention-grabbing word in politics and the public sphere, the study of security is a missing chapter in many state-of-the-art surveys of historical literature. Its central relevance for the modern statehood has been obvious for centuries in the European context. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-seventeenth-century Leviathan, written in the context of the devastating English civil war and previous religious wars, government was given the fundamental role in guaranteeing security. Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have constantly debated Hobbes's ideas and concepts about security and societal peace. Especially after the second world war, security has found major attention in the fields of International Relations and its sub-discipline security studies. Security studies evolved during the nuclear age and were originally foremost about the study of the threat, use and control of military force, as one proponent of security studies, Stephen Walt, stated. They were mainly concerned with military strategy and giving policy advice to the military. Since the cold war, the study of security has come a long way. Most importantly, as Emma Rothschild has reminded us, during the past two decades or so, the concept was first extended downwards from states to individuals, upwards from the nation to the biosphere and horizontally from the military to the economic, social, political and environmental. It is the reflection of this dynamic change in theory, methodology and empirical research that connects most of the books under review in this article.

The stabilisation and longevity of Franco's regime can be explained by the interpenetration of society and the institutions of the ‘New State’ in three overlapping areas: firstly, in the sphere of the shared culture of the community of civil war victors; secondly, through repression, based on the decisive collaboration of those supporting Francoism, which cut short any possible opposition; thirdly, in the socio-economic sphere, where those making up the groups supporting the ‘New State’ would see their personal interests fulfilled. At the same time, the defeated would be ensnared in a maze of misery and silence, abandoning any political concerns and concentrating instead on survival. Accordingly, the regime proved able to win support from a broad range of social groups while also eliminating any signs of opposition.

The pursuit of nature conservation was central to the scientific section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the outset. In order to build a network of expertise and practice, UNESCO supported the establishment of a non-governmental organisation, the fledgling International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN). This small core of non-governmental actors found itself thrown into the arena of global politics and was forced out of its conservation niche. In August 1949, UNESCO and IUPN jointly convened a global conference on ecology and education. The genesis and progress of this conference highlighted the growing prominence of environmental issues and the increasing reciprocity between these issues and questions of nutrition, development and health in the immediate post-war era.

In ‘Interpretations’ the editors invite scholars to explore and debate central issues, concepts or problems encountered in the study of contemporary European history. Recent sections have dealt with ‘Political Religion’ (18:4) and consumerism (20:1). Here, Peter Baldwin takes issue with Richard J. Evans's characterisation of British historians as peculiarly ‘cosmopolitan’. Evans provides an energetic defence of his thesis, and Baldwin responds with an equally robust rejoinder.

‘Development’ as a ‘process of enlarging people's choices’ is omnipresent. Constituents of global society – governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational corporations, the media and individual actors – are deeply involved in its practices and discourses. At universities around the world, development studies mushroom, and development research has become a darling of the social sciences. In particular, development assistance has become big business, involving the flow of $136 billion dollars in 2009. But more significantly than before, development issues and especially development assistance have become contested terrain, too. While the millennium development goals defined by the United Nations in 2000 and designed to halve global poverty by the year 2015 call on donor and recipient countries to increase their efforts, critics of development assistance are multiplying.

Jürgen Kuczynski, the East German Marxist intellectual and economic historian, is best known for his numerous publications on labour history. Far less has been written about his role as a leading figure in the German Communist Party in Britain between 1936 and 1944, and his work for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1944–5, activities which later came back to haunt him when he was the subject of a major inquiry launched by the Central Party Control Commission in 1953. Using newly available documents in London and Berlin, this article examines the investigation into Kuczynski as a case study for the inter-relationship between party purges, spy scares and the manipulation of individual biographies during one of the most volatile periods of the cold war.

The year 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the great revolts of 1968. As always, the occasion gave rise to impassioned debates. In Germany they were stimulated by the historian and 1968 veteran Götz Aly, who compared the ‘sixty-eight’ to the ‘thirty-three’ generations (the Nazi student body of the early 1930s), and postulated ‘parallels in German history’, continuities and ‘similarities in the approach to mobilisation, political utopianism and the anti-bourgeois impulse’. Following the thirtieth anniversary in 1998, which triggered a flood of scholarly publications, we have had ten further years of research into the recent history of the 1960s, up to the fortieth anniversary in 2008. In 1998, the central question was still to remove the 1960s protest movements from the realm of myth and to establish the ‘year of protest’ (i.e. 1968) itself as a subject for historical research. Since 1998, the aims of international research have been to develop a global comparative analysis of the movements and to contextualise them historically. Particular attention has been devoted to locating political protest movements in the overall process of socio-cultural transformation through the ‘long 1960s’.

My book Cosmopolitan Islanders derives from the Inaugural Lecture I delivered in 2008 as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. The brief of such a lecture is a tricky one – you have to say something about yourself, something about your field, and something about the discipline of History, and you have to appeal both to colleagues and to the wider world. In addition, in both Oxford and Cambridge, the only two universities with Regius Chairs of History, there have been many famous Inaugurals, by historians as varied as J. B. Bury, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, most famous of all, Lord Acton. In some universities, where professors are all-powerful, the Inaugural has served as a means of laying down the law about how the subject should be taught and researched. But in recent times this has been rare, and it has never really been true in Oxford or Cambridge; the one time that an Oxford Regius, the seventeenth-century specialist Sir Charles Firth, tried this, he ran into a huge amount of trouble and was more or less ostracised in the Faculty for the rest of his career.

Because my article was not a review of Richard J. Evans's book, but a thought piece on broader topics prompted by his work, it does not stick only to issues discussed by him. What a shame that Cosmopolitan Islanders was largely ignored, as Evans reports, for he raises important questions. Part of the reason for the book's stillbirth is exemplified in Evans’ response here: the self-isolation of the historical profession that is met by increasing indifference from the rest of the thinking world. Evans's concern to draw fine distinctions and quarantine history apart from all other social science is telling. Yes, Myrdal was a sociologist (well actually an economist, but no matter). And, yes, some of the foreign scholars I mention who write about the Anglosphere work on literature, not history as such. Why such vigorous policing of the disciplinary boundaries when larger issues are at stake? No wonder historians now have their largest audiences among the military history buffs while the more adventurous social sciences cash in on our work in ways we spurn. What William McNeill used to do has become the province of Francis Fukuyama.