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.

The article traces the origins and early developments of European fusion research in the framework of Euratom and of postwar nuclear international institutionalism, and as an episode of both the technoscientific Cold War and the interaction between big science and politics in the history of European integration. Based on original Italian, French and European Union archival sources, the article deals with four main passages of Euratom's fusion history: the Euratom treaty and Euratom's first five-year programme (1958–62); the early attempts to establish a Euratom ‒ CERN Joint Study Group for Fusion Research (1958‒9); the launching of Euratom's first fusion programme; and the contribution of Euratom's ‘fusion association contracts’ with the member states to the creation and training of a European transnational epistemic community of fusion scientists and technocrats. The Merger Treaty of 1965, the ‘crisis’ of Euratom and the prospect of British entry in the Community, as well as the ‘tokamak revolution’ of the late 1960s, would contribute to substantially redefine the European fusion programme.

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’.

Population statistics reflect a nation's quality of life and accordingly have the potential to be highly politically charged, with implications for a government's legitimacy. In the Brezhnev era Soviet Union, emerging negative trends regarding life expectancy, fertility and mortality had the potential to de-legitimise the Soviet regime just at the moment when population issues were taking the spotlight through the United Nations. For this reason, population statistics were subject to significant censorship. The article examines how this censorship worked for domestic and international audiences. I show the main form of censorship was an editorial review by trusted experts in the Party and argue that the process was defined by uncertainty and negotiation, with personal networks mediating the result. In general, the period was characterised by tension between the need to expand demographic research and leaders' desire to suppress knowledge of unfortunate demographic truths.

The present article focuses on the political and social influence of the antimilitarist movement in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s. The article shows how throughout the 1970s the issue of conscientious objection became part of a wider context of struggle for the individual and collective rights and freedoms the Francoist dictatorship denied the Spanish population, achieving an important political impact by concentrating its action on Spain's external image. Throughout the following decade, the antimilitarist movement grew within a context of large-scale mobilisations and public debate around pacifism and antimilitarism, on the occasion of the referendum on Spain's permanence in NATO. The most important campaign was that of resistance both to military service and the alternative social service, the so-called insumisión.

In the period between the proclamation of royal dictatorship and the assassination of King Alexander I, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was characterised by the dynamics of competing visions of Yugoslavism. Questions concerning the identity of a Yugoslav nation-to-be, in terms of both national unity and diversity of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, were held not only in political discourse, but also through architecture and the visual culture. This article explores the ideological roles of the Bridge of King Alexander I, built between 1929 and 1934 to connect Belgrade with the ex-Habsburg town of Zemun, which carried not only heavy transport but also powerful political messages. The bridge's construction prompted a widespread public controversy, representing a vivid testimony to rivalries, tensions and discontents between different ideas about the Yugoslav nation, underpinned by both political and professional agendas.

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.

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.

After the demise of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Fiume's long political transition provided women with new challenges and opportunities. This was especially true for female public employees who had to adapt to a weak and fluid state that provided them with social security and benefits in exchange for loyalty and control. Beginning with two case studies of women elected to the Fiume city council in 1919, this paper explores how the two professional cohorts they represented – teachers and tobacco workers – learned to cope with the turbulent national and political events, as well as with the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.

This essay focuses on West Germany as exemplary global-local intersection of the spiritual turn in the long 1960s. It shows how spirituality as practices and beliefs seeking a closer connection with the divine within or outside religious groups experienced a multifaceted renaissance in the countercultures of the long 1960s. In this spiritual quest contemporary explorations in the expansion of consciousness and the increasing interest in meditation were pivotal practices. The essay reflects the international exchange of knowledge about body-mind practices from Amazonia and Mexico to the United States, India and West Germany, showing how actors were influenced by international and national connections. Practitioners found the practices of spirituality neither in Christian contemplative traditions nor in Jewish versions, but in various forms of what seekers received and practised as Hinduism or Buddhism, etc., that gave contemporary followers and seekers a means of connecting to higher truths – to God – without God.

This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, which presented Poland as a socialist welfare state. By locating the display within the broader historical context of Cold War competitiveness, the article intends to make two points. Firstly, using written and visual sources, this article explores how the humanistic dimension of the socialist welfare project, which remained largely unmatched by the capitalist West, was visualised and rationalised. Effectively, it proposes reading of social benefits and state subsidised services as a novel subject of cultural diplomacy. Secondly, by indicating the role of designers as significant stakeholders who actively shaped the country's self-imagining abroad, this article advances the scholarship about design diplomacy. It evidences that modern design allowed the exhibition makers to convey both symbolic and material aspects of the welfare state, which had at stake the battle for hearts and minds.

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.

This article discusses the relation between state violence and public disorder under authoritarian rule in Poland. Focusing on the major crises and protests of the communist era, it examines regime violence through a double perspective – on the one hand, the way the regime resorted to physical violence to uphold its survival and, on the other hand, as a generational experience of those who suffered from it. Despite the state's use of physical violence until 1989 becoming more rationalised, modernised and efficient, it also turned less effective over time. This evolution contributed to a decreasing risk factor for protesters vis-à-vis the state. Since the bulk of those who participated in protests and riots were young people, the focus lies on the youthful dimension of public disorder and in particular the activity and experience of then students and young workers.

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.

Studies of interwar travels from Europe to Russia tend to prioritise reactions to the Soviet Union. This article, in contrast, examines how travellers reflected on Europe in the mirror of Russia and focuses on the little-studied writing and reception of narratives by Andrée Viollis, Luc Durtain, Georges Duhamel and Alfred Fabre-Luce in the late 1920s. Through a comparative analysis shaped by recent histories of temporality, the article explores how encounters between Europe and Russia challenged assumptions on borders, time and history. Although Europeans are generally associated with a model of linear, evolutionary time, this case study reveals their engagement with competing models of time as linear, cyclical and salvational.

The Dublin Convention (1990) was the first binding agreement on asylum between the member states of the European Community. It defined the criteria that determined responsibility for the examination of asylum applications lodged in their territories. Given the contemporary discussions about the system that derived from it, the paper reflects on one of its main criteria: the first entry principle. Drawing on archival research in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, the essay shows how the inclusion of the first entry principle was far more than a matter of course. It was influenced by the Schengen process and the establishment of the single market, previous North-South tensions over migratory issues, and governments’ (in)capacity to predict future developments. The inclusion of the first entry principle contributed to assimilating asylum policy with migration control, creating the premises for the subsequent burden-sharing problems and readmission agreement practices.

After the end of communism, foreign direct investment in Eastern Europe increased dramatically. In December 1990, the Austrian chain BILLA opened the first foreign-owned supermarket in Poland. I examine foreign-owned supermarkets as key spaces of encounter between West and East in which neoliberal ideas about urban space, everyday life, material consumption and retail were promulgated, contested and routinised. Examining coverage of the Warsaw BILLA shops in Gazeta Stołeczna, the local edition of the widely read and arguably most trusted daily newspaper in Poland, I draw from literature in consumer history as well as economic and urban geography alongside concepts from business and marketing to argue that local actors, and in particular the emerging independent press, helped naturalise neoliberal values about consumption and retail in early post-communism.

German war aims in the First World War developed over the course of the war in part as a response to shifts in the structure of global markets. Germany's industrial economy before the war relied substantially on access to global markets for raw materials, which were mediated by networks of infrastructure constructed as collaborative efforts by private capital and states, particularly the American and British imperial states. During the war, Great Britain and eventually the United States leveraged their position within those networks to isolate the German economy. In response, the German state sought to generate its own public-private alliances to develop German-dominated infrastructures of circulation and exchange in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. This often entailed working through other states, appropriating their sovereignty to further German ambitions. Military victory, however, so weakened these dependent states that they were unable to serve their expected role in advancing German imperial goals.

Rural modernisation was at the core of postwar development programmes, not least in the Mediterranean. The notion of ‘modernisation’ inherited a number of assumptions about the nexus between economic and social development from experiences in Western and Central European ‘internal colonisation’ projects. The Turkish case reveals how such concepts travelled alongside exiled scholars in the Nazi period. However, they were also renegotiated at the local and regional levels, in particular after the Second World War. Kemalist conceptions of a ‘modern’ countryside came into conflict with international policies. This article analyses these expert encounters through the prism of the German model farm of Tahirova. Zooming in on a particular breeding project of the Tahirova sheep, it seeks to untie the rationales of different actors and the ways in which they shaped Turkey's role in postwar Europe, deeply influenced by cryptocolonial representations of the Mediterranean as Europe's agricultural (and demographic) reservoir.

The article sheds light on the significant and understudied bond between West German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Laureate Willy Brandt and Spanish President Felipe González. It is based on interviews with senior policy makers; archival material from the Ebert Foundation in Bonn; fresh material from Austria, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and the United States, and exclusive additional private papers. Drawing on these sources, the article identifies the three key political-intellectual pillars – democracy, social democracy and internationalism – that sustained their special ‘father–son’ relationship and discusses their shared desire to project their brand of socialism across Europe and the world. In doing so, it also sheds light on how personal guidance, assistance and exchange, linked with institutional support, contributed to the expansion of democracy and social democracy in the late Cold War.