When Ireland became independent in 1922 there was widespread support for the imposition of a moral order that reflected Catholic teaching. This was remarkably successful: divorce was outlawed while contraception was prohibited as part of this process. The consensus on moral issues was challenged for the first time during the 1970s. The legalisation of contraception became the main battlefield between conservatives and liberals. This article analyses successive attempts to change policy and discusses the impact of social and political change in a homogeneous Catholic state. Ireland remained a predominantly religious country and the Roman Catholic Church wielded considerable influence. The controversy over contraception challenged the Church's authority and the society's deeply embedded moral values. For the first time, Irish politics was divided on matters of church and state. Resolution came in 1979, however the legislation reflected the continuing influence of the bishops on policy making. It also highlighted the caution of politicians who remained reluctant to act. In contrast to elsewhere in Western Europe, the legislation was not a turning point but an example of conservative retrenchment. The legislation generated a conservative backlash that successfully imposed traditional Catholic values on Irish society during the 1980s. The main sources used are the archives of the Departments of Justice and Health.

Drawing on an extensive range of French archival sources as well as Jean Monnet's papers, this article challenges several commonly held views regarding the establishment of the Monnet Plan by re-examining the domestic political context in post-war France. It reveals that the distinctive ‘supra-ministerial’ structure of the Monnet Plan was developed only after, and in direct response to, the October 1945 legislative elections in which the French Communist Party won the most seats and subsequently gained control of France's main economic ministries. Furthermore, Monnet managed to convince communist ministers to surrender important powers from their ministries to Monnet's nascent planning office on false premises, a finding that challenges the usual depiction of Monnet as an open and honest broker.

In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. Initially these newcomers were lumped in Western German discourse under the term ‘refugees’. Yet, within less than a decade, the term ‘expellees’ emerged as a more popular denotation. Scholarship has offered two explanations for this semantic change, emphasising the political influence of both the Allies and the ‘expellee’ leadership. This article presents a complementary reason for this discursive shift. We argue that ‘expellees’ marked the symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims in order to balance out German guilt for Nazi crimes.

This article challenges the assumption, frequently made in scholarship on Soviet media, that news was absent in the Soviet Union. Working across press, radio, and television, the article shows how after 1953 reform of Soviet news became a priority for journalists, editors and media professionals. The article focuses on discussions among journalists and officials about the future of journalism, arguing that journalists’ notions of professional excellence played a crucial role in shaping news coverage. In a climate of Cold War competition with western radio, new technological possibilities and changing political priorities, journalists gradually overcame their condescension towards news, emphasising its civic potential as an agent of social ‘democratisation’, and the artistic nature of reportage. This new configuration was precarious, however, and collapsed after the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1968. As the Party placed new restrictions on the flow of information, news lost its professional prestige.

This article widens the analysis of international organisations by including communist organisations, in particular the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Drawing on archival research in Moscow, Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva and Rome, this article traces the origins, the evolution and the collective actorness of both organisations. Both COMECON and the Warsaw Pact went through a process of institutionalisation, reorganisation and multilateralisation and began to share many characteristics with their Western counterparts, such as the European Economic Community and NATO. Contrary to conventional wisdom these organisations thus developed into multilateral international organisations, which the other members could use to challenge Soviet unilateralism. Comparing COMECON and the Warsaw Pact with each other and with their Western counterparts, this article shows how these Eastern European international organisations contributed to shifting the balance of power within the Soviet Bloc by empowering their members as sovereign states and themselves as collective actors.

In an effort to draw attention to the very wide variety of European historical traditions, the editors of Contemporary European History decided to commission a series of essays that will introduce our readers to the diverse historiographies and historical practices being produced in different European languages and national contexts. While this journal has been particularly active in supporting perspectives from transnational, international and global history, we also recognise that the national frame remains crucial for the production of historical narratives throughout Europe, whether it be through the training of historians, or the funding, peer-reviewing, institutionalisation and reception of historical research.

The on-going military conflict in eastern Ukraine has revitalised historical discussion and history battles in the country rendering history more relevant than ever before. Since 2014 different sides in the conflict have used historical references, specifically to the Second World War, to validate their actions. Moscow most notably claimed to be protecting the population of eastern Ukraine from Ukrainian ‘fascists’: the story of a three-year Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian nationalists on Russian state television was enhanced by references to atrocities that Ukrainian nationalists allegedly perpetrated during the Second World War. It is not, of course, the first time a regime has used history as a justification for military aggression or territorial annexation. Across Europe in the twentieth century, history has been used to defend political goals, and politics has been used to write history. The bellicose politicisation of history became the norm in Ukraine in 2014.

Since the early-2000s there has been an increasing amount of research on connections between the Nazi regime and the Arab world largely spurred by scholars of Germany. One of the key contributions of this scholarship has been the argument that historic links between National Socialism and Islam, in particular the connection between National Socialist racial ideology and contemporary anti-Semitism in the Middle East, persisted into the post-war period and crucially shaped Middle Eastern politics and policies. This approach is represented in this review in the studies by Matthias Küntzel, Jeffrey Herf, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers and Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz, who all – in various ways – suggest that there is a direct line of continuity between National Socialism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of al-Qaeda. By calling attention to the role of National Socialism, these studies challenge what has hitherto been the dominant historiography of the modern Middle East, which contextualises the rise of anti-Semitism in the region within a broader analysis of Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. The debate on the importance of National Socialism in the Arab world continues to develop. Recent books by historians David Motadel and Stefan Ihrig return the focus from the Middle East to Nazi policy in the region allowing them to place the Nazi regime within a longer history of Western misapprehensions of the ‘Muslim’ world. Placing these two approaches side by side allows us to evaluate the historical evidence of collaboration between Nazism and radical Islam and thereby assess the extent to which Nazi racial ideology penetrated the Arab world.

The question of ‘secularity’ (laïcité) has risen sharply up the French political agenda over the last twenty-five years. Ways in which it is defined and applied are hotly contested and lie at the nerve centre of wide debates about the nature of the Republic, French national identity and indeed of France's colonial past. According to an IFOP opinion poll in November 2015, 87 per cent of French people agreed that was important to respect laïcité at school, 84 per cent of respondents said that it was part of France's identity while 81 per cent thought that it was under threat in France. That said, they did not agree on what laïcité meant. For 32 per cent it meant separating religion from politics, for 27 per cent it meant ensuring liberty of conscience, while 17 per cent said it meant reducing the influence of religion in society. Historians, sociologists and political scientists as well as journalists and activists join battle on the question, and a selection of their recent contributions, from different angles and with different methodologies, are reviewed here.