The volunteers of the International Brigades are well known for their participation in the battles of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), yet their encounters with the people, places and politics of Spain are yet to receive substantial attention from historians. This is the first interpretive analysis of their wide-reaching work with children, which spanned from the holding of fiestas to the establishment of costly homes. By considering these cross-cultural encounters, it highlights how they understood themselves to be members of a unified anti-fascist community in which Spanish children themselves had a key role to play. While these children were invariably regarded as the principal victims of ‘fascism’, they were also encouraged to take an active interest in the violent struggle of the Brigades as well as the building of an anti-fascist ‘New Spain’. Their own letters and drawings show the surprising extent to which the volunteers succeeded in their efforts.

Over the course of the 1970s, Europe reckoned with the after-effects of decolonisation – a transformative process in world history that not only led to the movement of millions of people from the former colonies, but also threw into question European economic and cultural hegemony. The three articles in this forum investigate different ways Europe remade itself in response to the unmaking of European imperialism. All three demonstrate that Europe radically redrew the boundaries of belonging over the course of the 1970s, either by limiting access to national welfare states for migrants and former colonial subjects, by crafting a new form of international welfare state that was less focused on the redistribution of wealth, or by ‘Europeanising’ fossil fuel production so as to insulate the continent from the economic power of the so-called Third World.

When Nazi officials surrendered to the Allied powers on 8 May 1945, gay German men hoped fervently that their suffering had come to an end. Ten years earlier, the fascist government had promulgated draconian new laws criminalising all forms of male same-sex behaviour. After the war, as Allied officials embarked on an extensive programme of democratic renewal in the occupied lands, gay men hoped that democratisation would mean the repeal of these laws. Yet, the new West Germany retained the Nazi-era laws until 1969, convicting over 50,000 men in those twenty years. Using petitions to government officials as well as essays in and letters to the editors of homophile magazines, this article examines how gay men in West Germany conceived of democratisation, asking what expectations they held for the new republic, how their views shifted as it proved hostile to queer citizens, and what this history means for the broader understanding of democratisation in the postwar world.

This paper charts the emergence of social scientific studies on Black kinship from its origins in the United States and colonial Caribbean to its revivification in the decolonisation-era Netherlands. Demonstrating how racial knowledge was from its inception a tool of transnational governance, the author argues that Black kinship studies also informed the development of the Dutch welfare state in the aftermath of decolonisation. Drawing upon Dutch state – and municipal – archival sources as well as the private papers and published works of key figures in Black kinship studies, she charts how publicly-funded sociologists and anthropologists tracked Dutch citizens from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles through the metropolitan welfare state, producing a corpus of knowledge that connected kinship and welfare reliance. Though Caribbean-born Dutch citizens opposed the racist assumptions of state-funded scholarship, research on Black kinship ultimately informed the course of Dutch welfarism from the expansion of interventionist programmes in the 1970s to retrenchment in the 1990s.

The tripartite pact, concluded by Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1940, sought to create a new global order. This article is part of a broader shift in scholarship, inspired by global and cultural history. Instead of revisiting the decision-making that led to the pact's conclusion, this article explores the pact through the dialectics of culture and power. Through an archive-based interpretation of the pact's signing and the celebrations of its anniversaries from 1941 until 1945 that involved ordinary people in Axis-dominated territories around the world, the central mechanisms of this global fascist alliance become clear. A performative diplomacy of power and unity held the alliance together. Style and substance were not mutually exclusive categories of tripartite politics; instead, ‘real’ and representational politics shaped each other. The pact was a concerted attempt by the three signatories to transform global political structures and supersede the purported global hegemony of the liberal democracies.

Between 1969 and 1993, a genuine ‘European welfare state’ was forged at the level of the European Economic Community (EEC), even though this expression was not used per se. After a definition of the welfare state as a three-pronged set of policies, the article develops first the flourishing period in the 1970s, when many ambitious ideas such as a common reduction of working hours, or the control of multinationals, emerged. In a second step, it explains the failure of this project due to the neoliberal backlash of the early 1980s and the division of the welfarist coalition. Ultimately, the whole project was rekindled as a flanking wing of the internal market programme when the latter was launched in 1985. Hence, when the internal market opened up in 1993, a very unique kind of European welfare existed at the international level. It was less redistributive than that of national welfare states and more geared towards the management of common norms.

This article will focus on the prominent role played by the British Conservative government, guided since 1979 by Margaret Thatcher, in re-launching globally an energy model based on cheap fossil fuels by leveraging the newly available petroleum extracted in the North Sea. Between 1980 and 2010 global oil consumption increased by 50 per cent, while both coal and natural gas consumption nearly doubled. North Sea oil represented a crucial, if never openly acknowledged, ally for Thatcher, serving the purpose of bringing down oil prices, while at the same time achieving other crucial policy goals.The advent of the British North Sea oil weakened OPEC control of the global oil market, helped crush the resistance of the British coal miners, fed the ‘de-nationalisation’ of British energy sector, and then contributed to promote the ‘neoliberal governance’ of the EU energy sector.

This article investigates how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), left-wing British, Dutch and German-language newspapers ‘recruited’ their readers to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Recruitment could consist of donating time, money, social and political capital, or, in extreme cases, actually joining the fighting in Spain. It employs a double comparative approach, analysing recruitment messages attuned to readers in three different national political contexts and cultures produced on behalf of socialist and communist organisations. It argues that different ‘sketches of Spain’ co-existed, aligned to different domestic political and popular cultures and through different ideological lenses. These different sketches, in turn, were vital in shaping people's expectations of the Civil War, circumscribed the scope for and content of anti-fascist transnational connections made in Spain, and helped foster new understandings of social and political circumstances at home.

This article examines the activism of British women's organisations to establish peaceful internationalism built on women's roles as mothers, while simultaneously opposing the rise of European fascism in the interwar period. It considers the maternalist arguments made by women's organisations in their work for disarmament, which coincided with the increasing militarism of fascist governments and their promotion of the idea that women's roles were primarily as mothers to create future soldiers for the state. These campaigns were also connected to debates about the birth rate, and women's organisations promoted the idea that women were actively refusing biological motherhood until policy makers heeded women's demands. This article demonstrates how feminist activists in interwar Britain fought to claim and mobilise their own gendered and politicised understandings of women's roles as mothers at a time when they feared fascism would strip women of the political rights they had worked for decades to achieve.

French price controls and rationing after the Second World War sparked opposition from a broad range of economic actors – farmers, shopkeepers, manufacturers and consumers. Towns rang their church bells to mobilise residents against controllers, whom they attacked with verbal abuse and physical violence. They associated the controllers with Vichy and collaboration with the Nazis, and rejected controls as ‘economic tyranny’. Implicitly, they accepted moderate inflation as the path to economic recovery. This article explains the development of hostility, from wartime frustrations to the violent conflicts that forced the state to retreat and relax controls in 1947.

This article situates civil servants’ responses to regime change in 1933 in their longer-term context. Focusing particularly on the process of ‘self-coordination’ – a term used by historians to describe and explain ministerial bureaucrats’ voluntary adaptation to changed political circumstances by implementing the Third Reich's policy agenda – it argues that this process was far from unique, being in fact the typical response to regime change throughout the twentieth century. By examining how civil servants facilitated regime change in 1918/19 and 1933 specifically, it also argues that the central pillar of the ‘self-coordination’ thesis – that it was informed by civil servants’ political or ideological beliefs – needs to be revisited. Indeed, the fact that many began their careers in Imperial Germany and served under both the Weimar Republic and National Socialism suggests that it was not only ideology that informed their actions. So, in conclusion, the essay looks at how bureaucratic organisations like government ministries function and, more importantly, how individuals function within them, presenting a different angle, based on organisational theory, from which to assess civil servants’ propensity to ‘self-coordinate’.

This article narrates the history of two high-profile West German-Turkish toxic waste scandals in 1988. It argues that they marked a watershed moment between two ‘waste regimes’. The first scandal showcased to the Turkish and West German publics how waste dealers and policy makers misleadingly packaged hazardous waste exports as a substitute for traditional forms of debt and as a vehicle for economic development. The opposition it fuelled hastened the demise of this waste regime by prompting the Turkish government to enact a ban on toxic waste imports. The second scandal revealed the new regime that emerged in its aftermath – one in which waste dealers and policy makers sought to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space.

This paper presents a case study of German ‘Nazi internationalism’ as part of a broader, transnational counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism in the 1930s. It offers an analysis of the activities and main ideas of the Nationalist International (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten; IAdN), headed by the German jurist Hans Keller and active from 1934 to 1941. The IAdN promoted concepts such as Volk nationalism and a Third Europe as a solution to the European crisis, and attempted to establish an alternative law of nations to replace the post-1919 liberal order. The IAdN illustrates an early attempt to reconcile völkisch ideas with international cooperation, thus foreshadowing ‘ethno-pluralist’ concepts of the New Right in the post-war period.

In 1949, Norwegian social democratic representations of Zionism and Israel shifted from mere support to idealisation. Despite the existence of an increasingly voluminous literature on the European left and Zionism, idealisation of Israel has never previously been explained as distinct from more general support. Regarding the Norwegian case, this article argues that idealisation differed from mere support in its implicit message about the status of ‘civilisation’. Support for Zionism in 1947–8 had been founded on the notion that Europeans needed to ensure the survival of the Jews in a Jewish state in order for European civilisation itself to survive. The idealisation of Israel that emerged from 1949 implicitly argued that Israel proved the attainability of the civilisational ideal and removed from European shoulders the obligation to ensure civilisation's survival. For the Norwegian labour movement, the 1949 decision to make Norway a founding member of NATO contributed to making idealisation of Israel particularly desirable.

One of the main characteristics of the Soviet domination sphere in Europe after the Second World War was the unification of political systems of the countries within the Soviet Union. This paper examines the Soviet impact on the electoral system of the People's Republic of Poland, a country often considered to have been the most unique among the Eastern European states. This article argues that although there were some important differences between the electoral codes in the USSR and communist-led Poland, the effects of the elections in both countries were the same: popular voting could not pose any threat to the power of their communist parties. This resulted from practices – similar in both countries – not included in the electoral law. This leads to the conclusion that the differences between the elections in the Soviet Union and post-war Poland were rather illusory.

This article provides a perspective on liberal political thought in post-Cold War Finland by examining the small Young Finns party. Their political philosophy emphasised individualism against collectivism and criticised Finland's state-centred political culture. Special focus is on the party's ideas of reforming the Finnish welfare state. The Young Finns wanted to retain universal education and healthcare services but pursued radical tax, social security and labour market reforms with ideas inspired by neoliberal thinkers. The article argues that the Young Finns represented a Finnish variant of neoliberalism in their goal of retasking the welfare state into a slimmer enabler of individual freedom.

Two leading political organisations in interwar Romania were genuinely anti-Semitic: the fascist Legionary movement and the far-right party the National Christian Defence League (LANC), known from 1935 as the National Christian Party (PNC). Whereas the anti-Semitism of the Legionaries is well researched, that of the LANC/PNC has rarely been studied. I argue that, in addition to an anti-Semitic agenda and rhetoric, anti-Jewish violence was an inherent part of the political practices of the LANC/PNC. I analyse the party's national congress on 8 November 1936, when thousands of supporters gathered in Bucharest, and use party correspondence and police and Interior Ministry records to show that the attendees engaged extensively in anti-Jewish violence, before and even more so after the congress. The government, ruled by the National Liberal Party, agreed to the mass anti-Semitic gathering but had only a vague plan to repress violent anti-Semitism: expecting the event to stir up anti-Jewish hatred, the Interior Ministry mobilised the security forces to prevent outbursts during the congress, but not much before or after. The LANC/PNC played a central role in the politicisation of extreme anti-Semitism in interwar Romania, and addressing the party's history provides a better understanding of the right-wing radicalisation of the time.

In 1963 the West Berlin mayor proposed a joint bid from West and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games. West Germany's closest allies sought to persuade the West German and Berlin governments to stop the bid, which both supported but had largely kept secret from their allies. This episode demonstrates not only the significance which foreign ministries have long attributed to international sport, but also their clear involvement to actively end another country's Olympic aspirations because of the diplomatic ramifications, particularly the potential to challenge the four-power control of Berlin, and their own self-serving interests in hosting the same event.

Building on original research and dialoguing with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, this article argues that decolonisation and migrations from the (former) colonies triggered and moulded a new, post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe. Analysing the highly significant but hitherto much-neglected case of Portugal in its broader Western European context, this claim is substantiated by surveying how these migrations affected citizenship and notions of the national community, the welfare state and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white ‘returnees’ from Portugal's African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white ‘immigrants’, arguing that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonised territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Swiss government initially refused to become diplomatically involved, arguing that as a small, permanently neutral state, Switzerland was unable to make a difference in the Afghan crisis. The present article shows that between 1982 and 1986, the Swiss authorities began to identify the transfer of eleven Soviet prisoners of war from Afghanistan to Switzerland as an opportunity to demonstrate Switzerland's neutral good offices in situations of armed conflict. It also shows that Switzerland's involvement came about primarily through direct and indirect exchanges with non-state actors in the Afghan crisis.