This article addresses the divided memory and contested meaning of the Great War in interwar Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the legacy of a loose and short-lived movement of army deserters called ‘Green Cadres’ that appeared in 1918, it suggests that the Czechoslovak nation building project faced challenges not only from sizable ethnic minorities within the fledgling state, but also from the restive Czech peasantry. As elsewhere in East Central Europe, many peasants regarded the Green Cadres as liberators and representatives of a more radical, rural oriented national revolution. These unfulfilled hopes resonated through the interwar period. This article thus sheds light on an important social and cultural fault line that has been neglected in histories of the world wars in Europe.

This article discusses the public violence that occurred in the Bohemian lands after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918. It follows the tension between the self-empowered people, who expected a profound change in their daily lives, and the state, which sought stabilisation through the continuity of institutions. Using the examples of the Železná Ruda mutiny in July 1919 and the workers’ general strike in December 1920, the article shows that public violence was relatively easily manageable by a combination of negotiations and force, for it did not pursue a clear vision opposing Czechoslovakia but rather tried to participate in its formation.

This article examines the contested presence of Vichy administrators in high positions of the French administration of occupied Germany after the Second World War. In occupied Germany, where many of Pétain’s officials pursued their careers, resisters and collaborators negotiated their new positions in the wake of the German occupation of France. Key to understanding this settlement are the notions of expertise and merit as well as the role of the inherited French social order untouched by the collaboration.

Based on analysis of Lord Ismay's private papers and on documents from the NATO archives and the Foreign Office archives, this article examines the role of Lord Ismay as the first Secretary General of NATO. As the first person to occupy the role, with little guidance from the national governments and no previous examples to use as a guiding light, Ismay had the opportunity – and the challenge – to shape the new role and to lay the basis for the long-term development of the International Staff. This article argues that Ismay's careful approach was essential in cementing political consensus within the North Atlantic Council at a time in which the members of the Alliance were still learning to work together.

The main aim of this article is to show how the political evolution of Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without analysing the political experiences of countries like Spain, which were not at the centre of the period's political decisions but whose evolution was inspired and suggested by strategies outside the political mainstream. In this respect, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s portrays a peculiar political situation demonstrating the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. A minority of influential sectors linked to the Single Spanish Party, the Falange, pursued its own third way, ignoring the Cold War models. They instead looked to what was happening in Eastern Bloc countries, especially after the events in Hungary in 1956, as well as to the political experiments in Latin America, especially the Cuban revolution.

This article examines the effects of the 1974 child allowance reform on guest worker families in West Germany. As part of a wider reform, West Germany implemented a two-tiered system of child allowances whereby migrant parents received more money for children who lived in the European Economic Community (EEC) than for children who lived outside the EEC. Migrants protested the reform and with it the assumptions of the guest worker programme. However, these parents had to contend with a popular narrative whereby foreign parents who brought their children to West Germany after the reform were in fact irresponsible ‘welfare migrants’ who placed their desire for financial gain over their children's need for a stable environment. The idea that this specific welfare reform had been the trigger for large-scale family migration not only discouraged further investigation of the causes of family migration but was also used to support new restrictions on that migration.

This article discusses the relations between the French, Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties during the transitions to democracy in the Iberian Peninsula (1974–7). It focuses on the attempt of these parties to establish a distinctive ideological trend, Southern European socialism. The main argument is that the French socialists attempted to promote their ideological line – and predominantly the union between socialists and communists – in the Iberian Peninsula during the transitions to democracy. The Portuguese Socialist Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party initially considered following this line. However, the radicalisation of the Portuguese revolution in the sensitive context of Cold War détente, as well as the involvement of the European social democrats in both Portugal and Spain against the union of the left, prevented this model from being further considered by the Spanish and Portuguese socialist parties. Nevertheless, all these parties showed interest in promoting a common Southern European Socialist identity that differed from European social democracy as well as from Soviet communism, considering it useful in the struggle for hegemony within the left.

The extensive attention that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin has attracted since its publication in 2010 has raised our overall awareness of the structural might that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany displayed as they reshaped the territories that had separated the two states during the interwar period. In addition to earning widespread acclaim, the volume has been widely criticised by scholars who have exposed the extent to which non-German populations in Eastern Europe participated in the violent persecution of unwanted minority communities during the Second World War. Jan Gross, whose Neighbors unearthed that the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours without significant prompting from the German occupiers, has argued that Snyder deprives the inhabitants of his ‘bloodlands’ of agency by blaming wartime violence in the region almost exclusively on Hitler, Stalin and their overlapping policies of state destruction. The evident tensions between micro-historical approaches that stress the importance of local agency and macro-level analyses of larger geographical spaces have obscured how profoundly the interplay of broader structural factors and local variables shaped the course of the Second World War in different locations. Four recent micro-historical works help to partially reconcile the two seemingly oppositional approaches by providing new frameworks for thinking about the complex interactions that occurred between smaller groups of people and the broader forces that shaped their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The four volumes show that global, national, regional and local agendas overlapped to make ordinary people reconfigure how they saw themselves and how they interpreted the world around them. The identities and perceptions that emerged from these interactions enhance our understanding of the multiple factors that determined people’s actions during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The inhabitants of the overseas departments and collectivities of France have, of late, been reconsidering their relationships both to each other and to the former imperial metropole. In 2011 Mayotte, previously classified as an overseas collectivity, acceded to full French and European status as an overseas department of France following a referendum. This decision to, in the words of the social scientist François Taglioni, further ‘anchor’ the island in the republic has commonly been understood as a pragmatic decision as much as an ideological one. It was a way of distancing Mayotte from the political turmoil in neighbouring independent Comoros, as well as an indicator of the improbability of a small island nation achieving full sovereignty in a multipolar, resource hungry world. The narrative that self-determination must necessarily be obtained through national independence is still prevalent in the language of certain independence movements, including that of the Kanak people of New Caledonia. But it has been repeatedly tested at the ballot box, not least in November 2018 when New Caledonians voted in a referendum on their constitutional future. This referendum – and the further two due to follow it before 2022 – will be observed with interest by other self declared nations in waiting. Some anticipate, not a reclaiming of local sovereignty in the event of independence, but rather a transferral of economic hegemony from France to China, a prospect hinted at by Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Nouméa in 2018. However, the demographic minority status of the Kanak people whom the independentist Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste; FLNKS) claims to represent, coupled with divisions within the movement, means it is very hard to predict the contours of a future independent New Caledonian state.