In contrast to previous state-centric accounts, this article sheds new transnational light on the 1919 Paris peace settlement through its investigation of proposals for transnational associations’ roles in the envisaged new world order. The popularity of some of these proposals, and their perceived potential to contribute towards a more democratic, legitimate and peaceful international order, stimulated their consideration during official negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, and subsequent League of Nations practice was also perceived to have reflected some of the ideas put forward in the proposals. This article provides a typology of these proposals, and it critically evaluates the claims made with respect to their repercussions for democracy, legitimacy and peace. The article further elucidates how, despite their limitations, these proposals helped open up diplomacy to transnational associations both at the Paris Peace Conference and in the League of Nations era.

The role of market-oriented tourist policies in the planned economies of socialist Eastern Europe has been long overlooked. This article examines how the socialist regime in Romania moved from sheer ideological rhetoric to commercialism and market-driven strategies when promoting Romania as a tourist destination in the ‘West’ between the 1960s and the 1980s. It argues that there was a continual shifting between using tourism as an ideological tool and a certain pragmatism that was needed to turn socialist Romania into a desirable tourist destination.

Morocco and Catalonia are often mentioned as key elements in the crisis of Spanish liberalism, but little attention has been paid to the relation of these conflicts with the global developments of the 1920s. In their effort to break from Spain, Rifi rebels and Catalan separatists resorted to the League of Nations and were supported by sympathisers in British India, the United States, Latin America and Europe. Both separatist attempts utterly failed, but their campaigns provide new insights into the global connections (and dis-connections) of anti-imperialist and sub-national movements during the ‘Wilsonian moment’, and the strategies they developed to project their domestic agendas to the international sphere.

This article analyses the distinctive characteristics of how the League of Nations sought to publicly legitimise itself from 1919 to 1939. Discussing the work of the Information Section of the League Secretariat, it traces the organisational development of this section throughout the interwar years and argues that a preference of ‘collaboration’ through liaison with influential members of the public in the League's member states permeated this section's work, and that this strategy was, in the eyes of League officials, necessitated by the tight political constraints the Secretariat was subjected to rather than the result of an inherent ‘elitism’ of the officials.

This article explores the representation of alcohol on East German television, radio and film in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the state media's attempts to strike a balance between preaching moderation in the name of public health and co-opting the cultural legacy of beer, particularly for working-class men. The attempt to accomplish both goals simultaneously resulted in a seemingly contradictory programme of public messaging that reveals efforts by the socialist leadership to calibrate their vision of a modern socialist future to accommodate the persistent power of a cultural commodity in Germany.

During the First World War, hundreds of exiles and refugees from across Europe arrived in neutral Spain. This article investigates the colony of Russian exiles that settled in the country and their interactions with the Spanish labour movement. It contends that the exiles played a prominent role as conveyors of information on the Russian Revolution, which served as an important source of inspiration during the social upheavals that rocked Spain in 1917–20. The authorities tried to sever the connection between local activists and the Russian exiles through persecution. The article concludes with reflections on the significance of neutral countries as safe havens for internationalists during the war, comparing the Spanish and the Mexican case studies. It contends that neutrality helped preserve transnational radical networks, while contact with exiles rendered the labour movement in these countries more cosmopolitan and knowledgeable of world events and ideological trends.

This article investigates the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State (Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa dello Stato; TSDS) in the colonial territories that constitute present-day Libya at the time of fascist rule. This court acted as the judicial arm of the fascist regime in the so-called Italian ‘fourth shore’. As a tool of the repressive apparatus of the regime, it persecuted the ‘anti-national enemies’ outside the metropolitan area, striking against those who opposed the fascist dictatorship and the fascist occupation in the colony by de-legitimising the defendants on juridical, political and moral grounds. The TSDS in Libya shows that the fight against the ‘anti-nationals’ was a primary concern of Mussolini's ultranationalist regime not only in the peninsular territory but also within the colonial administration.

There were major guidelines in the application of Greek transitional justice in 1974–5. Trials connected with politics had often taken place in Greece: in 1922, 1935 and during the civil war in the 1940s. Justice had often been instrumentalised during previous internal conflicts, mortgaging both the interwar republic and the post-war democracy. The 1974–5 transition followed a different path. According to the internal documents of the Greek government, there was constant care to uphold the rule of law and conform to the emerging international standards concerning human rights. This was seen as a necessary precondition for the establishment of a modern European democracy.

Initially admitted to the United Kingdom on a short-term visa, the disabled German student activist Rudi Dutschke applied for a student visa in the United Kingdom in 1970. His application was rejected on grounds of national security. Dutschke was one of the first aliens who made use of his right to appeal, but the closed material procedure applied in his case meant that critical evidence remained undisclosed. Far from being ‘simply a historical curiosity’, the Dutschke case powerfully illustrates how two social dynamics at the centre of the moral panic in the late 1960s – immigration and student protest – were linked and framed as a threat to the nation.

This article focuses on the most renowned smuggling case concerning Polish athletes during the Polish People's Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL). In the early 1970s, several Polish football and basketball players were caught smuggling dollars out of Poland and importing gold into the country for profit. The article discusses the roles states devised for athletes in the countries of real socialism and how athletes attempted to assert agency within these confines. It draws on work by Robert Edelman and Sylvain Dufraisse to show how athletes often did not behave in the way Eastern bloc states wished them to.

Though not the forefathers of the Green party family, the Finnish Greens are an avantgarde when it comes to adapting to existing political culture and making their way from political margins to mainstream. The examination of the intra-party reasons and reasonings regarding adaptation and conformation reveals that it is never a question of either/or but a testament of conflicting interests. Although the compromise and consensus-seeking Finnish political culture and party system created external pressures on the Green League, forcing the party to conform with the existing procedures and traditions, the growing intra-party willingness to adapt was expressed in streamlining of the organisation and ideology as well as in the increasing office-seeking tendencies and accentuation of stability and credibility as preconditions of incumbency. Instead of pursuing radical changes to the existing political system, transforming growing adherence into incumbency required adaptation and conformation

This article provides a perspective on the relations between Jaspers, Sternberger and Paeschke, and the SEC, an intellectual organisation which advocated the autonomy of culture from politics and the idea of common cultural ground with Eastern Europe. While West German intellectuals could endorse the principles of the association, they were reluctant to cooperate with foreign colleagues to bridge the division of Europe. This article supposes that their failure to collaborate with the SEC was due to the existence of a limited space for independent political initiatives, but also to their actual approval of the Cold War status, which had brought them back into the international community, and to the persistence of a traditional interpretation of ‘culture’, regardless of whether they accepted or refused this. Thus, the Cold War situation is not the only explanation of why the SEC failed to have success in West Germany in that phase.

This article engages with the most recent literature on the global circulation of corporatist projects, discussing three reform schemes elaborated in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century – G.D.H. Cole's guild socialism, Dudley Docker's technocratic business parliament and Harold Macmillan's conservative industrial self-government. Overcoming the often too rigid equivalences between corporatism and fascism, this article seeks to ascertain to what extent and with what nuances corporatist ideas circulated among non-fascist political circles in Britain. It is argued that the schemes analysed shared a similar corporatist matrix, which nonetheless served as the core idea of different political strategies. In the conclusions, it is claimed that these dissimilarities are consequential to the degree of adherence to the principles of capitalism, i.e. the profit-earning motive and the private ownership of the means of production, as well as to the democratic level of the institutions proposed.

This paper addresses an under-researched topic in Soviet post-war history. It is about institutional hierarchies in a newly annexed Western borderland based on recently disclosed archival materials from Chișinău (including ex-KGB and MVD) and Moscow depositories. In contrast to all-Union institutional practices, the Moldavian SSR's case study shows that the party was hardly a hegemonic institution in late Stalinism. Using kompromat and inside information, the political police (NKGB-MGB) controlled the party institution. In contrast to the Baltic republics, Soviet Moldavia was headed by weak first secretaries appointed with the connivance of local police. Agency is an essential variable in explaining the dynamics of institutional design and hierarchies in Soviet peripheries in late Stalinism. Political police's predominance in this period is explainable as Bessarabia – mostly part of Soviet Moldavia – was a contested territory between Romania and the Soviet Union and hence the need to establish a more repressive policy to counteract the mass expectations of a regime change. I also argue that the realities of the immediate post-war Soviet Moldavia do not fit the conclusions of a recent book on ‘substate dictators’ by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk (2020).

As in many other countries, Spanish society also underwent its own ’68. In response, the Franco regime increased repression: it became much harsher, and much broader. After that, opposition to state brutality became the anti-Franco movement's main cause and a unifying element for its many different actors. This is the process addressed by this article. Specifically, it aims to explore how repression facilitated the encounters between activists coming from different social movements and political organisations. At the same time, it tries to show the importance of diversifying the analyses on the long ’68 – focusing on different countries, regions and cities – in order to grasp its transnational nature.

In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. ‘Law of the Journey’ consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals: Franz Kafka and Václav Havel. A few isolated rubber tubes floated on the concrete floor next to the raft, with rubber humans reaching out to be saved. The exhibit conveyed both the desperation of the migrants and the inadequacy of the response.

This article examines the activities of the Soviet military-political organs in the Baltic Fleet. It shows that the web of party institutions transformed the fleet into a space of political and social activism that had little to do with the strictly military aspects of government policy. Such activism was nevertheless unfailingly promoted, even as it became clear that it compromised core elements of military efficiency such as discipline and well-defined chains of command. This argument has implications for our broader understanding of the nature of the Soviet state. It indicates that once the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideology had become institutionalised in the state via the ubiquitous presence of party organs, pragmatic retreats for organisational efficiency became exceptionally difficult to implement.

This article examines how states with a fascist past – Germany, Austria and Italy – used modernism in the visual arts to rebrand national and European culture at the Venice Biennale of Art after 1945. I argue that post-war exhibitions of modern art, including those at the Biennale, reveal a vast confrontation with Jewish absence after the Holocaust. Christian Democrats and proponents of European integration attempted to reimagine modernism without the Jewish minority that had shaped it in crucial ways. Meanwhile, living Jewish artists resisted their exclusion from the post-war interpretations of modernism, as well as absorbtion of modernism as part of national heritage. Their criticisms lay bare a seeming paradox at the heart of post-war Europe: a desire to claim the veneer of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism without returning its enabling demographic and cultural diversity. This article points to the significance of philosemitism for establishing post-war national and continental identities.

During the 1960s, development aid helped West Germany project a benign image while it discouraged diplomatic recognition of East Germany. In Ghana, however, this effort clashed with the Pan-Africanist aims of President Kwame Nkrumah. Four periodicals under his control attacked West Germany as neo-colonialist, militarist, racist, latently Nazi and a danger to world peace. West German officials resented this campaign and tried to make it stop, but none of their tactics, not even vague threats to aid, worked for long. The attacks ended with Nkrumah's overthrow in early 1966, but while they lasted, they demonstrated that a small state receiving aid could use the press to invert its asymmetric political relationship with the donor.

The aim of this paper is to trace the evolution of the neofascist networks from the vantage point, between 1945 and 1953, of Madrid, a city where a myriad of extreme right activists gathered to discuss and promote their cause at a transnational level. Exploring the local socio-political context in which these (neo)-fascists moved, and the networks that they formed, the study delves into the creation of ratlines crucial for fascists to escape from the Allied prosecution once the Second World War was over, the consolidation of the city as a central meeting point for fascists from all over the world (from Degrelle to Skorzeny, passing by Horia Sima or Filippo Anfuso), discussions around the possible creation of paramilitary organisations, and the everyday lives of (neo)-fascists operating in Madrid. On the basis of police reports, secret service intelligences and other primary sources, this paper foregrounds the role of the fascist diaspora and the subsequent interactions as driving forces enabling entanglements, and cooperation among (neo)-fascist movements and the Francoist regime, at various formal or informal political levels.