This article explores cultures of militancy in public space among currents of the revolutionary left in France, Italy and West Germany during the ‘red decade’. It shows how radicals embraced convergent strategic perspectives, discourses on violence and insubordinate practices for confronting the police. However, patterns of militancy subsequently diverged along national lines in the face of different experiences of neo-fascist violence, domestic social conflict, and legacies of armed resistance and civil war. In particular, the relatively frequent use of lethal force by Italian police in defence of public order motivated a current of the Italian revolutionary left to endorse the use of firearms during protests. Across national experiences, domestic protest policing conditioned the use of force by protestors and the transformation – or not – of protestors into terrorists.

Taking the lives of seven men with one act of violence in common, this article explores how the history of a whole life might reframe our sense of the ‘soldiers’ tale’. If violence stops being the only experience we seek, if, rather than isolated and sought out, it gets left in the muddle of getting older, of getting by, do we come closer to the marks that violence made, or begin to see them in the context of all the other things that shape a life? Do we find something of the perspective that those who lived with killing tried to put it in? Rather than see their lives through the prism of one episode of conflict, which is the position so many histories of killing begin from, this article proposes instead a history of seven individuals, who just happened to have been party to the killing of two men.

There is a widely held perception that the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence was a hard-fought series of guerrilla war engagements punctuated by larger and often spectacular events in Cork, Dublin and elsewhere. However, an examination of the conflict from the perspective of a search for an alternative war, where little if anything occurred, can yield interesting and counter-intuitive results. This is exactly what this article sets out to do in order to demonstrate the often rich potential in the quest for nothing in particular, but primarily to establish that in every conflict of this type, another war often takes place, which shows itself to be largely ineffectual and futile though ultimately quite rewarding in its own way.

In this paper I examine the relationship between Polish experts on school-based sex education and international developments in the field during the post-war period. From 1956 onwards, Polish experts, hoping to introduce sex education to schools, drew on Western experience and knowledge. Using Polish sources, I focus on the ways in which this knowledge was transmitted, the role of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the approach of Polish experts towards the West. I argue that during the late 1950s and 1960s, Polish experts valued and relied exclusively on Western models. International exchange on sex education intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Polish expert Mikołaj Kozakiewicz becoming a regional leader within the international family planning movement. However, as Polish experts became more critical about certain Western models of sex education, they began to promote the socialist model of family life education as a more appropriate option.

Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above’. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views of the family into their welfare systems. Yet, this special issue aims to demonstrate that families have not merely been objects or subjects buffeted by political and social change. Rather, families have also consistently acted as ‘agents of change’. This is not to valorise the family – families have been patriarchal, damaging and oppressive as well as supportive, empowering and caring. However, this is to say that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change.

Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

On 7 March 2022, Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, and Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, demanded that ‘unaccompanied and separated children fleeing escalating conflict in Ukraine must be protected’.1 They insisted that children should, once they crossed Ukraine's borders, be immediately registered, offered safe spaces, reunified with their families, and receive emergency care.2 Under no circumstances should children who came with their families be separated, and everything should be done to protect children from exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence.3 However, since then, countless children from Ukraine who have crossed the borders unaccompanied have become victims of human trafficking and exploitation. Tens of thousands of children in Ukrainian state institutions or who had been orphaned prior to the war could not be protected. They were deported to Russia, many were interned in reeducation camps, and many were forcefully adopted by Russian families or moved into foster care.4 Since the war started, children have again become a means of warfare. The current war against Ukraine once more demonstrates how vulnerable children can become when they are separated from their families. Children have, once again, become targets of massive human rights violations and of crimes against humanity.

Ideology and state ownership are supposed to have characterised socialist housing. This article argues that economic and monetary constraints were also dominant in shaping housing policy in early socialist Hungary. These factors increasingly compelled the regime to promote private home ownership through state-subsidised credits. Despite high public interest in the programme, however, neither wealth, personal connections nor ideology alone could condition the outcome of home-build applications due to severe shortages. This impasse put the regime at a crossroads of whether to pursue needs-based housing or to introduce ‘profitability’ considerations in credit checks for self-build. This article argues that the Nagy government's pursuit of the latter option increasingly undermined the ideological basis of communism. The scheme's failure not only made citizens receptive to radical change in 1956 but also put the regime on a new trajectory where private wealth accumulation and self-provisioning became inseparable from the economic legitimacy of communism in Hungary.

As recent scholarship has shown, most of East Central Europe remained at war for several years after the official armistice in November 1918, complicating the transition from empires into nation-states. This article addresses another aspect of the state-building process. As opposed to centralising power emanating from capitals such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, I argue that local politicians and village leaders made their own territorial and sovereignty claims. Rather than whole nations, it was small communities that first defined self-determination. Here I present a loose typology of such localities (ethno-linguistic republics, non-Bolshevik workers’ councils, and radical agrarians), and show that conflicts between mini-states and burgeoning nation-states shaped the development of the latter.

Over the course of the 1970s, Europe reckoned with the after-effects of decolonisation – a transformative process in world history that not only led to the movement of millions of people from the former colonies, but also threw into question European economic and cultural hegemony. The three articles in this forum investigate different ways Europe remade itself in response to the unmaking of European imperialism. All three demonstrate that Europe radically redrew the boundaries of belonging over the course of the 1970s, either by limiting access to national welfare states for migrants and former colonial subjects, by crafting a new form of international welfare state that was less focused on the redistribution of wealth, or by ‘Europeanising’ fossil fuel production so as to insulate the continent from the economic power of the so-called Third World.

This article examines the debates within the French Ligue des Droits de l'Homme on the adoption in 1936 of a Complément (Complement) to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The Ligue questioned the relevance of the 1789 Declaration when social dislocation, economic distress and fascism challenged democracy. New rights, principally the ‘right to life’ (droit à la vie), the fundamental right from which all others flowed, were pronounced. The article examines the values and principles informing the Complément to address why a declaration of new rights was seen as a proper response to these crises. Aspirations for a radical transformation of the social, political and economic order were expressed in a genre and a language of rights deeply embedded in French history. The Complément continued the work of 1789, assuming a form through which this transformation could be imagined.

Drawing on Polish, US, French, British and German archival documents, this article examines the encounters between Western and Polish participants at the International Trade Fair in the Polish city of Poznań in the 1950s and 1960s. Challenging the predominant Cold War framework, it shows that Westerners who came to Poznań drew on power and privilege while pursuing personal interests. Consequently, the author both highlights the self-indulgence of the well-known story about the largely emancipatory motivations of Westerners who became involved with Eastern European affairs in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the resulting patterns of interactions are only tangentially related to Cold War political struggles. Instead, the article shows that these encounters are best seen in the context of a relationship between Westerners and East Europeans that spans decades, and even centuries, and that involved encounters fraught with contestation over economic power and cultural dominance.

This research examines the central banks of interwar Europe through the lens of statistics. It focuses particularly on how the rise of economic and statistical expertise simultaneously supported the existing goals of central banks to retain national autonomy and the tenets of liberal internationalism espoused by the League of Nations. The institutionalised efforts to improve quantitative research culminated in the 1928 Conference of Central Bank Statisticians, where delegates envisioned creating new channels of cooperation based on standardised terminology and a centralised information bureau. By framing central banks within the historiographies of statistics and interwar internationalism, this article details the confluence of factors that shaped a new dependence on expertise.

Tens of thousands of White Russians were forced to leave their country after 1920. Many of them were career officers and soldiers imbued with anti-communism, who were then hired by diverse armies. They acted as transnational soldiers of the counter-revolution during the interwar period. This article analyses the trajectory of some dozens of them, who volunteered for the Francoist army in 1936–8 during the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards, many of them joined the ranks of the Spanish ‘Blue Division’ as interpreters to take part in the invasion of their home country by the Germans. Their experience as occupiers was highly ambiguous and oscillated between disappointment and nostalgia once they perceived that the objective of the invasion was not to liberate Russia from communism, but to enslave the country and its inhabitants. However, once they returned to Spain, they cultivated a hero myth of their past experience and regarded themselves as winners.

This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molina – the superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944 – to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly ‘common-sense’ understandings of ‘Italian-ness’ (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to ‘Italianise’ their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials’ moral authority, political support and ‘totalitarian’ façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an ‘Italian identity’ among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state.

The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered ‘interweaving’. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the ‘women's question’ – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists’ reception of 1970s feminism.

On 1 March 2022, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin's government of waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she drew explicit links to the Nazi war of aggression in order to legitimise sanctions against Russia as she stressed the UN's mission to work for peace enshrined in the UN charter. Twelve months earlier, in February 2021, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz sentenced a forty-four-year-old Syrian citizen to four and a half years’ imprisonment. Based on the ‘shared values of humanity’, the verdict made headlines as the court explicitly cited the universal jurisdiction principle enshrined in the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (VStGB) that had been enacted in 2002 to bring German law into accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.1 Since 2002, German courts have adopted these international law principles and legal norms in a series of legal actions against foreigners to prosecute crimes against humanity.

This paper is about a remarkable file, ‘Interviews with Homosexuals’, in the bequest of László Cseh-Szombathy (1925–2007), who was internationally renowned and one of Hungary's most celebrated sociologists. Looking at the ways in which the interviews and the conceptual framework of the questions asked by Cseh-Szombathy were crafted, along with the interviewees’ answers to those questions, the article investigates the interaction of sexual experts and male homosexuals in late socialist-state Hungary. The author contends that, at the same time as sexual experts had historically fuelled and contributed to homophobia, sexual experts during late state-socialism also became the primary agents who started to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality and played a crucial role in facilitating homosexual men's exploration of sexual identity and self-acceptance. The paper highlights how Hungarian sexological experts engaged in productive dialogue with their patients and interview subjects, which shaped sexological expertise on homosexuality.

This paper charts the emergence of social scientific studies on Black kinship from its origins in the United States and colonial Caribbean to its revivification in the decolonisation-era Netherlands. Demonstrating how racial knowledge was from its inception a tool of transnational governance, the author argues that Black kinship studies also informed the development of the Dutch welfare state in the aftermath of decolonisation. Drawing upon Dutch state – and municipal – archival sources as well as the private papers and published works of key figures in Black kinship studies, she charts how publicly-funded sociologists and anthropologists tracked Dutch citizens from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles through the metropolitan welfare state, producing a corpus of knowledge that connected kinship and welfare reliance. Though Caribbean-born Dutch citizens opposed the racist assumptions of state-funded scholarship, research on Black kinship ultimately informed the course of Dutch welfarism from the expansion of interventionist programmes in the 1970s to retrenchment in the 1990s.

To understand the mindset that obstructed the paths out of the interwar crisis, we need to reconstruct widely held expectations for the future of states. To examine how such expectations changed, diverged and competed, this paper investigates the work of inquiry committees, ranging from British and German committees engaged in post-war economic planning to the League of Nation's Commission of Enquiry for European Union of the early 1930s. The paper concludes that the interwar crisis can only be understood if we put the Great War and the Great Depression into a common frame. The war changed expectations, but not as drastically as we would instinctively assume. The expectation of an order of expanding, integrating blocs was challenged by the emergence of new ‘small states’ but survived. It was shattered when efforts to overcome the economic slump failed, leading to a broader acceptance of territorial revisionism across Europe than hitherto assumed.