Journal of Contemporary History

The history and analysis of fascism has been a major theme of the first half century of the Journal of Contemporary History, and was a key interest of its founding co-editors, George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur. Both made important contributions to the field, but their approaches were quite different. Mosse began his work on fascism earlier and, in a manner consistent with his other research, emphasized cultural and ideological aspects. He was arguably the first to draw attention to ideology as a coherent aspect for study and inaugurated the ‘cultural turn’ in the historiography of fascism long before this became generally fashionable. Mosse was a pioneer in research on popular culture and the visual arts in this area, as well as on the role and character of myth, developing what some scholars have termed an anthropological approach. He also expanded treatment of the development of racial thought and made a major contribution to studying the psychology and culture of nationalism and mass mobilization. Walter Laqueur entered the field somewhat later and stimulated work on the origins and comparative history of fascism. His books were not as innovative in methodology as those of Mosse, but broader in scope and chronological treatment, and sometimes more narrative in structure. Laqueur extended the inquiry to Russia and to the Middle East, areas in which he was a specialist, and also examined the possibilities of neofascism after 1945, as well as its relation to Islamism at the end of the twentieth century.

The Berlin Wall collapsed a quarter of a century ago. This anniversary led to publication of studies about the success of Central and East European transformation. Some of them maintain that the region became ‘normal,' and nearer to their Western neighbors. In reality, the region still belongs to the periphery of Europe with a mostly dual economy and low level of income. Modern sectors and the entire banking industry are subsidiaries of Western multinationals. The political system is often authoritarian. Democratic forms often cover non-democratic contents. Corruption, tax evasion and other symptoms of peripheral political behavior are quite common. Transformation is so far not accomplished and will certainly require two or three generations to achieve.

Abolitionism as a humanitarian trend at the height of the colonial period was a great intellectual achievement by the European civilization. But the process of making Asian and African people and the right to manumit slaves exercised by Europeans also was a part of complex colonial policy and combined moral assumptions with political and economic interests. This article aims to show how the right to manumit became an important issue in British Imperial policy. It proves that for the British, with the on-going process of self-determination of people in Arabia and Persia, it became more and more difficult to exercise the right to manumit slaves and that in some cases a humanitarian approach was sacrificed for political interests and for imperial strategy.

The images of campus protests and street battles of 1968 are deeply ingrained in public memory and have been the subject of many academic writings. However, the courtroom as a site of protest has been neglected as a serious field of inquiry. By comparing the ‘Chicago 8’ trial of 1969 in the USA with the proceedings against the members of the West German Kommune 1 of 1967, this article not only demonstrates the importance of the legal process as part of a wider movement strategy, but it also reveals striking similarities between the two cases – in the defendants’ protest strategies, and in the repertoires of ‘social control’ by the legal authorities. In spite of the different legal systems in which the trials took place – and without any transnational exchanges of legal strategies between participants – the dynamics of contention were almost identical in both countries. When asking how contention happens, evolves, and escalates, it seems that similar goals and strategies of the contending parties and the interaction between them mattered much more than the structural or institutional differences between the two legal systems. This interaction determined the very nature of the trials and established their central role in the history of the era.

This article explores the British Foreign Office's engagement with International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, an event which has been viewed as a milestone in histories of transnational feminist activism, and a moment when the status of women became part of mainstream thinking about development, human rights and global security. Much of the existing literature on IWY dwells on the role of non-state actors, especially women's NGOs active at the United Nations (UN). In contrast, this article shifts the lens on to state actors, in order to ask what role diplomats, politicians and ministries of foreign affairs played in the construction of ‘women’ as a global political subject in the late twentieth century. It finds that the Foreign Office's reading of IWY was refracted through the prism of Cold War power politics and postcolonial struggles. Gender politics was conceptualised as essentially a proxy for these larger ideological battles, an approach dating back to Britain's semi-clandestine anti-communist propaganda campaigns after the Second World War. British women's NGOs, by contrast, insisted that women's activism should be accorded an independent dynamic of its own, imagining the possibilities of gender-based solidarities operating across political, social and economic divides. IWY and the subsequent UN Decade for Women tempered this idealism and set the international women's movement on a political learning curve. But, as the article will suggest, the 1970s was also a moment when state elites were forced to confront a new kind of global politics, the repercussions of which for the conduct of foreign policy and diplomatic relations only further fine-grained archival research can fully reveal.

This article identifies name registration and change as an important component of building a homogenous national society. It argues that the name changing policies of the West German state towards German co-ethnic immigrants (Spätaussiedler) during the postwar decades reflected evolving official conceptions of nationhood and national identity. Specifically, the article problematizes the notion found in parts of the literature that the German ‘regime of ethnicity’ evolved from a monoethnic and essentialist to an anti-ethnic and assimilationist model. It will show that official name changing policy underwent a process of ‘ethnicization’ decisively shaped by the associations of German expellees, which turned this seemingly technical issue into a matter of symbolic importance for national identity and established it as a crucial factor for Spätaussiedler integration. In the end, the monoethnic approach to name change won out against the rivalling anti-ethnic position, while both of them ignored the multiethnic reality developing on the ground.