At the beginning of the twentieth century the growth of towns was accompanied by the birth of a European and international municipal movement. In 1913 the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA) was founded in Ghent. This combined two approaches, one political and utopian, the other technical and professional. The former focused on turning cities into promoters of a project for co-operation at European and worldwide level; the latter on solving the problems caused by urbanisation. They shared a determination to pursue their objectives regardless of the barriers of culture and national boundaries, and of the administrative hierarchy between local and national government. Between the two world wars the UIV/IULA gradually lost its original utopian inspiration, which was taken up by the Conseil des Communes d'Europe/Council of European Municipalities, founded in Geneva in 1951 with the aim of using the municipalities as a starting point to promote a federation of European states.

The article argues that the postwar years rather than the 1930s, as hitherto has been assumed, was the period when top administrators of the Soviet creative Unions acquired their super-elite status. It shows how in this period the Union leaders finalised their control over the production and distribution of, as well as the reward for, literary and artistic work. The article looks at the reasons behind the government's conscious decision to allow a small group from the intelligentsia to become part of the state elite. It also assesses the consequences of postwar government policies towards the intelligentsia for the long-term stability of the regime.

The article argues that many of the factors which eventually produced Italian fascism should be identified not in the divisions of the war years nor in the conflicts of the immediate postwar period but in the period 1900–15 and in the failure of Giovanni Giolitti's reformist strategy. The increasing popular disaffection with parliamentary politics before the war reflected the inability of Giolitti to widen the political base of liberalism through significant social reform. It was this failure which made the experience of the First World War especially disastrous in Italy. In particular, it is argued that liberal governments totally failed to understand the kind of social conflict which was developing in the large estates of the Po valley – the area which would provide the specific context for the explosion of Fascism in late 1920. The essay links Fascism, therefore, less to an often cited ‘working class revolutionary threat’ in 1919–20 than to unresolved long-term structural problems in certain areas of rural Italy. Alexander De Grand offers a critical commentary on Paul Corner's conclusions and the author gives his response.

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’.

Town twinning can be seen as the first activity to involve municipal institutions as such in wide-ranging and long-term international action. Twinning fits Eric Hobsbawm's definition of an ‘invented tradition’. The French federalists played a decisive part in this process of invention, bringing European municipalities together in order to ensure an eventual European political union. Before long, however, the so-called bilingualist movement also turned to twinning as a way to further a universal mutual understanding that transcended the East–West divide. This resulted in a big clash between the French twinning organisations. Thus, the invention of town twinning needs to be studied alongside the dynamic political tensions that emerged on the French political scene during the Cold War

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.

The idea of an Italian Sonderweg is interesting, but it is not exactly a new interpretation of the Giolittian era. Gaetano Salvemini was very clear in blaming Giolitti for distorting Italy's path to democracy. I agree with Paul Corner's cautionary remark that nothing before the First World War made fascism inevitable. Still, we should look closely at the fifteen years before the Great War, if for no other reason than the fact that the great hopes for reform that marked the period gave rise to little structural reform. Giolitti simply did not bring about the modernisation of the liberal parliamentary system. However, I have my doubts that this adds up to a Sonderweg. Nowhere on the Continent did a modern mass party of the bourgeoisie emerge before 1914. Moreover, in no country did the middle-class movement for reform develop solid links with the growing socialist movement. It is curious in this regard that Corner never mentions France. Certainly the Giolittian era resembles the post-Dreyfus period in French politics more than anything that happened in Germany. It would be interesting for Professor Corner to expand on the viability of the British Lib–Lab pact of 1906; it is implied that this was a model that worked elsewhere on the Continent (p. 286). I also find it surprising that he finds the roots of the Weimar coalition in prewar imperial Germany (p. 294).

The formation of a relationship between early Soviet writers and the young Soviet state was conditioned by a pre-Revolutionary culture of patronage and clientelism among Russian literati. This culture enabled them to exert considerable influence over the state as they pushed it, via numerous state-based literary patrons, to provide them with a growing system of welfare and privilege in return for political support. In the literary battles of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin took control over all patronage chains and established himself as the single de facto patron of the literary world. His personality cult emerged from this process.

The article attempts a detailed analysis of the post-1956 purges in the field of economic research. It tries to identify and assess the role of patronage in protecting the field from lasting damage. Such damage was threatening in the form of both losing several young talents from the field as well as weakening the position of the empiricist research programme successfully launched in the immediate post-Stalin years of 1954–6. The analysis devotes great attention to the dialectical relationship between purge and patronage, that is, to the inevitability of certain senior communist patrons administering purges in order to be able to act as patrons.

I am indebted to Alexander De Grand for taking the time and trouble to comment on my article, although I am sorry that he seems to have read it principally as an attack on Giolitti and Giolittian policies. While I can see that it is possible to read this into the paper, it was certainly not my intention to lay the responsibility for the development of Fascism at Giolitti's door. My concern was rather to seek to identify some of the reasons for the dramatic clash between left and right in 1920 and 1921 which led to the affirmation of Fascism; it was in this light that I attempted to assess the Giolittian period, which has always seemed to me the great moment of democratic possibilities between one form of repressive government and another. I agree, of course, that the great radicalising and polarising event in Italy was the First World War. My point – put very simply – was that the experience of the war might have been much less devastating for Italy if the political situation in 1914–15 had not already been characterised by profound lacerations within Italian society. To put it another way, I was interested in seeing why, as De Grand himself says, ‘the great hopes for reform that marked that [Giolittian] period gave rise to little structural reform’ and in assessing the consequences of that lack of reform for the subsequent period. The central question of the article, therefore, is that of Fascism as breach or continuity rather than the culpability of Giolitti.

Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 261 pp., ISBN 0-691-08667-2.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Żydzi i Polacy 1918–1955: Współistnienie – zagłada – komunizm (Warsaw: Biblioteka Frondy, 2000), 731 pp., ISBN 8-391-25418-6.

Leo Cooper, In the Shadow of the Polish Eagle: The Poles, the Holocaust, and Beyond (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2000), 255 pp., ISBN 0-333-75265-1.

Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), ISBN 0-312-22056-1.

Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, 8th edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 508 pp., ISBN 0-803-21050-7.

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.

Aniceto Afonso, História de uma conspiração: Sinel de Cordes e o 28 de Maio (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2000), 222 pp., [euro]12.97, ISBN 972-46-1175-2. Manuel Baiôa, Elites políticas em Évora: Da I República à ditadura militar (1925–1926) (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 2000), preface by António Costa Pinto, xvi +344 pp., [euro]21.45, ISBN 972-762-199-6. Telmo Faria, Debaixo de fogo! Salazar e as forças armadas (1935–41) (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos & Instituto de Defesa Nacional, 2000), 286 pp., [euro]26.44, ISBN 972-762-220-8. João Medina, Salazar, Hitler e Franco: Estudos sobre a ditadura (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2000), 308 pp., [euro]18.85, ISBN 972-24-1074-1. Fernando Rosas, Salazarismo e fomento económico: O primado do político na história económica do Estado Novo (Lisbon: Editorial Notícias, 2000), 259 pp., [euro]13.92, ISBN 972-46-1110-8. Pedro Aires Oliveira, Armindo Monteiro: Uma biografia política (Venda Nova: Bertrand Editora, 2000), 340 pp., [euro]17.96, ISBN 972-25-1122-X.

Studies regarding the origins and nature of António Oliveira Salazar's New State are being published in Portugal at an impressive rate. New sources and methods are being employed by Portuguese historians in an attempt to come to grips with a dictatorship which lasted forty-eight years and which, although able to change its guise, was always reluctant to do so, and was never as successful in transforming itself as Francoist Spain.

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.

Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L'UNESCO oubliée. La Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919–1946), foreword by René Girault (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 352 pp., FF180, ISBN 2-6384-7701-1.

Christel Taillibert, L'Institut international du cinématographe international éducatif. Regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999), 401 pp., FF180, ISBN 2-85944-384-3.

Marta Aleksandra Balińska, Une vie pour l'humanitaire. Ludwik Rajchmann, 1881–1965, foreword by Bronislaw Geremek, L'Espace de l'histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), 399 pp., FF165, ISBN 2-7071-2485-0.

Pierre-Jean Benghozi and Christian Delage, eds., Une histoire économique du cinéma français (1895–1995): Regards croisés franco-américains (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 364pp., €28.97, ISBN 2-7384-5852-1. Laurent Creton, Economie du cinéma: perspectives stratégiques (Paris: Nathan, collection ‘Nathan Université’, 1994), 288 pp., €21.19, ISBN 209-190-219-5. Laurent Creton, Cinéma et marché (Paris: Armand Colin, collection ‘U’, 1997), 254 pp., €20.58, ISBN 2-200-01769-3. Eric Dubet, Economie du cinéma européen: de l'interventionnisme à l'action entrepreneuriale Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), 286 pp., €22.87, ISBN 2-7384-9043-3. Martin Dale, The Movie Game: The Film Business in Britain, Europe and America (London: Cassell, 1997), 340 pp., $19.95 (pb), ISBN 0-304-33387-5. Jean-Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: cinéma et nation, collection ‘Le champ méthodologique’ (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 248 pp., €20.58, ISBN 2-7381-0586-6. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., Film Europe and Film America: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange (1920–1939) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 406 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-85989-546-7. Albert Moran, ed., Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996), 286 pp., $24.99, ISBN 0-415-09791-6. David Puttnam, The Undeclared War: The Struggle for Control of the World's Film Industry (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 414 pp., £7.99 (pb), ISBN 0-00-255675-8. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella, 2000), 228 pp., $24.00, ISBN 1-55652-406-4.

Richard Katz and Bernhard Wessels, eds., The European Parliament, the National Parliaments, and European Integration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 280pp., £35, h.b., ISBN 0-19-829660-6.

Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, eds., Parliamentary Representatives in Europe, 1848–2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2000), 530pp., £55, h.b., ISBN 0-19-829793-9.

Jean Blondel, Richard Sinnott and Palle Svensson, People and Parliament in the European Union. Participation, Democracy, and Legitimacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 287pp., £45, h.b., ISBN 0-19-829308-9.

Amie Kreppel, The European Parliament and Supranational Party System. A Study in Institutional Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 288pp., £40, h.b., ISBN 0-521-80625-9.

Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream. A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 377 pp., $17.95, ISBN 0-691-05827-X. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 377 pp., $29.95, ISBN 0-8476-8649-3. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 250 pp., $68.00, ISBN 1-85973-284-4. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 213 pp., $19.50, ISBN 1-85973-239-9. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Washington: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 477 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-521-62694-3.

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of studies tracing the development of the principal institutions of ‘mass consumption’ in Westernised societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of leading department stores and the marketing policies of major firms, publicity and sales methods, have sought to increase understanding of the actors or ‘professions’ instrumental in the transformation of such practices, their methods and scope, the reasons for their success and by extension the reasons for the failure of alternative practices, ‘small’ shopkeepers and ‘small’ industrialists who felt threatened by the wave of change.

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 Gossel, Briten, Deutsche und Europa. Die Deutsche Frage in der britischen Außenpolitik 1945–1962 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 259pp., DM 88.00, ISBN 3-515-07159-8. Klaus Larres, ed., Uneasy Allies: British-German Relations and European Integration Since 1945 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000) 344pp., $85.00, ISBN 0-19-829383-6. Werner Rouget, Schwierige Nachbarschaft am Rhein: Frankreich–Deutschland, ed. Ernst Weisenfeld and Joachim Bitterlich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1998), 160pp., DM 29.80 ISBN 3-416-02762-0. Friso Wielenga, Vom Feind zum Partner. Die Niederlande und Deutschland seit 1945. (Münster: Agenda Verlag, 2000), 522pp., DM 59.80, ISBN 3-896880721. Robert Bohn, Jürgen Elvert and Karl Christian Lammers, eds., Deutsch-skandinavische Beziehungen nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 280pp., DM 96.00, ISBN 3-515-07320-5. Birgit Aschmann, ‘Treue Freunde. . .’? Westdeutschland und Spanien 1945–1963 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 502pp., DM 188.00, ISBN 3-515-07579-8. Guido Müller, ed., Deutschland und der Westen: Internationale Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert, Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 381pp., DM 138.00, ISBN 3-515-07251-9. Gottfried Niedhart, Detlef Junker and Michael W. Richter, eds., Deutschland in Europa. Nationale Interessen und internationale Ordnung im 20.Jahrhundert. (Mannheim: Palatium, 1997), 397pp., DM 98.00, ISBN 3-920671-29-5.