The Empty Chair Crisis of 1965–66 has traditionally been seen as a constitutional crisis, caused by the different European visions of General de Gaulle and the Commission president, Hallstein. This article will argue, however, that the root cause of the crisis was a clash over the programme of the EEC and, at a deeper level, about the leadership of the Community. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, it will suggest, used the 1965 common agricultural policy negotiations to challenge the traditionally prominent position of the French. In response, de Gaulle had little choice other than to escalate the crisis and launch a six-month boycott of Community institutions.

This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners, by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides little of value for a deeper historical understanding of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, Goldhagen's surprising popularity in Germany does, in fact, signal a possible shift in the Germans' long postwar struggle to ‘come to terms' with the Nazi past.

Portugal's presence in Guiné-Bissau through eleven years of intense guerrilla war was justified by the doctrine of ‘pluricontinentalim’. In this view concession to nationalist pressure in one part of the ‘indivisible state’ would lead inevitably to the collapse of the whole. The defence of Portuguese Guiné, therefore, was the price to be paid for the maintenance of the infinitely more valuable territories of Angola and Mozambique. While the Salazar regime was rigid in its adherence to this doctrine, some movement was detectable under his successor from 1968, Marcello Caetano. The governor-general in Guiné, General Spínola, was permitted to explore possibilities of negotiation. Politically insecure in the face of residual Salazarist power in the regime, however, Caetano abandoned this approach in 1972. This apparent loss of nerve would contribute to the overthrow of the Lisbon regime by its own military in 1974 – despite recently revealed secret talks between Lisbon and the Guinea nationalists on the very eve of the coup.

In September 1939, only a few weeks after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, the British government made perhaps its strongest effort since the Bolshevik revolution to achieve a rapproachement with the Soviet Union. This effort was interrupted and almost ruined by the Finno-Soviet ‘Winter War’, but the British initiative resumed after the war ended in March 1940. The Soviet government, though not the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii, was cool to British overtures, thus reversing the inter-war pattern where Moscow had often been the first to ask for better Anglo-Soviet relations. The publication of many Soviet diplomatic papers permits a comparison between Soviet and British accounts of important diplomatic meetings, a comparison which illustrates both British and Soviet foreign policy during the early months of the Second World War.

The article looks critically at attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism in Germany by trying to identify a peculiarly German tradition of antimodernism or reactionary modernism (by, among others, Jeffrey Herf). By looking at different critiques of civilisation in imperial Germany, it tries to show that most of them accepted the necessity of modern technology. What was new about the so-called ‘reactionary modernists’ in the Weimar Republic was not their willingness to use modern technology, but the full acceptance of the fact that modern technology could only exist on the basis of large technological systems, industrial production and fundamental social and cultural changes. They demanded that Germans unreservedly embrace all aspects of modernity, though without giving up their conservative political ideals.

While the ‘reactionary modernists’ tried to arrange the whole of society in accordance with an alleged technological functionality, National Socialism was politically more successful, exactly because its attitude towards technology and modernity was less coherent. As National Socialism had a purely pragmatic and open attitude towards technology, it could accept without hesitation that its goals were only achievable through the use of modern means, but that the cultural and private sphere should compensate for the deficits of a public life characterised by hardship and instrumental reason.

A total of 5,500 Danes joined the Waffen SS during the Second World War. They served primarily on the Eastern Front, often fighting under appalling conditions. The article follows the volunteers in action and examines in detail the Frikorps Danmark (Danish Legion), which provided a significant number of anti-Bolshevik, non-Nazi volunteers for the Waffen SS. The article analyses the behaviour of these men and focuses on the issue of ideological commitment. How did they react mentally to the context they operated in, and to the fact that they became more and more alienated in their homeland as the war progressed?

This article reviews recent literature on comparative fascism. It first examines the definition of fascism (the fascist minimum). The discussion of comparative fascism that follows focuses on the relationship between fascists and conservatives. It also analyses the comparability of various fascisms and National Socialism.

French anarchists were careful to distinguish between the Popular Front's leaders - the politicians - and its working-class supporters. They enthused over ‘the fraternity, the solidarity and the strength of the working class’ manifested in the extra-parliamentary antifascist movement of 1934–35. They took an active, and in some respects a leading part, in that movement. This article assesses the French anarchists' contribution to the antifascist movement and their critique of ‘Popular Frontism’. It also asks to what extent the anarchist movement can be said to have succeeded or failed in its objectives, and examines the ideological debates which the experiences of 1936–39 provoked between different anarchist currents over revolutionary strategy and tactics.

During the 1980s economic policy in the UK increasingly embraced free-market economics. For many, this was a necessary shift which improved economic performance, whereas previous periods of increased intervention, such as the 1930s, had harmed the UK economy. This article takes an alternative perspective. It argues that economic revival in the 1930s was primarily policy-induced; whereas economic growth in the 1980s can be largely explained by the unintentional demand side-effects of policy, with many of the free-market policies having, at best, a neutral impact and, in some cases, harming the long-run growth potential of the economy.