European History Quarterly

Imperial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been largely studied as a military and economic phenomenon. According to the widely accepted narrative, European empires expanded their power across the world following different ‘formal’ (direct) and ‘informal’ (indirect) strategies. This article argues that, beyond material forms of conquest and effective domination, empires also implemented their rule through the use of immateriality. We explore this phenomenon through a transnational and diachronic comparison of the cases of France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s. Both examples suggest that such notions as ‘civilization’, ‘race’, ‘spirit’, and ‘greatness’ not only underpinned the imaginary and the conceptualization of empire, but also actively produced powerful ‘immaterial’ means of domination, expansion, and influence. This work’s methodological approach relies on the conviction that concepts and significations are an integral part of politics. France and Spain did not have empires in Latin America in the periods under study, but they were imagined as being imperial powers in the Americas. This crafted an imperial mind-set that complemented the formal and informal imperial practices that France in the 1860s and Spain in the 1920s were undertaking in other parts of the world. We focus on intellectual and political projects and on practices of cultural diplomacy as two manifestations of these immaterial empires. By virtue of these projects and policies, French and Spanish leaders managed to create an image of France and Spain as deserving their ‘natural’ important place in the global scene. Immateriality served as an instrument to counterbalance the growth of competing powers, namely the United States, which, in the 1860s as well as the 1920s, was seen as a dangerous competitor in the so-called Western hemisphere. In this way, notions of Latinity and Hispanity competed with each other and, at the same time, targeted the ‘Anglo-Saxon’, ‘racial’, and ‘spiritual’ competitor.

This article investigates the policing measures of the Habsburg Empire against the exiled defeated revolutionaries in the Mediterranean after the 1848–1849 revolutions. The examination of this counter-revolutionary policy reveals the pioneering role Austria played in international policing. It shows, in particular, that Vienna invested more heavily in policing in the Mediterranean after 1848 than it did in other regions, such as Western Europe, due to the multitude of ‘Forty-Eighters’ settled there and the alleged inadequacy of the local polities (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Greece) to satisfactorily deal with the refugee question themselves. The article explains that Austria made use of a wide array of both official and unofficial techniques to contain these allegedly dangerous political dissidents. These methods ranged from official police collaboration with Greece and the Ottoman Empire to more subtle regional information exchanges with Naples and Russia. However, they also included purely unilateral methods exercised by the Austrian consuls, Austrian Lloyd sailors and ship captains, and ad hoc recruited secret agents to monitor the émigrés at large. Overall, the article argues that Austrian policymakers in the aftermath of 1848 invented new policing formulas and reshaped different pre-existing institutions (e.g., consuls, Austrian Lloyd), channelling them against their opponents in exile. Therefore, apart from surveying early modes of international policing, this study also adds to the discussion about Austrian (and European) state-building and, furthermore, to the more specific discussion of how European states dealt with political dissidents abroad in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the mobilizing and legitimizing function of educational and cultural activities in the Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Education and cultural participation played a crucial role in the Republican government’s attempts to co-opt left-wing revolutionary forces emboldened by the war and unite antagonistic constituencies in an inclusive, government-led war effort. Such attempts converged on the construction of a new conscript army, where investment in education was not solely a matter of military expediency but also a means to implement, in the crucible of war, important aspects of a reform programme initiated with the proclamation of the Spanish Second Republic in 1931. Consequently, the Republican Army did not only serve as the Republic’s armed defence force but also as a laboratory of political education in which both civil and military authorities could negotiate, articulate and disseminate new notions of Republican citizenship.

Drawing primarily on army records and trench journals from the Army of the Centre, the article shows how Republican educators and cultural workers employed a diverse range of techniques to deliver a reform programme designed to profoundly change Spanish politics and society. It also examines largely neglected questions of reception. Where soldiers’ engagement was forthcoming, educational activities could equip individuals with experiences and skills that were – and were understood to be – empowering. Yet in quantitative terms, rank-and-file engagement with educational activities was uneven and often quite limited. Contextual factors on all levels – international, national and local – impacted in various ways on soldiers’ educational and cultural participation, but ultimately it was the impending defeat of the Republic that undermined most soldiers’ willingness to engage. As a positive progressive vision of a future Republic faded among the debris of destroyed buildings, enthusiasm for a Republican educational programme inevitably faded too.

This article compares Italian and German memory cultures of Fascism and Nazism using an analysis of Italian and West- and East-German satirical magazines published from 1943 to 1963. In the early post-war period, as a consequence of the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi policies in Italy and in Germany that had been put into effect by the Allied occupation authorities, a significant part of the Italian and German public felt anxiety regarding the Fascist and the Nazi past and feared these past regimes as potential sources of contamination. But many, both in Italy and Germany, also reacted by denying that their country needed any sort of ‘purification’. This article’s main argument is that the interaction between these two conflicting positions exercised different effects in the three contexts considered. In Italy, especially during the years after 1948, the satirical press produced images that either rendered Fascism banal or praised it, representing it as a phenomenon which was an ‘internal’ and at least partly positive product of Italian society. I define this process as a sweetening ‘internalization’ of Fascism. In East Germany, by contrast, Nazism was represented through images linking the crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camps, depicted as a sort of ‘absolute evil’, with the leadership of the FRG, considered ‘external’ to ‘true’ German society. I define this process as a ‘demonizing’ externalization of Nazism, by which I mean a tendency to represent Nazism as a ‘monstrous’ phenomenon. In the West German satirical press, on the other hand, Nazism was not only ‘externalized’ by comparing it to the East German Communist dictatorship, but also ‘internalized’ by implying that it was a negative product of German society in general and by calling for public reflection on responsibility for the Nazi crimes, including West Germany as the Nazi regime’s successor. The demonization of the regime also played a crucial role in this self-critical ‘internalization’ of Nazism.

This article examines Romania’s opposition to the attempts of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in the early 1970s to adopt a common trade policy towards the European Economic Community (EEC). The article covers the period between 1969, when the CMEA embarked on negotiations regarding the deepening of the intra-bloc cooperation and integration, and 1 January 1973, which is the date marking the end of the derogations that the Eastern European states received with regard to the implementation of the EEC’s Common Commercial Policy. The article focuses on Romania’s reasons and tactics of opposition, but it also outlines its views with regard to the EEC, in general, and the CMEA-EEC relations, in particular. Corroborated by findings involving studies in other Eastern European archives, this article will help to create a better understanding of the CMEA debates on integration, on the CMEA-EEC relations, in general, and on Romania’s opposition to the CMEA’s intended common policy towards the EEC, in particular.