The article provides an insightful exploration of the intellectual world of Central European aristocracy in the interwar period. Using the example of two members of the Coudenhove-Kalergi family – Pan-European Union founder Richard and his older brother Johannes – it examines how the family navigated the challenges of a highly turbulent era. It compares the approaches of the two brothers, as well as those of other family members, to the political, national and economic issues facing Central Europe. The article highlights the significance of their family background in shaping their personalities, outlining their personal strategies while also pointing out both differences and shared traits. It demonstrates that, while the brothers had a strong connection to Japan through their mother, who was of Japanese origin, they remained part of the broader Germanic milieu of Central Europe. However, they were not nationalists; on the contrary, they viewed the efforts of some nations within the former Austro-Hungarian Empire to break away from the monarchy with disdain. At the same time, the article shows that during this period, they were only half-hearted monarchists, with neither envisioning the future of Central Europe as lying in the restoration of Habsburg rule. Furthermore, the article reveals that although Johannes and Richard did not agree on political or personal matters, their fundamental ideological orientation was not significantly different. Both opposed antisemitism but were critical of liberal democracy and expressed sympathies for far-right dictatorships, particularly the Italian regime, with Johannes even showing an affinity for Nazism. In this respect, both brothers (especially Johannes) could be described as conservative revolutionaries, though they diverged on essential details.
This special issue explores and seeks to reinterpret Nordic welfare history through the lens of materiality. Moving beyond institutional and policy-centred narratives, the issue highlights how welfare ideals were shaped, negotiated and experienced through the built environment, infrastructures and everyday objects. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from urban and architectural history, conceptual history, and the history of experiences, the special issue demonstrates how materiality functioned as an active site where welfare discourses and practices intersected and where Nordic welfare states were made tangible in daily life. The articles of the special issue connect to three overarching research themes: the role of planning, infrastructure and architecture in forming welfare citizenship; the circulation of material representations that influenced domestic and international understandings of Nordic welfare; and the lived welfare state where citizens engaged with welfare through intimate and emotional encounters with materiality. Through case studies ranging from housing estates and subway systems to prams and baby boxes, the special issue adopts a multi-scalar perspective, revealing how materiality connected welfare processes across scales—from national planning regimes and transnational image circulation to the embodied, intimate encounters of everyday life.
Using the biographical method, the article follows three members of the Soviet intelligentsia whose paths crossed in liberated Kharkiv: Lev Nikolaev, a professor of medicine and resident of the city who continued to keep a diary under Nazi occupation; Alexei Tolstoy, the famous writer who visited the liberated city as a member of the Soviet Extraordinary Investigation Commission on Nazi crimes, receiving, among other things, a copy of Nikolaev's occupation diary, and the filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whose teams filmed Professor Nikolaev for his documentary on liberated Ukraine. These three figures represent distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and political views, despite their shared public allegiance to Stalinism. As the article will show, their contributions to Soviet documentation of Nazi crimes were intertwined with their differing visions of both the Nazi occupation and the future of Soviet Ukraine, and, at the same time, overshadowed by their own positioning within Stalinist terror.
The Danish government's notorious 2018 policy document, ‘One Denmark without Parallel Societies’, targeted dozens of neighbourhoods as ‘ghettos’ and proposed solutions to eradicate them: privatisations, renovations and, most controversially, demolitions. In this article, I trace discourse and policies in government documents over the period from the 1960s to 2018 to follow their promotion of three forms of ‘liquidation’ ( afvikling ). First, modernist housing and landscapes built during mid- and late twentieth century signalled tangible evidence of welfare-state triumphs and ideals of utopian social progress through construction in concrete, turning liquid concrete to solid housing. By the 1980s and 1990s, such districts were understood as ‘problems’ to be solved through legislation and social programs and possible sites of liquid capital accumulation. Finally, the government has recently argued for their demolition, yet relied on stigmatizing descriptions and dubious statistics, including the areas’ numbers of so-called ‘non-Western’ residents to promote this ‘liquidation’ ( afvikling ). In following this history, I probe how demolition evolved into a preferred and celebrated means of addressing social conditions and unwanted (modernist) architecture, along with its construction in words, not walls.
This article argues that Greater Stockholm's subway system functioned as a material space to govern passengers into diligent welfare citizens, fit for life in a modern Swedish welfare society. It also shows that this was a contingent process, which was marked by conflicting answers to the moral question of how to live and how to act. Beginning with the expansion of the subway system in postwar Stockholm, the article explores how its development aligned with ideals of collectivism and social welfare. It then analyses the use of cultural and commercial policies, as well as disciplinary strategies to educate passengers into conforming and informed commuter citizens. Finally, the article addresses how countercultural protest groups challenged these prescribed subject positions by using the subway in ways that transgressed the virtues of welfare subjectivity. By materializing citizenship through Greater Stockholm's subway system, this article highlights how the terms and conditions of life in a modern Swedish welfare society were formulated, challenged and negotiated through seemingly mundane practices, such as commuting, and spaces, like Stockholm's modern subway system.
This article aims to examine the intersection of dense-low housing architecture and welfare politics in 1970s Denmark. Although scholars have investigated the role of architecture and housing in the expansion of the welfare state and later neoliberal restructurings, little attention has been given to the ways in which dense-low housing architecture and non-profit housing estates more broadly functioned as experimental platforms for the reimagining of community and decentralization in the context of the welfare state's crisis in the period. Focusing on two housing estates - Galgebakken and Gadek ae ret - the article identifies two central linkages between housing architecture, shifting welfare values and everyday life. First, the article shows how the design of Galgebakken and Gadek ae ret intertwined with the implementation of new models for resident democracy in the non-profit housing sector, rendering the housing estates as central sites for developing the meaning of local democracy and civic participation in everyday life. Secondly, the article points to the importance of emotions, particularly nostalgia, in shaping how non-profit housing architecture could emerge as models for community-making and civic participation in 1970s Denmark. In exploring these linkages, the article not only shows how non-profit housing estates came to work as platforms for envisioning, interpreting and practising new welfare values of community and decentralization on an everyday scale, but it also demonstrates the capacity of housing architecture in mediating new relations between materiality, emotions and welfare.
This article explores prams and strollers, also called baby carriages and buggies, as material objects and fabricated images in the Nordic region. Prams are frequently associated with a Nordic gender equality model, a development that this article argues is of recent vintage. For much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, prams in the Nordic countries were linked primarily with motherhood, despite shifting notions of what constituted childcare, gender roles and the welfare state. In tracing the development of prams, their usage and the narratives that surrounded them, this article examines prams' evolution from highly gendered objects to avatars of Nordic exceptionality. Pram usage came to represent vital characteristics of a new Nordic model that developed around the turn of the millennium and which carried a reputation for equality between men and women, including in gender-neutral parenting. In following these developments, the article contends that the history of prams presents a useful perspective for exploring the material contestations and the impact of welfare states, as well as the Nordic model concept.
This Forum examines conflict as a constitutive feature of European integration, challenging the view that current tensions are unprecedented. It adopts a long-term perspective, emphasizing how enduring conflicts over distribution, identity, and political sovereignty shape the integration process, particularly during periods of enlargement and institutional change. Drawing on diverse historical case studies, the contributions analyse how these tensions manifest across social groups, political institutions, and economic actors.
This article explores the role of materiality as a medium for experiencing the welfare state through the case of the 'maternity package' (or 'baby box'). The state has been providing Finnish families with these packages, containing various items for the new-born and the mother, without interruption since the passing of the Maternity Grants Act in 1937. Drawing from a diverse body of source material, mainly 90 written reminiscences collected in 2020/21, the article examines the ways in which the maternity package, through its use and adaptations over the decades, has become embedded in everyday life and produced relationships between the various actors and scales of the welfare state. While the baby box experience is far from universal, the package has had recurring utopian potential in the production of a shared sphere of experience: as a health tool, an everyday emotional experience and care practice, and a symbol of the Finnish welfare state. Throughout its history, the baby box has included a set of assumptions on how to parent a child, how to be a citizen or how to encounter welfare services. It has brought these expectations and wider welfare-state meanings into interaction with bodies and human relations, along with the materialities of homes and families' intergenerational childcare practices, all the while negotiating between individual and collective experiences.
Contributing to the growing literature on post-war European democracy from a transnational and comparative perspective, this article explores the role of the European Parliament in pushing the European Community to engage in new transnational policy fields in the long 1970s. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, parliamentary debates and media coverage, it compares three then-new issue areas and policy fields with limited or no explicit legal foundations in the original treaties: social policy, the environment and consumer policy. Although the EP was not directly elected until 1979, had no legislative decision-making role and only limited budgetary powers, we show that MEPs were nevertheless able to help politicise issues and co-shape the trajectories of policy Europeanisation. They did so chiefly by exercising entrepreneurial leadership, creating horizontal and vertical networks and alliances, devising innovative institutional strategies, and working with the media to push for European solutions to transnational problems.
The article explores the systematic expropriation of Jewish property in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Dr & zcaron;ava Hrvatska, NDH), led by the Usta & scaron;a regime. Croatia's expropriations began rapidly and were legally reinforced through numerous decrees. Despite the NDH's intrinsic corruption, which meant that many Jewish assets were stolen by individuals, I focus on the actions of the most powerful actor: the state. Although hindered by many obstacles, the authorities of the NDH remained focused on the appropriation of Jewish property throughout its existence. This article examines these institutions-their evolution, and their efforts to increase efficiency in seizing and securing expropriated property for the state. The NDH's primary agencies, including the State Directorate for Renewal and the Office for Nationalised Property, orchestrated the confiscation and redistribution of assets, aiming to consolidate Jewish property into state ownership. Ante Bari & cacute;, a key figure, drove efforts to streamline expropriations, overcoming obstacles and centralising assets under state control. By the end of this process, the NDH had stolen Jewish property worth at least 5.14 billion kuna and destroyed the economic foundations of Jewish life across the state.
This forum analyses how a dialogue between methodological approaches in historiographical research across different world regions and time periods can yield new perspectives on migration, mobility, and network research. By applying the postcolonial concept of subaltern groups, the authors discuss ways to let 'ordinary people' speak through unconventional sources.
In this article, I investigate early restitution efforts in Hungary based on two case studies: Ocsa and Ujpest. Both towns are located in Pest County; however, Ocsa had a small Jewish population, while in Ujpest, more than 10,000 Jews had lived before the Holocaust and at least 2000 survived. Most Hungarian survivors faced a similar situation at the end of the war: they had lost their relatives, their health was damaged, and upon their return, they realised that non-Jews had looted or claimed their property or even their apartments. In the post-war economic disaster, both Jews and non-Jews needed basic necessities such as furniture, clothes, bed linen, and so on-the former to restart their lives. Based on the two cases, I analyse whether early restitution for Holocaust survivors took a different course in a small town than in a big city, how the local leadership organised the restitution process, whether the survivors were involved in it, and what the outcomes were.
Looking at testimonies of victims, bystanders and perpetrators that report wartime theft and looting of Jewish belongings across East-Central Europe, this article focuses specifically on one aspect of genocidal dispossession which has so far received only tangential attention - the theft of the most intimate possessions: personal belongings, especially clothes. In doing so, it addresses the question of how this specific form of intimate dispossession facilitated genocidal policies by creating conditions for violence, incentivising collaboration, and providing a tool to inflict pain. The article lays out the ways in which genocidal dispossession accompanied, facilitated and constituted violence at different stages of Nazi-led anti-Jewish policies, including the phase of ghettoisation and hiding and the phase of mass killing. It also discusses particular measures, such as stripping down the victims and coercing Jews to sort victims' clothes, as forms of torture. Particular attention is given in this respect to accounts of sexual violence that accompanied dispossession. The study is based on archival sources, including post-war survivors' testimonies, post-war trials of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, yizkor books, victims' and bystanders' diaries, and oral history interviews, predominantly from the area of today's eastern Poland and western Belarus. It focuses on the experiences Jewish victims inside small towns (shtetls) that had a significant Jewish majority prior to World War II, and where the conditions for dispossession were particularly favourable.
The issue of property restitution in Poland became an important topic immediately after the end of the German occupation. Following the war, the Polish government implemented various decrees to manage abandoned and ownerless properties, which were often seized from Jewish individuals. Based on these central-level regulations, the article examines local practices within the institutions involved, as well as the associated negotiation processes. These were conducted through petitions and letters to the authorities, but also through numerous court proceedings. The negotiations over the distribution of the property of the murdered Jews were characterised by a high degree of continuity. In addition to practices already established during the occupation, many of the same people were involved. Former employees of the trust administration under German occupation and administrators of houses, shops or businesses belonging to the Jewish population who had already been appointed at that time sought to obtain or confirm their positions in post-war Poland. Furthermore, rationalisation and legitimisation strategies regarding the appropriation of Jewish property were similar. A central thesis of the article is that the occupation period and the post-war years up to 1948 should be examined more closely with regard to the treatment of Jewish property.
In October 1910, Arthur John Byng Wavell, a former British military-officer-turned-geographer, arrived in Hodeida to explore the Arabian Peninsula under the accreditation of the Royal Geographical Society of London. His presence exacerbated an ongoing Ottoman security crisis, which later escalated into a diplomatic setback between the British and Ottoman governments. While Wavell and British authorities claimed he was an explorer, Ottoman officials suspected him of espionage. This research situates Wavell's story within the larger context of British imperial expansion into Eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, alongside intelligence operations targeting the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century. By drawing on Wavell's memoirs and both British and Ottoman archival materials, it also examines Ottoman intelligence efforts and highlights how the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the subsequent abolition of spying compromised security in the Empire's borderlands during the Committee of Union and Progress's governance.
