With the outbreak of war in Ethiopia in late 1935 Italian Fascism shifted into a new phase, which can be called imperial-colonialist-racial. Until 1935 Italy had invested little in the colonies and maintained a relatively small presence in Africa beyond a few cities in Libya. Yet from 1935 to 1940 the Fascist regime shifted enormous amounts of money and effort to create a new Fascist colonial society. This article attempts to explain how this happened by linking the shift to imperial politics to a new totalitarian drive to re-educate Italians and to the adoption of official racism.

The role of Serbia's intellectuals in the post-Tito revival of Serbian nationalism and the eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia has been a subject of discussion and analysis by both scholars and journalists for more than a decade. The now infamous 1986 draft Memorandum of the Serbian Academy in Belgrade has been elevated by some observers to represent a coherent statement of Serbian national interests that was shared by most intellectuals and quickly captured the imagination of Serbia's political leaders and people alike. Unfortunately, such an interpretation appears too facile, and the relationship between Serbia's intellectuals and the national movement presents itself as a complex phenomenon without a coherent thread.

Serbian nationalism has rarely been the subject of theoretical analysis. For the most part, recent work on Serbian history implicitly supports the ‘modernist’ position among nationalism theorists, which holds that nationalism is a modern phenomenon that serves the interests of the politically powerful. In this article, the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s will be examined in light of the major theoretical approaches to nationalism (modernism, perennialism and ethno-symbolism). Using a small group of nationalist intellectuals (Dobrica Ćosi, Borislav Mihajlovi Mihiz and Mića Popović) as its subject, it concludes that the restrictive modernist approach leads to misunderstandings of the nature of modern Serbian national identity.

This article examines the evolving concepts of the state among Serbian intellectuals since the nineteenth century, and then focuses on their final attempt at conceptualising a new and reformed Yugoslavia before the disintegration of the country in 1991. Three concepts of the state historically existed in Serbian national thought: a centralised Yugoslav state, a federal Yugoslav union and a ‘Greater Serbia’ acting as an alternative to South Slav unification. This article argues that the Serbian intellectuals' main platform of the 1980s, the ‘Contribution to the Public Debate on the Constitution’ of 1988, remained within the main ‘pro-Yugoslav’ tradition, but that its proposals were neither genuinely ‘centralist’ nor ‘decentralist’. Rather, they were shaped by exclusively Serbian concerns and were too incoherent to resuscitate Yugoslavia.

The article compares the careers of two men, Dobrica Ćosić and Vojislav Koštunica, who gained prominence as dissident intellectuals in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and later served as presidents of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After outlining the main features of each man's dissident career, the article traces how one aspect of each's thought – his conception of the Serbian national interest – evolved during his transition from intellectual to political engagement. While highlighting differences in Ćosić's and Koštunica's political careers, the article emphasises similarities in their national thought. In conclusion, it considers some general aspects of the dominant Serbian response to Yugoslavia's dissolution.

Much has been written about the role of intellectuals in the Serbian nationalist movement of the last two or three decades. The quantity has generally been more noteworthy than the quality. Recently, however, some excellent work has appeared, notably by these three authors. Each is making important and original contributions to our understanding of the cultural and ideological context of Yugoslavia's demise.

The contributors to this section have produced three authoritative vignettes or ‘side-bars’ that enhance and add important corrective nuances to our understanding of Yugoslavia's disintegration and civil wars and especially the positions and roles of varieties of Serbian nationalism and nationalist intellectuals in the background to and the course of those events. Drawing on their previous work, which has established each of them as respected specialists on their respective and overlapping subjects, the authors also make use of more recently published and unpublished sources to offer fresh or revised perspectives and evaluations of the personalities, ideas and consequences of their subjects. The result is a coherent, conjoined triune analysis, with emphasis on individual and collective internal incoherencies and contradictions that constructively confound efforts to ascribe some kind of evolving consistency, continuity and coherence to the ideas, role and consequences of these intellectuals and the Serbian national ideas and programmes they shaped and often initiated.

John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 363 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8047-3422-4.

Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 406 pp., $13.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8014-8784-6.

Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organizations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 224 pp., £47.50 (hb), ISBN 0-7190-5856-2.

Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 400 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8166-3907 8.

Gabriele Metzler, Internationale Wissenschaft und Nationale Kultur: Deutsche Physiker in der Internationalen Community, 1900–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 304 pp., €29.90 (pb), ISBN 3-525-36246-3.

Sarah E. Mendelson and John K. Glenn, eds., The Power and Limits of NGOs: A Critical Look at Building Democracy in Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 300 pp., $16.00 (pb), ISBN 0-231-12491-0.

Alan S. Milward, The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy 1945–1963 (The United Kingdom and The European Community, Vol. I) (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2002), 512 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5111-7.

Alex May, ed., Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe: The Commonwealth and Britain's Applications to Join the European Communities (Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 188 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-80013-3.

Oliver J. Daddow, ed., Harold Wilson and European Integration. Britain's Second Application to Join the EEC (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2003), 298 pp., £45.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5222-9, £17.50 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8207-1.

Sir Con O'Neill, Britain's Entry into the European Community. Report by Sir Con O'Neill on the Negotiations of 1970–1972, ed. and with a foreword by Sir David Hannay (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), 464 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5117-6.

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.

Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.

Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.

Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

What is the difference between pre-modern despotism and modern dictatorship? The answer is simple: despotism does not need massive backing from below, but dictatorship presupposes the support of the masses. This simple distinction is the starting point of the three-year ‘mass dictatorship’ project, launched in December 2002 with the financial support of the Korea Research Foundation and Hanyang University, Seoul. The project aims to position Korean debates about coming to terms with its dictatorial past in the context of other countries' experiences with dictatorship.