Speaking on a popular TV show in 1990, soon after the collapse of the previous regime, long-time dissident and doyen of Bulgarian historical science, former Dean of the Faculty of History at the University of Sofia, Nikolay Genchev, insisted on putting the ‘Bulgarian national interest’ ‘above all’. Genchev said with regret that ‘the Bulgarian national problem has recently appeared mainly as a Turkish problem’. Irritated, he added that it is talked about ‘only for the Turks . . . [in spite of the fact that there were only] a million [Turkish] people living in this country’. He followed up with apocalyptic predictions that Yugoslavia wanted Pirin (or Bulgarian) Macedonia, Romania longed for Dobrodja (which is split between Bulgaria and Romania), the Turks claimed secession, and therefore only the ‘hard chest of the Balkan’ remained.

During and after the First World War, the United States provided very substantial amounts of humanitarian and economic aid to war-torn Europe. All compassion aside, international historians have long recognised the strategic and social expectations attached to such foreign aid. US generosity was to build trust, reverence and influence abroad and, by inspiring ‘gratitude’ among recipients, to translate into a foreign policy advantage. But what happened when these expectations were disappointed? This article looks at transatlantic relations after the First World War to explore the role of gratitude in interwar international politics. It shows just how difficult it often was for Europeans to be appropriately ‘grateful’ and how emotionally the US public could react to such displays of perceived ‘ingratitude’. US aid – and the expectations and obligations that came with it – could excite distrust and resentment on both sides of the Atlantic.

The wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s dramatically stimulated interest in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). To satisfy this interest from the outside world, many historical publications offered up various explanations for the outbreak of the wars.1 Yet the prior, and perhaps more significant, development occurred on the eve of the war, when historians in Bosnia and Herzegovina – although to a considerably lesser extent than in Serbia and Croatia – made an important contribution to national(ist) mobilisation and to the creation of a belligerent atmosphere by sensationally broaching traumatic topics linked to the Second World War.2 The war in the 1990s left behind a devastated and divided country and created deep social divisions which have also affected the role and status of the nation's historiography. Many today accept the claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country in which there exist three views on history, although this is only partly true, because in this country far more than ‘three views on history’ exist. In practice, the thesis of three national historiographies (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak)3 turns out to be completely erroneous, because the existence of ‘national historiographies’ would also presume the existence of clearly defined thematic and methodological approaches to historical research, and that is not the case with historiography in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hence, it is more precise to speak of a scholarly historiography that exists alongside an ideologically or politically motivated historiography or ‘parahistoriography’, by which is meant ‘dealing with history . . . in a completely different way than studying history’.4

This article examines the state's actions to arm and disarm the civilian population in Spain during the convulsive final years of the Bourbon Restoration period (1917–23). While this topic has received little attention in the abundant literature on the crisis of the liberal regime in Spain, it is crucial to fully understanding the inherent causes and nature of the high levels of political violence which characterised this period. By analysing the ‘selective rearmament’ of part of the population by both legal and illegal means, this article considers the relationship between dynamics of civilian disarmament and rearmament and the evolution of the alleged state monopoly on violence in Spain.

By reconstructing the lending policy of the European Investment Bank (EIB) from its inception in 1958 to the late 1970s, this article shows that, until the 1970s, the EIB did not pursue EEC (European Economic Community) policies but policy elaborated at the national level. The individual member states’ political priorities and preferences played a key role in shaping the loan operations and the bank's loans were used rather more individualistically by each community country in pursuit of national aims. This situation started to change in the 1970s when internal and external developments to the EEC redeployed and refocused the methods and objectives of the bank so that lending progressively became the result of the interplay between EEC institutions. Gradually, the EIB moved away from being a mere member state's tool to pursue individual national policies, transformed into an EEC policy-driven bank and it became the financial arm of the EEC.

The historiographical debate about France during the Second World War has long been dominated by two foreign historians. On the one hand, the Israeli intellectual Zeev Sternhell notoriously placed the origin of fascism in France's Belle Epoque and saw Vichy France as the paradigmatic example of a fascist regime in his book, Neither Right nor Left, four decades ago. Year after year, Sternhell, who had studied in Paris, made criticisms of the Parisian intellectual milieu and denounced its egocentrism and provincialism. On the other hand, American historian Robert Paxton reigned over the history of French collaboration with Nazi Germany. Although it raised certain controversies when it was translated into French in 1973, his Vichy France has been since accepted as the key reference on the subject, as well as an indispensable pedagogical tool against apologetic views of Marshall Pétain's regime, which enjoy periodic revivals in the country. Despite their age – Sternhell died in 2020 and Paxton is ninety years old – these two historians have remained the unavoidable cornerstones in the discussion on French attitudes during the Second World War – the first as a competitor, the second as a paternal figure.

Tax avoidance has become a hotly discussed topic. These debates have been informed by academic research done by social scientists. Historians, relative latecomers in the field, argue for a greater consideration of the interwar period so as to understand the pathway dependencies of the infrastructures used for tax dodging practices today. This article explores the question of how Luxembourg became, in the 1930s, an important node in the network of legal re-coding of capital for tax shopping purposes. The Holding Act of 1929 offered legal security but was vague enough to foster a fiscal bricolage that allowed notaries, banks and lawyers to serve a heterogeneous group of people eager to pay less tax. Concealing the real beneficiaries of the holding while at the same publicising the opportunities of the legal coding proved to be a complementary process.

Approaching Europe's historical trajectories to explain its present condition is an ever-growing genre. More than 200 years after the Congress of Vienna, more than 100 years after the First World War, more than sixty years after the Treaty of Rome, more than half a decade after the Brexit referendum – and after more than a year of open warfare in Ukraine, the European project remains in constant flux. A seemingly endless sequence of junctures over the last two decades has raised the demand for historically grounded analyses of Europe. The desire for such publications, both academic and for a broader audience, is thus far from exhausted. Every turn in European politics gives rise to a new take on Europe's past by historians and scholars working in related disciplines.

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.

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.

During the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–5), a woman sold ration cards on the Noordplein, one of the busiest streets in Rotterdam. She was paid twenty guilders for each ration card. Her buyers, in turn, resold the coupons for sugar, butter or bread separately in order to make a higher profit. They could make up to 150 guilders per ration card. Not far from there, in Amsterdam, people went to the corner of Rozendwarsstraat to fraudulently buy coupons for bread or wheat cake on the black market. Anyone with seven guilders could buy a slice. Considering that some people only earned twenty-two guilders a week, not everyone could afford to go to the black market for extra calories. Both of these stories were told by women who survived the Dutch Hunger Winter, and are included in Ingrid de Zwarte's recent monograph. They illustrate some of the important contributions that have emerged from recent historical works in the related fields of Hunger and Food Studies. They demonstrate the agency of ordinary and marginalised subjects, particularly women, in the face of scarcity. They reveal the importance of the coping strategies people developed, which allows us to think of these individuals beyond their traditional status as passive victims of scarcity. And they show us how, in the context of hunger and famine, ideas of what was normal or acceptable behaviour could be transformed.

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.

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.

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.

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.