Rebuilding Europe meant rebuilding family life after 1945. New welfare states and full employment together made possible a robust revival of family life in many European states devastated by war. Capital investment grew more rapidly in Western than in Eastern Europe, in part due to the Marshall Plan. The result was a widening of the material and demographic gap between Western and Eastern Europe, leading to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR in the period 1989–1991. Demographic debate changed with the times. Racist rhetoric went underground or took on new forms. Allegations of threats posed to “the nation” by resident groups mutated into fears of inundation by other groups from outside. The end of Western European empires created waves of White settler return migration to Europe; these people brought their settler mentality with them. Older forms of eugenic ideas about the improvement of the gene pool were marginalized, though over time fears of the replacement of White Europeans by non-White immigrants circulated in fiction and political rhetoric.

Memory and history differ in nature, yet they overlap in many ways. Memory is history reflected in emotions. The truth of historical interpretation depends on sources. The truths of memory depend on emotions and the passage of physiological time. Many national narratives about the Second World War involve heroic tales. However, the suffering of the civilian population in Europe during the war stubbornly resists any heroization.

The global shift from high to low fertility rates has sparked polarized reactions, from environmentalists who celebrate the shift as reducing population pressure on the environment, to economists who worry about its effects on economic growth. In Toxic Demography, Sciubba, Teitelbaum, and Winter explore the deep entanglement of population dynamics with identity, modernization, nationalism, and populism. They unravel how concepts such as “family” and “nation,” often seen as straightforward, carry disparate and politicized meanings that shape demographic debates. Focusing on the United States, Europe, and Asia, the authors examine the demographic dimensions of political and societal forces affected by changing demographic composition. These regions, at the forefront of unprecedented demographic transitions, reveal how population trends have been persistently distorted by political ideologies. From fears of existential decline to debates over migration and fertility, demographic issues have been refracted through ideological prisms, obscuring understanding and fueling divisive narratives. The book highlights historical and contemporary examples, including the ideological manipulation of population trends during the COVID-19 pandemic and the sustained very low fertility rates in countries such as Japan, China, and Germany. Across time and geography, the authors argue, demographic events have been consistently co-opted by political actors, transforming population debates into battlegrounds for broader ideological struggles. Toxic Demography offers a critical lens to understand the persistent politicization of reproduction, fertility, and migration, showing how these distortions shape the futures of nations and societies.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War. By Heinrich Hartmann. Translated by Ellen Yutzy Glebe. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Edited by Jed Z. Buchwald. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. xxiv+256. $40.00 (paper).Jay WinterJay WinterYale University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 96, Number 1March 2024 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728537 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Since 2000, the history of the Great War has weathered significant changes. The advent of the internet has changed both how research is carried out and the channels for exchange and publication regarding the First World War. The focus is no longer solely on Western Europe; research on the history of the war has now become global. The chronological limits of the war have been redefined, with the start and end dates now set in 1912 and 1923 respectively. The effect of the war on all facets ofcivilian life is now a central part of research in this field. The Centennial of 1914 stimulated massive public interest, though few conceptual breakthroughs have yet happened in terms of how we understand the war.

In this essay I claim that all sites of memory have both local and national meanings, since they say that something happened here or to the people who live here, in this country, which is worth remembering in public. Only some sites of memory are international, in that they are constructed not solely by locals or residents of a particular region or state, but by groups of people in different countries drawing attention to events they think significant. However, transnational sites are those which were constructed or designated as significant by people from different places or different states, who worked together to represent the past from a transnational perspective. Therefore, the central question of my research is what did memory agents, that is, the people who built or used these sites of memory, want to achieve through them? What were they for? The answers I present are based on war memorials and museums. Reflecting on these sites underscores the ways in which war memorials are palimpsests, in the sense that they have multiple levels of meaning attached to them, corresponding to the collective memory of local, regional, national, international and transnational communities about our violent age.

No AccessThe Nostalgic Temperament. Region and nation in the shadow of the two world warsJay WinterJay Winterhttps://doi.org/10.7767/9783205215936.45SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous chapter Next chapter FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book cover 1. AuflageISBN: 978-3-205-21591-2 eISBN: 978-3-205-21593-6HistoryPublished online:October 2022 PDF download

This article discusses the background and diplomatic strategies of the Turkish delegation at Lausanne and their selective understanding of self-determination, excluding non-Turkic and non-Muslim people in Anatolia from the 'self' that has the right to determine its national existence. It also elaborates on the reasons why the Allies acknowledged this exclusion in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. We borrow from Erez Manela's interpretation of the 'Wilsonian moment' to frame these diplomatic and political developments and to show how and why the democratic intent of Wilson's idea of self-determination vanished in the framing of the Peace Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

This Element is a user's guide to the cultural history of warfare since 1914. It provides summaries of the basic questions historians have posed in what is now a truly global field of research. It is divided into three parts. The first provides an introduction to the cultural history of the state, focusing on the institutions of violence, both political and military, as well as introducing the key concept of the civilianization of war. The second part addresses civil society at war. It asks the question as to how do men and women try to make sense and attach meaning to the violence and cruelty of war. It also explores commemoration, religious life, humanitarianism, painting, cinema and the visual arts, and war literature and testimony. The third part explores the family, gender and migration in wartime, and shows how modern war continues to transform the world in which we live today.

Abstract The Turkish delegation to Lausanne presented their struggle as one for national self-determination. They thereby used against the victorious Allies the Wilsonian commitment to self-determination as a right for all peoples. Discarding any claim to sovereignty over territory outside Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, the Turkish delegation refused to acknowledge any Armenian claim to a homeland in Anatolia. They were prepared to meet the Allies at numerous points, but were stubborn to a fault when it came to establishing the territorial integrity and economic independence of the new Turkey. This strategy worked in two essential ways: it enabled Mustafa İsmet, the head of the Turkish delegation, to break off the talks in early February 1923 and to retain the backing of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. Both enabled him to sign the Treaty on 24 July 1923 and to solidify the political position of his leader, Mustafa Kemal. The regime that emerged was self-determining, but in no sense democratic.

Only some of the guns of the Great War were silenced on 11 November 1918. War continued to rage for four more years throughout Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. The day the Great War finally came to an end was 24 July 1923. On the shores of Lake Geneva, Turkey and her former enemies signed the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the state of hostilities that had continued since 1914. This book frames that story of Lausanne in terms of a new and disturbing phenomenon—the civilianization of war. During the Great War and in its aftermath, war mutated. The distinction between military and civilian targets was erased, and non-combatants became the chief victims of war. Until then, wars ended with an exchange of prisoners of war. Lausanne was the first peace treaty which required an exchange of civilian populations. Over one million Greek Orthodox men and women lost their right to live in Turkey, and half that number of Muslims were deported forcibly from Greece. In the Treaty of Lausanne, the right to citizenship was defined by religion, and religion alone. There, on the shores of Lake Geneva, ethnic cleansing entered into international law. This book provides an account of how this happened. It traces humanitarian efforts to save civilian life in the whirlwind of war and looks at how the Great Powers tried to shore up their damaged imperial position in the early 1920s. It shows too how the peace settlement buried the hopes of the Armenian people for a homeland in Anatolia, and the way appeasement was born in the wake of Lausanne. In sum, Lausanne was a pyrrhic victory for the peacemakers.