Women entered police service between the wars in much of the world as a result of agitation by the international women's movement and the League of Nations. Nearly everywhere a gendered division of police work emerged, with female police primarily responsible for social welfare tasks and their male colleagues handling investigations and arrests. Poland represented a notable exception. Tapping into both international and national concerns, Polish policewomen laid claim to extensive powers by invoking the grave threat of the traffic in women. This focus on trafficking had a paradoxical effect, expanding the possibilities for female policing even as it justified a range of restrictive measures against prostitutes and poor female emigrants.

This article discusses loyalty trials conducted in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland region known as Felvidék after it was reannexed to Hungary by the First Vienna Award in 1938. All civil servants who had worked for the Czechoslovak state had to appear before local loyalty commissions to prove their loyalty to the Hungarian state. The commissions' task was complicated by two competing conceptions of loyalty – one investigating civic loyalty, the other national loyalty – and the politicisation and ethnicisation of peoples' daily practices for the previous two decades under Czechoslovak rule.

This article analyses Christian Democratic International organisations after the Second World War, namely the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (NEI) and the Geneva Circles (secret discussion groups), in order to understand how and to what extent this international network has been important for European Christian Democratic Parties and for the overall process of European unification. The goal is to describe the relationship between the Christian-inspired parties and their efforts to define a common ideological framework and a successful Europeanism capable of competing with other political groups and ideologies, especially communist and nationalist forces. The main sources used are the minutes of meetings of the NEI and the Geneva Circles.

The German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) had famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. During the Second World War, however, Arendt also spoke out repeatedly against the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Rejecting both alternatives, Arendt advocated for the inclusion of Palestine in a multi-ethnic federation that would not consist only of Jews and Arabs. Only in 1948, in an effort to forestall partition, did Arendt revise her earlier critique and endorse a binational solution for Palestine. This article offers a new reading of the evolution of Arendt's thought on Zionism and argues that her support for federalism must be understood as part of a broader wartime debate over federalism as a solution to a variety of post-war nationality problems in Europe, the Middle East and the British Empire. By highlighting the link between debates on wartime federalism and the future of Palestine, this article also underscores the importance of examining the legacy of federalism in twentieth century Europe for a more complete understanding of the history of Zionism.

The United States' support for the Franco dictatorship, along with British dominion over Gibraltar, caused an increasing sense of frustration towards the United States and United Kingdom amongst broad sectors of the Spanish public during the 1960s and 1970s. Growing resentment towards the Anglo-American presence in Spain threatened to jeopardise the geopolitical objectives of these two governments given the strategic importance of the Iberian Peninsula in the Cold War. Both the Americans and the British identified the promotion of the English language as a cultural tool to develop empathy amongst those Spaniards who would drive forward the eventual transition to a post-Franco era. This ‘soft power’ strategy fit perfectly with the pro-modernisation efforts taking place in several parts of the world. English teaching did not serve as a magic potion, however. Cultural seduction was not a cure-all to right the wrongs inflicted by the Anglo-American geostrategic priorities. This article explores the benefits and limitations of English language promotion in Franco's Spain and reflects on the ability of ‘soft power’ to influence what was a rather hostile hard-power context.

The article gives an overview of Finland's responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s. In particular, it focuses on public sector reforms that fall under the label New Public Management (NPM). These reforms are interpreted in the context of an overproduction crisis. The article contends that in the 1980s and 1990s power in Finland was centralised through the doctrines of NPM in order to reallocate public resources from welfare services to industrial policy and thus confront post-industrialism. In doing so, it provides a new explanation as to why NPM reforms were carried out. The main justification of NPM-reforms – ‘decentralisation’ – is analysed from different angles. In the late 1960s decentralisation referred to the autonomy of the municipalities. In the 1980s it referred to ‘efficient leadership’, which meant in practice more power over resources for the state. The idea was to reallocate public resources from welfare services to research and development and venture capital. In effect, NPM was part of a new kind of state interventionism not part of a neoliberal project to destroy or hollow out the state.