Sinking Ships, the LostHeimatand Broken Taboos: Günter Grass and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany

Nazi Germany and the Luso-Hispanic World

From Monnet to Delors: Educational Co-operation in the European Union

The Limits of US power: Transatlantic Financial Diplomacy under the Johnson and Wilson Administrations, October 1964–November 1968

Edge of Darkness: British ‘Front-line’ Diplomacy in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1937

‘Living the Blackshirt Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940

Europe and its Historians

By challenging prevalent ‘realist’ interpretations, this article seeks to open up a new perspective on Anglo-US efforts to create a viable Euro-Atlantic peace system after 1918. Its main thesis is that significant advances to this end did not result from enforcing the Versailles system but rather from a qualitatively new process of peaceful change: the making of the ‘unfinished transatlantic peace order’ of the 1920s. Initiated by Anglo-US policy makers, this process led to the first ‘real’ peace settlements after 1918, the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno pact of 1925. Crucially, these settlements fostered Germany's international reintegration on terms acceptable for France. They thus prefigured the terms on which more permanent stability was achieved after 1945.

The history of the foreign assistance policy of European countries has received comparatively little attention from economic, political or diplomatic historians. There is a remarkable lack of archive-based historical studies of intergovernmental and intra-governmental discussions about the aims, methods and priorities of foreign aid and its compatibility with national interests and capabilities. This is the more surprising since the ‘aid question’ constituted the third major field of international relations during the Cold War, and was tightly interlinked with the fields of security, finance and economics. In short, the Europeans' positions on development policy in relation to themselves, the United States and the Third World and between themselves have yet to be analysed. The only significant analysis so far of the inducements offered by the West to the Third World is the book by David K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World.

Historians' views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, which traded US financial help for a continuation of the United Kingdom's world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, and is often taken for granted in historical writing. There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact. However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which Britain was able to manipulate the relationship to its own ends. The United States still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain in a number of fields – diplomatic, economic and military.

‘History, more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a stopped up toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.’Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002), 116. All translations from the German are my own. Since February 2002 Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Günter Grass's latest book, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Walking like a crab: a novella), has offered these words of wisdom to several hundred thousand readers who have made Grass's book an immediate bestseller in Germany. With plans for the book to be translated into no fewer than thirty-one languages, Pokriefke's insights will soon be available to an international audience.Eva-Maria Mester, ‘Deutschstunde in Lübeck: Übersetzer trafen sich mit Günter Grass’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)-Europadienst, 2 April 2002.

This article argues that foreign-exchange transactions were one of the most effective forms of leverage that the Nazi regime had for controlling German business. Using the example of Schering AG, the article traces some of the mechanisms of control and shows how important these transactions were to international firms such as Schering. It further argues that corporate resistance to Nazi efforts to control international German firms was hardly an option because of the vulnerability of those firms to the foreign-exchange decisions of the state. Many of the financial decisions taken by businesses in the 1920s and 30s – coupled with businessmen's own predilection to mix national with private interests – left them highly dependent on the state and quasi-governmental solutions to private commercial problems even before the Machtergreifung.

In a recent collection of essays on Germany's relations with Latin America Natalja Karthaus argued that ‘Latin America was never a priority area for German foreign policy’.Natalja Karthaus, ‘Lateinamerika als Bezugsfeld der (bundes-) deutschen Außenpolitik’, in Manfred Mols and Christoph Wagner, eds., Deutschland-Lateinamerika: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven (Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 1994), 53. Karthaus's verdict can, in fact, be extended to the Luso-Hispanic world as a whole, thus including Portugal and also, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain.On aspects of the history of German – Spanish relations see now Conrad Kent, Thomas K. Wolber and Cameron M. K. Hewitt, eds., The Lion and the Eagle; Interdisciplinary Essays on German – Spanish Relations over the Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000). Even Hitler's foreign policy, despite its global aspirations, is included in Karthaus's assessment.The focus of this article is largely on Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Portugal. These four countries were of comparatively greater importance to the Nazi regime than the other Latin American countries. On the latter see, inter alia, Jobst-H. Floto, Die Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Venezuela 1933 bis 1958 (Frankfurt/Main, Vervuert, 1991); María M. Camou, Los vaivenes de la politica exterior uruguaya ante la pugna de las potencias; las relaciones con el Tercer Reich (1933–1942) (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1990); Klaus Volland, Das Dritte Reich und Mexiko. Studien zur Entwicklung des deutsch-mexikanischen Verhältnisses 1933–1942 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Ölpolitik (Frankfurt/Main, Berr: Peter Lang, 1976). To Hitler, both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (with the exception of Spain during the first year of that country's civil war and again in 1940/41) were of marginal relevance to his foreign policy objectives. This verdict notwithstanding Nazi Germany maintained regular, indeed in some areas close, relations to the countries of Latin America and the Iberian peninsula which warrant closer examination.

British policy during the Spanish Civil War was seen by many at the time as dishonest and dishonourable, and this is a criticism that has survived the opening of the official records to historical scrutiny. Research by Jill Edwards, Douglas Little and, most recently, by Enrique Moradiellos has presented the policy pursued by the British government as cynical, callous and objectively pro-Franco. Understandably, however, the literature on this subject, exemplified in the work of these scholars, has focused primarily on establishing how policy decisions were reached within the Foreign Office and other interested branches of government. What has tended to be neglected by historians (with some notable exceptions) has been the experience of British diplomatic and consular officials in the field. These were the men who carried the triple burden not only of being the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office in Spain, but also of negotiating with government and local authorities and of protecting British lives and interests amidst the chaos of civil war. This article seeks to redress the balance by placing the focus on these ‘front-line diplomats’. It concentrates on the experiences of those British diplomatic and consular staff in the main Republican zone who were most directly exposed to the war, although reference will also be made to officials in the Nationalist zone and in the relative tranquillity of the British embassy in exile at Hendaye. The article is concerned more specifically, although not exclusively, with George Ogilvie-Forbes's tenure as chargé d'affaires in Madrid and Valencia (August 1936–March 1937). For this period Ogilvie-Forbes's own papers offer an unparalleled insight into the private opinions of British diplomats in the front line of civil war, and provide a new perspective on their relationships both with each other and with the Foreign Office. The article concludes with the recasting of the British diplomatic presence in Spain in autumn 1937, with the relocation of the British embassy from Valencia to Caldetas, outside Barcelona, and the appointment of an agent to represent British interests in Nationalist territory. The first part of the article describes the development of the British diplomatic presence in Spain during this period, while the second examines the civil war's impact on individual British diplomats, and how their experiences affected their relationship with their superiors in London.

Development policies are commonly regarded as a phenomenon of the post-Second World War era. This essay looks at the historical antecedents of European development efforts and analyses the determining interests that motivated development policy in the twentieth century. The regional focus on south-east Asia allows for a differentiated appreciation of national approaches to European development policies. It shows that the legitimation of control and the securing of interests–security and economic interests, as well as notions of national prestige–are among the driving forces behind development policies. It also suggests that development policies were multifunctional from their inception.The author wishes to thank Heide-Irene Schmidt and Helge Pharo, the contributors to a workshop on early European development aid (held in Bochum, March 2003), as well as Jost Dülffer, Ruth Jachertz and Philipp Janssen for invaluable comments.

The institutional and intellectual transition of German academe from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic required a measure of self-denazification and intellectual realignment which combined a deliberate ‘politics of the past’ with the safeguards of professorial status. Against the background of the re-established civil service culture in postwar Germany this ‘moratorium of the mandarins’ can be seen as a social and intellectual process which required a re-evaluation of academic style and substance within the bounds of professorial collegiality. This process was exemplified in cases from history, theology and physics at the University of Göttingen.

The perennial struggle to fix the meaning of fascism has recently entered a phase which might best be described as, if I dare, palingenetic, one of rebirth after a period of crisis or decline. If there is any consensus to be reached from this debate, recently relaunched by Roger Griffin, it might be that fascism is more than simply a variety of political ideology or a category of state system. As recent scholarship has increasingly emphasised, not least Griffin himself, the cultural dimensions of fascist movements, in their many European manifestations, are as significant as their organizational development, their electoral successes and failures or their political programmes. Some have attributed this shift towards considering fascism as a cultural system to George Mosse's anthropologically informed interpretation of fascism. A closer reading of these ‘culturalist’ studies reveals that the euphemistically described ‘linguistic turn’ and social anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, have played a far more significant role in reconceptualising the problem of fascism than has Mosse's work.

Development aid became a significant feature of British foreign and economic policy from the late 1950s. While giving a chronological account of policy developments in this field down to the publication of the Pearson report of 1971, this article is organised around three predominant themes. First, aid has to be seen in the context of Commonwealth relations, with the Commonwealth as both the major recipient of British aid and the main context in which it was organised and discussed. Second, policies on aid were closely tied to developments in policy on the balance of payments, the perceived state of which consistently influenced the volume of aid-giving. Finally, aid policy was part of a complex international debate about the concept of ‘need’, which at least in part shaped who were to be the recipients of aid, and at the same time about the proper measure of the ‘burden’ of aid which helped to shape the policy of the main givers.I am grateful to Astrid Ringe, Roger Middleton and Neil Rollings for allowing me pre-publication sight of their forthcoming handbook on Public Record Office documents on economic policy in the 1951–64 period. This article has benefited from the comments of Catherine Schenk and participants in the international symposium on aid at the University of Bochum, March 2003.

This article presents an historical analysis of the European Union's educational policy from the inception of the European Community to the establishment of a directorate for education in the European Commission in 1993. It tells the story of a policy that was not anticipated in the original EEC programme but which developed as a result of the Single Market plan and the gradual acknowledgement that educational issues were related to common economic concerns.For a recent discussion of education, economic integration and the Single Market plan see Brad K. Blitz, ‘Professional Mobility and the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications in the European Union: Two Institutional Approaches’, Comparative Education Review, 43, 3 (August 1999), 311–31. The story turns on the ideas and efforts of key individuals working within the Commission and in national ministries. These functionaries took the lead in formulating a limited European educational policy based on co-operation, the sharing of information and, much later, the creation of specific action programmes that sought to increase the mobility of students, teachers and skilled professionals across the Community. During the political uncertainty that characterised the Community in the early 1970s, the functionaries identified education – which was understood to include any formal instruction that prepared the student for a qualification in a particular profession, skill or trade – as a potential policy area that could provide the floundering Community with direction at supposedly low cost to member states. From vague discussions about the value of a skilled and mobile workforce that were enshrined in intergovernmental resolutions, the idea of a European educational policy was eventually seized upon by officials within the Commission and institutionalised in trans-European programmes and Commission-sponsored organisations. Assisted by the European Court of Justice, the Commission was able to initiate educational programmes that received the blessing of the member states and later secured a place for education in a new directorate. Although education never because a supranational policy, it raised the Commission's standing and supported claims that the Community was actively creating a ‘people's Europe’.

This article examines in a comparative perspective the regulations to contain the process of family reunification implemented by the French and British governments in the early 1970s. The comparative analysis highlights how, despite their stemming from different legal systems, these rules repeatedly attempted to deny any right to family reunification, and shows that social and legal definitions aimed at measuring the extent of the family became more than once a source of many difficulties in the admission process. The comparison also allows for an evaluation of the way these controls were administered at points of departure and ports of entry and, more significantly, examines the predominance of governmental and administrative structures to demonstrate how in both cases these rules led to numerous infringements of immigrants' fundamental rights.

In the 1960s France's policy on development aid and co-operation had developed to a point where over 1.5 per cent of French gross national product was devoted to supporting growth and stability in African countries. Aid then became ‘global’ and encompassed private ‘aid’ from commercial sources; as such it helped France in its ambition to wield influence in international affairs. Its noblest aim was to create an area in which French culture, borne by thousands of volunteers and experts, would be mixed with the values of the host countries, but its impact was not great enough to prevent corruption or to save development from taking the wrong course.

‘The subject of identity, both personal and collective, is on the agenda in the West, as well as in post-Soviet Russia… The current intellectual climate encourages us to regard every expression of meaning and every assertion of identity as susceptible to reinterpretation’ (Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History, p. 4). And indeed, identity has become the focus of a great deal of theorising in contemporary social science. Whereas formerly the individual was characterised chiefly by his membership of a social class or group whose history could be reconstructed by a social historian, nowadays we prefer to stress the multiplicity, and especially the fluidity, of such groupings. A recent article by Rogers Brubaker acknowledges the importance of this concept of identity, while trying to show that it covers a multiplicity of uses and tends to blur the boundaries between a number of different notions.Rogers Brubaker, ‘Au delà de l'“identité”’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 139 (September 2001), 66–85. See also Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 1–47. Brubaker criticises this over-use and proposes its replacement by multiple concepts. It is true enough that social scientists have used the term somewhat indiscriminately: ‘attributed identity’, ‘acknowledged identity’, ‘group identity’, ‘individual identity’, and so on. On the other hand, David Kertzer and Dominique Arel are more positive: ‘The past decade has seen a great outpouring of interest in the nature of collective identities of various kinds.’ They see a close relationship between ‘state modernity and the impetus to categorize’, and hence stress the importance of ‘the official state certification of collective identities’.David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity. The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). They argue for the usefulness of a concept which may be broad, but does make it possible to group together various ways in which individuals and community relate to each other, or individuals to communities and states, or individuals to their own history. And indeed, this constant interaction between self and state, a relationship created through a multiplicity of categories constructed by administrators, individual perceptions and political authorities, builds up a multiplicity of collective and individual identities.

Histories of Europe have a long genealogy, whose origins can probably be found in the defence of Christian Europe, above all in humanist circles, against the threat of Muslim Ottoman expansion. In the course of the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic years, earlier elements that were regarded as characterising all Europe crystallised into a sense common to European elites – described as ‘civilisation’ – of the distinctiveness and superiority of Europeans and Europe from all other regions of the world. If we analyse what was understood by this ‘idea of Europe’, as I have argued elsewhere, we can identify a number of constituent elements of Europe's progress that, for their authors, explain its distinctiveness, particularly when compared with the historical experiences or contemporary condition of states and societies elsewhere in the world. These elements can be summarised as: (i) a secular cultural tradition, originating in classical antiquity, that revived (after the ‘barbarian’ interlude) with the Renaissance and culminated in contemporary France; (ii) individual entrepreneurship as the motor of European economic dynamism and strength; (iii) liberty as the defining quality of governance; (iv) the balance of power between a limited number of leading states; and (v) civilised manners, or civilités, understood (in Norbert Elias's sense) as publicly accepted regulatory mechanisms of the forms of social relationships. The Restoration, as Federico Chabod has clarified, extended this corpus of values attributed to Europe through a recovery of the Middle Ages and Christianity.

Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleştirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000), 244 pp., TL 7,900,000 (approx. €6.76), ISBN 975-470-779-0.

Étienne Copeaux, Espace et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d'une historiographie nationaliste, 1934–1993 (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 1997), 369 pp., €28.97, ISBN 2-271-05465-6.

Metin Heper, İsmet İnönü: The Making of a Turkish Statesman (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 270 pp., €80.00, ISBN 90-04-09919-0.

Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2000), 666 pp., €39.95, ISBN 0-58567-011-1.

Esra Özyürek, ed., Hatırladıklarıyla ve Unuttuklarıyla Türkiye'nin Toplumsal Hafizası (Istanbul: İletişim, 2001), 349 pp., TL 7,200,000 (approx. €6.16), ISBN 975-470-919-X.

Ahmet Yıldız, ‘Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene’: Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları (1919–1938) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), 351 pp., TL 9,400,000 (approx. €6.88), ISBN 975-470-866-5.