The end of the Cold War and the accompanying easing of archival restrictions in former communist countries have created a veritable renaissance in historical literature on the region in the last two decades. The fall of the Iron Curtain has subsequently thrown into doubt the historiographical salience of a strict East–West divide and prompted the resurgence of analytic concepts such as Central Europe or East Central Europe. The former term, defined famously but imprecisely in the 1980s by Milan Kundera as those lands ‘culturally in the West and politically in the East’, has grown no easier to delimit with the march of European integration and democratic stability across most of the ‘central’ part of the continent. The latter term is, in some senses, less problematic, since the ‘East’ in East Central Europe is generally understood to exclude those areas in current-day Germany or Austria. Yet the region's eastern and southern borders are still much disputed.

In the past decade there has been a real explosion of studies on collective memory in eastern Europe. Two large themes have attracted the attention of scholars: the ongoing re-evaluations of the past after the end of communism and the memory of state socialism. These two topics were evidently related to each other in two ways: first, the communist period became an object of collective memory and many events linked to communist rule were re-evaluated once taboos and politically imposed interpretations fell by the wayside. Second, many political and public figures identified communist rule in eastern Europe as the reason why the nation's ‘genuine’ memory had been distorted. Now, they claimed, history could and had to be rewritten in order to bring previously suppressed memories to the foreground.

The study of everyday life has had a particular resonance for historians of state socialism for a variety of reasons. First, the study of everyday life promises to get beyond the notorious doublespeak and rosy scenarios of official discourse. Second, the history of everyday life makes use of the great boon of recent history: the availability of interview subjects. Historians of earlier periods can only look longingly at the surfeit of interview subjects available to those who work on more recent decades. While oral history can have its own problems, the works under consideration in this review largely use them to good effect to get at the lacunae and misrepresentations in official discourse. Third, the study of everyday life offers an important vantage point for understanding the vast majority of citizens who were not resistors and yet challenged the state in important ways. As Sandrine Kott has noted, ‘individual preference . . . constituted a third brake on the “perfect” working of the system’. Finally, the ‘interesting’ events in East European socialism are ones that are people powered, most famously the 1989 revolutions that spanned the region. The history of everyday life offers the promise of explaining the paradox of how supposedly stable regimes which experienced comparatively little open resistance in forty years of existence collapsed in a matter of weeks or even days.

‘Geography costs – why does the map of Europe never stay put?’ The American poet Carl Sandburg posed that question in 1940 as the European continent was engulfed by another great conflict, the second in a generation. The course and conduct of the two world wars continue to dominate publishers’ lists but several recent volumes offer stimulating interpretations of Europe's international history during the intervening twenty years. They shed a sobering light on the cost of geography and on the challenges of statecraft, because what moved the map were not only the tectonic forces of socio-economic change but also the decision-making of political leaders.

Fascism continues to fascinate scholars within the social sciences, perhaps as much as communism, that other great non-democratic ‘-ism’ of the twentieth century. The topic also seems to be of continuing interest to the student and commercial book markets. In some cases bland repetition is the norm, but the pressure from commercial publishers often results in some excellent syntheses, even if based on secondary material, and that is not to mention the biography genre, which is always attentive to charismatic leaders and dictators — the more cruel the better. Moreover, the already voluminous academic literature on contemporary dictatorships often returns to the fascist and dictatorial regimes of the inter-war period. It is therefore only natural that Fascism should be incorporated in a series of handbooks published by Oxford University Press.

On 7 November 1968, the political activist Beate Klarsfeld entered the stage of a CDU party convention in Berlin, slapped the West German chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger in the face and cried ‘Nazi, Nazi’. During the Third Reich, Kiesinger had worked in one of the propaganda departments of the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office). The history of the German foreign office received additional attention in 1968 due to the fact that the then vice-chancellor and foreign secretary of the Grand Coalition, Willy Brandt, was a former resistance fighter, who had been stripped of his citizenship by the Auswärtiges Amt in 1938. Despite numerous scandals about the post-war careers of former Nazi diplomats in the 1950s and 60s, the Auswärtiges Amt escaped closer scrutiny until 2005, when the then foreign secretary Joschka Fischer set up a historical inquiry commission. In his memoirs, Fischer has argued that his decision was influenced by the events of 1968.

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was ‘refreshingly inchoate’. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.

In ‘Interpretations’ the editors invite scholars to explore and debate central issues, concepts or problems encountered in the study of contemporary European history. Recent sections have dealt with ‘Political Religion’ (18:4) and consumerism (20:1). Here, Peter Baldwin takes issue with Richard J. Evans's characterisation of British historians as peculiarly ‘cosmopolitan’. Evans provides an energetic defence of his thesis, and Baldwin responds with an equally robust rejoinder.

My book Cosmopolitan Islanders derives from the Inaugural Lecture I delivered in 2008 as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. The brief of such a lecture is a tricky one – you have to say something about yourself, something about your field, and something about the discipline of History, and you have to appeal both to colleagues and to the wider world. In addition, in both Oxford and Cambridge, the only two universities with Regius Chairs of History, there have been many famous Inaugurals, by historians as varied as J. B. Bury, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, most famous of all, Lord Acton. In some universities, where professors are all-powerful, the Inaugural has served as a means of laying down the law about how the subject should be taught and researched. But in recent times this has been rare, and it has never really been true in Oxford or Cambridge; the one time that an Oxford Regius, the seventeenth-century specialist Sir Charles Firth, tried this, he ran into a huge amount of trouble and was more or less ostracised in the Faculty for the rest of his career.

Because my article was not a review of Richard J. Evans's book, but a thought piece on broader topics prompted by his work, it does not stick only to issues discussed by him. What a shame that Cosmopolitan Islanders was largely ignored, as Evans reports, for he raises important questions. Part of the reason for the book's stillbirth is exemplified in Evans’ response here: the self-isolation of the historical profession that is met by increasing indifference from the rest of the thinking world. Evans's concern to draw fine distinctions and quarantine history apart from all other social science is telling. Yes, Myrdal was a sociologist (well actually an economist, but no matter). And, yes, some of the foreign scholars I mention who write about the Anglosphere work on literature, not history as such. Why such vigorous policing of the disciplinary boundaries when larger issues are at stake? No wonder historians now have their largest audiences among the military history buffs while the more adventurous social sciences cash in on our work in ways we spurn. What William McNeill used to do has become the province of Francis Fukuyama.

The year 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the great revolts of 1968. As always, the occasion gave rise to impassioned debates. In Germany they were stimulated by the historian and 1968 veteran Götz Aly, who compared the ‘sixty-eight’ to the ‘thirty-three’ generations (the Nazi student body of the early 1930s), and postulated ‘parallels in German history’, continuities and ‘similarities in the approach to mobilisation, political utopianism and the anti-bourgeois impulse’. Following the thirtieth anniversary in 1998, which triggered a flood of scholarly publications, we have had ten further years of research into the recent history of the 1960s, up to the fortieth anniversary in 2008. In 1998, the central question was still to remove the 1960s protest movements from the realm of myth and to establish the ‘year of protest’ (i.e. 1968) itself as a subject for historical research. Since 1998, the aims of international research have been to develop a global comparative analysis of the movements and to contextualise them historically. Particular attention has been devoted to locating political protest movements in the overall process of socio-cultural transformation through the ‘long 1960s’.

Despite the present-day attraction of ‘security’ as an attention-grabbing word in politics and the public sphere, the study of security is a missing chapter in many state-of-the-art surveys of historical literature. Its central relevance for the modern statehood has been obvious for centuries in the European context. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-seventeenth-century Leviathan, written in the context of the devastating English civil war and previous religious wars, government was given the fundamental role in guaranteeing security. Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have constantly debated Hobbes's ideas and concepts about security and societal peace. Especially after the second world war, security has found major attention in the fields of International Relations and its sub-discipline security studies. Security studies evolved during the nuclear age and were originally foremost about the study of the threat, use and control of military force, as one proponent of security studies, Stephen Walt, stated. They were mainly concerned with military strategy and giving policy advice to the military. Since the cold war, the study of security has come a long way. Most importantly, as Emma Rothschild has reminded us, during the past two decades or so, the concept was first extended downwards from states to individuals, upwards from the nation to the biosphere and horizontally from the military to the economic, social, political and environmental. It is the reflection of this dynamic change in theory, methodology and empirical research that connects most of the books under review in this article.

‘Development’ as a ‘process of enlarging people's choices’ is omnipresent. Constituents of global society – governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational corporations, the media and individual actors – are deeply involved in its practices and discourses. At universities around the world, development studies mushroom, and development research has become a darling of the social sciences. In particular, development assistance has become big business, involving the flow of $136 billion dollars in 2009. But more significantly than before, development issues and especially development assistance have become contested terrain, too. While the millennium development goals defined by the United Nations in 2000 and designed to halve global poverty by the year 2015 call on donor and recipient countries to increase their efforts, critics of development assistance are multiplying.