In the early 1970s, when the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) was coming to an end, some Catholic intellectuals began to defend people's right to end their failed marriages and seek happiness with a new partner. In so doing, they recognised that love was the primary purpose of marriage; if it was absent the union ceased to be valid. These intellectuals thus broke with a discourse that had until then been deep-seated in both Catholic theology and Francoist morals and laws. According to these, love was only a secondary end of marriage and the conjugal union was indissoluble, leaving people no choice but to tolerate it if it was an unhappy one.

While the historiography on the religious Cold War has tended to focus on Christian anticommunism, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sought to transcend the Cold War while simultaneously advancing religious freedom in the Soviet Union. This article connects the WCC's ecclesiastical diplomacy to the wider story of human rights, from which religion has too often been excluded. The WCC's quest for Christian fellowship led it to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church into its membership, but this commitment generated tensions with the rise of Soviet dissidence. Moreover, the WCC's turn towards the left and the Third World contrasted with newly ascendant voices for human rights in the 1970s: Amnesty International's depoliticised liberalism, evangelical anticommunism, and the Vatican under John Paul II. Thus, the WCC, an early and prominent transnational voice for human rights, ran afoul of shifts in both the Cold War and the politics of protest.

This article explores how a specific strand of neoliberal-oriented intellectuals, namely those who revolved around the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), conceptualised the EEC policies between the 1980s and the early 1990s. In particular, this contribution considers two MPS general meetings, respectively held in 1982 and 1990, which were dedicated to the issue of European integration. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, this article first assesses how neoliberal thinkers commented on and interpreted the EEC transformations during the 1980s. Second, it challenges the assumption according to which the run-up to the establishment of the EU was the outcome of a consolidated project of neoliberalisation of the EEC and EU institutions. Finally, this article shows in which terms these neoliberal thinkers conceived of the depoliticisation of European institutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the looming end of the Cold War.

This article analyses the relationship between charted (drawn) maps and mental maps of the contested border-region between Italy and Yugoslavia following the First World War. Drawing upon graphic and verbal depictions of tourist routes, railways, supply chains, demographics, topographic features and telephone and telegraph lines, the article analyses representations of an unstable border at a moment of peak uncertainty. In so doing, it reveals the centrality of architects, engineers, tourist bureaus, artists and cartographers in forging an imaginary geography that correlated with emerging political divisions in post-war Europe. On both sides of the contested border, cartography was utilised to change the way people conceived political geography. Maps, the article argues, both revealed existing mental maps and helped to shape new ones.

This paper investigates the mobilisation of the Hungarian Red Army in 1919 by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. It challenges the literature's existing interpretations, explaining the successful mobilisation of the regime with its ‘nationalist’ or ‘Bolshevik’ character. First, the paper examines the military policy of the regime, arguing that it was not a mere copy of the Russian communist model but was a unique combination of social-democratic and communist ideas. Second, it analyses the recruitment propaganda and demonstrates how it combined dogmatic Bolshevism with traditional elements of the wartime propaganda. Third, it investigates the methods used by the Hungarian Soviet Republic to mobilise the population both in Budapest and in the rural eastern countryside. It argues that the mobilisation was possible through the involvement of civil associations (mostly the trade unions) and the incorporation of the former Habsburg regiments in the new Red Army.

Despite considerable scholarly and popular interest in the International Brigades, which fought on the side of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, traditional approaches centred on ‘national’ contingents of foreign volunteers have left significant gaps in historical knowledge. In particular, relations between the foreign volunteers and their Spanish hosts have received little attention, even though these relationships were fundamental to the everyday experience of volunteering, as well as affecting the International Brigades’ cohesion during their time in Spain. This account introduces a range of new archival material relating to the English-speaking XV International Brigade, arguing that pervasive structural and cultural factors led to a complex and variable set of outcomes that defy binary categorisation. In doing so, this study contributes to an emerging new literature on transnational approaches to the Spanish Civil War and interwar anti-fascisms, as well as comparative approaches to foreign fighter mobilisations.

This article examines the role of emotions in papal discourse about European integration. Expanding on the ‘emotional turn’ in history, it develops an analytic framework to study emotional valence in constructing the past and future. Analysing Pope Pius XII's three major post-war encyclicals (Communium Interpretes Dolorum, Fulgens Radiatur and Summi Maeroris), this article shows how the emotional vocabulary of Pius XII bridges the gap between theology and politics. In particular, it illuminates how Pope Pius XII integrated emotional and religious vocabulary to (re)construct an image of a European past and future.

The Portuguese constitution, passed in April 1976, considered the nationalisations undertaken after the Carnation Revolution to be ‘irreversible’, prescribing a development model based on state planning. Changes made to the constitutional text, in 1989, allowed for a privatisation programme that curtailed government intervention and reinforced market provision. This mirrored a previous shift in the public sphere. Whereas political debate in 1976 was mostly centred on state-led development models, the next decade witnessed the rise of a pro-market approach. Two crises of the balance of payments encouraged a growing number of economists, businessmen, journalists and politicians to argue for the need to revise the constitution, enhancing the role and scope of markets. This article focuses on the rise of a neoliberal intellectual field in Portugal between 1976 and 1989, analysing its efforts to overcome the legacy of the Carnation Revolution and build a competitive market order in a semiperipheral context.

In 2012 the historian Julia Adeney Thomas restrained her temper but unleashed a warning. The occasion was a forum in the American Historical Review on ‘historiographic “turns” in critical perspective’. The perspectives offered were critical enough, Thomas wrote in praise of the other authors, but the forum had a blind spot: ‘alongside the turns analyzed here, a world-altering force has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive even than “contemporary flexible forms of capitalism”: I speak of climate change – or climate collapse – and all of its related global transformations’. Since then, some intersectional scholars have gone beyond that to argue that climate collapse and racial capitalism are not separate topics at all, but are bound together by white supremacy and lingering forms of European imperialism. Over the past decade some environmental historians have grappled with these connections and deployed new frameworks for thinking about scale, the interdependence of the local and the global, the implications of a Euro-centric analytical framework for our understanding of the world and the relationship between economic systems and environmental change. Although they have developed separately, both environmental history and global history have called upon historians of Europe to rethink boundary making in their methodologies and in their categories of analysis. In an era of global climate catastrophe, global pandemic and global economic crisis, where does the ‘European’ environment end?

In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. ‘Law of the Journey’ consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals: Franz Kafka and Václav Havel. A few isolated rubber tubes floated on the concrete floor next to the raft, with rubber humans reaching out to be saved. The exhibit conveyed both the desperation of the migrants and the inadequacy of the response.

On 3 October 2020 Pope Francis issued his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Signed in the symbolic location of Assisi, home of St Francis, the encyclical represented the pope's response to the fears and anxieties wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the burning injustices of racism, global inequality and climate change. The encyclical explicitly invoked human rights, criticising the ways in which, ‘in practice, human rights are not equal for all’. As nations and societies succumb to ‘disenchantment and disappointment’, ‘the temptation to build a culture of walls’ to keep out the ‘other’ grows ever greater. The antidote, Francis insisted, is a ‘culture of encounter’ in which it is again possible to ‘rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters who orbit around us’. Priority, too, must be given to ‘the dignity of the poor’ and ‘respect for the natural environment,’ rather than the privileges of the affluent to continue to amass wealth at all costs. Only then – by aligning human rights with the global common good – can rights become truly universal.