Concerned by the revolutionary violence that spread in Catalonia after the failed military coup of 17 and 18 July 1936 led to civil war, France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d’Orsay) appointed veteran ‘front-line’ consuls in Barcelona. These consuls had already experienced revolutionary events during the Russian civil wars; however, their prior experience shaped their interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, leading them to fear a Bolshevik contagion beyond the Pyrenees border. Their bias thus shaped the French general consulate’s humanitarian action in Barcelona. Far from being strictly neutral and impartial, it adopted a resolutely counter-revolutionary stance.

This essay explores how Iceland, a newly independent state on the northern European periphery, responded to the international agenda for post-war stabilisation set out by economic experts after the turmoil of the First World War. It shows that the government of the so-called Austerity Alliance, led by Jón Þorláksson, adopted austerity policies devised at the international financial conferences in Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). To please external experts and creditors, it implemented a comprehensive fiscal and monetary policy of austerity and created a new central bank that was independent of politics. The aim, however, was not to divorce markets from government in a return to a pre-war era of laissez-faire as the scholarly literature suggests. Offering the first analysis of ‘the Icelandic business cycle’, the Þorláksson government enforced austerity by carving out ‘the economy’ – a measurable entity legible to expert management – that greatly expanded the role of the state.

This article argues that practices of gratitude were central to Franco-American relations in the early Cold War. Through the story of the French Gratitude Train to the American People in 1948–1949, it brings the diplomacy of gratitude to the heart of the post-war years, reflecting on the complicated relations between the two countries and on the ability of emotional performances of gratitude to shape as well as nuance post-1945 dynamics. Rather than focusing on political elites, this is a grassroots story which revolves around lace doilies and metal toys; women, children and veterans; lingering traumas mixed with genuine amazement. Through the lens of gratitude practice and performance, the article highlights the importance of ordinary citizens, material culture and feelings in the ideological battles and geopolitical reconfigurations of the mid-twentieth century.

This article examines the work habits of saleswomen in West Germany's retail and describes the amorphous yet evolving boundaries of working and non-working time. During the 1960s, women employed in retail began to work part-time to combine their domestic duties and a career. In their non-working hours, these women attended to childcare and household duties. This much is known, but this article shows that, in addition, female workers in retail often had to face irregular extensions of their working hours. This enabled companies to reduce the paid time of their employees. Moreover, some employment qualifications associated with women (smiling, engaging in conversation, displaying fine motor skills) were not properly appreciated, much less financially rewarded, but were instead regarded as natural traits and not subject to compensation. All these micro mechanisms led to women being held back from full work life participation, and therefore reinforced gender inequalities in general.

The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the British printing industry seemed to epitomise the United Kingdom’s status as the sick man of Europe, worn down by changing patterns of consumption, lagging technological modernisation and all-powerful trade unions. Especially the latter were more often than not seen as the problem, not the solution to the industry’s problems. An extravagant set of so-called restrictive practices, critics alleged, was used to hide that print workers were not putting in the work they were paid for while giving them undeserved bonuses that were choking corporate profitability. Print workers and their representatives offered a very different reading, in which the incriminated practices reflected a thoroughly earned privilege to define and distribute waged work. By looking at shop floor practices and conflicts, the article argues that print workers’ defence of non-working intervals articulated a broader vision of their own place in capitalist production.

Despite the burgeoning literature on historical humanitarianism and transnational history, little work has sought to explain the humanitarian intervention in the ‘first battleground’ of the Cold War, namely the Greek Civil War (1945–9). This paper casts light on the intricate relationship between civilians’ forced displacement and humanitarian aid during the late phases of this conflict. It also questions the extent to which humanitarianism was embedded into liberal and conservative politics of the early Cold War.

From 1941, multiple humanitarian organisations distributed aid to famine-stricken Greek areas, while the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) intervened in Greece in 1943. As the civil strife intensified, more than 700,000 civilians were displaced during the royalist counterinsurgency operations against the communist rebels, while humanitarian groups received the mandate by the royalist government to feed, accommodate and rehabilitate these populations. Most of these relief workers had grappled with wartime famine and relied on the restoration of the pre-war political system to solidify their presence in Greece.

Drawing on archival material from UNRRA and the personal records of humanitarian workers Charles Schermerhorn and Ewan John Christian Hare, I scrutinise how humanitarian logistics became embedded into the conflict, and how the distribution or withholding, of aid determined the forced displacement of civilians. On a second level, I focus on the antagonism between the aid distributed by ‘purely’ humanitarian organisations, such as UNRRA, the NEF and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the so-called ‘development’ aid, as institutionalised by the European Recovery Program in 1948.

On 7 March 1966, when President Charles de Gaulle announced France's withdrawal from the military, leadership of NATO, he also called for the removal of American troops from French soil. To this the American Secretary of State retorted, ‘and those in French cemeteries as well?’ The United States saw de Gaulle's action as an insulting and traitorous rebuff of Allied commitments forged during and after the war. For the French, however, the move was considered a justifiable assertion of national sovereignty, having little to do with the Allied ‘Liberation’ of France some twenty years earlier. In this article, I explore French and American perceptions of the Liberation using French anthropologist Marcel Mauss's pathbreaking 1923 work, The Gift. How can applying Mauss's ideas at the transnational level make sense of the meanings, (mis)interpretations, and implications of the Liberation for state actors on both sides of the Atlantic?

This essay analyses the Holy See's engagement in the postwar discourse surrounding displaced minors by focusing on the case of displaced Italian children from Libya. Separated from their families and evacuated to Italy at the onset of the Second World War, they were placed in Italian Youth of the Lictor (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio; GIL) camps. In the aftermath of the war, these displaced children petitioned to return to their families who had remained in territories no longer part of the Italian empire. This article shows how the Papal Aid Committee for Assisting Refugees took part in the relocation efforts and contributed to the conversation on family reunification. By navigating postwar aid and forming unexpected alliances, the Holy See not only contributed to reshaping Italy's geopolitical presence in the Mediterranean but also solidified conservative family norms within the international discussion on humanitarianism.

This response to Robert Gerwarth and Gwendal Piégais’s special issue on humanitarianism and civil wars in Europe has three parts. First, it aims to situate the authors’ findings in the broader context of what might be termed the ‘dialectic of humanitarianism’ – namely the reciprocal tendency of the violence of war, and notably civil war, and the mobilisation of humanitarian aid for its victims, to reinforce each other. Second, it considers in more detail some of the implications of the findings of all of the authors on the specific challenges posed by civil wars for ‘humanitarianism’ and for the ways in which we might write the history of the latter in the future. Finally, it reflects briefly on one key aspect of that history, namely the politicisation of humanitarian aid.

The Treblinka revolt has received extensive scholarly attention, though little of this work considers the resistance actions of women prisoners. In this article, I use spatial methods to reveal how Jews at Treblinka created three examples of what I term ‘places of resistance’ and how women supported each. Critically, this article demonstrates how studying these locations highlights the roles of women in resistance up to and including the famous uprising. Taking analyses of gender and memory further, I also examine how our scant knowledge of women's lives at Treblinka prompts consideration of archival silences, masculinity, and oral history practice.

The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusing on the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning of tourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to national security in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange and human contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

Crackdown on religious institutions characterised the onset of the postwar communist dictatorships in East Central Europe. The literature commonly assumes that the new religious policies were influenced by the Soviet Union. However, the adoption of the Soviet blueprint was not straightforward and manifested differently across various regions. This article analyses the implementation process by examining the treatment of nonlegalised religious minorities in early Cold War Czechoslovakia. It argues that beyond adopting the legal framework, the strategy was not seriously informed by the Soviet realities. Through an analysis of the state's attitude towards Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostal movement and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, this study concludes that the Czechoslovak Communist Party did not have any clear plan of action. The relationship with the religious organisations developed organically. It was heavily influenced by confessional distinctions among denominations and ad hoc local decisions, highlighting a deeply decentralised approach to creating religious policies.

This article explores the making of a unified Muslim community in interwar Austria and its ultimate failure. It argues that while the Islamischer Kulturbund Wien represented a visionary idea which aimed at establishing a Muslim community, rooted in both faith and Austrian society, it ultimately remained the dream of only a select few individuals. The association succeeded in strategically positioning itself as the representative body of Muslims in Austria; however, due to a lack of commitment from its members and the rise of fascism in Austria, this early attempt to establish a unified Muslim community in Austria eventually failed. By incorporating unofficial sources in various languages, including private letters, oral history interviews, and newspapers, alongside official archival material, the article amplifies the voice, perspective and agency of key Muslim figures involved, allowing for a more fully developed understanding of the internal and external dynamics of Muslim activism in interwar Vienna.

What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances? This article focuses on and advocates for further analysis of an unstudied discrete phenomenon: ‘the moment of discovery’ in early twentieth century Germany and Austria. The article's four empirical sections analyse various facets of this moment: the clues which pointed towards the Jewish ancestral secret, missed by many non-Jewish ‘Jews’; the reaction of antisemites to becoming the object of their own hatred complex; the deep despair felt during the moment of discovery; the mitigatory actions which could ameliorate the latter; and the minority who reacted positively to the news. Collectively, the piece displays the terror associated with being ‘Jewish’ at the time, the extent to which non-Jewish ‘Jews’ were truly separated from the Jewish community and, crucially, the radicalisation of moments of discovery under Nazism, when they became more devastating than ever.

This article analyses how wealthy men and women manipulated citizenship regimes during and after the Habsburg Empire to access the family laws most convenient for their private lives. To do this, I compare migratory divorce practices in pre-1918 Habsburg Hungary and the post-1918 Free State of Fiume. This article shows that while before 1918 it was mercenary actors who utilised legal loopholes between Austrian and Hungarian family laws and citizenship regulations to obtain divorces for the rich, after 1918 it was the impoverished, globally-isolated, mercenary postimperial state that procured the means for rich clients to buy their way out of their own state's family laws, raising questions about the relationship between the early twentieth-century postimperial world of globally dependent European successor states with today's postcolonial ‘golden passport’ system.

This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign refugees in post-Second World War Sardinia undertaken by two idealistic Americans with the support of the Brethren Service Committee and the fledgling UNHCR. Focusing on individuals rejected for immigration, the initiative aimed to integrate these ‘hard core’ refugees by rendering them agents of development of a ‘backwards’ region of the Italian South and to overcome Italian reluctance to serve as a country of permanent resettlement for the displaced. The history of this project reveals the contradictory impulses of early Cold War refugee relief and humanitarianism: the competition between intergovernmental and voluntary agencies, of secular and spiritual enterprises, and of images of refugees as dependent and difficult to settle and yet capable of self-sufficiency. Many of the ideas piloted in Sardinia, notably the linking of self-sufficiency and development, later became prominent in the UNHCR's work in the Global South.

This article proposes a re-examination of one of the most controversial cases of reparations: the Treaty of Versailles. By focusing on Article 238, which stipulated the restitution of objects stolen or displaced by the German army during the First World War, we can see that the treaty helped to solidify norms concerning the protection of civilian property in wartime and gave civilians a right to have a voice in international law. However, the process of restitution was beset with both practical and political challenges and its success hinged on the role of public authorities, the nature of the objects returned and the impact of social class dynamics. Through this study, we are able to gain a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of restitution, its potential as well as its limitations.

The Czechoslovak oppositional initiative Charter 77 produced dozens of documents on human rights between 1977 and 1992. Yet it never dedicated a separate document to women's rights, even if the issue of women's equality was well represented in global human rights discourse at the time. This article explores this absence in Charter 77's intellectual production. It analyses in detail several Charter documents and samizdat publications that touched upon issues of women's equality, showing that some Charter signatories were ready to acknowledge that the socialist state granted women formal equality, while suggesting that neither material conditions nor cultural norms provided full emancipation. However, a more prevalent critique marked the socialist agenda of women's emancipation as something that restricted women's individual freedom in their personal lives. I argue that in their legalistic approach, the Charter milieu largely lacked the conceptual tools to explore discrimination against women as the manifestation of the broader imbalance of power between men and women beyond the law.