It is with great regret that we announce the death in May this year of Heide-Irene Schmidt. She was the Reviews Editor for Contemporary European History for eleven years, responsible for the first issue in March 1992 to that of May 2003. She established the tradition of the impartiality and rigour in book reviews required for a first-class journal, as well as fostering the journal's reputation for commissioning notable review articles from a wide range of scholars working in several languages and in a number of countries. Her knowledge of the work being done in contemporary history around the world was immensely impressive, and the journal benefited enormously.

The question today is the same as that of twenty years ago: what do we call the events that transformed eastern Europe in 1989? Our improved perspective has not necessarily generated better answers. The most popular term is ‘revolution’, but many observers still hesitate to apply it to largely non-violent change. Can there be a ‘liberal revolution’? Timothy Garton-Ash's evocative neologism ‘refolution’ (meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’) captures well the ambivalence many feel about describing a gradual transition to democracy as ‘revolutionary’. The processes of civil society formation he observed in the 1980s by no means concluded with 1989; in south-eastern Europe in particular the transition to democracy has not been revolutionary but slow and painful. Perhaps ‘democracy’ is not even the right word.

The years from 1928 to 1930 witnessed a bitter struggle for the control of the German National People's Party (DNVP), the bastion of German conservatism in the Weimar Republic. One of the principal protagonists in this conflict was Count Kuno von Westarp, chairman of the DNVP from 1926 to 1928 and of the DNVP delegation to the Reichstag from 1924 to 1929. Westarp struggle with great determination to preserve the unity of the party in the face of a concerted effort from the radical Pan-German nationalists around the newly elected party chairman, film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg. But Westarp's efforts on behalf of party unity ultimately failed as the moderates who stood on the DNVP's left wing abandoned the party in two secessions, the first in December 1929 and the second in July 1930. In the second of these Westarp himself left the party. In the meantime the DNVP had been transformed from a conservative Sammelpartei into an instrument of the radical right.

Despite its importance, historical scholarship has largely ignored Catholic education as a historical force. This article argues that a closer look at Catholic education in Spain in the first decades of the twentieth century can widen our understanding of educational modernity and at the same time help us to grasp better the specificity and contradictions of religious political mobilisation in Europe. Catholic pedagogues and schools responded to the increasing politicisation of education, the changing demands of upper- and middle-class parents and challenges posed by the new psychological and pedagogical knowledge with fundamental changes in their educational practices. The article identifies the main developments in this contradictory shift, concluding that, first, it is highly misleading simply to identify the ‘new pedagogy’ of the early twentieth century with liberal democracy. This questions a sterile dichotomy of collectivism versus individualism in analysing social movements in the twentieth century. Second, the case study points to both the power and the inherent limits of Catholic mobilisation.

This paper is a frankly subjective effort to return to questions posed about the nature of communist rule and the sudden collapse of communism in the light of the intervening two decades. It asks, first, why feelings of elation about the transformations of 1989 faded relatively quickly, second, why the communist system collapsed so clamorously, and, third, how might we best describe its earlier operation. The paper suggests that there will always be a sense of let-down after intensely hopeful political activity. It endeavours to provide a model of social complexity that communist rule with its Marxist archetypes of social development could not really master. But it also rejects the idea that ‘society’ under communism can be judged autonomously apart from the regime that sustained and structured it. Efforts to do so will trivialise the degrees of repression and surveillance. Finally the paper proposes that the nature of communist rule in the decades after Stalin must be described in terms of a ‘life cycle’ metaphor, such as the idea of ‘late style’ provides for artistic creation. It is fruitless to describe an ideal type of transformative political regime that makes no allowance for change over time. Hence, returning to the first enquiry, the paper argues that efforts to reclaim communal fulfilment will always exist or revive alongside efforts at individual emancipation.

In ‘Interpretations’ the editors invite scholars to explore and debate central issues or concepts encountered in the study of contemporary European history. Recent sections have dealt with political violence (14:1), Europe and its historians (12:3) and fascist-era dictatorships (11:3). Here, David Roberts discusses the merits of the term ‘political religion’, and Carl Levy has responded. Although authors have the right of reply, David Roberts has declined to do so on this occasion.

This article explores why slow and indirect media were regarded as particularly appropriate means in the US public diplomacy efforts towards Norway in the period 1950–65. The article traces how these strategies were carried out in practice by using as examples exchange programmes and the setting up of American Studies in Norway. The Norwegian case is seen in relation to similar efforts elsewhere, and the article discusses whether this case should be seen as a singular one or as a local variation of more general US public diplomacy strategies. In conclusion, it is suggested that the Norwegian case appears to be an almost ideal-typical example of how ‘culturalist’ public diplomacy approaches were mobilised for political purposes.

In 1939 Francoists won the Spanish Civil War, but continued to prosecute hundreds of thousands from the defeated Republican side in summary military tribunals that imposed either the death sentence or jail terms of up to thirty years. Historians have paid much attention to the outcomes of these trials and stressed the institutional power of the courts within the emerging Francoist state. By contrast, this article, through a study of court documents, examines how the Francoist authorities devolved much of the prosecution process to the municipal level. Here they came to rely on their grass-roots supporters to identify, classify, provide testimony against and convict Republicans.

This article seeks to clarify the uses and disadvantages of the concept of ‘political religion’, which has recently returned to currency, especially to account for the liturgy and the sense of world-historical mission central to Italian fascism, German Nazism and Soviet communism. But the category leads us to inflate abiding, suprahistorical impulses at the expense of historical specificity and novelty. And by making the phenomena in question seem relatively familiar, it diverts us from the deeper challenge they constitute. Still, the objections of critics often miss dimensions that ‘political religion’ at least approximates. Essential to the requisite synthesis is a recast notion of totalitarianism, understood as a novel frame of mind leading to a new mode of collective action.

The events of 1989 had world-shattering revolutionary consequences. They brought about a new vision of the political based upon a rediscovery of democratic participation and civic activism. The upheaval in the east, and primarily in the central, European countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. When explaining 1989, one needs to focus on three major themes: the deep-seated meanings of the collapse of state socialist regimes in east central Europe, the nature of revolutions at the end of the twentieth century, and the role of critical (public) intellectuals in politics. There is no single factor that explains the collapse of Leninism: economics as much as politics, and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. The aftermath of 1989 generated a fluidity of political commitments, allegiances and affiliations that signalled a general crisis of values and authority. There is a need for ‘social glue’ and the existing political formations have failed to imagine such ingredients for the consensus needed in order to generate constitutional patriotism. A fundamental source for reinforcing democracy in east central Europe is the synthesis between the history and the memory of communism with the purpose of achieving moral justice.

This article explores the connection between food politics and genocide in the occupied eastern territories. The examination focuses on Herbert Backe, the ‘second man’ in the agricultural administration during the period of Nazi rule. Backe was in charge of food rationing during the war, and was involved in the planning of the economic exploitation of the Soviet Union after the invasion. Under Backe's directive, food policy turned into ‘starvation policy’ for people in the occupied lands of the Soviet Union. The author uses a range of archival sources, including rarely used personal letters and diaries of Backe and his wife, to understand Backe's role and motivations.

This article investigates the origins of modern citizenship in Portugal through the example of the historical construction of housing as a social right. It argues this process owes much to the centralisation and strengthening of the state undertaken by Salazar's ‘New State’ (1933–74), whose transformative project changed the nature of the relationship between the governing and the governed, making political claims based on social rights plausible. The ensuing political dynamic changed the nature of the social contract in Portugal, tying the legitimacy of the state to the provision of social rights, a factor which eventually contributed to the dictatorship's demise.

Political scientists have documented significant variation in political and economic outcomes of the 1989–91 revolutions. Countries bordering on western Europe have become relatively democratic and economically successful, with both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. Explanations for this variation and the replication of an older pattern on the Eurasian landmass have moved farther and farther into the past. Yet in moving to the longue durée, more proximate events such as the revolutions of 1989, the demise of communism and even the communist experience itself recede into the background and are themselves accounted for by antecedent conditions. The article discusses how two more proximate factors helped to change older patterns in central and eastern Europe: the impact of communist modernisation and the prospect of European integration.

This article focuses on the remembrance of the deportations of Silesians to the Soviet Union in 1945, undertaken in Upper Silesia, Poland, after the collapse of communism. It explores the relationship between local elite-sponsored official remembrance of the deportations and the formation of regional identity in the context of the Upper Silesia's borderland locality and the post-war population movement. The article also investigates the role of public commemorations of the Silesian past in the construction of a Silesian national identity undertaken by the Silesian separatist movement that gained in popularity against the backdrop of the post-1989 de-industrialisation of the region, Poland's most important centre for coal mining industry.

Burgundians developed new cultural strategies to market their wines during the inter-war years. Regional leaders, cultural intermediaries and the wine industry collaborated to overcome overproduction, prohibition and foreign as well as regional competition by exploiting the concept of terroir to develop a repertoire of popular festivals such as the Gastronomic Fair of Dijon, the Paulée of Meursault, Saint Vincent parades, an annual wine auction at the Hospice in Beaune and a Burgundian Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. These drew attention to the unique qualities of their wines and suggested how they might be best consumed. This aggressive marketing strategy was so successful that it became a model for French agricultural products promoted through the système d'appelation d'origine controlée. The result united natural resources, historical memory, marketing strategies and cultural performance into an imaginative and enduring form of commercial regionalism.

David Roberts has published widely on Italian fascism and more recently a significant comparative study of totalitarianism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. The short essay published here is a useful compression of the arguments presented in the longer work. Unfortunately, this piece represents all that is problematic and frustrating in totalitarian/political religion studies. Roberts gives us a useful review of the growth and evolution of totalitarianism and political religion from the inter-war period through the Cold War until we reach the sunny postmodern uplands of the cultural turn. A review of the arguments of Gentile, Griffin, Morgan, Kershaw, Eatwell, Payne, Burrin and Voegelin is helpful to the reader who is unfamiliar with a series of complex arguments, which straddle decades.