Journal of Contemporary History

Sir Lewis Namier is known for his much-professed conservatism and his ardent admiration for the English aristocracy and élite society. This article calls attention to the little-known fact that Namier was a socialist with revolutionary enthusiasms in his earlier years. A detailed study of Namier’s memos and reports, written for the Foreign Office and Cabinet during the first world war in his capacity as Polish expert, uncovers Namier’s socialist commitment, Marxist assumptions on the nature of nationality conflict in Central and Eastern Europe, and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution. Namier’s socialist beliefs can be traced to his upbringing in Galicia, the Austrian part of what was formerly Poland. Like the Austro-Marxists, Namier believed that the nationality conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe were in reality class conflicts. His support for national self-determination during the first world war was based on the assumption that national autonomy or independence would lead to a fairer social order. Namier discovered, however, that the nationality conflict in Central and Eastern Europe raged more fiercely than ever in the new post-war order. He was especially disillusioned to discover rampant nationalism and antisemitism even in the ranks of socialists. Despite his disenchantment with socialism, however, socialist assumptions continued to inform his politics and history throughout his life.

This article reconstructs an important aspect of fascist ideology: the critiques directed by the main political and cultural groupings among Italian fascists against Giovanni Gentile, from 1922 until his death in 1944. This article seeks to make a significant contribution to the debate on the part played by Gentile during the fascist regime, demonstrating the way in which, and the extent to which, fascism, as realized, represented a form of totalitarianism quite different from the one he had conceived in his theory.

The Spanish Falange was established in Madrid in November 1933 in an attempt to offer new solutions to the severe social and political problems which assailed Spanish society throughout the years of the Second Republic (1931-36) and to the perceived inability of the conservative Right effectively to face the growing threat to Spain’s religious and territorial unity. The Sección Femenina of the Falange (SF), which was founded in June 1934, existed for 43 years, reaching at its height a membership of over 680,000. Yet despite its impressive size and diverse activities, it received little attention from historians prior to the 1990s, partly due to a prevailing tendency of Spanish historiography to view women in right-wing entities as having little autonomy or independent authority. This article demonstrates that by using its relative organizational autonomy the SF was able to construct a new ‘discourse on femininity’ and to offer its members an identity which would take into account their self-perceptions as both women and Falangists in Francoist society. ‘Naturalizing’ and appropriating some so-called virile attributes such as heroism, forcefulness and intelligence served to establish a meaningful place for both the SF and its members on the public stage of Franco’s ‘New Spain’.

Of the many myths which Sir Oswald Mosley later fostered about his activities before and during the second world war, none is more widespread than the belief that he ‘urged his members to fight once war was declared’. Two key quotations from his own publications were used by him, and by later apologists, for this purpose: one, from September 1939, to prove his patriotic credentials at the outbreak of war, and another, from May 1940, to prove that, at that stage, he was calling his followers to arms in face of the threat in France and the Low Countries. Close examination of both these quotations shows that, by a process of truncation, distortion and (in the latter case) misdating, a completely different message has been produced from the one to be found in the originals. Moreover, an examination of his movement’s actual activities and of its advice to young men who were about to be called up, show a determination not to ‘offer to fight in the quarrel of Jewish finance’, but to impede the war effort in various ways, above all by British Union members registering as conscientious objectors. The cause for such ‘political’ conscientious objection was to be clearly indicated to the authorities, not as an objection to war, but as an objection to this war against Nazi Germany. A great many young British Union members did register in this way and the examination of one such case shows how closely it followed the instructions from the leaders of the movement. Finally, Mosley’s insistence that, despite his opposition to the war, he would call on his followers to fight ‘if the life of Britain were threatened’, is shown to have been a hollow promise; throughout the period of the German invasion of the Low Countries and France he still failed to produce any call to arms (in fact, his much-quoted May statement did the opposite). Such a call was only finally produced on 1 July, the day before his appearance before the Advisory Committee, on the advice of his solicitors and at a time when his rereading of his original statements, and his consequent rewriting of history, was already taking place.

Despite the plethora of material written on the history of prisoners of war in the second world war, surprisingly few works analytically assess Germany’s overall treatment of British and American POWs. The handful of dissertations written on the subject have examined tightly-focused aspects within this field, while most published works have tended to examine the issue from the perspective of the prisoners themselves. While these are valid and valuable approaches, they leave a significant gap in the historiography: how precisely was German policy towards British and American POWs ultimately put into practice? This article distils every report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protecting Power delegates on their visits to most of the British or American POWs in German-run transit camps (dulags), regular camps for non-commissioned soldiers (stalags), and camps for commissioned officers (oflags), which could be found in the national archives of Great Britain, the USA and Canada. The findings of the inspectors were analysed to determine how well the OKW tended to treat the prisoners in terms of material conditions in the camps as well as in terms of harassment and serious violations of the Geneva Convention. Ultimately, it was determined by these two neutral sources that material conditions of life were ‘satisfactory’ for most of the war years and that instances of mistreatment by the German armed forces were rare, once a prisoner of war had been accepted as such by Germany.

The Communist Party of Great Britain consistently supported a trade union strategy after the second world war designed to eliminate the Labour Party. Yet by the 1990s leading members of the Party claimed that the organization’s last major contribution to British politics, before it dissolved itself in 1991, was to help rescue Labour from the left-wing ghetto into which it had been consigned during the 1980s. This article explains communist strategy in the postwar decades and the paradoxical outcomes to which it led.

The dynamic of change in the long 1960s was pushed forward significantly by the young. The assumption that this happened mainly in conflict with the older generations is not based on fact. In reality, older people reacted to new patterns of behaviour in a measured way and adapted to them relatively quickly. In particular, there is not much evidence for intra-family conflict between the generations. On the other hand, an increasing number of youth subcultures appeared, which distanced themselves from the political and cultural mainstream. Within society as a whole, there was considerable conflict, since there were many cultural, but only a few political, opportunities for young people.

In the years following metapolitefsi (the 1974 transition from dictatorship to multi-party democracy) a plethora of groups from the far left appeared on the Greek post-junta political scene. Obsessed with the dynamics of the Athens Polytechnic revolt of November 1973, these marginal but vocal and persistent groups viewed the process of constitutional change and democratic consolidation with deep scepticism. Many of them did not accept the legitimacy of the transfer of power and used confrontational anti-regime rhetoric and radical forms of action to denounce constitutional structures and attack the regime’s legality, conservative ethos and lack of structured political solutions. The purpose of this article is to describe the emergence and evolution of the major extra-parliamentary groups of the left and to examine their analyses and interpretations of Greek political circumstances in the late 1970s.