Journal of Contemporary History

There has been much historical debate about whether or not there was a ‘political consensus’ in Britain in the postwar decades. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what politicians said about ‘consensus’ at the time and what this indicated about the nature of political argument. This article shows that ‘consensus’ and similar terms (such as ‘the middle way’) were in use from the 1940s, but it does not assume that consensus existed just because some contemporaries asserted that it did. Rather, it examines how differing interpretations of consensus were invoked in political debate in order to advance a range of partisan agendas. It further shows how right-wing Conservatives from the late 1960s sought both to attack the consensus rhetorically and to reach out (in Keith Joseph’s phrase) to ‘the common ground’ that New Right policies supposedly represented. It concludes that Thatcher, as Conservative leader and Prime Minister, did not abandon the structure of consensus rhetoric so much as repopulate it with exclusively ‘national’ terms.

This article examines the British attempt to use the momentum created after the conclusion of the Locarno Agreements of October 1925 to promote a similar settlement in Central Europe among the Little Entente countries and Hungary, and in the Balkans, where Bulgaria had to be reconciled with her neighbours, particularly with Yugoslavia (Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), with each region being dealt with in a separate settlement. The approach of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, was to induce the leaders of the countries in question to come into personal contact and tackle their mutual antagonisms, while at the same time securing that Britain, France and Italy maintained a common stance and spoke with one voice to all the concerned governments. The article outlines the main lines of diplomatic intercourse and analyses the reasons for the ultimate failure of both ‘Central European’ and ‘Balkan Locarno’. It is argued here that Chamberlain’s policy, his distorted perceptions, delusive premises and fallacious judgement accounted for the inevitable breakdown of his Locarno-like scheme. This failure became apparent towards the end of the period studied here and its consequences heralded difficult times in the years to come.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union employed arms exports as a means of attempting to exert influence on its less-developed Asian neighbors, either by intervening in internal struggles or encouraging pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist foreign policy. In Turkey and Iran, Soviet arms aimed to promote friendly governments and head off potential intervention. In Afghanistan, the Soviets attempted unsuccessfully to prop up the regime of Amanullah Khan. In China, the Soviets pursued an unfocused policy of providing weapons to a wide range of factions and warlords in an effort to win favor, only to find their efforts collapsing with Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. This led the Soviets to overhaul their management of arms exports, handing authority to Wostwag, a front company for Soviet intelligence.

Propaganda was always a key preoccupation of the Soviet regime and it was not limited to the printed word. Public speaking – whether in meetings and lectures or on the radio – had a prominent place in the Soviet version of modernity. From the early 1920s onwards, propagandists, journalists and performers debated how best to use the spoken word: what was the balance to be struck between oratory and information, edifcation and theatricality, authority and popular participation? Radio professionals struggled with these issues more than anyone: they had to get broadcasts right, yet studios worked under great pressure and faced serious technological constraints. By 1937 experimental and interactive forms of broadcasting were effectively banned. They made a slow comeback in the postwar era, thanks in no small part to technological improvements such as the introduction of mobile recording equipment. The story of how Russia learned to speak on air is an important and hitherto overlooked aspect of Soviet ‘cultural construction’.

Between summer 1937 and autumn 1938, the time of the ‘Great Terror’, numerous so-called ‘National Operations’ targeting ethnic minorities were carried out in the USSR. The largest was the ‘Polish Operation’. Starting in August 1937 and ending in October 1938, NKVD units arrested over 150,000 people, 111,000 of whom were soon shot. The ‘Polish Operation’ marked the zenith of the persecution of Poles in the Soviet Union, which had begun in the early 1930s when the party leadership embarked on systematic mass terror against the Polish minority. Between 1930 and 1936 Stalin ordered the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics to be purged of Poles, resulting in thousands of deaths and many more deportations. It is estimated that Polish losses in the Ukrainian SSR were about 30 per cent, while in the Belorussian SSR, where some 300,000 persons declared themselves as Poles in the 1920s, the Polish minority was almost completely annihilated or deported. The available sources clearly imply that it was ethnic-defined terror and that the ‘Polish Operation’ was merely a peak in the persecution.

Historiography is currently discussing the concept of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ as social practice in National Socialist Germany. Yet the debate barely touched upon the largest institution of the Nazi state, the Wehrmacht. This research gap was due not least to a lack of appropriate sources. A collection of sources has been made accessible, however, that enables us to address this desideratum: the files of the US interrogation centre Fort Hunt, where over 3000 German soldiers were interrogated and wiretapped during the Second World War. The files contain eavesdropping transcripts and biographical data that reveal both mentalities and socio-cultural backgrounds. These documents allow for an analysis of the extent to which milieu-specific lines of segregation and cultural interpretation retained their effectiveness in the Wehrmacht or were superimposed by an overarching collective morality. By looking at soldiers from the working-class and the Catholic milieu, the article argues that traditional dividing lines were largely blurred in the Wehrmacht, even if cores of dissident milieus persisted. Loyalty to the regime crisscrossed milieu boundaries and the majority of the soldiers across the social strata identified themselves with the Wehrmacht’s canon of values, which was a key factor for the cohesion of the armed forces of the Nazi state.

Fritz Todt created a program of lectures for German engineers in 1941. This ‘Speaker System’ was designed to enhance technical training, spread Todt’s Deutsche Technik ideology and prepare for technocratic Nazi control of postwar Europe. The Speaker System illustrates the tension inherent in the ‘ideological-pragmatic synthesis’ that was the Third Reich. Due to deteriorating wartime conditions and to Albert Speer’s shift to a ‘total war’ footing, the Speaker System faded away after 1943. Lectures were on the whole apolitical, with the ideological thrust varying widely between regions. Many speakers were not members of the Nazi Party or its engineering affiliate, demonstrating the regime’s wartime shift to technological pragmatism. Fritz Todt’s ideological vision proved secondary to the core Nazi goals of conquering Lebensraum and destroying the Jews.

Australia was an active member of the Colombo Plan for aid to South and Southeast Asia, beginning in 1951 as a loosely organized umbrella of multiple bilateral aid agreements between Commonwealth countries and quickly expanding in geographical reach and membership. Towards the end of the 1950s, as members of this ‘plan’ geared up for a new wave of aid projects, they also attached new importance to information activities associated with aid. In this Australian case study, journalists were thrust to the fore of story-generation relating to Australia’s involvement in the Colombo Plan. These written stories, and also still and moving images, were aimed at both domestic Australian audiences and also overseas audiences. Thus began some of the first important steps in what today is called ‘public diplomacy’, and what, at the time, was a new experiment in foreign policy and reputation-making.