Like most European historiographies, modern Croatian historiography was founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. It coincided with the appearance and spread of nationalism – what is more, it was one of its essential components. Nonetheless, the number of historians in Croatia remained small for a long period of time (In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, approximately twenty historians worked in universities, museums, and archives), and historiographic production was modest and methodologically traditional. The number of historians and institutions dedicated to historical writing increased significantly in the decades following the Second World War, reflecting the importance placed on history by the communist authorities. Approximately one hundred historians were employed in Croatia at the time of its independence in the early 1990s, principally at the country's two universities and a number of historical institutes. Today, Croatia – a country with a population of less than four million – offers up to eight undergraduate and graduate history programs, as well as several doctoral programs. More than 300 professional historians work in faculties, institutes and other institutions such as archives, museums or non-governmental organisations.

One of the main characteristics of the Soviet domination sphere in Europe after the Second World War was the unification of political systems of the countries within the Soviet Union. This paper examines the Soviet impact on the electoral system of the People's Republic of Poland, a country often considered to have been the most unique among the Eastern European states. This article argues that although there were some important differences between the electoral codes in the USSR and communist-led Poland, the effects of the elections in both countries were the same: popular voting could not pose any threat to the power of their communist parties. This resulted from practices – similar in both countries – not included in the electoral law. This leads to the conclusion that the differences between the elections in the Soviet Union and post-war Poland were rather illusory.

This article provides a perspective on liberal political thought in post-Cold War Finland by examining the small Young Finns party. Their political philosophy emphasised individualism against collectivism and criticised Finland's state-centred political culture. Special focus is on the party's ideas of reforming the Finnish welfare state. The Young Finns wanted to retain universal education and healthcare services but pursued radical tax, social security and labour market reforms with ideas inspired by neoliberal thinkers. The article argues that the Young Finns represented a Finnish variant of neoliberalism in their goal of retasking the welfare state into a slimmer enabler of individual freedom.

The wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s dramatically stimulated interest in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). To satisfy this interest from the outside world, many historical publications offered up various explanations for the outbreak of the wars.1 Yet the prior, and perhaps more significant, development occurred on the eve of the war, when historians in Bosnia and Herzegovina – although to a considerably lesser extent than in Serbia and Croatia – made an important contribution to national(ist) mobilisation and to the creation of a belligerent atmosphere by sensationally broaching traumatic topics linked to the Second World War.2 The war in the 1990s left behind a devastated and divided country and created deep social divisions which have also affected the role and status of the nation's historiography. Many today accept the claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country in which there exist three views on history, although this is only partly true, because in this country far more than ‘three views on history’ exist. In practice, the thesis of three national historiographies (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak)3 turns out to be completely erroneous, because the existence of ‘national historiographies’ would also presume the existence of clearly defined thematic and methodological approaches to historical research, and that is not the case with historiography in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hence, it is more precise to speak of a scholarly historiography that exists alongside an ideologically or politically motivated historiography or ‘parahistoriography’, by which is meant ‘dealing with history . . . in a completely different way than studying history’.4

Historians are playing an important role in Macedonian society. Their understanding of history and their focus of research interest revolves around the national identity of Macedonians and differentiating them from Others. In recent decades, the political debates in the Republic of (North) Macedonia and its relations with Bulgaria and Greece have had important impact on historiographic production and the new (revisionist) interpretations of the past. History has become an essential element in contemporary politics that is key for framing the national identity of the Macedonians. In this new political context historians are even more engaged in political campaigns and debates, thus making them and their historiographical work one of the sources for symbolic division in the country.

Two leading political organisations in interwar Romania were genuinely anti-Semitic: the fascist Legionary movement and the far-right party the National Christian Defence League (LANC), known from 1935 as the National Christian Party (PNC). Whereas the anti-Semitism of the Legionaries is well researched, that of the LANC/PNC has rarely been studied. I argue that, in addition to an anti-Semitic agenda and rhetoric, anti-Jewish violence was an inherent part of the political practices of the LANC/PNC. I analyse the party's national congress on 8 November 1936, when thousands of supporters gathered in Bucharest, and use party correspondence and police and Interior Ministry records to show that the attendees engaged extensively in anti-Jewish violence, before and even more so after the congress. The government, ruled by the National Liberal Party, agreed to the mass anti-Semitic gathering but had only a vague plan to repress violent anti-Semitism: expecting the event to stir up anti-Jewish hatred, the Interior Ministry mobilised the security forces to prevent outbursts during the congress, but not much before or after. The LANC/PNC played a central role in the politicisation of extreme anti-Semitism in interwar Romania, and addressing the party's history provides a better understanding of the right-wing radicalisation of the time.

In 1963 the West Berlin mayor proposed a joint bid from West and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games. West Germany's closest allies sought to persuade the West German and Berlin governments to stop the bid, which both supported but had largely kept secret from their allies. This episode demonstrates not only the significance which foreign ministries have long attributed to international sport, but also their clear involvement to actively end another country's Olympic aspirations because of the diplomatic ramifications, particularly the potential to challenge the four-power control of Berlin, and their own self-serving interests in hosting the same event.

Building on original research and dialoguing with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, this article argues that decolonisation and migrations from the (former) colonies triggered and moulded a new, post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe. Analysing the highly significant but hitherto much-neglected case of Portugal in its broader Western European context, this claim is substantiated by surveying how these migrations affected citizenship and notions of the national community, the welfare state and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white ‘returnees’ from Portugal's African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white ‘immigrants’, arguing that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonised territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire.

Speaking on a popular TV show in 1990, soon after the collapse of the previous regime, long-time dissident and doyen of Bulgarian historical science, former Dean of the Faculty of History at the University of Sofia, Nikolay Genchev, insisted on putting the ‘Bulgarian national interest’ ‘above all’. Genchev said with regret that ‘the Bulgarian national problem has recently appeared mainly as a Turkish problem’. Irritated, he added that it is talked about ‘only for the Turks . . . [in spite of the fact that there were only] a million [Turkish] people living in this country’. He followed up with apocalyptic predictions that Yugoslavia wanted Pirin (or Bulgarian) Macedonia, Romania longed for Dobrodja (which is split between Bulgaria and Romania), the Turks claimed secession, and therefore only the ‘hard chest of the Balkan’ remained.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Swiss government initially refused to become diplomatically involved, arguing that as a small, permanently neutral state, Switzerland was unable to make a difference in the Afghan crisis. The present article shows that between 1982 and 1986, the Swiss authorities began to identify the transfer of eleven Soviet prisoners of war from Afghanistan to Switzerland as an opportunity to demonstrate Switzerland's neutral good offices in situations of armed conflict. It also shows that Switzerland's involvement came about primarily through direct and indirect exchanges with non-state actors in the Afghan crisis.

After the demise of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, Fiume's long political transition provided women with new challenges and opportunities. This was especially true for female public employees who had to adapt to a weak and fluid state that provided them with social security and benefits in exchange for loyalty and control. Beginning with two case studies of women elected to the Fiume city council in 1919, this paper explores how the two professional cohorts they represented – teachers and tobacco workers – learned to cope with the turbulent national and political events, as well as with the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.

This article explores cultures of militancy in public space among currents of the revolutionary left in France, Italy and West Germany during the ‘red decade’. It shows how radicals embraced convergent strategic perspectives, discourses on violence and insubordinate practices for confronting the police. However, patterns of militancy subsequently diverged along national lines in the face of different experiences of neo-fascist violence, domestic social conflict, and legacies of armed resistance and civil war. In particular, the relatively frequent use of lethal force by Italian police in defence of public order motivated a current of the Italian revolutionary left to endorse the use of firearms during protests. Across national experiences, domestic protest policing conditioned the use of force by protestors and the transformation – or not – of protestors into terrorists.

In recent years, school strikes and street protests for climate justice have drawn international attention to young people's mobilisation and activism on global issues. This article addresses the need to map the history of global awareness among young people by exploring the origins of the Operation Dagsverke (Operation Day's Work) campaign in Sweden during the early 1960s. Drawing primarily on material from the student-led school council organisation SECO, the aim is to show how young people mobilised support for addressing global issues. The results show that the campaign format was initially developed by university students in 1960, after which it was adapted by students in secondary education. It is argued that the campaign was successful in transforming time, a resource that young students possessed, into economic contributions. On the organisational level, the structure of the student council organisation SECO was important for the campaign's initial success.

This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, which presented Poland as a socialist welfare state. By locating the display within the broader historical context of Cold War competitiveness, the article intends to make two points. Firstly, using written and visual sources, this article explores how the humanistic dimension of the socialist welfare project, which remained largely unmatched by the capitalist West, was visualised and rationalised. Effectively, it proposes reading of social benefits and state subsidised services as a novel subject of cultural diplomacy. Secondly, by indicating the role of designers as significant stakeholders who actively shaped the country's self-imagining abroad, this article advances the scholarship about design diplomacy. It evidences that modern design allowed the exhibition makers to convey both symbolic and material aspects of the welfare state, which had at stake the battle for hearts and minds.

The Romanian government encountered unexpected difficulties after the First World War with the increase of religious minorities, particularly evangelicals in the newly acquired border region of Bessarabia. International affiliations and increasing success in rural areas led government officials and the Romanian Orthodox Church to label these groups as foreign pawns or socially deviant sectarians. The Baptist Church in Chișinău proved a special case of concern as its leadership included a Jewish man, Lev Averbuch. Averbuch's congregation was a diverse religious community, filled with Romanians, Russians, Bulgarians, Jews, Greeks, and others. Their multi-ethnic composition, multi-lingual services, ties to international organisations, and controversial sermons speaking out against nationalism and antisemitism were used by police and Orthodox Church authorities to paint them as a threat to national security. The analysis of Averbuch's interwar community of Jewish Christians in Chișinău shows the region was not a homogenous religious space and that religious identity was of greater value than national identity. It provides insight into the fluidity of religious, ethnic, and even geographic borders, and how policies of national consolidation were challenged at the local level by religious minorities during Europe's tumultuous interwar years.

This article analyses the political impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Spain, a hitherto scarcely explored subject. It first discusses the evolution and impact of the pandemic, focusing on political and social responses. It then shows how these responses were related to debates about the crisis of Restoration Spain's political system. Lastly, it analyses the long-term political impact of the influenza pandemic, showing how the demands of this period can be linked to policies and discourses during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, particularly regarding the links between the call for a ‘health dictatorship’ developed during the pandemic and the rhetorical use of medical language linked to authoritarian regenerationism between 1923 and 1930.

Using visual-historical methods, this article seeks to offer insights into the experiences of two historiographically underrepresented – but in this specific case overlapping – groups during the National Socialist era: elderly and provincial Jews. The article centres on a fascinating set of images: namely, a selection of portraits of individuals and photos of the Jewish community inside and outside of the local synagogue on a Saturday morning. The photographer, a young man by the name of Heinz Bähr, was preparing for his imminent immigration to the United States when he returned to his hometown of Breisach am Rhein in 1937 and photographed his extended family and members of the small rural Jewish community. As the article shows, photography was not simply a means to represent the elderly through the eyes of younger Jews but was an intergenerational practice of constituting communal memory. The photos reveal the self-perceptions of those who stood in front of and behind the camera and how these actors chose to represent historical processes on film.

From the mid-1950s, industrial food manufacturing has become a key priority of the Soviet economy. Increasing the production of agricultural and manufactured foodstuffs was a matter of improving living standards, which from 1961 the Soviet leadership declared as a crucial step in achieving the aims of communism. At the same time, since the 1950s and 1960s, the role of science and technology in making food products has significantly increased, promising improvements in both the quantity and quality of nutrition. Specialists played a key role in incorporating traditional foods into the complex nexus of modern science and technologies of production and they developed new qualities of food they called ‘modern’. Food modernity was based on the strong belief in the power of chemical elements, microbiology and modern technologies of production to make healthier, tastier and more sustainable food products. By the 1970s, hygiene also became a crucial element of production, incorporated into the system of labour incentives at Soviet enterprises. These attempts, however, co-existed with food shortages, infrastructural problems and a low production culture that became especially obvious by the 1980s. This paper demonstrates the controversy of Soviet industrial food-making: strong beliefs in food science as the trigger for increasing living standards co-existed with backward industrial infrastructures which left ‘modern food’ a matter of experiment rather than real production. This reveals a pivotal problem in the Soviet economy, where intensive research met insufficient infrastructures for implementation.

Population statistics reflect a nation's quality of life and accordingly have the potential to be highly politically charged, with implications for a government's legitimacy. In the Brezhnev era Soviet Union, emerging negative trends regarding life expectancy, fertility and mortality had the potential to de-legitimise the Soviet regime just at the moment when population issues were taking the spotlight through the United Nations. For this reason, population statistics were subject to significant censorship. The article examines how this censorship worked for domestic and international audiences. I show the main form of censorship was an editorial review by trusted experts in the Party and argue that the process was defined by uncertainty and negotiation, with personal networks mediating the result. In general, the period was characterised by tension between the need to expand demographic research and leaders' desire to suppress knowledge of unfortunate demographic truths.

This article focuses on the Francoist ‘New State's’ foreign policy as a means of explaining the failure in food supplies which led to ‘Franco's famine’ in the early 1940s. It contends that eschewing strict neutrality in favour of pro-Axis policies after the outbreak of the Second World War contributed to creating the famine. Faced with Spain's Germanophile stance, first Britain, and later the United States, took a series of measures aimed at preventing any form of Spanish participation in the war. Most significant among these was the strictly managed economic blockade of Spain, which exacerbated problems of basic supply that had already been created by the dictatorship's policy of autarky. The result was the aggravation of famine conditions. The article will further demonstrate that the dictatorship was perfectly aware of the blockade's effect on the population and the suffering it caused.