In the 1970s, the West German extra-parliamentary Left struggled to respond effectively to left-wing terrorism and the state powers mobilised against it. This article argues that a shared conception of counter-violence as legitimate resistance helps explain the Left's ambivalent relationship to political violence and its solidarity with militants. The mounting strain on the projects and protest networks of student rebels, older leftists, anti-nuclear demonstrators and feminist activists, however, provoked debate and, eventually, change. Caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism, leftists revised assumptions upon which their commitment to resistance had rested – and reconceived resistance itself as part of everyday, mainstream politics.

The impact of the Sino-Japanese War on Britain has generally been overshadowed by the impact of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out a year earlier. Indeed, the only book on the subject, Arthur Clegg's Aid China (1989), is subtitled A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Yet, for a few months in the autumn of 1937, these two campaigns achieved a kind of parity in British public perception. British opinion was united in condemnation of the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, and, at its peak, the ensuing campaign attracted a broader range of supporters than the movement in solidarity with the Spanish Republic. For instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly criticised Japan's actions in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of Franco's Spain. Moreover, some acts of solidarity with China (such as the refusal by British dockers to load Japanese ships) went beyond what the supporters of the Spanish Republic could hope to achieve. This article makes a comparison of the two campaigns, and examines the interconnections between them. It not only sheds new light on the ‘forgotten’ campaign for China, but also asks why Spain – unlike China – became the ‘Great Cause’ of the later 1930s.

As the regime collapsed in 1989/90, it became clear that an extreme right movement had already developed in East Germany. Its origins and development have been variously interpreted as, first, an outcome of the conditions the GDR, second, a result of the Wende, the great change, and third, an outcome of the unification process. This article integrates all three interpretations. It shows how a heterogeneous, politically diffuse skinhead milieu arose as the first extreme right cliques began to develop in the GDR; how, at the time of the Wende, it acquired a radically nationalistic political orientation; and how it became part of a pan-German ‘national opposition’ in the reunited Germany.

This article contributes to the literature of occupation, as well as to transnational history, by exploring the social history of the military government in the French Zone of Occupation in West Germany (ZFO). It uses the Zone as a case study to understand the construction of a French community abroad by looking at systems of buying and selling, and asks whether these systems were not in themselves constitutive of the very transformation of members of the military government into a ‘French community’. By investigating the insistence that French customers buy French goods at the économat, the shop restricted to their use, the article claims that gender, family and commercial practice helped to define home for members of the French administration in Germany.

The history of Coca-Cola in Denmark in the early post-war years offers a fascinating case for studying the close links between Cold War politics, business interest and cultures of consumption. In the early 1950s, the well-organised Danish beverage industry lobbied effectively to protect their home market against the American soft-drink giant. The result was a special cola tax that made production of cola drinks unprofitable in Denmark. This tax came under growing pressure in the late 1950s and was eventually abandoned in 1959. Resistance to ‘America's advance’ continued after 1959 as the Coca-Cola Company came to face strong competition from the local Jolly Cola brand, produced by exactly the same business interests that had lobbied for the cola tax six years earlier.

This article proposes a revision of the predominant view of southern Italians during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Turin, one of the most remarkable moments of working-class mobilisation in modern European history. The representation of southern Italians as ‘primitive rebels’ and ‘spontaneous’ radicals has its roots in an earlier notion of southerners as social deviants and has obscured a much more complex historical reality. This image, endorsed by historians and popularised in fictional accounts, contradicts contemporary evidence which points to southerners’ singular mix of radicalism and conservatism, resistance and integration.

The end of the Cold War and the accompanying easing of archival restrictions in former communist countries have created a veritable renaissance in historical literature on the region in the last two decades. The fall of the Iron Curtain has subsequently thrown into doubt the historiographical salience of a strict East–West divide and prompted the resurgence of analytic concepts such as Central Europe or East Central Europe. The former term, defined famously but imprecisely in the 1980s by Milan Kundera as those lands ‘culturally in the West and politically in the East’, has grown no easier to delimit with the march of European integration and democratic stability across most of the ‘central’ part of the continent. The latter term is, in some senses, less problematic, since the ‘East’ in East Central Europe is generally understood to exclude those areas in current-day Germany or Austria. Yet the region's eastern and southern borders are still much disputed.