This article takes the fate of industrial wealth in East-Central and Southeast Europe through the ruptures of the twentieth century as a case study. It compares post-imperial transitions in East-Central Europe to regime changes in the 1940s and after 1989. It maintains that the peculiarities of post-imperial transitions and the uniquely high leverage available to Austro-Hungarian industrialists to preserve their assets despite geopolitical transformations after 1918 come to the fore especially clearly when we compare them to the ruptures by the Holocaust and subsequently by the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Industrialist Ferenc Chorin Jr. (1879–1964), a Hungarian of Jewish origins with major investments in Transylvania's coal mines, was among those key industrialists who lived through both world wars, passing away in 1964 in New York. The article uses his life as a thread to show how the fate of a business family can influence mainstream narratives of modern European history, usually driven by a concentration on political ruptures.

After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czech teachers and other civil servants came to the peripheral regions of the Slovak part of the state. Their task, apart from ensuring the functioning of the newly established state institutions, was to promote the Czechoslovak national project. Some of these officials remained in their positions for many years, overcoming major macro-political upheavals. This article analyses the role of individuals, their loyalties and networks in establishing and maintaining stability across historical ruptures in a remote, linguistically heterogeneous area of Czechoslovakia. Since these actors fostered the official state ideology and played a prominent role in the lifeworld of local communities for many decades, this article shows how these figures endured numerous ruptures, bound together the state and their localities and reinforced the state’s presence on the ground. Using the case of a Czech school principal in the predominantly German- and Hungarian-speaking town of Nižný Medzev in eastern Slovakia, this article examines the role of individual actors in promoting and shaping the various forms of Czechoslovak nation-building policies on the local level.

The memory of the early-1940s Greek famine has rarely been researched. A narrative attributing full responsibility to the Axis occupying forces, mostly Germans, and focusing almost exclusively on the 1941–2 ordeal of Athens was shaped by 1950. This became the official collective (cultural) memory and remained largely unchanged until the early twenty-first century. The financial crisis that Greece experienced since 2009 further enhanced this memory, bringing the focus exclusively on the German responsibility. This article interrogates the adult fiction works that dealt with this famine in the period 1950–2019, exploring whether these reflect the official collective memory and its changes. Furthermore, it explores how fiction has dealt with two aspects of the famine that are not included in the official collective memory: the black market and famine prostitution. The selected fiction works are utilised as ‘archives’ of the collective memory that prevailed at the time of their writing.

Jacob Lorenz (1883–1946) was a pathbreaking Swiss statistician and sociologist turned right-wing intellectual who promoted a revision of Swiss society and politics. In 1938, the Turkish government invited Lorenz to conduct fieldwork and submit a report on the country's high cost of living. Recent studies of transnational corporatism might lead us to assume that this invitation was the result of a shared corporatist ideology. Using Lorenz's report and travel writings alongside archival documents, however, this article argues against the hypothesis that Lorenz's mission served as a conduit of transnational corporatist interaction and influence. Instead, Lorenz's mission is best understood in its Turkish domestic political context, while its findings were shaped by Lorenz's personal ideological ambivalence. By highlighting the ideological tensions inherent in Lorenz's mission, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on ‘illiberal internationalism’.

The article, as an afterword to the special issue Navigating Post-Imperial Transitions, uses the story of a Transylvanian Romanian and Greek Catholic family, the Pordeas, as an example of several key themes of the articles: managing difference within and after the empire, concrete consequences of international arrangements, agency of individuals in the transition. The Pordeas’ extremely intense engagement and entanglement with the empire highlights that a key feature of imperial biographies, the skill of connecting milieus as a way of differentiated rule, was not limited to the high-ranking imperial bureaucrats; it was rather a knowledge important in lower educated strata of society. After 1918, within nation states that often consciously used techniques of imperial rule for their own consolidation, it opened upward mobility and sometimes global horizon for these people. However, the ability to create connections is just as important for any state facing internal difference as it was for empires, showing how much empire was created from below.

In the 2000s, Estonia’s self-avowedly neoliberal government institutionalised voting over the internet, becoming the only country in the world to use online voting in national elections. This innovation was branded as a key component of Estonia’s ‘digital republic’, articulated as an alternative to the bulky welfare state as well as to Soviet authoritarianism. This article suggests that by focusing on the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpinned the e-voting project, specifically the Estonian digital ID, we can reframe the history of post-Cold War development. It argues that reforms of post-Soviet state institutions were driven by a fragile coalition of civil servants, looking for ways to accomplish new challenges under serious budgetary constraints, computer engineers, who shared an ethos of experimentation developed at the Soviet-era Institute of Cybernetics, and banks, who offloaded their R&D initiatives to the state. This coalition was fraught with conflict, did not last long and had no singular goal – and thus could later be framed as a victory for democratic reform as well as another example of state capture by private interests. Further, the infrastructural basis of e-voting helps explain how Estonian policymakers could defend the institutions against criticisms that prevented its widespread adoption elsewhere.

Especially as regards Commonwealth restrictions, Ireland's immigration policy has been seen as (surreptitiously) dependent on UK policy. Although the Common Travel Area imposed serious limits, Irish discretion was in fact significant and restrictive. In 1948–9 the United Kingdom secured Ireland's public commitment to extend reciprocal citizenship rights to all the Commonwealth, notwithstanding its secession, but Ireland avoided this vis-à-vis the ‘new’ Commonwealth and left its aliens exemption law deliberately opaque. Whilst broadly mirroring the UK Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, Ireland retained apartheid South Africa as partially privileged and only comprehensively exempted British citizens born within the United Kingdom. From 1973, the United Kingdom largely abandoned any privileged treatment but, in entirely removing this in 1975 and selectively imposing visas from 1976, Ireland went beyond even this. These divergences reflected that, compared to the United Kingdom, it had left an increasingly diverse Commonwealth in 1949 and had a stronger homogenous nationalism.

In the second half of the twentieth century, West Germany was one of the largest pesticide producers and exporters worldwide. Among these exports were substances that were unpopular, obsolete, or entirely banned due to their health risks. The country case adds to our knowledge of global pesticide politics in three ways: First, politicians and industry used hunger in the Global South as an argument to justify export practices in the 1970s. Second, public criticism against this export was only successful when the health of German citizens was perceived to be under threat. Third, industry arguments led to creative and legal ways to export substances that have been problematised in the Global North. In view of this, the current EU initiative to regulate banned pesticide trade, though important, appears to remain tentative or ineffective.

After the Second World War, lawmakers in the re-established democracies of Western and Central Europe set in place various judicial, administrative and political review processes. These were highly controversial as they had to manage two conflicting demands: the desire to purge former Nazis, fascists and collaborators as a means of re-democratisation, and to keep them away from power through a series of democratic restrictions such as temporary disenfranchisement. In this article, I investigate how postwar elites in France, Austria and West Germany dealt with this democratic conundrum and how their opponents used the concept of democracy in order to discredit postwar purges and achieve their revision through amnesty laws. I put forward the notion of democratic revisionism and I try to define its role within the wider framework of postwar transition and democracy.

This article proposes to connect the history of European integration with that of protest movements. Drawing on a transnational approach, it highlights a double link between the protest movements of spring 1968 in France and autumn 1969 in West Germany and the rise of the European Economic Community. Firstly, the completion of the common market on 1 July 1968 increased competition between European economies, fostering social demands on the eve of the protest. Secondly, the economic consequences of May 1968, both in France and in West Germany, underlined the new interdependencies of French and German societies within the common market. The need for convergence towards a ‘community of stability’ paved the way for negotiations on an economic and monetary union after the relaunch at the Congress of The Hague in December 1969.

This article focuses on the early history of Northwestern European opinion polling (1940s–1950s), specifically the cases of the Netherlands and Sweden. The evolution of opinion polling and its influence on post-war politics and society should be understood in light of processes of international transfer and entanglement. The Dutch-Swedish comparison brings into focus the ways in which the national experiences of the Second World War influenced how opinion pollsters discursively linked the practice to ideas about democracy. Furthermore, the article highlights entanglements across the boundaries of science, as commercial survey methods were picked up by social scientists, and across national borders, as opinion pollsters across Western Europe were in frequent contact with each other.

Norway is celebrated for its successful management of petroleum resources. This success is often attributed to Norway's institutions and to key Norwegian policymaking figures. However, the roles of foreign experts in shaping early Norwegian oil policy have been overlooked. This article explores the roles of two Iraqi oil experts, Farouk Al-Kasim and Hasan Zakariya, and finds that they contributed to shaping the Norwegian petroleum management system at a crucial stage in its development. The article reveals the interconnectedness of global oil policies and challenges conventional North-South diffusion narratives, broadening our understanding of the impact of decolonisation on contemporary Europe.

This article discusses the development of lifestyle and value studies in the market research industry in relation to changing understandings of the consumer in late twentieth-century Sweden. It uses the analytical notion of the ‘sovereign consumer’ to argue that the market research industry both exploited and reinforced this perception of consumers through lifestyles as a means for categorisation. The analysis draws on material from the leading Swedish market research company at the time, Sifo, including its connections to the European industry. The results show how the industry sought to break up the supposedly homogenous postwar Swedish consumption landscape by constructing new consumer types that suited a more market-oriented society, and it was the confident, individualised consumer who sought self-fulfilment that was portrayed as the most attractive type. The article argues that the politics of marketing and advertising played an important part in shaping Swedish consumer culture during the market turn.

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.

The article examines efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerised, post-Fordist ‘flexible’ production. Focusing on the enterprise level, this article demonstrates that the Communist Party inaugurated its own variation of flexible production; in doing so, it inadvertently created the conditions of possibility for the transition from state socialism to capitalism on the factory floor.