The volunteers of the International Brigades are well known for their participation in the battles of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), yet their encounters with the people, places and politics of Spain are yet to receive substantial attention from historians. This is the first interpretive analysis of their wide-reaching work with children, which spanned from the holding of fiestas to the establishment of costly homes. By considering these cross-cultural encounters, it highlights how they understood themselves to be members of a unified anti-fascist community in which Spanish children themselves had a key role to play. While these children were invariably regarded as the principal victims of ‘fascism’, they were also encouraged to take an active interest in the violent struggle of the Brigades as well as the building of an anti-fascist ‘New Spain’. Their own letters and drawings show the surprising extent to which the volunteers succeeded in their efforts.

When Nazi officials surrendered to the Allied powers on 8 May 1945, gay German men hoped fervently that their suffering had come to an end. Ten years earlier, the fascist government had promulgated draconian new laws criminalising all forms of male same-sex behaviour. After the war, as Allied officials embarked on an extensive programme of democratic renewal in the occupied lands, gay men hoped that democratisation would mean the repeal of these laws. Yet, the new West Germany retained the Nazi-era laws until 1969, convicting over 50,000 men in those twenty years. Using petitions to government officials as well as essays in and letters to the editors of homophile magazines, this article examines how gay men in West Germany conceived of democratisation, asking what expectations they held for the new republic, how their views shifted as it proved hostile to queer citizens, and what this history means for the broader understanding of democratisation in the postwar world.

The tripartite pact, concluded by Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1940, sought to create a new global order. This article is part of a broader shift in scholarship, inspired by global and cultural history. Instead of revisiting the decision-making that led to the pact's conclusion, this article explores the pact through the dialectics of culture and power. Through an archive-based interpretation of the pact's signing and the celebrations of its anniversaries from 1941 until 1945 that involved ordinary people in Axis-dominated territories around the world, the central mechanisms of this global fascist alliance become clear. A performative diplomacy of power and unity held the alliance together. Style and substance were not mutually exclusive categories of tripartite politics; instead, ‘real’ and representational politics shaped each other. The pact was a concerted attempt by the three signatories to transform global political structures and supersede the purported global hegemony of the liberal democracies.

This article investigates how, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), left-wing British, Dutch and German-language newspapers ‘recruited’ their readers to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Recruitment could consist of donating time, money, social and political capital, or, in extreme cases, actually joining the fighting in Spain. It employs a double comparative approach, analysing recruitment messages attuned to readers in three different national political contexts and cultures produced on behalf of socialist and communist organisations. It argues that different ‘sketches of Spain’ co-existed, aligned to different domestic political and popular cultures and through different ideological lenses. These different sketches, in turn, were vital in shaping people's expectations of the Civil War, circumscribed the scope for and content of anti-fascist transnational connections made in Spain, and helped foster new understandings of social and political circumstances at home.

French price controls and rationing after the Second World War sparked opposition from a broad range of economic actors – farmers, shopkeepers, manufacturers and consumers. Towns rang their church bells to mobilise residents against controllers, whom they attacked with verbal abuse and physical violence. They associated the controllers with Vichy and collaboration with the Nazis, and rejected controls as ‘economic tyranny’. Implicitly, they accepted moderate inflation as the path to economic recovery. This article explains the development of hostility, from wartime frustrations to the violent conflicts that forced the state to retreat and relax controls in 1947.

This article narrates the history of two high-profile West German-Turkish toxic waste scandals in 1988. It argues that they marked a watershed moment between two ‘waste regimes’. The first scandal showcased to the Turkish and West German publics how waste dealers and policy makers misleadingly packaged hazardous waste exports as a substitute for traditional forms of debt and as a vehicle for economic development. The opposition it fuelled hastened the demise of this waste regime by prompting the Turkish government to enact a ban on toxic waste imports. The second scandal revealed the new regime that emerged in its aftermath – one in which waste dealers and policy makers sought to evade new restrictions in the less visible margins of a changing regulatory and legal space.

This paper presents a case study of German ‘Nazi internationalism’ as part of a broader, transnational counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism in the 1930s. It offers an analysis of the activities and main ideas of the Nationalist International (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten; IAdN), headed by the German jurist Hans Keller and active from 1934 to 1941. The IAdN promoted concepts such as Volk nationalism and a Third Europe as a solution to the European crisis, and attempted to establish an alternative law of nations to replace the post-1919 liberal order. The IAdN illustrates an early attempt to reconcile völkisch ideas with international cooperation, thus foreshadowing ‘ethno-pluralist’ concepts of the New Right in the post-war period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper reconstructs and compares four squatter conflicts in Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Copenhagen and Hamburg during the 1980s in which squatters defended themselves from eviction from occupied houses by barricading entire streets. Remarkable similarities can be observed in how these conflicts developed. Was this the result of international contacts between the squatters, of similarities between the cities, or did the construction of barricades set in motion more general dynamics that influenced protest dynamics? This paper warns against overestimating the influence of transnational activist networks. Although the conflicts unfolded in similar ways while squatters fostered international contacts, the latter alone do not suffice to explain the former. Instead, this paper highlights the ‘social function’ of the barricade and the inherent conflict dynamics that barricade building set in motion.

The Locarno Film Festival (LFF), founded in 1946 by film industry professionals and local tourism promoters, is reputed as an international hub for emerging cinema. Built apart from, or in opposition to, traditional commercial cinema, the Swiss event gave particular attention to Eastern European movies, to the point that the LFF has frequently been presented as the place where ‘Westerners discovered the talents of Eastern Europe’. However, the presence of these films in Locarno, whose characteristic was the absence of official support from the state, exacerbated Switzerland's anti-communism and led to the creation of a ‘national’ selection committee in 1962 to limit the programming of movies coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This article analyses how Swiss politics and ideological tensions conditioned the construction of the Locarno Festival's identity through the prism of the (non-)interventions of the federal state.

This article examines an overlooked group of participants within 1970s housing occupation movements in Western Europe – migrants. More specifically, I analyse Italian migrants’ participation in housing occupations in the city of Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, from 1970–3. By engaging in visible protest, Italian migrant occupiers performed ‘acts of urban citizenship’ that ruptured understandings of localised citizenship and belonging. This case study thus illuminates two interrelated historic phenomena: (1) how social rights became de-territorialised and attached to the individual rather than the nation-state; and (2) how the city became a crucial site of citizenship formation, even across national borders.

This article reveals how, in the interwar period, British colonial authorities in Cyprus borrowed from the combination of political authoritarianism and economic development characterising Italian rule in the neighbouring Dodecanese, as both a solution to Greek irredentism and an administration suitable to ‘Mediterranean populations’. British authorities shunned, nonetheless, the chronopolitics and biopolitics buttressing fascist governance, which aimed at the political and cultural assimilation of Dodecanesians into the Italian national community. In conversation with the literature on imperial formations, the article therefore highlights the forms and limitations of the circulation of administrative practices and ideas across European colonial boundaries.

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

In the late Habsburg period, Fiume's municipal flag became the representative symbol of local patriotism. This article argues that local patriotism in Fiume was a form of identification that combined features of modern nationalism with loyalties to the Habsburg Empire. With the disappearance of the dual monarchy and the subsequent transition period (1918–24), the Fiumian flag was redefined and contested both as a symbol of Italian irredentism realised through annexation and of Fiume's independence by local autonomists. Thus, the article demonstrates how local patriotism survived the empire's dissolution and how attachment to a locality was a significant feature of European political life in general during that period.

Taking as a case study the commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony of Cabo Verde to memorialise the Portuguese ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century, this article scrutinises how those mnemonic schemes acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. It analyses the management of those schemes in the fixation of the narrative established as official history of ‘discovery’, in a context featured by controversies, uncertainties, omissions and historical lack about that very ‘discovery’. It also critically examines the contradictions, the concoction of facts and the distortions created by the promoters of the commemorations and monuments, as well as the role they played in that process. This article proves how, through the commemorations held and the monuments erected, the promoters of colonial memory distorted the protocols of interpretation of the information on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde present in the Portuguese official documents and how they shaped the global understanding of that fact.