Historians' views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, which traded US financial help for a continuation of the United Kingdom's world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, and is often taken for granted in historical writing. There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact. However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which Britain was able to manipulate the relationship to its own ends. The United States still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain in a number of fields – diplomatic, economic and military.

The perennial struggle to fix the meaning of fascism has recently entered a phase which might best be described as, if I dare, palingenetic, one of rebirth after a period of crisis or decline. If there is any consensus to be reached from this debate, recently relaunched by Roger Griffin, it might be that fascism is more than simply a variety of political ideology or a category of state system. As recent scholarship has increasingly emphasised, not least Griffin himself, the cultural dimensions of fascist movements, in their many European manifestations, are as significant as their organizational development, their electoral successes and failures or their political programmes. Some have attributed this shift towards considering fascism as a cultural system to George Mosse's anthropologically informed interpretation of fascism. A closer reading of these ‘culturalist’ studies reveals that the euphemistically described ‘linguistic turn’ and social anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, have played a far more significant role in reconceptualising the problem of fascism than has Mosse's work.

This article presents an historical analysis of the European Union's educational policy from the inception of the European Community to the establishment of a directorate for education in the European Commission in 1993. It tells the story of a policy that was not anticipated in the original EEC programme but which developed as a result of the Single Market plan and the gradual acknowledgement that educational issues were related to common economic concerns.For a recent discussion of education, economic integration and the Single Market plan see Brad K. Blitz, ‘Professional Mobility and the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications in the European Union: Two Institutional Approaches’, Comparative Education Review, 43, 3 (August 1999), 311–31. The story turns on the ideas and efforts of key individuals working within the Commission and in national ministries. These functionaries took the lead in formulating a limited European educational policy based on co-operation, the sharing of information and, much later, the creation of specific action programmes that sought to increase the mobility of students, teachers and skilled professionals across the Community. During the political uncertainty that characterised the Community in the early 1970s, the functionaries identified education – which was understood to include any formal instruction that prepared the student for a qualification in a particular profession, skill or trade – as a potential policy area that could provide the floundering Community with direction at supposedly low cost to member states. From vague discussions about the value of a skilled and mobile workforce that were enshrined in intergovernmental resolutions, the idea of a European educational policy was eventually seized upon by officials within the Commission and institutionalised in trans-European programmes and Commission-sponsored organisations. Assisted by the European Court of Justice, the Commission was able to initiate educational programmes that received the blessing of the member states and later secured a place for education in a new directorate. Although education never because a supranational policy, it raised the Commission's standing and supported claims that the Community was actively creating a ‘people's Europe’.

In a recent collection of essays on Germany's relations with Latin America Natalja Karthaus argued that ‘Latin America was never a priority area for German foreign policy’.Natalja Karthaus, ‘Lateinamerika als Bezugsfeld der (bundes-) deutschen Außenpolitik’, in Manfred Mols and Christoph Wagner, eds., Deutschland-Lateinamerika: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven (Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 1994), 53. Karthaus's verdict can, in fact, be extended to the Luso-Hispanic world as a whole, thus including Portugal and also, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain.On aspects of the history of German – Spanish relations see now Conrad Kent, Thomas K. Wolber and Cameron M. K. Hewitt, eds., The Lion and the Eagle; Interdisciplinary Essays on German – Spanish Relations over the Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000). Even Hitler's foreign policy, despite its global aspirations, is included in Karthaus's assessment.The focus of this article is largely on Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Portugal. These four countries were of comparatively greater importance to the Nazi regime than the other Latin American countries. On the latter see, inter alia, Jobst-H. Floto, Die Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Venezuela 1933 bis 1958 (Frankfurt/Main, Vervuert, 1991); María M. Camou, Los vaivenes de la politica exterior uruguaya ante la pugna de las potencias; las relaciones con el Tercer Reich (1933–1942) (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1990); Klaus Volland, Das Dritte Reich und Mexiko. Studien zur Entwicklung des deutsch-mexikanischen Verhältnisses 1933–1942 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Ölpolitik (Frankfurt/Main, Berr: Peter Lang, 1976). To Hitler, both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (with the exception of Spain during the first year of that country's civil war and again in 1940/41) were of marginal relevance to his foreign policy objectives. This verdict notwithstanding Nazi Germany maintained regular, indeed in some areas close, relations to the countries of Latin America and the Iberian peninsula which warrant closer examination.

‘History, more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a stopped up toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.’Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002), 116. All translations from the German are my own. Since February 2002 Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Günter Grass's latest book, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Walking like a crab: a novella), has offered these words of wisdom to several hundred thousand readers who have made Grass's book an immediate bestseller in Germany. With plans for the book to be translated into no fewer than thirty-one languages, Pokriefke's insights will soon be available to an international audience.Eva-Maria Mester, ‘Deutschstunde in Lübeck: Übersetzer trafen sich mit Günter Grass’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)-Europadienst, 2 April 2002.

By challenging prevalent ‘realist’ interpretations, this article seeks to open up a new perspective on Anglo-US efforts to create a viable Euro-Atlantic peace system after 1918. Its main thesis is that significant advances to this end did not result from enforcing the Versailles system but rather from a qualitatively new process of peaceful change: the making of the ‘unfinished transatlantic peace order’ of the 1920s. Initiated by Anglo-US policy makers, this process led to the first ‘real’ peace settlements after 1918, the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno pact of 1925. Crucially, these settlements fostered Germany's international reintegration on terms acceptable for France. They thus prefigured the terms on which more permanent stability was achieved after 1945.

This article argues that foreign-exchange transactions were one of the most effective forms of leverage that the Nazi regime had for controlling German business. Using the example of Schering AG, the article traces some of the mechanisms of control and shows how important these transactions were to international firms such as Schering. It further argues that corporate resistance to Nazi efforts to control international German firms was hardly an option because of the vulnerability of those firms to the foreign-exchange decisions of the state. Many of the financial decisions taken by businesses in the 1920s and 30s – coupled with businessmen's own predilection to mix national with private interests – left them highly dependent on the state and quasi-governmental solutions to private commercial problems even before the Machtergreifung.

This article examines in a comparative perspective the regulations to contain the process of family reunification implemented by the French and British governments in the early 1970s. The comparative analysis highlights how, despite their stemming from different legal systems, these rules repeatedly attempted to deny any right to family reunification, and shows that social and legal definitions aimed at measuring the extent of the family became more than once a source of many difficulties in the admission process. The comparison also allows for an evaluation of the way these controls were administered at points of departure and ports of entry and, more significantly, examines the predominance of governmental and administrative structures to demonstrate how in both cases these rules led to numerous infringements of immigrants' fundamental rights.

The institutional and intellectual transition of German academe from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic required a measure of self-denazification and intellectual realignment which combined a deliberate ‘politics of the past’ with the safeguards of professorial status. Against the background of the re-established civil service culture in postwar Germany this ‘moratorium of the mandarins’ can be seen as a social and intellectual process which required a re-evaluation of academic style and substance within the bounds of professorial collegiality. This process was exemplified in cases from history, theology and physics at the University of Göttingen.

Throughout the 1960s the international monetary system crumbled in a gradual process which was punctuated by a series of crises. The international community proposed, debated and ultimately procrastinated over major reforms, and opted instead for ad hoc ‘plumbing’ solutions such as the Gold Pool and bilateral currency swaps. While this turmoil unfolded, Britain made repeated attempts to join the European Economic Community. This article shows that while monetary issues were not as often publicly discussed, they were a crucial factor in the negotiations for British membership. It also aims to bring together the discussions on the reform of the international monetary system in the 1960s with those on the enlargement of the EC.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the growth of towns was accompanied by the birth of a European and international municipal movement. In 1913 the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA) was founded in Ghent. This combined two approaches, one political and utopian, the other technical and professional. The former focused on turning cities into promoters of a project for co-operation at European and worldwide level; the latter on solving the problems caused by urbanisation. They shared a determination to pursue their objectives regardless of the barriers of culture and national boundaries, and of the administrative hierarchy between local and national government. Between the two world wars the UIV/IULA gradually lost its original utopian inspiration, which was taken up by the Conseil des Communes d'Europe/Council of European Municipalities, founded in Geneva in 1951 with the aim of using the municipalities as a starting point to promote a federation of European states.

Town twinning can be seen as the first activity to involve municipal institutions as such in wide-ranging and long-term international action. Twinning fits Eric Hobsbawm's definition of an ‘invented tradition’. The French federalists played a decisive part in this process of invention, bringing European municipalities together in order to ensure an eventual European political union. Before long, however, the so-called bilingualist movement also turned to twinning as a way to further a universal mutual understanding that transcended the East–West divide. This resulted in a big clash between the French twinning organisations. Thus, the invention of town twinning needs to be studied alongside the dynamic political tensions that emerged on the French political scene during the Cold War

This article analyses the contribution of European socialism to the building of a variegated network of reformers in municipal politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Unsuccessful as a network inside the Second International, a broader international federation of cities, the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA), was proposed in 1913. Belgian, French, Dutch and English socialist leaders remained strongly influential in this federation between the two world wars, working in connection with co-operative movements and the International Labour Office based in Geneva. The fifty years of debates and projects animated by the international journal Les Annales de la Régie Directe founded by the French socialist Edgard Milhaud allows us to follow the development of a generation of local reformers from the beginnings of municipalist thought and praxis up to the idea of building a decentralised European Community of cities and regional authorities.

Attempts to develop a ‘municipal science’ bear witness to the challenges posed by the city to methods of government in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in France. Both in France and on the international scene, reformers sought new ways of thinking ‘scientifically’ about towns and their government. This article takes a serious look at ‘municipal science’, a fragile development which was never fully accepted in academic circles. It studies the endeavours to provide a scientific clothing for the reforming discourse developed by associations of town councillors and disseminated by teaching institutions or journals devoted to municipal administration. It also examines the contribution made by this crusade – at once political and scientific – to the renewal of public action through local authorities.

Globalisation, the buzzword of the late twentieth century, calls for the attention of historians. As others have already suggested, one way to contribute to the historicisation of the phenomena encapsulated in this idiom is to pay attention to connections over long periods. Connections between municipal governments and exchanges about the subject have both been neglected by historical scholarship for various reasons, but they can contribute to the history of the ‘construction of the universal’. Indeed, the information systems of municipal connections – their vectors, actors and structures – have defined, intersected with, nourished or undergone a series of would-be universalist ‘transboundary formations’. These formations are shifting combinations of values, collective actions, practices, rules, organisations and individuals, all of which are advanced as possible futures for mankind. By examining some of these discourses of ‘social order’ and ‘world order’ and the way in which they combine with municipal connections, this article attempts to produce the ‘municipal contribution’ announced in its title.

The new Polish state was founded more than 100 years after Poland's partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria. The partitioned Polish lands had been included one way or another in the administrative structure of the ocupying powers, and the individuals who became active in urban issues in the new state were socialised by associations established by the partitioners. Poland became not only a arena for a meeting of Prussian, Russian and Austrian imaginations about local government but also a place with a great variety of municipal praxises as well. The author analyses different meanings of local government with special attention to those employed by municipal officers from Warsaw and Cracow within the Union of Polish Cities. There were strong regional cleavages in the Union, but the political development of the Polish state strengthened centralisation and the Union itself remained united.

Salazar's Portugal, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany were roughly contemporaneous departures from what had come to seem the progressive democratic mainstream. Seeking greater authority and effectiveness, each revolved around a strong leader and a single party. So there was unquestionably a family resemblance among them, and comparison surely illuminates each. Moreover, it is useful to pinpoint the variables that account for the differences among them. By doing so, in fact, we can devise a comparative array, a scale of radicalisation, understood in the neutral sense as the extent of departure from the norm and/or the prior situation.

This article considers four dictatorships that have each been associated with European fascism: Portuguese Salazarism, Spanish Francoism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. It seeks to ascertain the ‘locus’ of political decision-making authority, the composition and the recruitment channels of the dictatorships' ministerial elites during the fascist era. The interaction between the single party, the government, the state apparatus and civil society appears fundamental if we are to achieve an understanding of the different ways in which the various dictatorships of the fascist era functioned. The party and its ancillary organisations were not simply parallel institutions: they attempted to gain control of the bureaucracy and select the governing elite – forcing some dictatorships towards an unstable equilibrium in the process, even while they were the central agents for the creation and maintenance of the leader's charismatic authority. The article focuses on an analysis of the gradations of these tensions that may be illustrated by the eventual emergence of a weaker or stronger ‘dualism of power’. This ‘dualism of power’ appears to be the determining factor in explanations for the typological and classificatory variations used to qualify those dictatorships that have been historically associated with fascism, and which have been variously defined as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’, or as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘fascist’.

The French police during the Second World War were used both as a tool of collaboration between the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupier and to enforce an internal political reform, known as the National Revolution. The police initially responded enthusiastically, since an input of new resources was promised and the regime's main opponents – communists and foreigners – were also traditional police targets. A fierce repression ensued, police actions including the handing over of communists to the Nazis and playing an important role in deporting foreign Jews to their deaths. However, after two years police support began to falter, and by mid-1943 many police forces were at collapsing point. The police were suffering from an acute patriotic identity crisis and were the target of Resistance propaganda. The promised new resources had largely failed to materialise, which both demoralised the police and further undermined their efficiency.

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.