In Chapter 13, we provide a preliminary analysis of the policy orientation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 new economic governance (NEG) regime to give policymakers, unionists, and social-movement activists an idea about possible future trajectories of EU governance of employment relations and public services. We do that on the basis of not only the recently adopted EU laws in these two policy areas, such as the decommodifying Minimum Wage Directive, but also EU executives’ post-Covid-19 NEG prescriptions in two areas (employment relations, public services), three public sectors (transport services, water services, healthcare services), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania). Vertical NEG interventions in national wage policies paradoxically cleared the way for the decommodifying EU Minimum Wage Directive by effectively making wage policy an EU policymaking issue, but, in the area of public services, we see an accentuation of the trend of NEG prescriptions in recent years: more public investments but also much more private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.

Chapter 9 analyses the EU governance of water and the countervailing mobilisations against its commodification. Initially, European law decommodified water services through the harmonisation of quality standards that took them out of regulatory competition between member states. However, from the 1990s onwards, the Commission repeatedly attempted to commodify water through liberalising EU laws. When these attempts failed, EU executives tried to advance commodification by new means, namely, through the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions. Our analysis revealed that all qualitative prescriptions on water services issued from 2009 to 2019 to Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Romania called for their marketisation, despite recent calls to increase public investment. Like preceding attempts by draft EU directives, the NEG’s consistent commodification script triggered transnational protests by unions and social movements that defended water as a human right and as a public service, namely, under the banner of the successful Right2Water European Citizens’ Initiative.

Chapter 10 traces the EU governance of health services and its discontents. The first European interventions in the health sector facilitated mobile workers’ access to health services in their host countries, thereby decommodifying cross-border care, albeit by recourse to solidaristic mechanisms situated at national rather than EU level. Since the 1990s however, European horizontal market pressures and EU public deficit criteria have led governments to curtail healthcare spending and to introduce marketising reforms. Thereafter, healthcare became a target of EU competition and free movement of services law. In 2006, transnational collective action of trade unions and social movements moved EU legislators to drop healthcare from the scope of the draft EU Services Directive. After the financial crisis of 2008 however, EU executives pursued commodification of healthcare through new means, as shown by our analysis of their new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania. Even when commodifying prescriptions were on occasion accompanied by decommodifying ones, the latter remained subordinated to the former. Although NEG’s country-specific methodology hampered transnational protests, the overarching commodification script of NEG prescriptions led not only to transnational protests by the European Federation of Public Service Unions, but also to the formation of the European Network against the Privatisation and Commercialisation of Health and Social Protection, which unites unionists and social-movement activists.

Eugenics suffused the medical field through its convergence with hygiene and ideologically underpinned governmental policies of national health, maternal health, and venereal disease control in many countries globally, including in Romania and China. This resulted in the creation of Institutes of Social Hygiene in different countries, including in Romania. The writings of Dr Iuliu Moldovan, founder of The Institute of Hygiene and Social Hygiene in Cluj, Romania, offer insights into eugenics and its connection to veneral disease control in Romania. One case study of applying eugenics to public health is the work against venereal disease at the Model Sanitary Station in Gilau between 1924-33 in Transylvania, Romania. This chapter also uncovers transnational medical cooperation to create public health in China by following the international training of Dr Yang Chongrui, a renowned specialist in maternal health. The details of Yang”s Euro-American study tour attest to how she encountered important elements for eugenic public health: hygiene, venereal disease control, lectures on “the mentally defective”, puericulture, facilities for syphilitic children, prisons, and hospitals for indigent women. Yang”s interaction with Andrija Štampar, who arranged her global tours sponsored by League of Nations Health Organization, was also formative in shaping her eugenic beliefs.

The chapter describes the main nature conservation challenges in Romania, its main policy responses and actions, and their achievements and lessons, primarily over the last 40 years. This covers the country’s natural characteristics, habitats and species of particular importance; the status of nature and main pressures affecting it; nature conservation policies (including biodiversity strategies), legislation, governance and key actors; species measures (e.g. concerning hunting, and large carnivores); protected areas and networks; general conservation measures (e.g. for coastal habitats and the Danube Delta, High Nature Value farmland and forests); nature conservation costs and funding sources; and biodiversity monitoring. Likely future developments are also identified. Conclusions are drawn on what measures have been most effective and why, and what is needed to improve the implementation of existing measures and achieve future nature conservation goals.

Economic nationalism became a dominant, and often destructive, discourse in the interwar period. This manifested itself in the rise of economic antisemitism in Nazi Germany, as well as in the corporatist dictatorships ruling Italy, Romania and Brazil. These autocracies were promoted in the writings of Mihail Manoilescu, who believed that dictatorship could spur growth even in autarky. In other ways, however, the interwar period saw a sharpening of existing nineteenth-century trends. Anti-imperialist movements remained powerful, especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen conceived of a powerful protector state that would manage foreign investment. Multi-ethnic contexts, as in Mandatory Palestine, encouraged isolationist approaches, this time from Zionist nation-builders. These efforts at nation-building encouraged economic segregation and ultimately inter-communal conflict. Even Britain, the erstwhile beacon of free trade, attempted to transform its Empire into a self-sufficient trading block during the Great Depression.

Historical geography is one of the disciplines associated with toponymy and historical toponomastics. It aims to investigate the settlements and land uses of a place with evidence from archival sources and can help to analyse the remote origins of place names. This is evident in the example of Bistagno, a village located in Piedmont, northwest Italy. A number of scholars have used historical-geographic methods and sources to account for its name, with varying degrees of success. Methods and sources from historical geography can also be used in more contemporary contexts. For example, another case study shows how written records and newspapers were utilised to study the many toponyms renamed after Romania turned Communist – with the aim of celebrating the Communist ideology, figures, and worldview. This was followed by an extensive renaming in Romania’s post-Communist/post-Socialist era, when the new leaders removed links to Communism. In the case study of Singapore, the authors trace the names and naming processes connected with three toponyms in the relatively young nation, by using maps, archival documents, and books. The new field of study, historical geographic information systems, brings a new tool to the historical analysis of environments and geographic areas.