Gerald D. Feldman, professor emeritus of the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, died on 31 October 2007 at his home in Berkeley at the age of 70. He was a member of the editorial board of Contemporary European History from the journal's foundation in 1992.

The introduction to this special issue on peace in twentieth-century Europe develops a novel interpretation of twentieth-century European history. Rather than focusing on the question of the impact of war and violence within European societies, it seeks to examine what we can gain from exploring how peace was established and maintained in the wake of wars in various European societies. In particular, it focuses on the manifold ways in which different social and international actors negotiated peace, both literally and symbolically. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue thus present a much more complex picture of twentieth-century Europe than the one of a ‘Dark Continent’ (Mark Mazower) ravaged by violence or that propagated by European institutions of a peaceful Europe.

Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) is frequently seen as a democratic ‘island of peace’ in international politics and the three states are seen as ardent supporters of an ‘international community’ under the umbrella of the United Nations as well as its predecessor, the League of Nations. This article seeks to challenge this idealised, unitary conception of Scandinavian peace politics by exploring how different strands of internationalism, as transnational phenomena, developed from the outbreak of the First World War until the three states became members of the League. Initially, that development was more or less independent of official foreign policy. The article explains how and to what degree new internationalist ideas were eventually merged with traditional neutralist Scandinavian foreign policies.

Founded in 1918, the Czechoslovak state faced a series of problems in the years after its foundation. Apart from the question of the relationship between the ideal of a nation-state and the reality of its multi-ethnic structure, as well as the question of territorial security, the successive Czechoslovak governments faced the challenge of pacifying an uprooted post-war society. During this phase of transition, ideals of nationhood and peace as well as concepts of political power were adapted to pragmatic government policies. Despite rifts between the Czech- and the German-speaking parts of the population, combined with the dangers of a radicalised strike movement and the difficult integration of members of the Czechoslovak Legion into the new polity, attempts at pacification were much more successful in the west of the country than in Slovakia and in Carpathia, since the latter two regions lacked the structural continuities of laws and institutions.

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.

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.

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?

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.