Throughout the 1960s the international monetary system crumbled in a gradual process which was punctuated by a series of crises. The international community proposed, debated and ultimately procrastinated over major reforms, and opted instead for ad hoc ‘plumbing’ solutions such as the Gold Pool and bilateral currency swaps. While this turmoil unfolded, Britain made repeated attempts to join the European Economic Community. This article shows that while monetary issues were not as often publicly discussed, they were a crucial factor in the negotiations for British membership. It also aims to bring together the discussions on the reform of the international monetary system in the 1960s with those on the enlargement of the EC.

The French police during the Second World War were used both as a tool of collaboration between the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier and to enforce an internal political reform, known as the National Revolution. The police initially responded enthusiastically, since an input of new resources was promised and the regime's main opponents – communists and foreigners – were also traditional police targets. A fierce repression ensued, police actions including the handing over of communists to the Nazis and playing an important role in deporting foreign Jews to their deaths. However, after two years police support began to falter, and by mid-1943 many police forces were at collapsing point. The police were suffering from an acute patriotic identity crisis and were the target of Resistance propaganda. The promised new resources had largely failed to materialise, which both demoralised the police and further undermined their efficiency.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Portugal and its regime, Salazar's New State, were presented to the Irish public as a model of a new, socially just and Catholic brand of politics. Deliberately ignoring the repressive nature of the New State, Irish defenders of corporativism benefited from the lack of impartial information concerning it. This lack of information, at least in official circles, was overcome through the establishment of a legation in Lisbon in early 1942. Irish diplomats were able to provide a truer account of life in Portugal, countering the earlier propaganda and providing an interesting picture of the New State at work.

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.

This article considers four dictatorships that have each been associated with European fascism: Portuguese Salazarism, Spanish Francoism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. It seeks to ascertain the ‘locus’ of political decision-making authority, the composition and the recruitment channels of the dictatorships' ministerial elites during the fascist era. The interaction between the single party, the government, the state apparatus and civil society appears fundamental if we are to achieve an understanding of the different ways in which the various dictatorships of the fascist era functioned. The party and its ancillary organisations were not simply parallel institutions: they attempted to gain control of the bureaucracy and select the governing elite – forcing some dictatorships towards an unstable equilibrium in the process, even while they were the central agents for the creation and maintenance of the leader's charismatic authority. The article focuses on an analysis of the gradations of these tensions that may be illustrated by the eventual emergence of a weaker or stronger ‘dualism of power’. This ‘dualism of power’ appears to be the determining factor in explanations for the typological and classificatory variations used to qualify those dictatorships that have been historically associated with fascism, and which have been variously defined as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’, or as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘fascist’.

Salazar's Portugal, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany were roughly contemporaneous departures from what had come to seem the progressive democratic mainstream. Seeking greater authority and effectiveness, each revolved around a strong leader and a single party. So there was unquestionably a family resemblance among them, and comparison surely illuminates each. Moreover, it is useful to pinpoint the variables that account for the differences among them. By doing so, in fact, we can devise a comparative array, a scale of radicalisation, understood in the neutral sense as the extent of departure from the norm and/or the prior situation.

This reply to Professor David D. Roberts' comments must begin with a methodological note. My critic quite correctly states that several of the points discussed in my article have little ‘explanatory value’. Within the history and social sciences disciplines typologies and classifications are of inestimable utility, as Roberts will almost certainly point out to his students. However, they cannot be confused with explanatory models. For this latter purpose there exist models of causality and other analytical instruments for use by those who believe that history is a discipline that is much closer to the social sciences than it is to literature – which is in itself a belief that remains far from consensual. The typologies applied to modern political regimes are, fundamentally, descriptive ideal-types that tell us little about why these regimes were institutionalised and consolidated. Put briefly, these typologies serve more to explain the how rather than the why. It just so happens that why fascism ascended to power does not explain very many of the characteristics of its use of power once it was consolidated.

Ada Ferrari and Gaia Giusto (eds.), Milano città della radio televisione (Milan: Francoangeli, 2000) 139pp., L 24,000 (pb) ISBN 88-464-1721-6.

Chiara Giaccardi, Anna Manzato and Giorgio Simonelli, Il paese catodico. Televisione e identità nazionale in Gran Bretagna, Italia e Svizzera Italiana (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998) 135pp., L 24,000 (pb) ISBN 88-464-0734-2.

Ralph Negrine, Television and the Press since 1945 Documents in Contemporary History, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 212pp., £12.99 (pb) ISBN 0-7190-4921-0.

Jeffrey S. Miller, Something Completely Different. British Television and American Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 208pp., £12.99 (pb), ISBN 0-8166-3241-3, £31.00 (hb) 0-1866-3240-5.

Marie-Francoise Lévy (ed.), La Télévision dans la République. Les années 50, Collection ‘Histoire du temps present’ (Paris: IHTP/CNRS, Editions complexe, 1999), 242pp (pb), €18.30, ISBN 2-87027-730-X.

Francesca Anania, Davanti allo schermo. Storia del pubblico televisivo (Rome: Carocci, 1997), 152pp., L 30,000 (pb), ISBN 88-430-0535-9.

Arthur Turner, The Cost of War: British Policy on French War Debts, 1918–1932 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998), 272pp., £45.00 (hb), ISBN 1-898723-37-0.

Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe, 1929–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan/Palgrave 2000) 244pp., £13.99 (pb), ISBN 0-333-60681-7.

Karl Mayer, Zwischen Krise und Krieg. Frankreich in der Außenpolitik der United States zwischen Wirtschaftskrise und Zweitem Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 275pp., DM 84.00, ISBN 3-515-07373-6.

Christoph Buchheim and Redvers Garside, eds., After the Slump. Industry and Politics in 1930s Britain and Germany (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 235pp., DM 69.00. ISBN 3-631-34912-2.

Philipp Heyde, Das Ende der Reparationen. Deutschland, Frankreich und der Youngplan 1929–1932. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), 506 pp., DM 134.00 ISBN 3-506-77507-3.

Monika Rosengarten, Die Internationale Handelskammer. Wirtschaftspolitische Empfehlungen in der Zeit der Weltwirtschaftskrise 1929–1939 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), 360 pp., DM 148.00, ISBN 3-428-10411-0.

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 634 pp., $36.95, ISBN 0-674-05131-9.

Axel R. Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 252 pp., €37.00, ISBN 3-515-07461-9.

Nancy Stieber, Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam. Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 386 pp., $45.00, ISBN 0-226-77417-1.

Christian Topalov, ed., Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914, (Paris: Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999), 574 pp., €38.00. ISBN 2-7132-1323-1.

William R. Smyser, From Yalta to Berlin. The Cold War Struggle over Germany. Foreword by Paul H. Nitze (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 465 pp., $39.95. SBN 0-312-06605-8.

Hanns Jürgen Küsters, Der Integrationsfriede. Viermächteverhandlungen über die Friedensregelung mit Deutschland 1945–1990. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000), 1,026 pp., €64.80, ISBN 3-486-56500-1.