Neoliberalism can be defined as the drive to shield capitalism from the scrutiny and accountability of democratic processes. This definition is particularly relevant to the creation of the euro, as it reflects some imbalances of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union (EU). The monetary union was designed to function with full independence, largely beyond the reach of democratic deliberations. This article investigates whether this outcome was intentional. It argues that the asymmetric structure of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was purposefully crafted, as the European policymakers involved in the negotiations were acutely aware of the imperfections of the system being developed. However, these shortcomings were not specifically aligned with a particular neoliberal ideology. Instead, this article shows they resulted from a broader set of concerns, primarily driven by a reluctance to centralise decision-making power at the EU level due to fears of losing aspects of national sovereignty. Understanding the unintentional nature of this outcome is crucial, as confusing what is accidental with what is deliberate can lead to misunderstandings about the motivations behind EMU and misconceive the paths for its reform.

In 1920, the League of Nations implemented the first modern international zones in Europe. While historians have largely presented international zones as unworkable peace-making solutions devoid of resident support, this article draws attention to those figures who saw in zones an opportunity to cash in on the end of empire. It follows the case of Ludwig Noé–a preeminent industrialist in the Free City of Danzig–who was employed to run the city’s imperial shipyard. Noé’s transformation of the Danzig shipyard into a successful international concern demonstrated the economic advantages that internationalisation could facilitate and chimed with calls to exploit the zone further by converting it into a manufacturing free port. The article contributes, therefore, to a growing literature concerned with how abstract international visions were realized locally and independently, and who, ultimately, made internationalism work in the 1920s.

This article focuses on Jewish political stances in early post-war and post-Holocaust Poland and explores why so many Polish Jews supported the new communist-dominated regime after 1945, despite the fact that only a small minority held communist political views. While acknowledging the impact of Holocaust experiences, the weakness of the Polish Jewish community after the war and the widespread perception that the communist regime was the only possible bulwark against post-war anti-Jewish violence, this article offers a different perspective in foregrounding the inter-war experiences of Polish Jews. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English, this article argues that inter-war experiences shaped Polish Jews’ understandings of the emerging post-war social and political system, as well as their political stances towards the new state.

This article argues that the 1918 flu appeared so suddenly, spread so rapidly, killed so quickly and disappeared so swiftly that Europeans’ focus on their immediate circumstances led them to experience and interpret it as a local health crisis rather than as a global or continental pandemic. It also demonstrates that Europeans were so inured to privation and death; so isolated by anaemic and dysfunctional media and medical regimes; and so distracted by economic, political and social chaos that they were either unaware of or unconcerned with the flu’s origin. It takes as its source base nearly 1,000 memories of the 1918 flu collected from individuals across ten European countries and archival materials from federal, municipal, religious and diary archives in France (an Allied power in the First World War), Germany (a Central power in the First World War) and Switzerland (a neutral power in the First World War).

The article examines efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerised, post-Fordist ‘flexible’ production. Focusing on the enterprise level, this article demonstrates that the Communist Party inaugurated its own variation of flexible production; in doing so, it inadvertently created the conditions of possibility for the transition from state socialism to capitalism on the factory floor.

This article takes the fate of industrial wealth in East-Central and Southeast Europe through the ruptures of the twentieth century as a case study. It compares post-imperial transitions in East-Central Europe to regime changes in the 1940s and after 1989. It maintains that the peculiarities of post-imperial transitions and the uniquely high leverage available to Austro-Hungarian industrialists to preserve their assets despite geopolitical transformations after 1918 come to the fore especially clearly when we compare them to the ruptures by the Holocaust and subsequently by the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Industrialist Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964), a Hungarian of Jewish origins with major investments in Transylvania's coal mines, was among those key industrialists who lived through both world wars, passing away in 1964 in New York. The article uses his life as a thread to show how the fate of a business family can influence mainstream narratives of modern European history, usually driven by a concentration on political ruptures.

This article discusses the development of lifestyle and value studies in the market research industry in relation to changing understandings of the consumer in late twentieth-century Sweden. It uses the analytical notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ to argue that the market research industry both exploited and reinforced this perception of consumers through lifestyles as a means for categorisation. The analysis draws on material from the leading Swedish market research company at the time, Sifo, including its connections to the European industry. The results show how the industry sought to break up the supposedly homogenous postwar Swedish consumption landscape by constructing new consumer types that suited a more market-oriented society, and it was the confident, individualised consumer who sought self-fulfilment that was portrayed as the most attractive type. The article argues that the politics of marketing and advertising played an important part in shaping Swedish consumer culture during the market turn.

In West German law, selling sex was held to be legal but ‘immoral’, a definition that prevented its recognition or protection as a profession. Despite this categorisation, however, women (and men) sold sex in streets, bars and backrooms across the country. They developed routines and relationships to manage their trade, while being excluded from many welfare state provisions and targeted by local police, health or welfare departments. Rising prosperity and the loosening of social norms in West Germany between 1949 and 1974 provide the backdrop to an exploration of how older notions of prostitution as ‘work-shy’ were confronted with the changing circumstances of urban commercial sex in this period. The article examines how politicians, police and welfare workers interpreted the continued existence of commercial sex in the context of rising security. It also highlights the disparate working practices of women who sold sex across the period.

Norway is celebrated for its successful management of petroleum resources. This success is often attributed to Norway's institutions and to key Norwegian policymaking figures. However, the roles of foreign experts in shaping early Norwegian oil policy have been overlooked. This article explores the roles of two Iraqi oil experts, Farouk Al-Kasim and Hasan Zakariya, and finds that they contributed to shaping the Norwegian petroleum management system at a crucial stage in its development. The article reveals the interconnectedness of global oil policies and challenges conventional North-South diffusion narratives, broadening our understanding of the impact of decolonisation on contemporary Europe.

After the Second World War, lawmakers in the re-established democracies of Western and Central Europe set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These were highly controversial as they had to manage two conflicting demands: the desire to purge former Nazis, fascists and collaborators as a means of re-democratisation, and to keep them away from power through a series of democratic restrictions such as temporary disenfranchisement. In this article, I investigate how postwar elites in France, Austria and West Germany dealt with this democratic conundrum and how their opponents used the concept of democracy in order to discredit postwar purges and achieve their revision through amnesty laws. I put forward the notion of democratic revisionism and I try to define its role within the wider framework of postwar transition and democracy.

Especially as regards Commonwealth restrictions, Ireland's immigration policy has been seen as (surreptitiously) dependent on UK policy. Although the Common Travel Area imposed serious limits, Irish discretion was in fact significant and restrictive. In 1948–9 the United Kingdom secured Ireland's public commitment to extend reciprocal citizenship rights to all the Commonwealth, notwithstanding its secession, but Ireland avoided this vis-à-vis the ‘new’ Commonwealth and left its aliens exemption law deliberately opaque. Whilst broadly mirroring the UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Ireland retained apartheid South Africa as partially privileged and only comprehensively exempted British citizens born within the United Kingdom. From 1973, the United Kingdom largely abandoned any privileged treatment but, in entirely removing this in 1975 and selectively imposing visas from 1976, Ireland went beyond even this. These divergences reflected that, compared to the United Kingdom, it had left an increasingly diverse Commonwealth in 1949 and had a stronger homogenous nationalism.

This article examines the work habits of saleswomen in West Germany's retail and describes the amorphous yet evolving boundaries of working and non-working time. During the 1960s, women employed in retail began to work part-time to combine their domestic duties and a career. In their non-working hours, these women attended to childcare and household duties. This much is known, but this article shows that, in addition, female workers in retail often had to face irregular extensions of their working hours. This enabled companies to reduce the paid time of their employees. Moreover, some employment qualifications associated with women (smiling, engaging in conversation, displaying fine motor skills) were not properly appreciated, much less financially rewarded, but were instead regarded as natural traits and not subject to compensation. All these micro mechanisms led to women being held back from full work life participation, and therefore reinforced gender inequalities in general.

When considering the ideas behind economic and monetary union, most of the scholarly attention has focused on Germany and its ordoliberal tradition. The role of smaller countries such as the Netherlands, however, has yet to be considered. The Netherlands has long been one of Europe's staunchest fiscal hawks. To explain Dutch hawkishness, the international business press has reverted to the cultural trope of Calvinism. In contrast, this article traces this hawkish stance to the Dutch neoliberal turn of the 1980s, in particular the rise of public choice theory. In early 2012, during a meeting in Brussels, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described the need for fiscal discipline as ‘the lesson of the 1980s’. Building on institutional analysis and intellectual history, this article shows how Dutch policymaking elites conceived of EMU as a response to that lesson.

In the 2000s, Estonia’s self-avowedly neoliberal government institutionalised voting over the internet, becoming the only country in the world to use online voting in national elections. This innovation was branded as a key component of Estonia’s ‘digital republic’, articulated as an alternative to the bulky welfare state as well as to Soviet authoritarianism. This article suggests that by focusing on the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpinned the e-voting project, specifically the Estonian digital ID, we can reframe the history of post-Cold War development. It argues that reforms of post-Soviet state institutions were driven by a fragile coalition of civil servants, looking for ways to accomplish new challenges under serious budgetary constraints, computer engineers, who shared an ethos of experimentation developed at the Soviet-era Institute of Cybernetics, and banks, who offloaded their R&D initiatives to the state. This coalition was fraught with conflict, did not last long and had no singular goal – and thus could later be framed as a victory for democratic reform as well as another example of state capture by private interests. Further, the infrastructural basis of e-voting helps explain how Estonian policymakers could defend the institutions against criticisms that prevented its widespread adoption elsewhere.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the British printing industry seemed to epitomise the United Kingdom’s status as the sick man of Europe, worn down by changing patterns of consumption, lagging technological modernisation and all-powerful trade unions. Especially the latter were more often than not seen as the problem, not the solution to the industry’s problems. An extravagant set of so-called restrictive practices, critics alleged, was used to hide that print workers were not putting in the work they were paid for while giving them undeserved bonuses that were choking corporate profitability. Print workers and their representatives offered a very different reading, in which the incriminated practices reflected a thoroughly earned privilege to define and distribute waged work. By looking at shop floor practices and conflicts, the article argues that print workers’ defence of non-working intervals articulated a broader vision of their own place in capitalist production.

This article focuses on the writings of female Icelandic socialist intellectuals and activists during the twentieth century and analyses how they perceived of time spent on work dedicated to the socialist education of the Icelandic working class. It will neither try to evaluate the impact of intellectuals’ work, nor will it attempt to deconstruct the class dichotomy and power structures inherent in intellectuals advocating on behalf of workers. Instead, the focus here is on intellectual women's conceptualisation of time devoted to advocacy, broadly defined, in light of their gender, authority, and privilege. In Iceland, as in many other places, writers and intellectuals were at the forefront of the ideological battle between communism and capitalism that took place during the Cold War. Earlier, in the interwar period, intellectuals also led the way in terms of advocating for Soviet style socialism in Iceland, and they took their role as educators very seriously.

Free movement of labour was established as a so-called principle, that is, one of the four fundamental norms governing all community policy, in the Treaties of Rome in 1957. Yet already from this beginning, what was to be understood as labour, and what was not, was up for debate. In due course, judicial disputes would arrive at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, most of them related to migration. While claims to social security benefits by Italian miners played the most important part in the first couple of years following the Treaties of Rome, over the course of the decades a vast variety of welfare and social policy issues came to be associated with free movement of labour. As time went on, the trajectory pointed to a broader, both more complex and more flexible understanding of what constituted labour as the number of cases brought to Luxemburg increased that dealt with activities previously not regarded as work. Students and sex workers, unemployed and sick persons were demanding national benefits through European channels, transcending the boundaries of national welfare state systems and helping re-define labour and work in the process. This article will chart this development by studying a sample of cases that arose in Belgium from 1972 to 1988, tracing the social transformations that gave rise to the legal claims and analysing how these were translated into the language of Community law and endorsed or rejected by the Court.

This article explores the little-known response of the Irish Save the Children Fund to famine in Soviet Russia and Ukraine from 1921, as well as to hunger in the west of Ireland in 1924–5. Drawing on wide-ranging sources from the Cadbury Research Library, the Women’s Library at LSE and elsewhere, it examines the translation of humanitarian relief into different local, national and transnational contexts. The Volga famine was a seismic moment in inter-war humanitarianism and the initial focus of the newly formed Irish Save the Children Fund, itself formed in the context of war and civil war. Humanitarianism in the new Irish Free State had distinctive gendered, class and religious dynamics, as well as connections to Britain and the Irish diaspora. This article argues that tracing relatively small and largely unexamined organisations like the Irish Save the Children Fund offers new angles into the relationship between humanitarianism, nationhood and social change.

Concerned by the revolutionary violence that spread in Catalonia after the failed military coup of 17 and 18 July 1936 led to civil war, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay) appointed veteran ‘front-line’ consuls in Barcelona. These consuls had already experienced revolutionary events during the Russian civil wars; however, their prior experience shaped their interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, leading them to fear a Bolshevik contagion beyond the Pyrenees border. Their bias thus shaped the French general consulate’s humanitarian action in Barcelona. Far from being strictly neutral and impartial, it adopted a resolutely counter-revolutionary stance.

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czech teachers and other civil servants came to the peripheral regions of the Slovak part of the state. Their task, apart from ensuring the functioning of the newly established state institutions, was to promote the Czechoslovak national project. Some of these officials remained in their positions for many years, overcoming major macro-political upheavals. This article analyses the role of individuals, their loyalties and networks in establishing and maintaining stability across historical ruptures in a remote, linguistically heterogeneous area of Czechoslovakia. Since these actors fostered the official state ideology and played a prominent role in the lifeworld of local communities for many decades, this article shows how these figures endured numerous ruptures, bound together the state and their localities and reinforced the state’s presence on the ground. Using the case of a Czech school principal in the predominantly German- and Hungarian-speaking town of Nižný Medzev in eastern Slovakia, this article examines the role of individual actors in promoting and shaping the various forms of Czechoslovak nation-building policies on the local level.