This article explores communism – including its pre-history and aftermath – as a generational history. The structure is diachronic and largely biographical. Attention is paid to the roles of milieu, the Second World War, generational cleavages and a Hegelian sense of time. Nineteen sixty-eight is a turning point, the moment when Marxism as belief was decoupled from communism as practice. The arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague meant a certain kind of end of European Marxism. It also meant the coming of age of a new generation: those born in the post-war years who were to play a large role in the opposition. The anti-communist opposition was organically connected to Marxism itself: the generation(s) of dissidents active in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood as a further chapter in the generational history of communism. Nineteen eight-nine was another moment of sharp generational rupture. The new post-communist generation, Havel's great hope, possessed the virtue of openness. Openness, however, proved a double-edged sword: as eastern Europe opened to the West, it also opened a Pandora's box. Perhaps today the most poignant generational question brought about by 1989 is not who has the right to claim authorship of the revolution, but rather who was old enough to be held responsible for the choices they made under the communist regime. There remains a division between those who have to account for their actions, and those who do not, between those who proved themselves opportunists, or cowards or heroes – and those who have clean hands by virtue of not having been tested.

This article contributes to the recent transnational turn in labour history with a case study of West German and British trade union politics at Ford between 1967 and 1973. It demonstrates that international economic interdependence became a major concern for organised labour in both countries because of the emergence in 1967 of the Ford of Europe holding company. Paradoxically, however, this was accompanied by the accentuation of national allegiances and action frameworks, in particular with regard to the framing of labour market interests and industrial relations policies. These processes played out differently in the two countries, not only because national contexts were different but also because the new international challenges interacted with national contexts in specific ways.

This article examines the use of forced labour in Republican Spain during the civil war. Although much has recently been written on Francoist camps, very little research has been undertaken on their Republican counterparts. As a consequence the significance of Republican camps has not been recognised. Although some historians argue that the Republicans used forced labour only in a desperate attempt to avoid military defeat, this article demonstrates that labour camps were an integral aspect of Republican ‘popular justice’. Work, it was argued, would redeem ‘fascists’ by allowing them to contribute to the economic reconstruction and transformation of Spain.

This article examines the role of nationalism in the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that nationalism (both in its presence and its absence, and in the various conflicts and disorders that it unleashed) played an important role in structuring the way in which communism collapsed. Two institutions of international and cultural control in particular – the Warsaw Pact and ethnofederalism – played key roles in determining which communist regimes failed and which survived. The article argues that the collapse of communism was not a series of isolated, individual national stories of resistance but a set of interrelated streams of activity in which action in one context profoundly affected action in other contexts – part of a larger tide of assertions of national sovereignty that swept through the Soviet empire during this period.

This article evaluates the interplay between international sport and international politics during the cold war through an examination of the two Germanys and the Olympics from a British perspective. Germany was at the centre of Olympic and cold war politics between 1945 and the early 1970s, and the two German states competed fiercely over questions of national legitimacy. West Germany was initially successful in denying international recognition to the ‘other’ German state. East Germany countered this by developing a strategy that utilised international sport, particularly the Olympic Games, to further its claims for statehood. While recognising the flaws in the West German case against East Germany, British policy was constrained by the need to accommodate Bonn's sensibilities, given that the Federal Republic was a major ally. An examination of this ‘Olympian’ struggle from a British perspective tells us much about the West's cold war strategy and casts new light on this arena of East–West competition.

During the 1930s the Dutch social democratic party changed into a party which sought to reform rather than to abolish capitalism. This transformation was accompanied by a change in tactics and strategy intended to meet the challenges of economic and political crises. Henceforth, the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij tried to establish co-operation with social groupings well beyond its traditional rank and file of industrial labourers. A new generation of voluntarist politicians proposed to adopt the methods of propaganda, and turned for inspiration to activities undertaken by Belgian and German socialists, as well as the world of commercial advertising.

Western communists reflected two opposing responses to the final crisis of communism that had matured over time. The French communists represented a conservative response increasingly hostile to Gorbachev's perestroika, while the Italians were supporters of a reformist response in tune with his call for change. Thus Gorbachev was the chief reference, positive or negative, against which Western communists measured their own politics and identity. In 1989 the French aligned with the conservative communist leaderships of eastern Europe, and ended up opposing Gorbachev after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Accordingly, the PCF became a residual entity of traditional communism. On the other hand, the Italian communists agreed with all Gorbachev's choices, and to some extent they even inspired his radical evolution. But they also shared Gorbachev's illusions, including the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall would produce a renewal of socialism in Europe. Unlike the PCF, the PCI was able to undertake change in the aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, thus standing as a significant ‘post-communist’ force. However, if conservative communism was destined to become marginal, reform communism also failed in its objective of renewing the Soviet system and the communist political culture

NATO enlargement after the cold war contributed to the democratic transformation of post-communist states. It failed, however, to generate a larger consensus on the shared mission and to provide the requisite military capabilities. Today, notwithstanding the rhetoric of unity after the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO struggles to reconcile the out-of-area experience of the Balkan wars with its post-9/11 tasks and the renewed territorial defense concerns raised by the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. Paradoxically, the more NATO has expanded to foster the military–political security of the new democratic states of eastern and south-eastern Europe, the less it seems capable of dealing with real security threats such as Afghanistan. Facing the possible strategic failure of its ISAF mission, NATO needs to re-evaluate the policy track chosen post-1989.