This article argues that syndicalist trade union organizations, viewed internationally, were unique in First World War Europe in not supporting the war efforts or defensive efforts of their respective governments. The support for the war of the important French organisation has obscured the fact that the remaining five national syndicalist organisations – in belligerent Germany and Italy, and in neutral Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands – remained faithful to their professed workers' internationalism. The article argues that forces tending to integrate the labour movement in pre-1914 Europe had less effect on syndicalists than on other trade unions, and that syndicalist resistance to both integration and war in the non-Gallic countries was also influenced by their rivalry with social-democratic organisations.

At the end of the Weimar Republic, German business people, socialists, and communists used images of unemployed workers to define the boundaries of what they each considered acceptable and unacceptable in German Society. While concerns over Jews, homosexuals, and so on stayed within narrow discursive boundaries in the Weimar Republic, the public discourse on the unemployed ranged across a number of discursive boundaries and became a nodal point of social critique and commentary. Despite the marginal social status of unemployed workers, discussions about them became central to the self-understanding of different social groups in Weimar's political economy. In defining the unemployed, these communities also defined themselves and laid bare their existential concerns.

This paper presents a comparative study of the development of national and regional identities in three different border regions of France: the Basses-Alpes, the Moselle and French Flanders. It demonstrates that in spite of political, economic and social differences between the regions, the presence of the border and interaction with foreigners in specifically border regions similarly influenced identity formation in interwar France. In each case hierarchies or degrees of foreignness were developed, and a specific form of national identity came to be dominant which was determined more by a differentiation from ‘others’ than through an identification with shared, centre-generated national images.

This article examines and analyses the discussion over ‘the Spanish Problem’ taking place between the leaders of the three great Allied powers during the Postdam Conference of July–August 1945. It argues that the approved condemnation of the Franco regime was a bald rhetorical declaration which contained no effective sanctions, be they diplomatic, economic or military. The reference to Spain was the result of a minimal agreement reached with great difficulty after arduous negotiations which resulted in the imposition of a toothless international ostracism. Consequently, aided by the disintegration of the Grand Alliance and its replacement by the Cold War, the Francoist dictatorship cautiously inched its way to post-war survival.

In the decade after 1952 France faced sustained United Nations criticism of its colonial policies in north Africa. As membership of the UN General Assembly expanded, support for the non-aligned states of the Afro-Asian bloc increased. North African nationalist parties established their permanent offices in New York to press their case for independence. Tracing UN consideration of French North Africa from the first major General Assembly discussion of Tunisia in 1952 to the end of the Algerian war in 1962, this article considers the tactics employed on both sides of the colonial/anti-colonial divide to manipulate the UN Charter's ambiguities over the rights of colonial powers and the jurisdiction of the General Assembly in colonial disputes.

Gerald Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit. Staatsvertrag, Neutralität und das Ende der Ost-West-Besetzung Österreichs 1945–1955 (4. völlig überarbeitete und wesentlich erweiterte Auflage), Studien zu Politik und Verwaltung 62 (Vienna/Cologne/Graz: Böhlau, 1998), 834 pp., ISBN 3-205-98383-1. Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55. The Leverage of the Weak (Basingstoke/London: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 1999), 237 pp., ISBN 0-333-72547-6. Lothar Höbelt, Von der vierten Partei zur Dritten Kraft. Die Geschichte des VdU (Graz/Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1999), 303 pp., ISBN 3-702-00866-7. Anton Pelinka, Austria. Out of the Shadow of the Past, Nations of the Modern World: Europe (Boulder/Oxford: Westview, 1998), 256 pp., ISBN 0-813-32918-3.

Alexander von Vegasack and Mateo Kries, eds., Automobility – Was uns bewegt (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 1999), exhibition catalogue, Vitra Design Museum, 551 pp., ISBN 3-931-936-17-1. Paride Rugafiori, ed., La capitale dell'automobile: Imprendatori, cultura e società a Torino (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), 262 pp., Lire 35,000. ISBN 8-831-77194-9. Ulrich Kubisch, Das Automobil als Lesestoff: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Motorpresse, 1898–1998 (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1998), 80 pp., ISBN 3-895-00072-8. David Thoms, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon, eds., The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 307 pp., ISBN 1-859-28461-2. Sean O'Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 240 pp., ISBN 0-71-905506-7

Angelo Varni, ed., Il mondo giovanile in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 252 pp., £38.00, ISBN 8-815-06779-5. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996), 280 pp., ISBN 0-415-03052-8. Andrew Blake, The land without music: music, culture and society in twentieth-century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 256 pp., ISBN 0-719-04299-2. Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 256 pp., ISBN 0-631-19477-0. Christoph Bernhardt and Gerd Kuhn, Keiner darf zurückgelassen werden! Aspekte der Jugendhilfepraxis in der DDR 1959–1989 (Münster: Votum, 1998), 176 pp., ISBN 3-930-40595-4. David Fowler, The first Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-earners in Interwar Britain (London: The Woburn Press, 1995), 212 pp., ISBN 0-713-04018-1. Alfons Klenkmann, Wilde Jugend. Lebenswelt grossstaedtischer Jugendllcher zwischen Weltwirtschaftkrise, Nationalsozialismus und Waehningsreform (Essen: Klartext, 1996), 480 pp., ISBN 3-884-74283-3. Paola Ghione and Marco Grispigni, eds. Giovani prima della rivolta (Roma: Manifestolibri, 1998), 252 pp., £28.00, ISBN 8-872-85172-6.

Ivan T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 414 pp., $64.95 (hb), ISBN 0-521-55066-1, $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-521-66352-0. Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206 pp., $54.95 (hb), ISBN 0-521-58449-3; $19.95 (pb), ISBN 0-521-58592-9. Helena Flam, Mosaic of Fear: Poland and East Germany Before 1989 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998; distributed by Columbia University Press, New York), 283 pp., $50.00, ISBN 0-880-33406-1. Leszek Dziegiel, Paradise in a Concrete Cage: Daily Life in Communist Poland – An Ethnologist's View (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Arcana, 1998), 307 pp., ISBN 8-386-22517-3. András Gero and Iván Peto, Unfinished Socialism: Pictures From the Kádár Era (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 250 pp., $29.95, ISBN 9-639-11650-5.