In the 1960s, when I was Head of the (UK) Government Economic Service, I kept a private diary of conversations and events which has just been published. The excerpts from the diary which appear below relate to what I learned in 1967–8 about French attitudes to issues of international importance in which the United Kingdom was involved. The diary deals with four such issues: (1) the British application to join the European Economic Community; (2) the proposals to add to international liquidity through the creation of a new unit or, alternatively, of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); (3) the British devaluation of 1967; and (4) the Bonn Conference in November 1968, at which it was widely expected that agreement would be reached to devalue the franc and revalue the mark.

Emerging from the Balkan wars and the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1913, the nation state of Albania frustrated the expansionist ambitions of Serbia and Greece which had planned to partition the area. Early indications suggested Albania would be, potentially, one of the most destabilising regions of the Balkans. This was primarily due to its geographical position vis à vis the Adriatic coast, and to the manner in which the Great Powers deemed Albanian independence an issue of international concern. For Britain, the proximity of the important military base of Malta and the existence of oil in Albania were further reasons why Italian domination had to be checked, and it is of little surprise that Albania quickly became the focus of attention for jealous and covetous eyes.

Polish higher education, like Poland as a whole, is in an exciting but perilous phase. The political changes of the last few years have brought new opportunities but also new expectations and constraints. Many university personnel are looking forward to a less insular, more fulfilling academic life, but there are plenty of others who feel nostalgia for a past which was ideologically inflexible but in some respects less demanding and more secure.

The Institute for Human Sciences (Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) was founded in Vienna in 1982 by a group of scholars from Eastern Europe and the West. The purpose of the Institute was to overcome the cultural and intellectual division of Europe by promoting conferences, seminars and research programmes. The latest report of the Institute stresses that the disappearance of the Iron Curtain has made the work of the Institute all the more important. As the authors of the report explain, ‘…the civil society which is reemerging in Eastern Europe will hardly be viable without living connections to the West and, equally, the Western world will be much poorer without the historical experiences of the East. The Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen views itself as a place where the experiences and perspectives of Eastern Europeans can be (re-) introduced into the Western discussion as a means of rousing, changing and broadening Western culture. Europe should be seen as a challenge: as a manifold, but also contradictory, intellectual and cultural unity.’

In 1930, the Romanian Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, numbered 756,930 members. Of these, about 150,000 lived in Northern Transylvania, which was occupied by Hungary in the summer of 1940; the remaining 600,000 Jews remained in territories ruled by Romania. In 1944, the Jews from Northern Transylvania shared the fate of the Hungarian Jews; only about 15,000 of them survived the deportations.

Hungary, after the 1956 revolution, played a special part in the dispute that broke out between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and continued with varying intensity for several years. This eventful story was an important part of the process that decided the fate of the East-Central European region. The immediate cause of political contention between Belgrade and Moscow was their differences over the Hungarian question, especially the fate of Imre Nagy, who had been prime minister during the revolution. The intrinsic conflicts lay deeper, however. Although the Nagy affair remained an important factor in the disagreements throughout – from his kidnapping to the ‘war of the protest notes’ that followed his execution – it acted mainly as a catalyst. The Nagy affair was an insurmountable problem for all the players concerned. It provided ample fuel for the debates, and each side found that it could be used to put pressure on the other. Due to the system of relations between the three communist countries, the Hungarian side played the least active part. János Kádár, having come to power through the crushing of the uprising of October 1956, was left in no doubt that Hungary had to follow faithfully the Kremlin's foreign-policy line and accommodate itself to Soviet regional policy requirements. Nonetheless, the story remains interesting from Hungary's point of view as well, because it reveals more than the constraints on a small, exposed country. It also shows how Kádár, as he zigzagged between the conflicting demands of Tito and Khrushchev, trying to keep on good terms with both, was gathering experience that would be useful in his later foreign policy.

Poland in 1956 saw a profound crisis in the political and social system created during the Stalinist period. The decay of the system after Stalin's death resulted in, and was at the same time accelerated by, a great mobilisation of and participation involving various political and social groups. Social activity on such a scale recurred only once in the history of Communist Poland-the ‘Solidarity’ period (1980–1).

Is France racist, as Michel Wieviorka has suggested in a recent book?1 And if so, why? Is France more or less racist than her European neighbours, and is the degree of racism increasing or decreasing? These questions are being hotly debated in the wake of the electoral successes of the National Front, which is seen as a ‘racist’ party by three-quarters of French people old enough to vote.2

Alan Taylor was something of a transitional figure among British historians. He began with more than a touch of the old-style gentleman scholar about him but went on to become an early example of the media personality, in some ways a second-half-of-the-twentieth-century variant of this. Yet he was a substantial scholar who could draw large academic audiences as well as someone who could present history to a big national audience. He wrote on traditional topics in a traditional manner, but he took narrative history to new heights.

An older friend of mine, a man of outstanding intelligence and great novelistic talent, asked me a rather curious question: ‘Did you notice that out there in the street everybody is acting abnormally? The salesman is pretending to sell, the bricklayer is building imaginary homes, newspapers don't have any news, the children's traffic warden is waving his lollipop like crazy, but there isn't really any traffic […].’ This friend of mine remembered the pre-war years, but I later realised that even people who had never seen anything other than the People's Republic of Poland had the same kind of feeling.

The last years of the Cold War have produced a bumper crop of studies of its beginnings, and the books reviewed here are a part of it. Anne Deighton's, Cyril Buffet's and Saki Dockrill's monographs are succinct and thoroughly well-written histories based on extensive archival research. Olaf Mager's book, like the former three a well-converted PhD thesis, takes more of a political science approach, looking at the historical commitment of Britain's forces to the defence of Continental Europe in the light of its continuing importance. Klaus A. Maier's and Wilhelm Meier-Dornberg's examinations of Western policies towards the European Defence Community (EDC) project form part of the ambitious multi-volume series on the beginning of West German security policy, edited by the office of military history of the Federal Republic. Hermann-Josef Rupieper's colossal monograph on US policy towards Germany, like Maier's and Meier-Dotnberg's studies of the EDC phase in the evolution of German rearmament, is based on enormously comprehensive multi-national archival research, where the first four books mentioned drew mainly on the archives of one country. The volume on Germany and the Marshall Plan edited by Charles Maier and Giinter Bischof, and the Gottinger Arbeitskreis's volume on the German question from 1953 to 1955, are both collections of multi-author articles concerned with a common theme.

Although the industrialised West has seen since the 1970s a very marked leaning to the right both in government and in popular politics, the experience of the British Conservative Party has been unique. The party can trace a continuous existence to the reconstruction of the King's government by William Pitt the Younger in 1784, and is probably the oldest political organisation in the world: far older, indeed, than most sovereign states. In two centuries of life it has transformed itself from the party of monarchy, aristocracy and the Established Church into a highly successful practitioner of mass politics. It has been in government, either as the sole party of government or as the dominant partner in coalition, for seventy years in the last hundred, and thirty-two years in the last fifty. This remarkable political achievement can be explained at many levels; the purpose of this article is to explore just one of them. By bringing together the explanatory insights of political scientists working on electoral sociology with the records of the party in government and opposition, it is possible to discern how the Conservatives used the opportunities of government to cultivate the society which tended, and increasingly tends, to give them victory at the ballot box. This cultivation of the political environment was not exactly social engineering – a project which contemporary Conservatives emphatically reject – but in tune with the biological metaphor of the title of this paper it could be called ‘social gardening’. The first part of the article examines very briefly how political scientists have come to understand the functioning of the British electoral process since the Second World War. The second part explores the process of adaptation which has enabled the Conservative Party to dominate British politics since the war.

By 1955, the formation of a Cold War bloc in Western Europe was complete. The Western European Union (WEU), a redesigned Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO) within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with West Germany and Italy as members, was created. The 1954 Paris Agreements that established WEU also enabled West Germany to become a virtually sovereign actor, and a member of NATO. The Agreements were effected on the rubble of an acrimonious four-year international debate over a proposed European Defence Community (EDC). This would have created a European army for France, the Benelux countries, Italy and West Germany on the model of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and a parallel political community for the Six.

Central bankers failed in their efforts to reconstruct the international gold standard on a durable basis after World War I. The gold-exchange standard did not unite them in a managed international system in the 1920s, and it perished with little regret in 1931. Stephen V. O. Clarke's monograph on central bank co-operation sees ‘considerable merit’ in the stabilisation efforts from 1924 to 1928, followed by failure to maintain the system from 1928 to 1931.1 Critics have pointed out with justice that co-operation was irregular before 1928, and that central banks continued to co-operate after 1931.2 Clarke recognizes that no conceivable improvements in central bank co-operation could have coped with the combination of political and economic convulsions in 1931; national goals necessarily took priority in central bank policies, and international objectives were determined by national experience and interest.3

After 1945, the reordering of international affairs around the ideological polarities of Washington and Moscow initiated for European social democrats an extended period of self-examination. Accustomed to a place at the centre stage of ideas on the evolution of advanced capitalist economies, they suddenly found themselves in a smaller Europe, the principal theatre of the superpower confrontation. At the point when it seemed only reasonable to suppose that the crisis of industrial capitalism in the 1930s, followed by six years of war, would at last bring a durable electoral majority to the cause of reconstruction under democratic socialism, both domestic and international politics were full of new ambiguities. The hope of the immediate post-war years gave way to uncertainty. That uncertainty, however, could not be attributed to altered circumstances alone. The fact that the decade of the 1950s turned out to be ‘long’ – involving electoral defeats to which there appeared to be no obvious answers – was due in no small part to the nature of the social democratic tradition itself.1

The point has to be made at once that any attempt to quantify public reaction to Nazi propaganda is fraught with difficulties. Accurate measurement of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda is weakened by the absence of public opinion surveys and the fact that, in a society that resorted so readily to coercions and terror, reported opinion did not necessarily reflect the true feelings and moods of the public, especially if these views were opposed to the regime. Nevertheless, to state that public opinion in the Third Reich ceased to exist is not strictly true. After the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels stressed the importance of co-ordinating propaganda with other activities. In a dictatorship, propaganda must address itself to large masses of people and attempt to move them to a uniformity of opinion and action. But the Nazis also understood that propaganda is of little value in isolation. To some extent this explains why Goebbels impressed on all his staff at the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda the imperative necessity constantly to gauge public moods. Goebbels therefore regularly received (as did all the ruling élites) extraordinarily detailed reports from the Secret Police (SD reports) about the mood of the people and would frequently quote these in his diary. Hitler, too, was familiar with these reports, and his recorded determination to avoid increasing food prices at all costs for fear that this would undermine the regime's popularity suggests a political sensitivity to public opinion. To assure themselves of continued popular support was an unwavering concern of the Nazi leadership, and of Hitler and Goebbels in particular.

With the end of the Cold War, opportunities long foreclosed to Europe came back into view on the horizon. The prospect of Western Europe providing for its own security became a realistic proposition for the first time in fifty years. The French government developed a strategy for replacing US power with a more cohesive European Union security and defence identity which garnered substantial support from other European NATO countries, especially Germany, resulting in an intensive four-year competition over which institution would form the basis of Europe's security and defence capabilities. By the end of 1995, NATO had decisively won this contest, due to rapid reconfiguration of NATO's military structures and the test for both organisations of responding to Yugoslavia's collapse. In the final analysis, it was the military capability of NATO that defeated the French alternative security structure. This article tells the story of that evolution.

A casual glance at the display in front of the SHAPE Liaison Office in Room 1A711 of the Pentagon in 1996 might have startled an unwary observer. Throughout the year, under the slogan of 'Operation Joint Endeavor – the New NATO', there was a list of non-NATO countries, eighteen including Russia, contributing forces to NATO's operation in Bosnia. The flags of sixteen countries flanked the office, along with colour photographs of Supreme Allied Commanders Europe, past and present. They represented the old NATO. Did then the inclusion of a host of new nations, from former members of the Warsaw Pact to current members of the Arab League, symbolise a NATO ‘enlargement’ without going through the painful process of formal membership? Did their presence signal new functions for the old alliance? Conceivably, both changes were taking place, the latter openly, the former clandestinely.

Nature plays a significant role in the discussion for and against modernism, which got under way from the late eighteenth century onwards. The rationalists of the Enlightenment considered not only human nature, but also the whole uncultivated realm of nature beyond, that of the animals and plants, as wild and dangerous. It should, according to them, be tamed for the benefit of mankind and put to use. Thus they laid the ideological foundations that made possible the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources for the free development of the market and specifically for industrialisation, ie for material and ideological modernisation processes. The Romantics, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of non-material values. In their view the inherent and irretrievable beauty of nature should not be sacrificed on the altar of utilitarianism. A century later the critics of unrestrained economic modernisation expanded on the Romantics' view. They criticised the ‘tumours’ of industrialisation, urbanisation and materialism, advocating greater preservation of the wilderness and, indeed, of agrarian land and the rural way of life. For them, such things were not just symbols of originality, beauty and health, but were also part of the ‘national character’. They were unique treasures, unlike replaceable material interests. Nature, as a source of raw materials, became a multifunctional cultural heritage. ‘Materialism’ and the idea of progress, the central characteristics of modernisation, were challenged by criticism of civilisation and by historicism. Thus the basic cultural and political camps were established, but also the decisive ideological preconditions for the emergence of a nature conservation movement.