European History Quarterly

This paper explores the utility of the interpretive device of ‘Balkanism’ for the analysis of British foreign policy-making in the 1920s. It does so through the case study of the efforts to construct a regional security pact involving guarantee and arbitration treaties reconciling former enemies, a so-called ‘Balkan Locarno’. This was not the most important or fruitful initiative in interwar diplomacy, but it is nonetheless revealing. On the one hand, it illustrated the existence amongst British policy-makers of a network of deeply embedded negative and essentialising assumptions about the region and its peoples. On the other, it casts new light on the nature of the 1925 Locarno settlement itself: the terms in which British policy-makers construed the extension of the Locarno principles indicates that in endowing it with mythic significance, they overlooked the fact that it was concluded only because of the coincidence at a particular moment of otherwise divergent national interests.

In the post-First World War era, French youth became the focus of considerable attention from a variety of political parties and movements, particularly on the right. One of these was the Faisceau, the first avowedly fascist group in France. Group leaders Georges Valois and Jacques Arthuys sought to mobilize youthful will, sacrifice and heroism in order to recreate the fraternity present in the trenches during the Great War and topple the Third Republic. However, neither figure took an active hand in organizing youth under the Faisceau banner, instead leaving the task to Hubert Bourgin, the group’s most conservative luminary. Concentrating on social Catholicism and tradition, he abandoned the notion of youthful ‘anciens combattants’, in favour of educational reform. Yet both visions of the moral and physical transformation of youth proved to be highly influential, auguring the extreme-rightist platform of the 1930s leagues and various factions within the Vichy regime.

This article examines the role played by the BDM in the Nazis’ training and socialization of girls. It analyses training manuals and guidelines, the BDM’s magazine and other sources to demonstrate the norms and values of the organization and the way in which it imbued German girls with Nazi ideology. It considers the extent to which the organization had a modernizing impact on German girls. It examines the racial and behavioural expectations of the girls within the movement and their role in Nazi society, for example as ‘culture bearers’ to the next generation. Future motherhood was an important aspect of girls’ training, but girls were also expected to serve their nation in other ways, especially during the wartime period, when pragmatic concerns created a tendency towards modernity in the roles given to girls.