More than 20 years ago, Philip Windsor proposed a succinct explanation of the East–West divide: ‘… the Cold War began with the deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’ For the following two decades from 1969 to 1989, the formula ‘Peace and stability through partition” (U. Nerlich;J. Joffe) reflected widespread satisfaction with the territorial status quo in Europe. However, substantial disagreements (as L. Freedman observes p. 5) with established security policies, defence doctrines and armed forces' structures both in NATO and the Warsaw Pact (WP) might be taken as evidence that ‘Europe was on the verge of an historic change’. In respect of the state of public opinion, NATO ministers in early March 1988 declared the need gradually to overcome the unnatural division of Europe

The last years of the Cold War have produced a bumper crop of studies of its beginnings, and the books reviewed here are a part of it. Anne Deighton's, Cyril Buffet's and Saki Dockrill's monographs are succinct and thoroughly well-written histories based on extensive archival research. Olaf Mager's book, like the former three a well-converted PhD thesis, takes more of a political science approach, looking at the historical commitment of Britain's forces to the defence of Continental Europe in the light of its continuing importance. Klaus A. Maier's and Wilhelm Meier-Dornberg's examinations of Western policies towards the European Defence Community (EDC) project form part of the ambitious multi-volume series on the beginning of West German security policy, edited by the office of military history of the Federal Republic. Hermann-Josef Rupieper's colossal monograph on US policy towards Germany, like Maier's and Meier-Dotnberg's studies of the EDC phase in the evolution of German rearmament, is based on enormously comprehensive multi-national archival research, where the first four books mentioned drew mainly on the archives of one country. The volume on Germany and the Marshall Plan edited by Charles Maier and Giinter Bischof, and the Gottinger Arbeitskreis's volume on the German question from 1953 to 1955, are both collections of multi-author articles concerned with a common theme.

A review of Italian journals dealing with contemporary European history suggests that there have been notable improvements in the standards of Italian historiography in the last decade. This reflects the continued success of Quaderni Storici, the challenge of new periodicals established since the late 1970s, and the response of more established journals to the changed nature of the Italian political contest.

The social history of élites and the bourgeoisie must be one of the most popular areas of French historical research at the present moment, after a long period of neglect. It may be useful to look first at the reasons for this previous distrust and present enthusiasm so as to trace the main directions of contemporary research.