Louis de Jong, who died on 15 March 2005, held a unique position as the official historian for the Netherlands during the Second World War. As head of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (RIOD), de Jong effectively came to dictate the research agenda on his country’s recent history for more than forty years after the conflict was over. For the Dutch, his name was synonymous not only with RIOD but also with the history of the German occupation from May 1940 to the final liberation in May 1945.

This article seeks to explain the emergence of the CAP between 1958 and 1968. It draws attention to four particular political factors that made the policy’s birth possible, despite the vagueness of the Treaty of Rome commitment to an agricultural policy and the unpromising precedents of earlier attempts to integrate Europe’s agriculture. These were the strength of the coalition pushing for the CAP’s emergence (primarily composed of France, the Netherlands and the European Commission), the weakness and inconsistencies of their opponents (Germany and Italy), the favourable international context, and the incremental nature of the policy’s development. The article further argues that the complexity of the bargaining over the farm support policy, and the manner in which CAP discussions often became entwined with other seemingly unrelated aspects of EEC decision-making, illustrate how even the early Community of the 1960s was sufficiently complex to require a radical change of approach from those who wish to study its historical development.

After the liberation in 1945, two conflicting narratives of the war experience were formulated. A consensus narrative presented the Danish nation as being united in resistance while a competing narrative, which also stressed the resistance of most Danes, depicted the collaborating Danish establishment as an enemy alongside the Germans. This latter narrative, formulated by members of the resistance movement, was marginalised after the war and the consensus narrative became dominant. The resistance narrative survived, however, and, from the 1960s, it was successfully retold by the left, both to criticise the Danish alliance with the ‘imperialist’ United States, and as an argument against Danish membership of the EC. From the 1980s, the right also used the framework of the resistance narrative in its criticism of Danish asylum legislation. Finally, liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started using it as his basic narrative of the war years (partly in order to legitimise his government's decision to join the war against Iraq in 2003). The war years have thus played a central role in Danish political culture since 1945, and in this process the role of historians has been utterly marginal.

This article examines the life and times of Richard Scheringer, an army officer and supporter of Adolf Hitler who became famous during the early 1930s for his high-profile conversion to communism. Known in the closing years of the Weimar Republic as a point-man for Communist efforts to win support from the radical right, Scheringer survived the Third Reich to become a leading figure in the postwar Communist Party. His well-documented but little-studied career, bridging critical caesurae of modern Germany history, highlights the unique political constellation of the interwar period, demonstrating fundamental continuities in the relationship of German communism to the nation before and after 1945.

This article focuses on two mass spectacles performed in Paris stadiums in 1937, one Catholic and the other Communist, both of which sought to picture the ideal city with the working people at centre stage. By studying these productions in the light of recent research on fascist theatre and politics, and with reference to the debate on ‘modernity’ in interwar France, the article explores the French use of theatre in responding to the aesthetic, political and social challenge of representing the masses. The parallels between these two little-known productions can also be used to illuminate a wider rivalry to orchestrate the masses and to portray them as a united national community.

Using the fine arts exhibition of the Venice Biennale as a case study, this article considers the role of the Italian national government's cultural policy in pursuing its key domestic and foreign concerns between 1948 and 1958. These were, respectively, suppressing communism at home, and promoting Western European unification and Italy's role within it. By scrutinising their involvement at the Biennale, it aims to show the importance placed not only by the Italian Christian Democrats but also by their European counterparts on constructing the idea of a culturally integrated Western Europe as a vital complement to analogous economic and political initiatives.

Marian devotion has long been a central component of Catholic spirituality, in part because the image of the Virgin has been accommodated effectively within so many diverse cultural contexts. In modern Poland, Marianism gained much of its power from the way it linked seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a national (or even nationalist) worldview. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualising the feminine within the nation, a model which is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant, protector of Poland; on the other, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She provides an image of authority and power which ultimately (perhaps paradoxically) poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity – indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining conservative gender relations and the other on attaining victory in the international realm.

This article details the year 1989 in the East German District Perleberg up to the fall of the Wall as reflected in the documents of the Ministry for State Security – the Stasi. It seeks to introduce empirical evidence on the course of the revolution in the towns of East Germany, an area which has received much less scholarly attention than larger centres. The article argues that in this particular outlying district, the generally accepted key factors behind the revolution (regime implosion, the changing international situation and popular pressure) are valid, but would best be weighted away from the changing international situation to the advantage of the other two. Furthermore, the evidence from District Perleberg suggests that pervasive state control, rather than accommodation and limited spheres for manoeuvre, was the dominant feature in 1989 in East Germany

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that ‘revolutionary’ Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new ‘political religion’ – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and ‘friends’ conditioned Fascist militancy and framed ‘ordinary life’, all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.

The aim of this case study of the two Antalls, father and son (the latter became the first Hungarian prime minister after the free elections in 1990) is to present and analyse the period that coincided with the post-1956 development of the Kádár system. Its apparent success, efficiency and partial, surrogate, legitimacy has often been explained by the so-called ‘compromise’ of the Kádárist leadership with Hungarian society after 1956, particularly the ‘old intelligentsia’ or ‘old middle classes’. In fact, while there was an obvious continuity in institutions and ideology between the classic Stalinist regime and that of Kádár, the societal and political practice of the system gradually changed. The Antalls were representative of the inter-war upper middle class (the father) and the participants in the 1956 revolution (the son). Discrimination according to their social background, prevalent in the early 1950s, diminished at the turn of the 1960s, so that someone descended from the former Christian middle class, like the younger József Antall, could be recruited into the intelligentsia.

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

Scholarly research to date has analysed the Cyprus issue from the perspective of Greek–Turkish relations, suggesting that the United States was attempting to strike a balance between them in order to safeguard the cohesion of NATO's southern flank during the cold war. This article, without undermining the validity of previous historical findings on the issue, nevertheless constitutes an attempt to move towards a differing research agenda: it locates Cyprus in the Middle Eastern theatre and suggests that the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 may have more linkages to the Cyprus crisis of summer 1974 than one may at first sight discern.

The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.

The history of France's defeat, occupation and subsequent liberation may be read, and written, as a constant struggle for legitimacy. Here the diverse candidates for legitimacy are analysed (Pétain, de Gaulle and the internal Resistance) as well as the agents of legitimation, and the arbiters of that process of legitimation (French society, the German occupier, Britain and the United States). Four successive configurations are distinguished within that struggle for legitimacy: summer 1940 to spring 1941, the time of the defeat; summer and autumn 1941, when French society called into question the legitimacy of the Vichy French State; the crossroads of greatest legitimacy between late 1942 and mid-1943, which also marked the period of greatest fragility for de Gaulle; and spring to autumn 1944, when the key question was which state should be rebuilt.

The Nazi occupation of northern Italy led to the creation of the Adriatisches Küstenland operations zone, a Nazi civil administration led by Gauleiter Friedrich Rainer. Although this was supposedly a temporary measure, the article argues that the intention was to separate the zone from the Italian state and incorporate it into an economic and political sphere directly controlled by the Reich. The article explores the legitimising strategies exploited by the Nazi civil administration and its organs of propaganda, which focused on the political, social and economical failures of the Italian Fascist government. Rainer strove hard to find ways of encouraging each of the zone's diverse ethnic and social groups to look to the Reich – and hence to the local Nazi administration – as the promoter of its national destiny, the guarantor of its socio-political security and the harbinger of its economic prosperity, safeguarding this against the social revolution advocated by the strong local communist Resistance. Rainer's administration, in trying to eradicate the region's Italian roots, established a new ethnic hierarchy, which favoured Slovenes over Italian nationals.

The inefficient operation of state institutions – including municipal administration – lay at the heart of Belgium's crisis of legitimacy in the 1930s. In 1940, the German military occupation government opted to keep many of the existing administrative institutions and personnel in place. The collaborating political parties, Rex and the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), possessed little legitimacy with either the Germans or the Belgian population. However, this article argues that both parties turned this to their advantage, infiltrating the Flemish municipal apparatus (especially mayors). Yet, as their political programme and legitimation was completely derived from the Germans, their legal position as administrators (especially mayors) was very weak. Both collaborating parties compensated for this with the theory of ‘good government’. Their takeover of power was an administrative operation which, the article argues, would bring them legitimacy through everyday ‘good government’. The entire ‘Neuordnung’ in Belgium in 1940–2 was strongly legitimised on administrative, not political grounds. The failure of this tactic lay in the open politicisation of collaborationist local government. As the article shows, the post-liberation authority also faced a problem of legitimacy. Generally speaking, the trauma of occupation had seemed to strengthen Belgians' wishes for the restoration of stability rather than reforms.

This article presents a re-examination of Hungary's postwar transition from the perspective of the politics of legitimacy that were deployed by the various significant political actors. It argues that postwar state formation following Soviet occupation and legitimacy were closely connected. Hungary's communists and their allies aimed to create a state based on the ideological formula of ‘people's democracy’, which in the Hungarian context led them to build a state based on the restricted social base of the industrial working class. They ignored or antagonised alternative political traditions, particularly those associated with the rural majority and middle classes, which were instead mobilised by an alternative project that rested on a democratised conservatism. This created two visions of a potential postwar political order. The contest between these two visions generated the bitter political struggles that characterised the late 1940s and shaped the social roots of dictatorship in the country.

This article considers the postwar Czechoslovak regime's attempt to employ the courts to gain political legitimacy. In particular, it examines four retribution trials of prominent Czech collaborators and German Nazis and the role these cases played in the development of the contemporary power struggle. The article argues that the postwar regime's manipulation of the judicial system for political ends was fraught with contradictions and ultimately met with only limited success.

This article explores the meaning and impact of the Nazi concept of a ‘New Order’ for Europe on German-occupied Denmark. The first German civil authority in power in Denmark was the Foreign Ministry, which struggled to conclude an economic union with Denmark in summer 1940. Then Goering's Four-Year Plan and the Reich Economics Ministry took command and economic union was abandoned by Berlin, since a pragmatic, day-to-day approach now prevailed. Other initiatives were taken in order to facilitate Denmark's incorporation in the European New Order, such as the setting up of a ministerial Eastern Committee with the purpose of re-establishing Danish industry in the occupied USSR. The article shows how, in Denmark, German short-term politics actually coincided with long-term plans. Germany's ideas of becoming the economic centre of a self-sufficient continental Europe were closely connected to the idea of securing foodstuffs from its neighbours, and this idea, too, was implemented in spring and early summer 1940, when, after the swift occupation of Denmark and the subsequent severance of its trade with Britain, agricultural exports were diverted to the German market.