This article explores how the Greek state created and implemented the legislation relating to recognition of the National Resistance during three different transitional periods of the country's postwar history: civil war, dictatorship and democracy. The article's principal argument is that recognition served as the main tool for building consecutive national narratives not only of the resistance but also of Greekness, determining who was included in and excluded from the nation. By addressing one of the most loaded political issues in Greek society and politics in its entirety, this article revisits Greece's postwar history, highlighting the ruptures and continuities over a long period.

This article investigates an important but understudied phenomenon: the bureaucratic class division, which is analysed as a difference technology for envisioning, studying and managing the population. I examine a long-lived and widely spread taxonomy of the Swedish population into three social groups (Socialgrupper). Specifically, I look at how it influenced the production of statistics and knowledge about the voter during the first half of the twentieth century and higher education in the post-war welfare state era. The article understands the effects of the taxonomy as a ‘scientisation of the social’, using Lutz Raphael's term, in which fuzzy conceptual class boundaries were turned into exact classification, making it possible for different actors to act and calculate through them. The division was at the same time contested among social scientists and politicians. However, because of lack of alternatives and because it was well established, actors continued using it.

This article examines a series of financial study courses for women in 1950s Sweden, jointly organised by commercial banks and an important non-partisan women's organisation, the Fredrika Bremer Association. The aim is to highlight and explain historical connections between feminism and financialisation. I argue that the feminist aspiration to emancipate women from the curtailments of ‘petty’ domestic finance aligned with the banks’ desire to domesticate financial markets. The performances of ‘female finance’ in these campaigns – striking a balance between PR and empowerment – contributed to the making of a new historical figure, not that of the female investor but rather the consumer of finance. The article not only demonstrates the role of gender in the financialisation of everyday life and in the domestication of finance, but also uncovers a longer pre-history behind these processes that are conventionally associated with neoliberalisation in later decades.

In line with recent studies revealing the role of neoliberalism in Dutch post-war history, this article highlights the influence of neoliberal ideas during the first half of the 1970s. In addition to a clear orientation towards supply-side economic policies and a firm tradition of fixed budgetary rules, the author emphasises the importance of Dutch monetarism in guiding Central Bank policies and prioritising monetary objectives such as price stability, fixed exchange rates and balance of payment equilibrium over Keynesian policy goals. A short-lived Keynesian intermezzo of countercyclical demand-management commenced in March 1974, after which rules-based, stability- and supply-side economic, financial and monetary policies started to regain the upper hand in 1976.

Race is the black box at the centre of the German–Japanese alliance during the Second World War. Early Nazi racial legislation provoked speculation regarding its potential impact on Japanese German Mischlinge (individuals of mixed race), and the regime's reluctance to define its position helped to spread the rumour that they had been recognised as ‘honorary Aryans’. Although this was never more than a rumour, the ambiguous racialisation of the Japanese historically seemingly legitimised demands by Japanese Germans that the regime should recognise their rights as members of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (national community). This article traces how the Japanese Germans were able to negotiate concessions enabling them to function as a protected minority, albeit in contingent and arbitrarily defined ways. In effect, the Japanese Germans were able to exploit the ambiguities of Nazi racial thinking in order to carve out a place for themselves within the margins of the racial state.

After seizing power in 1933, the Nazis added photographic denunciation to the repertoire of modern European public shaming practices to forge a new consensus about who belonged in German society. Photographic denunciation, in which Nazi functionaries took and displayed pictures of non-Jewish Germans shopping at Jewish-owned businesses advanced the Nazi dispossession of German Jews while coercing non-Jewish Germans into severing ties with Jewish neighbours . Contrary to what most historical scholarship has implied, photographic denunciation lasted well into the 1930s in Germany and even transcended German borders. Ultimately, photographic denunciation was among the Nazis’ most successful tools to turn non-Jewish Germans against Jews, a key precursor to the ability of the Nazi regime to perpetrate the Holocaust.

The centenary of the Irish Revolution has just concluded, with 2023 marking the hundredth anniversary of the ‘dump arms’ order which ended, albeit ambiguously, the civil war of 1922–3. European history has been accustomed to marking centenaries during the past ten years, from the First World War which overturned a global order, to the Russian Revolution which created a new one, to the post-war national reverberations which created revolutions of their own. The enthusiasm with which these have been marked across Europe has varied considerably, with the sombre ne plus jamais tones of the centenary of the First World War giving way rapidly to the muted if not entirely absent commemorations of the October Revolution in Russia. The island of Ireland has perhaps been more wedded than elsewhere in Europe to the relentless treadmill of centenaries, with the Irish state formally dating its existence to the vanguardist rebellion, popular mandates and political institutions that occurred between 1916 and 1922, and Northern Ireland being dated to 1920. The ‘Decade of Centenaries’, as it is known in Ireland, has been unfolding according to a carefully arranged schedule since 2012; the end, marking the ambiguous conclusion of the Irish Civil War, is finally upon us. The implications of the ‘Decade’ for public history, for the position of professional historians within and outside the academy, and for the broader understanding of the revolutionary decade are significant and have generated their own critical literature.

This article aims to provide the basis for a theoretical framework conceptualising Romanian fascist ideology at work in relation to law and politics, by focusing on the way it operated within the movement's understanding of foundational concepts of state power, sovereignty and justice. In doing so, I investigate the relationship between fascism, understood here as both an ideology and a political movement, and constitutional law in the context of interwar Romania. I ask how the ideology – that is, the doctrinal body of Romanian ultranationalism, as well as political practice – related to core constitutional concepts such as sovereign power and popular sovereignty. Accordingly, I map the nexus between law and politics within the ideology of the Romanian main ultranationalist movement – the Legion of Archangel Michael and its paramilitary branch, the Iron Guard.

This article explores cultures of militancy in public space among currents of the revolutionary left in France, Italy and West Germany during the ‘red decade’. It shows how radicals embraced convergent strategic perspectives, discourses on violence and insubordinate practices for confronting the police. However, patterns of militancy subsequently diverged along national lines in the face of different experiences of neo-fascist violence, domestic social conflict, and legacies of armed resistance and civil war. In particular, the relatively frequent use of lethal force by Italian police in defence of public order motivated a current of the Italian revolutionary left to endorse the use of firearms during protests. Across national experiences, domestic protest policing conditioned the use of force by protestors and the transformation – or not – of protestors into terrorists.

The Irish Revolution inflicted significant damage to built-up and natural landscapes between 1916 and 1923. Destruction transcended national and ideological divisions and remained a fixture within Irish urban and rural landscapes years after independence, presenting an Ireland politically transformed yet physically disfigured. An environmental reading of this transformative period calls into question many of its established lessons and interpretative boundaries, including the agency and considerations of those who participated in and witnessed it. This article examines the extent and impacts of environmental destruction experienced on communal levels throughout the revolution, and how a war that was waged on higher ideological grounds very often disrupted and alienated the everyday lives of communities and individuals.

Taking the lives of seven men with one act of violence in common, this article explores how the history of a whole life might reframe our sense of the ‘soldiers’ tale’. If violence stops being the only experience we seek, if, rather than isolated and sought out, it gets left in the muddle of getting older, of getting by, do we come closer to the marks that violence made, or begin to see them in the context of all the other things that shape a life? Do we find something of the perspective that those who lived with killing tried to put it in? Rather than see their lives through the prism of one episode of conflict, which is the position so many histories of killing begin from, this article proposes instead a history of seven individuals, who just happened to have been party to the killing of two men.

The Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association (SILRA) was originally founded in London in 1922 to aid ‘refugees’ in Britain. It also had an Irish sub-committee, and soon focussed its attention almost exclusively on those loyalists who remained in the Irish Free State (IFS). Populated by diehard Conservatives and Irish unionists, SILRA demonstrates the longevity of the afterlife of the Irish Revolution for both of these groups – though both had experienced it very differently. As a non-violent reactionary movement that spanned Britain, Ireland, and the dominions, SILRA offers a useful transnational case-study of interwar counter-revolution in a British context. Moreover, SILRA's Irish committee highlights some of the ways in which the sternest southern loyalists and unionists – who found themselves among the ‘losers’ of the Irish Revolution – preserved allegiances and social solidarity in the IFS.

No phase of Ireland's 1913–23 revolution has proven as challenging for social remembrance as the 1922–3 civil war. While the conflict structured party politics and fuelled political agendas for decades, its toxic memory was widely regarded as best forgotten. Yet, as Beiner has argued, even ‘when communities try . . . to forget discomfiting historical episodes’, they still ‘retain muted recollections’. Drawing on oral history interviews, this article examines civil war silences and selective memories transmitted across generations among families and communities impacted by the conflict. Themes to be touched on include silence; memories of incidents of violence and other traumatic experiences; partisan animosities and political reverberations of the period; and the material and physical manifestations of civil war memory. Consideration of these patterns illuminates complexities in nationalist memory in Ireland, while it suggests broader insights into how societies and communities make sense of divisive historical episodes.

There is a widely held perception that the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence was a hard-fought series of guerrilla war engagements punctuated by larger and often spectacular events in Cork, Dublin and elsewhere. However, an examination of the conflict from the perspective of a search for an alternative war, where little if anything occurred, can yield interesting and counter-intuitive results. This is exactly what this article sets out to do in order to demonstrate the often rich potential in the quest for nothing in particular, but primarily to establish that in every conflict of this type, another war often takes place, which shows itself to be largely ineffectual and futile though ultimately quite rewarding in its own way.

In this paper I examine the relationship between Polish experts on school-based sex education and international developments in the field during the post-war period. From 1956 onwards, Polish experts, hoping to introduce sex education to schools, drew on Western experience and knowledge. Using Polish sources, I focus on the ways in which this knowledge was transmitted, the role of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the approach of Polish experts towards the West. I argue that during the late 1950s and 1960s, Polish experts valued and relied exclusively on Western models. International exchange on sex education intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Polish expert Mikołaj Kozakiewicz becoming a regional leader within the international family planning movement. However, as Polish experts became more critical about certain Western models of sex education, they began to promote the socialist model of family life education as a more appropriate option.

Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above’. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views of the family into their welfare systems. Yet, this special issue aims to demonstrate that families have not merely been objects or subjects buffeted by political and social change. Rather, families have also consistently acted as ‘agents of change’. This is not to valorise the family – families have been patriarchal, damaging and oppressive as well as supportive, empowering and caring. However, this is to say that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change.

Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

This article explores the origins of the European Union (EU) peacebuilding approach in Northern Ireland through the role of the long-serving MEP and Nobel Laureate, John Hume. It gives particular emphasis to the part played by the European Parliament (EP) in this endeavour, which has been neglected in existing studies of the EU influence on Northern Ireland. The article shows how Hume helped to create better understanding, interest and ultimately engagement by the EU to support peacebuilding efforts in Northern Ireland. Local political shifts would prove decisive in creating the peace process that emerged in the region in the 1990s, but the article argues that Hume's efforts, stretching as far back as the 1970s, both encouraged these shifts and then provided the basis for much greater EU engagement in support of the peace process. This deepens our understanding of the EU role in aiding political change in Northern Ireland.

Ideology and state ownership are supposed to have characterised socialist housing. This article argues that economic and monetary constraints were also dominant in shaping housing policy in early socialist Hungary. These factors increasingly compelled the regime to promote private home ownership through state-subsidised credits. Despite high public interest in the programme, however, neither wealth, personal connections nor ideology alone could condition the outcome of home-build applications due to severe shortages. This impasse put the regime at a crossroads of whether to pursue needs-based housing or to introduce ‘profitability’ considerations in credit checks for self-build. This article argues that the Nagy government's pursuit of the latter option increasingly undermined the ideological basis of communism. The scheme's failure not only made citizens receptive to radical change in 1956 but also put the regime on a new trajectory where private wealth accumulation and self-provisioning became inseparable from the economic legitimacy of communism in Hungary.

As recent scholarship has shown, most of East Central Europe remained at war for several years after the official armistice in November 1918, complicating the transition from empires into nation-states. This article addresses another aspect of the state-building process. As opposed to centralising power emanating from capitals such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, I argue that local politicians and village leaders made their own territorial and sovereignty claims. Rather than whole nations, it was small communities that first defined self-determination. Here I present a loose typology of such localities (ethno-linguistic republics, non-Bolshevik workers’ councils, and radical agrarians), and show that conflicts between mini-states and burgeoning nation-states shaped the development of the latter.