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.

After 1950, at least 23,000 German POWs remained in Soviet captivity as ‘war criminals’, and they were pardoned and released in several amnesties from 1950 to 1956. This article examines the political and propagandistic reactions of the ruling SED to the return of those prisoners. It analyses how the SED's attempts to reintegrate ‘war criminals’ into a socialist society related to the official politics of the past (Vergangenheitspolitik) and the construction of a memory of the Nazi past in East Germany. The SED's key strategy in dealing with these returnees – avoiding the question of individual and collective responsibility – is put into the context of the party's central ideological objective, namely to dissociate the socialist GDR from the legacy of Nazi Germany. On the basis of newly accessible documents from the archives of the former Ministry for State Security, the article also describes the intensive involvement of the Stasi in repatriation and reintegration matters at all levels of society.

Although almost all of Europe was under royal rule for most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, very little effort has so far been dedicated to explaining this phenomenon. By examining royal photographs the author is able to shed light on some of the central mechanisms leading to this remarkable royal success. By analysing the production, distribution and perception of royal photographs in a variety of European countries, this article shows that these images were a crucial means by which royal families were turned into powerful symbols of modern nations. Regularly made by the most renowned portrait photographers and widely distributed via the press and as postcards and personal commemorative gifts, royal photographs allowed monarchies to acquire an absolutely vital asset for their survival at the head of modern European societies, namely strong emotional bonds between individual members of the general public and royal families.

This article considers the role of music among German, Polish and Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, the Nazi concentration camp. It focuses primarily on the songs that were composed and sung in the camp, of which at least 350 are known. The article uses song as a lens through which to examine the diversity of the camp's social landscape, and places particular emphasis on the distinctive ways in which prisoner groups chose to interpret and respond to the experience of incarceration.

With the outbreak of war in Ethiopia in late 1935 Italian Fascism shifted into a new phase, which can be called imperial-colonialist-racial. Until 1935 Italy had invested little in the colonies and maintained a relatively small presence in Africa beyond a few cities in Libya. Yet from 1935 to 1940 the Fascist regime shifted enormous amounts of money and effort to create a new Fascist colonial society. This article attempts to explain how this happened by linking the shift to imperial politics to a new totalitarian drive to re-educate Italians and to the adoption of official racism.

The constitutional debate around the establishment of the Union Française (1946) is examined here as part of a long-term debate between two competing definitions of the nation and the republic: an integrating and ‘jacobin’ one, which aimed at moulding the colonial empire along the lines of the ‘one and indivisible’ republic, and another, ‘Girondin’ and contextual one, that saw the Union Française as a possible means of carving out a diverse, possibly divisible, republic. Two different ways of considering both French citizenship and the hybrid citizenship of the Union Française as put together in the Constitution of 1946 developed out of those two conceptions.

The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police.

When urban planners Marcello Piacentini and Antonio Muñoz looked at the Rome they helped create through their participation in the Master Plan of 1931, they saw a metaphor for Fascism's transformation of Rome, a metaphor that captured the ‘effect’ of the Master Plan but not its ‘intention’. The Fascist regime aimed to build a modern capital on the nineteenth-century models of Paris and Vienna, but created instead a modernist city which challenged, on many levels, the neo-classicist rationalism of the previous century's urban planning. This article explores the reasons for such a disjuncture between intention and effect and finds them within Fascist ideology and experience.

This article examines the origins of Norwegian development aid in the early 1950s and the institutional structure, the geographic spread and the goals of the Norwegian aid effort until the early 1970s. The article argues that Norwegian aid must be seen as the outcome of broad set of considerations of an altruistic, geopolitical and domestic political nature. Both domestic and international pressures from within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development contributed to substantially increasing Norwegian foreign economic assistance from modest beginnings. It is argued that oil wealth played a minor role in this transition.

Leisure and tourism are not just pervasive social and cultural practices, they are also big business, with tourism now being the world's largest industry. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2001 tourism generated $462.2 billion in international receipts, despite declining from the previous year owing to the 11 September terrorist attacks. Thus, leisure and leisure travel have long been vital subjects for a variety of disciplines; economics, sociology, geography, anthropology and literary criticism, among them. Yet if leisure in general has in recent years drawn the attention of historians, tourism is just now coming into its own as an engaging historical subject. The works reviewed here indicate that leisure and tourism thrive as fields of interdisciplinary inquiries. They also demonstrate a new appreciation of tourism among historians, as an expression of individual and collective ‘experience’, as well as for its contributions to major developments, such as nationalism and regional development, class formation, and the rise of modern consumer cultures.

Development aid became a significant feature of British foreign and economic policy from the late 1950s. While giving a chronological account of policy developments in this field down to the publication of the Pearson report of 1971, this article is organised around three predominant themes. First, aid has to be seen in the context of Commonwealth relations, with the Commonwealth as both the major recipient of British aid and the main context in which it was organised and discussed. Second, policies on aid were closely tied to developments in policy on the balance of payments, the perceived state of which consistently influenced the volume of aid-giving. Finally, aid policy was part of a complex international debate about the concept of ‘need’, which at least in part shaped who were to be the recipients of aid, and at the same time about the proper measure of the ‘burden’ of aid which helped to shape the policy of the main givers.I am grateful to Astrid Ringe, Roger Middleton and Neil Rollings for allowing me pre-publication sight of their forthcoming handbook on Public Record Office documents on economic policy in the 1951–64 period. This article has benefited from the comments of Catherine Schenk and participants in the international symposium on aid at the University of Bochum, March 2003.

Development policies are commonly regarded as a phenomenon of the post-Second World War era. This essay looks at the historical antecedents of European development efforts and analyses the determining interests that motivated development policy in the twentieth century. The regional focus on south-east Asia allows for a differentiated appreciation of national approaches to European development policies. It shows that the legitimation of control and the securing of interests–security and economic interests, as well as notions of national prestige–are among the driving forces behind development policies. It also suggests that development policies were multifunctional from their inception.The author wishes to thank Heide-Irene Schmidt and Helge Pharo, the contributors to a workshop on early European development aid (held in Bochum, March 2003), as well as Jost Dülffer, Ruth Jachertz and Philipp Janssen for invaluable comments.

As ever, the Third Reich and its aftermath are still proving a fertile ground for historians. The Nazi dictatorship and its review and reappraisal during the post-war years continue to fascinate historians. The books discussed in the following review highlight the cultural, political, economic and judicial consequences of the Third Reich for postwar Germany.

In the 1960s France's policy on development aid and co-operation had developed to a point where over 1.5 per cent of French gross national product was devoted to supporting growth and stability in African countries. Aid then became ‘global’ and encompassed private ‘aid’ from commercial sources; as such it helped France in its ambition to wield influence in international affairs. Its noblest aim was to create an area in which French culture, borne by thousands of volunteers and experts, would be mixed with the values of the host countries, but its impact was not great enough to prevent corruption or to save development from taking the wrong course.

The history of the foreign assistance policy of European countries has received comparatively little attention from economic, political or diplomatic historians. There is a remarkable lack of archive-based historical studies of intergovernmental and intra-governmental discussions about the aims, methods and priorities of foreign aid and its compatibility with national interests and capabilities. This is the more surprising since the ‘aid question’ constituted the third major field of international relations during the Cold War, and was tightly interlinked with the fields of security, finance and economics. In short, the Europeans' positions on development policy in relation to themselves, the United States and the Third World and between themselves have yet to be analysed. The only significant analysis so far of the inducements offered by the West to the Third World is the book by David K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World.

In 1959, while it was struggling to modernise its economy and to tackle the internal north–south gap, Italy joined Western initiatives to increase the quality and quantity of assistance to developing countries. Politically, this was part of an effort to upgrade Italy's standing in the international arena and to develop a regional role in the Mediterranean. Economically, it could increase exports, but this had to be accommodated to a tight state bugdet and a small private capital market. Therefore in the Development Assistance Group/Development Assistance Committee Italy opposed both narrow definitions and automatic criteria for burden sharing. The 1962–63 structural crisis required a new policy and a limit to foreign aid commitments. Export credits remained the key instrument of Italy's development assistance, while ‘soft loans’ as requested by DAC resolutions were considered incompatible with Italy's capabilities and financial resources and had to be restricted to the multilateral level.

By the end of the 1950s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had established its global approach in Dutch development policy, with the United Nations regarded as the ideal platform. This article argues that in the course of the following decade Dutch business interests succeeded in challenging the multilateral approach, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs shaping the legal instruments of foreign aid, such as tied aid and investment guarantees. The article further argues that despite this economic pragmatism the Minister for Development Co-operation managed to represent the Netherlands as a distinterested worldwide actor by the end of the 1960s.

The article argues that although the Federal Republic of Germany had a genuine interest in the development of the ‘Third World’, it was the pressure of the United States that urged West Germany to become a major donor country during the first development decade. Its economic and financial strength made West Germany the primary target of burden-sharing claims. Having accepted the position as a major contributor of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries, West Germany at first tried to pursue a development policy based on its own postwar experiences and economic concepts in reconstructing its economy. It operated within the framework developed by Western donor countries in the Development Assistance Committee and agreed to soften the terms of its foreign aid-giving during the second part of the 1960s. Its substantial and effective foreign economic assistance policy gave West Germany some leverage in pursuing its own political interests in other fields and in gaining political status in the international community.

Does the turn of the twenty-first century set a new frontier in the writing of urban history? According to demographers we are advancing towards a fully urbanised world where for the first time the majority of the planet's population will live in cities, but for a European urban historian it is difficult to discern a period in contemporary history when this has not been the main trend. In fact, it has been precisely the overwhelming presence of cities in recent European history which has made it so difficult to define urban history as a distinct branch of knowledge. To some extent, the complexity of the urban fabric and the diversity of events which define an urban environment have often constrained the work of urban historians and the heuristic value of their research in comparison with the work of more established disciplines such as social and economic history, the history of planning and architecture or, even more recently, environmental history.

British policy during the Spanish Civil War was seen by many at the time as dishonest and dishonourable, and this is a criticism that has survived the opening of the official records to historical scrutiny. Research by Jill Edwards, Douglas Little and, most recently, by Enrique Moradiellos has presented the policy pursued by the British government as cynical, callous and objectively pro-Franco. Understandably, however, the literature on this subject, exemplified in the work of these scholars, has focused primarily on establishing how policy decisions were reached within the Foreign Office and other interested branches of government. What has tended to be neglected by historians (with some notable exceptions) has been the experience of British diplomatic and consular officials in the field. These were the men who carried the triple burden not only of being the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office in Spain, but also of negotiating with government and local authorities and of protecting British lives and interests amidst the chaos of civil war. This article seeks to redress the balance by placing the focus on these ‘front-line diplomats’. It concentrates on the experiences of those British diplomatic and consular staff in the main Republican zone who were most directly exposed to the war, although reference will also be made to officials in the Nationalist zone and in the relative tranquillity of the British embassy in exile at Hendaye. The article is concerned more specifically, although not exclusively, with George Ogilvie-Forbes's tenure as chargé d'affaires in Madrid and Valencia (August 1936–March 1937). For this period Ogilvie-Forbes's own papers offer an unparalleled insight into the private opinions of British diplomats in the front line of civil war, and provide a new perspective on their relationships both with each other and with the Foreign Office. The article concludes with the recasting of the British diplomatic presence in Spain in autumn 1937, with the relocation of the British embassy from Valencia to Caldetas, outside Barcelona, and the appointment of an agent to represent British interests in Nationalist territory. The first part of the article describes the development of the British diplomatic presence in Spain during this period, while the second examines the civil war's impact on individual British diplomats, and how their experiences affected their relationship with their superiors in London.