It was a turning point in the history of European integration and a unique moment for the first President of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein. On 16 June 1965 in the afternoon, Hallstein appeared before the European Parliament (EP) to express his strong support for the constitutional interpretation of European law launched by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the new Van Gend en Loos (1963) and Costa v ENEL (1964) judgments. Here the ECJ had controversially assumed the competence to define the relationship between European law and national constitutional orders. By doing so the ECJ sidestepped the respective constitutional clauses of the member states on how to receive international (and European) law. Primary legal norms from the founding treaties, when clear and unambiguous, would have direct effect inside the legal order of the member states as well as primacy vis-à-vis national legislation, whether precedent or antecedent. This was a remarkable breakthrough for a constitutional interpretation of European law.

Between 1789 and 1815, the nation evolved from a political novelty to a constitutional cornerstone.This chapter summarizes the turning points in that process, through the shifting relations among European monarchies and empires and between those empires and their populations and cultural communities. The ‘ground zero’ of emerging nationalism was not one or another specific country but rather the grinding tectonic fault-lines between empires with conflicted populations along their peripheries: importantly that between the Holy Roman Empire and France, owing to their advanced state of institutionalized literacy and communicative technologies and infrastructures. Amidst these crises and transitions, the nation did not so much wrest power from the monarchical state as gain prestige, charisma and influence within it. When the two came to arm-wrestling, the nation almost invariably lost the battle – but it was never quite annulled as a political force. When Europe’s states were unmade in the constitutional and strategic conflicts between 1789 and 1914, the nation influenced and shaped their remakings. The nation, through a steady flow of appealing and inspiring cultural production, positioned itself as the natural, logical platform for democratic civil rights. Nations gained soft power as states and empires lost their hard power.

This book has historicized the quest for individual freedom in twentieth-century Europe by highlighting conflict-ridden expansion: more and more people claimed the status of free individuals, but they did so in very different ways, in various contexts, and more often than not in the face of powerful opposition. The Conclusion brings out the overarching narrative centered around ordinary Europeans’ efforts to expand their realm of control in spite of obstacles, to carve out a space for themselves, and to live freely according to their own preferred understandings. It also argues that these efforts stood in tension with various political movements that aspired to combine individual and collective freedom. This tension eased when the quest in its unheroic versions, having put both democracies and dictatorships under pressure to adapt, could be pursued in the more favorable context of détente and affluence. With the end of the Cold war, it seemed indeed to have prevailed. But the relationship between individual freedom and Europeanness was never entirely exempt from conflict and complexity and has recently become more controversial again.

This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in Europe. While the phenomenon has received significant attention from several academic disciplines, social justice has rarely been explored as a historical subject in its own right. This chapter explores why this should have been so. It argues that the elusiveness of social justice as a historical subject can be explained by the way in which conceptions of social justice were located at the confluence of other historical narratives that have shaped the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. The chapter provides an extensive survey of these influential narratives, which include the rise of state power, the development of cultures of social improvement, the changing popular expectations of government, and the domain of citizenship. The chapter then presents an innovative approach for the historical study of ‘social justice in context’. Focusing on the ways in which conceptions of social justice grew out of the intricate interplay between rulers and ruled, it develops a research agenda that concentrates on the analysis of three distinctive dimensions, including the temporalities, the spatiality, and the actors and agencies of conceptions of social justice.

Pufendorf is mainly remembered as a natural law philosopher but he was also an influential historian and a public intellectual. Apart from an early phase where his historical interests followed a conventional antiquarian course he focused on recent or contemporary history as evidenced by his popular and much translated, adapted and imitated European History (1680), his acerbic pamphlet History of Popedom (1679), and the monumental ex officio treatments of recent history of Sweden and Brandenburg: History of Gustavus Adolphus and Christina (1686), History of Charles Gustavus (1696) and History of Frederick William (1695). Pufendorf's historical works are informed by a clear and simple vision of states as unified agents acting within a framework of real (moderate) and imaginary (unrealistic), permanent (geopolitical) and temporary (contingent) interests. He combined this vision, informed by his natural law theory, with an abiding interest in diplomacy and decision making and a corresponding disregard for the concrete political players and the action on the battlefield. As royal Swedish and later electoral Brandenburg historiographer he had privileged access to archival sources. He used this to bolster his authority but also to present a firmly streamlined and occasionally biased account in harmony with his religious and political loyalties.

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural materials aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. It considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers’ rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. In recognising rehabilitation systems as complex and multi-faceted sociocultural constructions, it sheds light on the ways in which they became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging. Internal to such systems, the book argues, were the limits of expansion of services to the industrially disabled. In interrogating the post-war quest to extend rehabilitation rights to civilians, the book provides insight into the development of social rights and statist welfarism and the evolution of ideas about the means, ends, and objects of humanitarianism.

This chapter introduces and contextualizes the book's focus on the Portuguese retornados or returnees and argues that by spotlighting their history, we illuminate the remaking of the Portuguese nation in a world after empire. Via Portugal’s returnees, we grasp how decolonization reshaped Western European societies – their demographic makeup, their laws and institutions, their notions of the national community, their political communication, and their public memories.