The recent evolution of both the historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and even the general population's perception of the conflict, cannot be separated from the changes in the political and cultural paradigms in Europe since the end of the Cold War. By this I mean that Europeans, but not only them, have been evolving from a mostly ideological view of the past to an increasingly humanistic one.

While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

In the early 2000s a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write a historiographical essay on the war of 1936–9 in Spain, only then to say that they wouldn't be able to publish my text because their readers ‘wouldn't recognise in it the war they knew’. The essay I'd written analysed the conflict in 1930s Spain in the context of the many cognate ones catalysed across continental Europe by the war of 1914–8. All these conflicts were, in one way or another, conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world, already shaken by the First World War, and those who sought to effect some form of levelling social and political change, whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, including in Spain, such conflicts arose from a common hinterland of accelerating urbanisation, industrialisation and, crucially, from the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.

Eighty years after both the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of a new war on European soil, we are facing a situation of both accelerated information and of reductionism in the stories about the past, often for very ‘presentist’ motivations. In such a context, it is even more difficult than usual to anticipate the place that the Spanish conflict will occupy in academic study and social debate in the next two decades, the period remaining until the conflict's 100-year anniversary. But historians seeking to re-evaluate or ‘re-size’ the Spanish war face two primary tasks: to place Spain back at the heart of our understanding of the interwar European crisis and to develop a robust interpretation of the war, one which can challenge presentist distortions of its history and help Spain build a healthier society around a fairly shared understanding of the past.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War much contemporary commentary about the International Brigades was consistent with the view that what was taking place on the Iberian Peninsula was part of a larger struggle between democracy and fascism. Sympathetic reporting highlighted their positive military contribution and the selfless sacrifices in what later was tagged as the ‘curtain-raiser’ to the Second World War. From the 1980s scholarship about these foreign fighters for the republic was framed quite differently. In these cases the volunteers’ war experiences tended to be placed within the contextual narratives of their own national groupings or were applied in relation to the impact of the returned veterans from Spain on the post-war politics in their own home states. In several current analyses of the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the unexamined historical figure of the Spanish International Brigadier has been utilised as a foil against which to catalogue the pernicious and destabilising role of foreign fighters in these on-going civil wars.

Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.

Recent research into the Moroccan troops who fought in the Spanish Civil War has both drawn from and contributed to insights gained from new historiographical developments in the field of the Spanish conflict as well as other European twentieth-century conflicts. Studies examining the experiences and choices of low-level participants of the war, whether soldiers or civilians – on both the Francoist and republican sides – have increasingly shown that they were players in possession of a certain degree of agency, however limited. That agency allowed these low-level players, whether Spanish or Moroccan, to influence war events to a higher degree than previously thought possible, and has shown that mobilisation for and maintenance of the war effort depended on a certain mixture of coercion and negotiation, even within the more authoritarian Francoist camp. In the European context, the Moroccan participation in the 1936–9 war has its special characteristics, one of which is that its military significance weighed heavier than other colonial contributions to European battlefields between 1914 and 1945, and therefore the agency of Moroccans was more consequential. Nevertheless, it has much in common with other European experiences. A recent collaborative volume on British, French, Spanish and Dutch colonial armies in the first half of the twentieth century, Colonial Soldiers in Europe (2016), edited by Eric Storm and myself, has helped put the Moroccan–Spanish experience in European perspective. Similarities abound, not only in colonial soldiers’ experiences of fighting in foreign lands, but also between the various Western European attempts at controlling, i.e. limiting, the cultural and human consequences of this massive irruption of male warriors into the continent.

Any civil war leaves a legacy of partisanship. Divisions persist over time and may be particularly bitter when, as in Spain, a culture of victory survives long after the end of hostilities. Any attempt at reconciliation was postponed, leading to an unusually bifurcated historiography, framed by a perennial interest into who, at base, was responsible for the outbreak of the civil war. The parameters of this debate were set in the 1970s, most notably in works by Stanley Payne and Paul Preston. It has continued in various guises since then, most recently revived by a generation of Spanish scholars, such as Fernando del Rey Reguillo, who have added case studies and new levels of detail, while leaving the terms of the debate more or less unchanged. Of course the historiographical panorama can change, often in tandem with the historical context, as several contributions to this roundtable make clear, notably those of Vjeran Pavlaković, Helen Graham and Giuliana Chamedes. However, the framing of the Spanish Civil War is still essentially moral: who bore responsibility for the outbreak of war, who was to blame for the defeat of the republic and, as a consequence, the conduct of the repression. One result has been to assimilate the history of the civil war with that of the Second Republic; another is a historiography that is largely political in tone and focus.

This article examines the violent imaginaries and practices of squadrismo in the period preceding the establishment of the Italian fascist dictatorship. Based on the examination of newly accessible documentary sources at provincial state archives, the article sheds light upon the ways in which squadristi imagined, performed, justified and ascribed meanings to their violent actions and the disintegrative impact of violence on local communities. The article concludes with a reflection on Blackshirt violence in the aftermath of the March on Rome and the persistence of the ideological and cultural fabric of squadrismo in the years of the dictatorship.

This article shows how corporatism in the Nordic countries helped shape the ‘ecological turn’ as governments and conservationist associations co-organised the Council of Europe's ‘European Conservation Year 1970’. The national programmes came to present highly diverging levels of discord, as this nascent policy field channeled challenges to the premise of economic growth. Cross-national comparisons highlight the importance of variations in the institutional maturity of environmental administrations as well as in the power afforded to industrial representatives. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian archival sources illuminate negotiations between governments and private associations, contributing to an in-depth analysis of a rarely researched transnational event.

As a result of the nationwide strike wave in August 1980 that gave birth to the Solidarity trade union, the Polish state authorities conceded to the reform of state censorship and to Solidarity creating union bulletins that were not subject to preventative censorship. This article analyses the Solidarity press to explore its censoring through direct state censorship and self-censorship in 1980–1. It argues that Solidarity's dual commitment to truth and legality were irreconcilable and that the state cultivated this conflict, contributing to the undermining of Solidarity's moderate leaders and the treatment of history as an arena for politicisation and state control. It posits that these conflicts have contributed to the current Polish government's frontal assault on the legacy of the Solidarity leadership.

In 1987 a recreational centre called the Bowlingtreff arose at the centre of East German Leipzig without knowledge from central authorities thanks to 40,050 hours of volunteer labour. What can this incident of apparent optimism tell us about state–citizen relations as they had evolved on the eve of revolution? Rather than ‘ostalgic’ evidence of socialist paradise lost, this article shows how, overcoming years of bureaucratic proscriptions, dedicated local authorities built ‘off the record’ to prove to the people that they could attain something; and residents disillusioned with communism were eager to build a piece of the ‘imaginary West’ in their dying city. Ultimately, however, the bowling palace demonstrated system dysfunction and whetted Leipzigers’ appetite for the ‘real’ West.

In November 2018 eight people, including a mother from the Comoros and residents from Tunisia and Algeria, died when two buildings collapsed in the run down area of Noailles in the old port area of Marseille. A 2015 government report had already warned that 40,000 dilapidated and dangerous homes put 100,000 people at risk in France's second city, but campaigners say little was done. The tragedy occasioned widespread anger about run down and exploitative housing in the Mediterranean city. It also refocused public attention on housing and the concept of the home. In turn this raised questions about how housing and the home connect to space and social justice, the division of labour between national and local government, citizenship and ‘the right to the city’.