The years that followed the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France after World War I proved that reunion was a complicated and painful process. The potential for misunderstanding, if not outright conflict, between Alsatians and French policy-makers was from the outset grossly underestimated by virtually everyone on both sides. Alsatians saw no incompatibility between the wish to preserve their regional cultural personality, or particularism, and their loyalty to France. The believers in the ‘Republic one and indivisible’, however, did. The preservation of Alsatian particularism, especially in language and religion, was regarded by French politicians as the perpetuation of German cultural and political influence. The end of the armistice celebrations and the introduction of a transitional administration brought the realisation that the cultural gulf between France and Alsace, widened by years of separation following the Treaty of Frankfurt of 1871, could not be legislated away. With few exceptions, the people on both sides of the Rhine who welcomed the end of the annexation had assumed that the commitment to reunion was sufficient to make it a success.1 This belief was nowhere more rapidly disproven than in the matter of religion. The enforcement of French legislation ending the role of the state in overseeing the congregations became the flash-point between the Catholic majority in Alsace and the Third Republic.

Perhaps the most cherished prerogative of French intellectuals is the right to take a position, to have a public opinion on any and every matter. This power to pronounce judgement has crumbled somewhat in the electronic age before the pressures of the public opinion poll and the occasionally surreal media star syndrome, but generally intellectual and cultural leaders in France have retained highly visible and respected roles within national life.

(The Melians to the Athenians, 416/15 BC)

We see that you have come prepared to judge the arguments yourselves.… If we surrender, then all our hope is lost at once, whereas, so long as we remain in action, there is still a hope that we may yet stand upright.… We put our trust … in the help of men – that is of the Spartans.

The German Democratic Republic was long noted for its apparent stability, efficiency and political quiescence, in contrast to the more turbulent domestic histories of neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia. In established narratives of East German history, the sole evidence of mass popular unrest before the autumn of 1989 was the June Uprising of 1953. After this, with a few isolated exceptions, East Germans simply kept their heads down. ‘Dissent’ was for the most part an activity associated with a few intellectuals–Harich, Havemann, Bahro–until the growth of oppositional movements associated with unofficial peace initiatives and environmentalist groups in the 1980s1. To all outward appearances, this sketch was correct. What now requires reconsideration, however, are the underlying reasons for these appearances, and the evaluation – indeed, the very characterisation – of patterns of popular political dissent in the GDR.

Based on the international colloquium held in Florence in September 1987, which involved more than a hundred British, French, German and Italian historians, Power in Europe? is part of a larger collaborative research project designed to investigate perceptions of power in Western Europe over the period 1938 to 1958. Although collections of this kind are bound to be uneven in quality, most of the contributions to Di Nolfo's book reach a high standard, and it will be an important source of information and ideas for scholars working on Western European history in the 1950s.

For the first two years after the Berlin Wall came down and, as Jacques Delors put it, while the speed of history accelerated, most scholars confined themselves to journalism. Some books that did appear were rapidly overtaken by the heady pace of history, and the books under review here do not entirely escape being dated by the relentless progress of events on the European continent. Indeed, it can hardly be said that the dust has settled on German unification and the seismic events that we call the end of the Cold War. Both in the East (predictably) and in the West, unscrambling the elaborate territorial, strategic and ideological Cold War structures is bringing a re-examination of the nation state and its democratic practices; international governmental organisations; ‘Western’ values; and security issues. At one level, debate has been raging among some historians between two unsatisfactory notions: the ‘end of history’, and ‘real’ history being on the move again. At another level the German question has been returning unsteadily into focus, as historians start to pick at issues of national identity, nationalism and the nation-state. Other analysts have been trying to fit the European structures and assumptions we inherit from the Cold War years into a post-Cold War security and economic architecture. The close relationship between these strands of European history is obvious.

Polish higher education, like Poland as a whole, is in an exciting but perilous phase. The political changes of the last few years have brought new opportunities but also new expectations and constraints. Many university personnel are looking forward to a less insular, more fulfilling academic life, but there are plenty of others who feel nostalgia for a past which was ideologically inflexible but in some respects less demanding and more secure.