Pub Date : 2023-03-27DOI: 10.1017/s0960777322001011
V. Strazzeri
The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered ‘interweaving’. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the ‘women's question’ – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists’ reception of 1970s feminism.
{"title":"The Interweaving: Communist Women and Feminism in 1970s Italy","authors":"V. Strazzeri","doi":"10.1017/s0960777322001011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322001011","url":null,"abstract":"The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered ‘interweaving’. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the ‘women's question’ – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists’ reception of 1970s feminism.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43540831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.1017/s0960777323000115
S. Huxtable
In an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay was a rejoinder to those who would see harbingers of the Soviet collapse in the heterogeneous social tendencies of the postwar period. Instead, Bittner draws attention to the sources of cohesion that held the Soviet Union together through the challenges of wartime and beyond. However, Bittner intended his essay not as a general theory of post-war Soviet society, but as an observation about the integrative tendencies that kept the Soviet Union together during the Second World War and in the decades that immediately followed. So when did this alchemical potential for ‘self-organization, resilience, regeneration, redefinition, and creation of new social forms and structures’ come to an end?2
{"title":"A Deceptive Stability: New Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Society","authors":"S. Huxtable","doi":"10.1017/s0960777323000115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777323000115","url":null,"abstract":"In an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay was a rejoinder to those who would see harbingers of the Soviet collapse in the heterogeneous social tendencies of the postwar period. Instead, Bittner draws attention to the sources of cohesion that held the Soviet Union together through the challenges of wartime and beyond. However, Bittner intended his essay not as a general theory of post-war Soviet society, but as an observation about the integrative tendencies that kept the Soviet Union together during the Second World War and in the decades that immediately followed. So when did this alchemical potential for ‘self-organization, resilience, regeneration, redefinition, and creation of new social forms and structures’ come to an end?2","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46935038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1017/s0960777323000024
C. Schields
This paper charts the emergence of social scientific studies on Black kinship from its origins in the United States and colonial Caribbean to its revivification in the decolonisation-era Netherlands. Demonstrating how racial knowledge was from its inception a tool of transnational governance, the author argues that Black kinship studies also informed the development of the Dutch welfare state in the aftermath of decolonisation. Drawing upon Dutch state – and municipal – archival sources as well as the private papers and published works of key figures in Black kinship studies, she charts how publicly-funded sociologists and anthropologists tracked Dutch citizens from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles through the metropolitan welfare state, producing a corpus of knowledge that connected kinship and welfare reliance. Though Caribbean-born Dutch citizens opposed the racist assumptions of state-funded scholarship, research on Black kinship ultimately informed the course of Dutch welfarism from the expansion of interventionist programmes in the 1970s to retrenchment in the 1990s.
{"title":"A Science of Reform and Retrenchment: Black Kinship Studies, Decolonisation and the Dutch Welfare State","authors":"C. Schields","doi":"10.1017/s0960777323000024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777323000024","url":null,"abstract":"This paper charts the emergence of social scientific studies on Black kinship from its origins in the United States and colonial Caribbean to its revivification in the decolonisation-era Netherlands. Demonstrating how racial knowledge was from its inception a tool of transnational governance, the author argues that Black kinship studies also informed the development of the Dutch welfare state in the aftermath of decolonisation. Drawing upon Dutch state – and municipal – archival sources as well as the private papers and published works of key figures in Black kinship studies, she charts how publicly-funded sociologists and anthropologists tracked Dutch citizens from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles through the metropolitan welfare state, producing a corpus of knowledge that connected kinship and welfare reliance. Though Caribbean-born Dutch citizens opposed the racist assumptions of state-funded scholarship, research on Black kinship ultimately informed the course of Dutch welfarism from the expansion of interventionist programmes in the 1970s to retrenchment in the 1990s.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47989880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1017/s0960777323000103
F. Camerin
This review article focuses on two key developments in urban history. The first is that the new transnational approach to urban history is significantly advancing the field and the second is that within the European context an important new emphasis is being placed on Eastern and Southern Europe. As claimed by Claus Møller Jørgensen in his review of nineteenth-century transnational urban history: transnational urban history entails a measure of comparative work to find commonalities as hints of connections . . . The enlargement of scale and the search for connections does add new perspectives to urban history and produces new knowledge . . . Focusing on cities as the location of transnational processes of modernity brings urban place more centrally into discussions of national space and national histories.1
{"title":"Investigating European Cities in the Modern Age through the Lens of the Global Urban History Approach","authors":"F. Camerin","doi":"10.1017/s0960777323000103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777323000103","url":null,"abstract":"This review article focuses on two key developments in urban history. The first is that the new transnational approach to urban history is significantly advancing the field and the second is that within the European context an important new emphasis is being placed on Eastern and Southern Europe. As claimed by Claus Møller Jørgensen in his review of nineteenth-century transnational urban history:\u0000\u0000 transnational urban history entails a measure of comparative work to find commonalities as hints of connections . . . The enlargement of scale and the search for connections does add new perspectives to urban history and produces new knowledge . . . Focusing on cities as the location of transnational processes of modernity brings urban place more centrally into discussions of national space and national histories.1\u0000","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41514515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1017/s096077732200100x
Klaus Richter
To understand the mindset that obstructed the paths out of the interwar crisis, we need to reconstruct widely held expectations for the future of states. To examine how such expectations changed, diverged and competed, this paper investigates the work of inquiry committees, ranging from British and German committees engaged in post-war economic planning to the League of Nation's Commission of Enquiry for European Union of the early 1930s. The paper concludes that the interwar crisis can only be understood if we put the Great War and the Great Depression into a common frame. The war changed expectations, but not as drastically as we would instinctively assume. The expectation of an order of expanding, integrating blocs was challenged by the emergence of new ‘small states’ but survived. It was shattered when efforts to overcome the economic slump failed, leading to a broader acceptance of territorial revisionism across Europe than hitherto assumed.
{"title":"The Catastrophe of the Present and That of the Future: Expectations for European States from the Great War to the Great Depression","authors":"Klaus Richter","doi":"10.1017/s096077732200100x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s096077732200100x","url":null,"abstract":"To understand the mindset that obstructed the paths out of the interwar crisis, we need to reconstruct widely held expectations for the future of states. To examine how such expectations changed, diverged and competed, this paper investigates the work of inquiry committees, ranging from British and German committees engaged in post-war economic planning to the League of Nation's Commission of Enquiry for European Union of the early 1930s. The paper concludes that the interwar crisis can only be understood if we put the Great War and the Great Depression into a common frame. The war changed expectations, but not as drastically as we would instinctively assume. The expectation of an order of expanding, integrating blocs was challenged by the emergence of new ‘small states’ but survived. It was shattered when efforts to overcome the economic slump failed, leading to a broader acceptance of territorial revisionism across Europe than hitherto assumed.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43463977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1017/s0960777322000947
A. Kurimay
This paper is about a remarkable file, ‘Interviews with Homosexuals’, in the bequest of László Cseh-Szombathy (1925–2007), who was internationally renowned and one of Hungary's most celebrated sociologists. Looking at the ways in which the interviews and the conceptual framework of the questions asked by Cseh-Szombathy were crafted, along with the interviewees’ answers to those questions, the article investigates the interaction of sexual experts and male homosexuals in late socialist-state Hungary. The author contends that, at the same time as sexual experts had historically fuelled and contributed to homophobia, sexual experts during late state-socialism also became the primary agents who started to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality and played a crucial role in facilitating homosexual men's exploration of sexual identity and self-acceptance. The paper highlights how Hungarian sexological experts engaged in productive dialogue with their patients and interview subjects, which shaped sexological expertise on homosexuality.
{"title":"From Hormone Shots to Cruising Tips: Hungarian Experts and Homosexuality in Late State-Socialism","authors":"A. Kurimay","doi":"10.1017/s0960777322000947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322000947","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is about a remarkable file, ‘Interviews with Homosexuals’, in the bequest of László Cseh-Szombathy (1925–2007), who was internationally renowned and one of Hungary's most celebrated sociologists. Looking at the ways in which the interviews and the conceptual framework of the questions asked by Cseh-Szombathy were crafted, along with the interviewees’ answers to those questions, the article investigates the interaction of sexual experts and male homosexuals in late socialist-state Hungary. The author contends that, at the same time as sexual experts had historically fuelled and contributed to homophobia, sexual experts during late state-socialism also became the primary agents who started to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality and played a crucial role in facilitating homosexual men's exploration of sexual identity and self-acceptance. The paper highlights how Hungarian sexological experts engaged in productive dialogue with their patients and interview subjects, which shaped sexological expertise on homosexuality.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43066400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-02DOI: 10.1017/s0960777322000935
Benedetto Zaccaria
This article addresses the influence of personalism – an anti-liberal, anti-socialist intellectual movement which developed in France in the 1930s – on the process of European integration during the European Commission presidency of Jacques Delors (1985–95). The received wisdom is that the personalist tradition contributed to shaping the early developments in European integration in the 1950s but its influence later declined with the consolidation of the bipolar equilibrium in Europe. Instead, this work shows that personalism gradually re-emerged during the mid-1970s and 1980s and inspired the Commission's search for an anti-individualist European social model, the supranational democratisation of the integration process and the continental vision of European integration after 1989.
{"title":"Personalism and European Integration: Jacques Delors and the Legacy of the 1930s","authors":"Benedetto Zaccaria","doi":"10.1017/s0960777322000935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322000935","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the influence of personalism – an anti-liberal, anti-socialist intellectual movement which developed in France in the 1930s – on the process of European integration during the European Commission presidency of Jacques Delors (1985–95). The received wisdom is that the personalist tradition contributed to shaping the early developments in European integration in the 1950s but its influence later declined with the consolidation of the bipolar equilibrium in Europe. Instead, this work shows that personalism gradually re-emerged during the mid-1970s and 1980s and inspired the Commission's search for an anti-individualist European social model, the supranational democratisation of the integration process and the continental vision of European integration after 1989.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41698028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0960777322000959
Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco
This article focuses on the Francoist ‘New State's’ foreign policy as a means of explaining the failure in food supplies which led to ‘Franco's famine’ in the early 1940s. It contends that eschewing strict neutrality in favour of pro-Axis policies after the outbreak of the Second World War contributed to creating the famine. Faced with Spain's Germanophile stance, first Britain, and later the United States, took a series of measures aimed at preventing any form of Spanish participation in the war. Most significant among these was the strictly managed economic blockade of Spain, which exacerbated problems of basic supply that had already been created by the dictatorship's policy of autarky. The result was the aggravation of famine conditions. The article will further demonstrate that the dictatorship was perfectly aware of the blockade's effect on the population and the suffering it caused.
{"title":"Building an Empire and Bringing About a Famine: The Allied Economic Blockade of Spain during the Second World War (1939–1945)","authors":"Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco","doi":"10.1017/s0960777322000959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322000959","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the Francoist ‘New State's’ foreign policy as a means of explaining the failure in food supplies which led to ‘Franco's famine’ in the early 1940s. It contends that eschewing strict neutrality in favour of pro-Axis policies after the outbreak of the Second World War contributed to creating the famine. Faced with Spain's Germanophile stance, first Britain, and later the United States, took a series of measures aimed at preventing any form of Spanish participation in the war. Most significant among these was the strictly managed economic blockade of Spain, which exacerbated problems of basic supply that had already been created by the dictatorship's policy of autarky. The result was the aggravation of famine conditions. The article will further demonstrate that the dictatorship was perfectly aware of the blockade's effect on the population and the suffering it caused.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48255421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/726061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726061","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":"32 1","pages":"498 - 499"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46195593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-27DOI: 10.1017/s0960777322000911
Maurice J. Casey
What can a focus on intimacies and affinities between radical immigrants in Ireland and their Irish counterparts tell us about the transnational scope of the global Irish revolution? This article answers this question through the lives of Rose MacKenna, an Irish playwright and socialist, and her husband Sidney Arnold, a Latvian literary translator. The activist career of this obscure Irish-Latvian couple took them from revolutionary Dublin in the wake of the Easter Rising to Petrograd in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This article argues that MacKenna and Arnold, by virtue of their obscurity and marginality, rather than in spite of it, can suggest the sources and methodologies required to uncover the transnational world of Ireland's radical intelligentsia.
{"title":"‘Save Me from My Friends’: The Transnational Intimacies of an Irish-Latvian Couple within and beyond the Irish Revolution, 1916–1921","authors":"Maurice J. Casey","doi":"10.1017/s0960777322000911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0960777322000911","url":null,"abstract":"What can a focus on intimacies and affinities between radical immigrants in Ireland and their Irish counterparts tell us about the transnational scope of the global Irish revolution? This article answers this question through the lives of Rose MacKenna, an Irish playwright and socialist, and her husband Sidney Arnold, a Latvian literary translator. The activist career of this obscure Irish-Latvian couple took them from revolutionary Dublin in the wake of the Easter Rising to Petrograd in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This article argues that MacKenna and Arnold, by virtue of their obscurity and marginality, rather than in spite of it, can suggest the sources and methodologies required to uncover the transnational world of Ireland's radical intelligentsia.","PeriodicalId":46066,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary European History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47681263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}