European History Quarterly

This article de-constructs and re-constructs the dynamic of a sixteenth-century political dispute between the Catholic Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V and the Protestant Saxon Elector August I. By focusing on the visual imagery which ignited the dispute, the paper explores sixteenth-century ‘ways of seeing’ and the epistemic role realistic images played in the production of knowledge about the natural world. While the peculiar dynamic of the affair is based on a specific understanding of the evidential role of images, the paper also argues that the wider socio-cultural context, in particular certain strategies of truth-telling, provide further clues as to the dynamic and closure of the affair.

The article analyses how nineteenth-century Spanish Democrats understood democracy, what were the issues at stake, how they were debated, and how political and social discourses evolved. It focuses on Democrats’ conceptions of citizenship, freedom, equality, sovereignty, political activity and the nation, as well as on their ideas on the most convenient form of government and organization of the State. It traces the process through which their original idea of democracy as an active and immediate exercise of power evolved into another centred on the control and limitation of power and the promotion of individual autonomy. It finally points out their holistic vision of society and their difficulty accepting a plurality of interests and parties, which had considerable influence on their political practice and their attempts at self-organization.

Throughout the twentieth century, French intellectuals of the Right have been locked in a cycle of resentment and reaction against the intellectual Left whom they blame for repeatedly ostracizing them from the role of ‘intellectuel’. This resentment of a perceived exclusion has resulted in a recurring trope of left-wing cultural hegemony and right-wing marginalization that has come to define the individual and collective identities of the intellectual Right today. This process of perceived hegemony, resentment, and identity reconstruction is readily apparent in the work of right-wing intellectuals Ferdinand Brunetière, Ramon Fernandez, Drieu la Rochelle, Maurice Bardèche, and Alain de Benoist. When faced with perceived left-wing hegemony, these intellectuals reacted with resentment, revaluation of their designation as the excluded ‘other’, and retreat to self-segregated cultural communities. Over time, this process has both distinctly defined the intellectual Right and effectively radicalized and alienated it from mainstream intellectual life and the French public.

This essay aims to shed light on the role of radio in state territorial conflicts during the interwar era, a topic that has hardly received serious attention from scholars. Its focus is on the use of radio in the German-Polish contest over the Upper Silesian borderland. State actors of both countries built radio stations at the border with the explicit aim of integrating the largely culturally-mixed and ‘nationally indifferent’ population of locals on both sides of the borderland into – and thereby to secure the whole region for – their nation. A ‘radio war’ thus erupted by 1927, as the two sides competed against one another in this effort, and it lasted to the very end of the interwar era. This essay focuses its analysis on the programmes of the Polish Radio Katowice as they were broadcast over and received in German Upper Silesia. It demonstrates that contrary to the views of Polish nationalists, the popularity of this radio station stemmed not so much from widespread Polish consciousness as the quality of the programmes and popularity of the performers.

For two years in the turbulent mid-1930s, the Royal Anthropological Institute co-convened an expert committee tasked with scientifically evaluating Nazi claims about race. Called the Race and Culture Committee, this body was created at the behest of Charles G. Seligman and given the unofficial objective of producing a strong anti-racist statement attacking the anthropological notion of a pure Aryan race. Scientists and other scholars of Jewish descent were intentionally excluded from the Committee to pre-emptively avert attacks on the report’s validity by anti-Semites. However, such a report was never produced due to the interference of members who were committed to defending Nazi Germany and the country’s racial policies. Using newly uncovered sources, this article argues that the Committee was doomed to failure from the start, and that its demise prevented the collective British anthropological establishment from attacking Nazi views on race with a unified voice before the Second World War despite an emerging consensus that the German government’s pronouncements were scientifically indefensible. More significantly, there is also now evidence that the obstructionist faction within the Committee was taking its ideological direction directly from German scientific practitioners with their own agendas during this period, raising questions about the relationship between science, politics, and interactions between academics and the state. It was only with the later publication of We Europeans that mainstream British scientists would declare their opposition to Nazi racial views, but by then the opportunity to make a more impactful stand had been lost.