The article examines posters produced by the peace movements in the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War, with an analytical focus on the transformation of the iconography of peace in modernity. Was it possible to develop an independent, positive depiction of peace in the context of protests for peace and disarmament? Despite its name, the pictorial self-representation of the campaign ‘Fight against Nuclear Death’ in the late 1950s did not draw on the theme of pending nuclear mass death. The large-scale protest movement in the 1980s against NATO's 1979 ‘double-track’ decision contrasted female peacefulness with masculine aggression in an emotionally charged pictorial symbolism. At the same time this symbolism marked a break with the pacifist iconographic tradition that had focused on the victims of war. Instead, the movement presented itself with images of demonstrating crowds, as an anticipation of its peaceful ends. Drawing on the concept of asymmetrical communicative ‘codes’ that has been developed in sociological systems theory, the article argues that the iconography of peace in peace movement posters could not develop a genuinely positive vision of peace, since the code of protest can articulate the designation value ‘peace’ only in conjunction with the rejection value ‘war’.

This article examines the process of state reconstruction in Austria and Hungary's borderlands that followed the Second World War. This process of state reconstruction was also a process of pacification, as it represented an attempt to (re)build states on the foundations of the military settlement of the war. The construction of legitimate state authority was at its most successful on the Austrian side of the border, where political actors were able to gain legitimacy by creating a state that acted as an effective protector of the immediate demands of the local community for security from a variety of threats. On the Hungarian side of the border the state was implicated with some of the actors who were seen as threatening local communities, something that produced political polarisation. These differences set the stage for the transition from war to cold war in the borderlands.

Why has ‘development aid’ been donated by so-called developed to under-developed populations since the Second World War? Using discourse analysis, this article provides partial answers to this riddle. First, we suggest that donor motives may be rooted in an ideology of ‘being good’, which, paradoxically, motivates recipients to be helpless – that is, a Samaritan's dilemma. Second, drawing on journal articles published in 1960–70, we test this theory by tracing a global development discourse and ‘goodness ideology’ in a Western country such as Denmark – a process that was strongly influenced by the agricultural co-operative movement, which sought to export the ‘Danish co-operative model’.

In the early 1950s, Norway attempted to join the sterling area. This article argues that this futile attempt can be used as a point of departure for understanding the country's ambivalence towards multilateralism in the early post-war period. The attempt was triggered by the prospects of an early move to convertibility under conditions Norway believed to be premature. Norway saw closer association with Britain through the sterling area as a buffer against the negative effects of multilateralism and at the same time as a window of opportunity for becoming part of a larger market. Moreover, I argue that both the perception of the costs of multilateralism and the positive view of Britain as a natural ally was deeply embedded in the prevailing economic thinking of Norwegian social democracy.

For twenty years before the famous crisis of 1976 Britain was a regular borrower from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Through this lending role, the Fund in these years played a key part in determining the credibility of British policies. Borrowing from the Fund meant that British policy had to be seen as conforming to certain norms, but these norms were always negotiable, albeit within shifting limits. This article uses archival material from London and Washington to examine these processes of negotiation, showing how far British policy was shaped by the desires of the IMF, and how far it was able to maintain autonomy in national economic policy.

In 1949, the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht opened his book The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (from which the title for this review article is borrowed) with the following lines:

This article focuses on the early years of the cold war in Italy in the form of an analysis of the Catholic press from 1947 to the eve of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. In so doing it attempts to answer key questions for Italian Catholicism relating to peace building that arose from total war in the age of mass democracy.

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, a few book editors seeking a silver lining, however slight, suggested that the global shock might generate a revival of international history. As time passed, works gendering (or engendering) the landscape or re-imagining the city remained dominant in the historical profession. Some international historians addressing very recent periods found a bandwagon and focused on cultural diplomacy, which was largely a post-1945 innovation, but the rest of the field continued to languish. Only time will tell if the optimism of the editors was justified, but whether or not ‘9/11’ (as Americans term it) had any causal role, we now have four studies directed to the international history of Europe in the inter-war era.

On 31 December 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President François Mitterrand of France called for the creation of ‘a European confederation’ designed to ‘associate all states of [the] continent in a common and permanent organisation for exchanges, peace and security’. Yet less than eighteen months later the Confederation project, a major initiative for post-Yalta Europe, had collapsed. What were Mitterrand's objectives? What were the modalities of the project, and how was it conducted? And why did it fail in the end, after having raised much hope?

The downfall and disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, and the unification in 1990 of the two German states into the Federal Republic of Germany, the FRG, marked the end of an era. Forty years of divided and non-simultaneous German history had been brought to an end, and the national or German question had at last been solved. Since 1990 German history has continued as the history of the Federal Republic. From this perspective 1990 marked not an absolute end, but the continuity of the Federal Republic and to some degree even the triumph of the political, economic and social system of the FRG, as the inhabitants of the socialist GDR, when they had the opportunity, voted for joining the successful and wealthy West German state. The end of divided history, however, has had another consequence. Even if the era of the GDR, because of the very favourable archive situation, attracted great attention among historians, the focus of historical research has turned more and more to the history of the Federal Republic in order to analyse and explain why the FRG ended as a success, while the socialist GDR failed in its ambitions and aspirations as an alternative Germany. History demonstrated that the GDR was no German option, although for some time it was a German reality.

Any definition of peace is also a definition of war. The two cannot be described other than in each other's image. In the twentieth century there have been four roughly separate periods of warfare. Their character and consequences tell us much about how peace was defined.