This article analyses prostitution in Spain between the Civil War and the abolitionist decree of 1956 through the lens of deviance and moral regulation. Drawing on police archives, judicial records and the documentation of the Women's Protection Board, it reconstructs more than two hundred trajectories of women identified as prostitutes across different regions. Rather than treating prostitution as a stable social status or the direct outcome of sustained sexual commerce, the article conceptualises it as a historically produced trajectory and redefines prostitution as a historical category, shaped by structural vulnerability, constrained labour opportunities, cumulative institutional labelling, administrative memory and constrained mobility. It examines processes of entry, stabilisation and recidivism, showing how early institutional encounters, documentary reiteration and inter-institutional circulation transformed contingent practices into durable classificatory identities. Situating the Spanish case within broader European debates on the governance of sexuality under authoritarian regimes, the article argues that early Francoism did not fundamentally transform existing mechanisms of control but intensified and routinised them, consolidating prostitution as a managed form of deviance and marginality. By framing prostitution as a trajectory rather than a fixed social condition, the article highlights how authoritarian governance actively produced the very marginality it purported to regulate, offering a comparative lens on gendered vulnerability, institutional continuity and moral regulation across twentieth-century Europe.
The article reframes Albania’s and Romania’s defiance of the Soviet Union by situating it within global debates about sovereignty. We use the latter as an umbrella term that encompasses concepts such as equality in international relations, economic self-reliance and self-determination against hegemony. During the 1950s and 1960s, these notions gained popularity across the globe because of decolonisation, non-alignment and the dynamics of dissent within world communism. The article argues that the regimes in Tirana and Bucharest employed these concepts to assert autonomy and legitimacy within the Cold War order. The discourses and actions of Albanian and Romanian party elites were not isolated expressions of national dissent, and instead, were shaped by and actively contributed to transnational debates that were catalysed by anti-colonial emancipation. We compare Albania and Romania by juxtaposing each party-state’s transnational projections of sovereignty in relations with the Soviet Union, China and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, as well as post-colonial countries. The article highlights that from the vantage point of the margins of Eastern Europe, focusing on sovereignty brings the impact of decolonisation upon the pluralisation of state socialist identities during the 1960s into focus.
This article analyses the affective dimensions of the relationship between nostalgia and the historiography of the period from the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974 to the present. Nostalgia is an emotion that has marked public space in Greece since the financial crisis of the 2010s. This development coincided with the popularisation of digital media, particularly social media. The article discusses nostalgia-driven developments in the media as affective stimuli that impact how contemporary history is written and felt. Contemporary history is approached as an emotion-driven area of socio-cultural activity in interaction with the popularisation of digital media, a media process that boosts nostalgia. Finally, the article argues that this activity affects historical writing and invigorates understudied areas, such as the history of consumer culture.
While the history of neoliberalism and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom has been the subject of much analysis, the history of ordoliberalism, a German variety of neoliberalism, in the same country is unexplored. Drawing on grey policy literature and archival material from inside party political discourses, this article examines engagements with the core ordoliberal concept of the social market economy in British political discourse and identifies not isolated incidents but a recurrent and sustained engagement from the 1970s to the 1990s. Across this periodisation, social markets, and with it ordoliberalism, appear in three different policy debates, in the Conservative Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Labour Party. This variety of neoliberalism, and its accompanying social and moral thought, features in the legitimation of neoliberalism and neoliberal policies.
This article provides a transnational microhistory of the Dniester River – the border between Soviet Ukraine and the Kingdom of Romania – in March 1932. On the Soviet side of the river, the onset of famine prompted hundreds of starving Soviet Ukrainian peasants to migrate to Bessarabia; on the Romanian side, state-sponsored antisemitism drove Bessarabian Jews to migrate to Soviet Ukraine. I argue that the border was porous because both groups of migrants instrumentalised climactic conditions – the freezing of the Dniester during an unprecedented cold snap – and cross-border networks in ways that states could not control. While primarily highlighting similarities, this article also presents differences between the two groups: Soviet Ukrainian peasants primarily crossed in family units and utilised firsthand knowledge of the border; Bessarabian Jews crossed in small groups and relied on people-smugglers to travel to the Dniester and across into Soviet Ukraine.
While the neoliberalisation of social democracy has been extensively studied, the embrace of neoliberal ideas and policies by Christian Democratic parties has received far less attention. This article examines the contested early stages of neoliberalisation among West German and Austrian Christian Democrats during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on two prominent advocates of neoliberalism within these parties - Franz Josef Strauss and Wolfgang Schussel - it traces the influence of their ideas at a time when Christian Democrats were in opposition and seeking to renew their electoral appeal. Particular attention is paid to the role of the transnationalisation of Christian Democracy in facilitating the gradual diffusion and adoption of neoliberal positions. By doing so, the article sheds light on an understudied chapter in the history of Christian Democracy, one that is crucial for understanding both the transformation of Christian Democracy since the post-war era and the long-term development of centre-right parties in Europe.
Eduardo Aunós Pérez, minister of labour during Primo de Rivera’s regime, launched an ambitious reform in November 1926, intended as the first step in transforming the country into a corporatist state. However, the results were lacklustre. Initially, corporations were limited to the industrial sector (and encountered a complex application); it was not until 1928 that Aunós attempted to finalise the reform by including agricultural workers but was faced by the fierce opposition of the Catholic trade unions and the agrarian landowners, who managed to block it until the collapse of the regime in 1930. While limited in its results, Aunós’s reform nonetheless represented an important precedent for the application of corporatism in Europe and in the contemporary debates surrounding it. In particular, the network Aunós built in Spain by concentrating power and personnel around his ministry is worth examining in this context. This contribution takes a three-pronged approach, analysing the construction of this network, the main topics Aunós conveyed in his writing around corporatism and how his network functioned as a means to disseminate them to investigate the way in which these topics were rearticulated, as part of a process of ‘fascistisation’ of Spanish politics during the 1920s, as well as the role of Aunós in coalescing this network together.
This article reviews recent scholarship in two distinct but related fields of historical research: neoliberalism and Euroscepticism. It begins from the observation that these fields face similar epistemological challenges and exhibit considerable empirical overlap, since the most influential strand of Euroscepticism, originating in the 1980s, was heavily influenced by neoliberal thought. The article first traces the emergence of this intersection. It argues that Thatcherite Britain remains pivotal to this story but notes that similar trends had already surfaced in other EU member states by the early 1990s. At the same time, a distinctly anti-neoliberal strand of Euroscepticism emerged in response. The article then outlines promising avenues for future research, focusing on two areas in particular: the transnational connections of neoliberal Euroscepticism and the influence of neoliberal thought on the EU’s role on the global stage.
This article examines the nature and limits of democracy in Hungarian agricultural producer cooperatives during the period of reform socialism, roughly 1967–82. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies, party documents, legal texts and ethnographic evidence, it argues that producer cooperative democracy represented a significant, if circumscribed, space for genuine collective decision-making within the constraints of one-party rule. The 1967 legislative package created what was arguably the most functional segment of socialist democracy. Yet this democratic space was structurally constrained by party oversight and progressively undermined by technocratic management. The article traces the ideological roots of cooperative democracy in both utopian socialist thought and the international cooperative movement, analyses the institutional framework established by key party reformers and agricultural policy architects and examines how cooperative democracy functioned in practice through survey data and ethnographic observation. It engages critically with both the scholarship on the coercive origins of collectivisation and interpretations that foreground technocratic expertise, arguing that neither fully captures the genuinely contested terrain that cooperative democracy occupied. It also explores the paradoxical relationship between cooperative democracy and the party’s goal of dissolving the peasantry as a distinct class: cooperative self-governance rested on collective property rights, yet the socialist project aimed to eliminate property-based identity entirely. The case of the Felcsút cooperative, documented in the 1972 film The Resolution , illustrates both the possibilities and limits of this arrangement.
This article explores a new phenomenon taking root across the Global North in the late millennium. Emigration, long assumed to be the preserve of younger age groups, was increasingly the choice of the recently or soon-to-be retired. Centring the British case, the article traces the later-life mobilities of two groups: the mostly white retirees who relocated to southern Europe in search of better lifestyles, and the black and South Asian citizens who returned ‘home’ to Britain’s former colonies in older age. It argues that these mobilities should be understood as belonging to the same paradoxical moment: when rising affluence was expanding older people’s aspirations and opportunities and postcolonial anxieties were turning ageing in multiracial Britain into an unattractive prospect for many. Through a critical reading of qualitative ethnographic data, oral histories and press and media sources, the analysis shows that ageing was a significant force in the movements of people in and beyond Europe during a period more typically associated with exclusionary bordering regimes. It suggests that historians should attend more closely to these intersections of mass immigration, demographic change and ‘neoliberal’ welfare states in the remaking of European societies over the past half-century.
This article analyses the shifting narratives surrounding Polish nude activism during its emergence and eventual decline between the 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing on a wide range of sources - from archival records and media reports to oral histories and private archives - this article reconstructs ways in which nude activists negotiated and reacted to the changing social and economic landscape. It examines how naturism was portrayed in late socialist media as a form of social and erotic escapism and sheds light on how activists navigated the new political reality after the regime change, launching their own adult magazines and even founding the Polish Erotic Party. By focusing on this overlooked aspect of Polish history, the article reveals the paradoxical nature of activist narratives under late socialism and highlights the critical role played by gender and sexuality in the daily experiences of political and economic transformation.
The Italian priest, politician and sociologist Luigi Sturzo developed a distinctive form of Catholic internationalism during his exile in the United States (1940-6). Sturzo, a major political figure in European social Catholicism, founded in 1919 the Partito Popolare Italiano. During the war, he argued that Catholicism provided the moral and theoretical toolkit for constructing a vision of a democratic post-war world in which persons and communities could live in peace and prosperity. Focusing on two books that Sturzo published in English, this study argues that his vision of democracy beyond the nation-state was based on pluralism, federalism and popular participation. As a religiously grounded alternative to liberal and socialist visions, Sturzo's internationalism highlights how moral and political arguments were intertwined in imagining democracy on a global scale.
When the German occupation of the British Channel Islands began in 1940, many members of the Wehrmacht believed they were stationed in a Schlaraffenland, a paradisical 'Promised Land'. At the Islands' liberation five years later, German soldiers, having experienced an occupation characterised by monotony, loneliness, starvation and resultant distrust of leadership, had become so worn down by the geographic conditions of the Islands that they believed such a Schlaraffenland could be almost anywhere else. This radical shift in perspective demonstrates troops' descent into disillusionment. Exploring the geographic causes of this disillusionment and how geography shaped soldiers' responses to it, this article highlights how soldiers in rural and isolated postings had profoundly different experiences of occupation from those of their counterparts in more densely populated areas. In studying these occupation experiences, historians can understand more clearly the complex ideological landscape of troops and the ways the physical landscape shaped their behaviours.
The articles in this special issue makes three important contributions to New Cold War History. First, they strengthen the interpretations highlighting the multiplicity and fluidity of the Cold War, which extended well beyond the interactions between superpower and formal bloc-to-bloc divisions to include a diverse array of national actors, including non-European ones such as Japan. Second, they underscore the significance of international organisations as fora for debate, exchange and expertise, as well as active agents - through their secretariats and staff - of pan-European economic cooperation. Moreover, the special issue places particular emphasis on the agency of non-state actors on the ground, including industrial and financial enterprises, business associations, experts and academics. Collectively, the contributions offer new empirical evidence on how these actors and sites structured and sustained pan-European economic spaces throughout the Cold War. Third, while the focus remains on the Cold War, some contributions emphasise the temporal dimension of pan-European economic spaces, tracking continuities from the inter-war period alongside discontinuities that reflect their reinvention during the Cold War decades. Some cases also suggest divergent post-Cold War trajectories, which point to avenues for further research on how pan-European spaces were reconfigured through the persistence, adaptation or transformation of collaborative structures and modes of engagement.
This article examines the early post-Second World War Polish state's campaign to 'repatriate' German citizens of Polish descent from the Ruhr region and the consequent official and public contestations that erupted between Polish, British and German observers. Alternate interpretations of the Ruhr's labour regime and its transformative ethno-social impact lay at the heart of these debates. For many Polish commentators, repatriating the Ruhrpolen from Germany's industrial heartland was inextricably intertwined with Poland's recent acquisition of the 'Recovered Territories' and modernising growth imperatives. By contrast, British and (especially) German observers depicted the Ruhr's labour regime as a transformative forge of Germanisation, one that had elevated individuals of Polish descent into the region's native working class and now depended on their presence to drive recovery efforts in Western Europe. Even after the late 1940s, repatriation - and frustrations therewith - continued to serve as a legitimising force for redemptive state-building projects in West Germany and Poland.
