Sexual policies were a core component of the National Socialist racial policies, both in the Altreich (territories considered part of Nazi Germany before 1938), as well as in the occupied territories. In occupied Poland the Germans imposed a ‘prohibition of contact’ (Umgangsverbot) with the local Polish population, a restriction that covered both social as well as sexual encounters. But this model of absolute racial segregation was never truly implemented. This paper attempts to show that there existed a wide range of sexual contacts between the occupiers and the local inhabitants, with the focus here being on consensual and forced contacts (sexual violence) as seen against the backdrop of National Socialist policies. This article positions itself at the intersection of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), the history of sexuality and the gender history of the German occupation of Poland – perspectives that have rarely been used with regard to this region.

This article is about EEC trade policy-making in the GATT Kennedy Round negotiations. It questions whether the European Commission was decisive in terms of reaching an agreement in Brussels and then in Geneva, and whether the final outcome resembled the Commission's preferences. The article shows that in Brussels the Commission was able to make its preferences prevail only when these appealed to the Council of Ministers. In Geneva, member states pragmatically set limits to the actions of the Commission, guided by the principle of how they could enhance their trade interests. Eventually, they allowed the Commission to strengthen its role because this was in line with their interests.

This article challenges the currently dominant understanding of Italian Fascism as a ‘political religion’, arguing that this view depends upon an outdated model of secularisation and treats Fascism's sacralisation of politics in isolation from church–state relations, the Catholic Church itself and popular religious experience in Italy. Based upon an historiographical review and analysis of what we now know about secularisation and these other religious phenomena, the article suggests that only when we grasp Italian Fascist political religion in relation to secularisation properly understood, and treat it in the context of religious experience and its history as a whole can the nature of Italian Fascism be adequately grasped.

How new states dealt with minority populations and developed (or failed to develop) strong and secure government institutions are significant research areas in the history of states born in the aftermath of the First World War. This article examines how Irish First World War veterans served as transitional figures during the state-building phase of the Irish Free State in the 1920s and 1930s. Though they are often presented as categorically maligned or forgotten victims of a period of rising nationalism, this article argues that the ex-servicemen, despite the imperial legacies they represented, were popularly supported during the 1920s and early 1930s, and even served as vehicles through which the Free State cemented its stability and defined its independence and obligations in the international and domestic arenas.

This article contributes to historiographical debates on political cultures, the construction of female citizenship and democracy development through an analysis of the construction of gender identities in socialist culture and working-class culture in Spain. From 1931, in the context of the Second Spanish Republic, socialist culture experienced a complex mixture of egalitarian proposals, collective actions and strategies to achieve the political mobilisation of women. This process reformulated in female terms many of the concepts historically present in this political culture: equality, freedom, secularism and citizenship.

One of Leonid Brezhnev's primary goals when he acceded to party leadership in the Soviet Union was to restore Moscow's control over the world communist movement, severely undermined by the Sino-Soviet dispute. Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania was determined to prevent this, in order to consolidate his country's autonomy in the Communist bloc. The Sino-Soviet dispute offered the political and ideological framework for autonomy, as the Romanian Communists claimed their neutrality in the dispute. This article describes Ceauşescu's efforts to sabotage Brezhnev's attempts to have China condemned by an international meeting of Communist parties between 1967 and 1969. His basic ideological argument was that unity of world communism should have a polycentric meaning.

Germans have long been part of the multi-ethnic and multicultural histories that shaped the territory between the Oder and the Urals. The presence of Germans, however, was seldom the same as ‘a German presence’ nor has it always been clear who the ‘Germans’ might be, or might have been. During the medieval period, for example, as Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder reminded us more than a decade ago, a German in eastern Europe ‘might be one who came from a core German territory, spoke a Germanic language, or to whom German law applied; but none of these criteria was necessarily decisive or historically unambiguous’. That equivocality proved tenacious, and consequently the clichéd polarity of Teuton and Slav has frequently obscured the ‘fluidity of identity and multiplicity of interaction’ that remain ‘crucial’ to understanding the history of this region, where ‘impulses of culture, religion, political and economic interest, whether uniting or dividing, have often cut across linguistic or ethnic differences’.

The extent to which European dictatorships of the twentieth century enjoyed popular support is one of the most contested and difficult questions in international contemporary history. In the case of Italian Fascism, two opposing points of view continue to hold sway. The first, orthodox viewpoint was established before 1945, and holds that the majority of the Italian population rejected Mussolini's regime, making widespread repression of the ubiquitous antifascist resistance essential for maintaining Mussolini's claim to power. A second, revisionist opinion first gained ground in the 1960s, and asserts that large segments of the population consented to the rule of regime, but that Fascist Italy was harmless compared to the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler. It is only in recent years that an anti-revisionist, and, in certain cases, post-revisionist school of thought has been established. The five publications discussed in this article are representative of this new line of thinking. I argue that some of these publications are best characterised as anti-revisionist, as they focus predominantly on overturning the thesis of consensus. By contrast, only three of these works exhibit a truly post-revisionist perspective that attempts to combine both narratives into a new synthesis.