Journal of Contemporary History

British mandated Palestine has attracted scholarly attention for its role in the development of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Some aspects of the time period, however, remain somewhat overlooked, and one prominent example is the reversal of the Passfield White Paper in 1931. Following extremely violent anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1929, the British Government in Westminster utilized two commissions of enquiry – the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Commission – to justify a change in policy. Rather than adhere to Britain’s original Zionist commitments, articulated in the Balfour Declaration and official mandate, the government decided to limit Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine, articulated in the Passfield White Paper, before reversing the policy months later. Subsequent explanations of this decision have been sparse and focused almost solely on the efficacy of Zionist lobbying. Why the British Government was susceptible to pressure and how this process took place has remained largely unexplored. In order to provide a more thorough analysis of why the Passfield White Paper was reversed, this article reassesses several assumptions within the literature and places the decision within the context of a Labour Government’s need to maintain internal unity, as well as cross-party support, on foreign and particularly India policy.

This article investigates one of the most tragic episodes of Soviet history: the collectivization campaign of 1929–30, when the Soviet state’s brutal assault on the peasantry plunged the whole country into chaos and provoked large scale rebellions. Resistance was especially fierce in the Muslim dominated parts of the North Caucasus, a notoriously troubled region where Soviet structures were still very weak, and the social cohesion of mountain communities strong. Ultimately, the Red Army and the armed forces of the secret police crushed these rebellions ruthlessly. Yet in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karachai and parts of Dagestan, they were at least sufficiently violent for the Soviet leadership to decide to suspend their collectivization attempt altogether until the mid-1930s. This is the first study to analyse collectivization in the non-Russian areas of the North Caucasus based on material from Russian archives as well as published document collections containing Soviet secret police reports.

Given the recent scholarly interest in the history of anti-communism, it is surprising that relatively little has been written on the ambitious transnational anti-communist campaign launched by the Vatican in the early 1930s. Drawing on new archival material, this article explores how the Vatican founded an organization known as the Secretariat on Atheism, which disseminated a form of anti-communism grounded in Catholic teachings. The Secretariat sought to buttress the position of the Roman Catholic church in international affairs and unite Catholic groups across Europe and the Americas, all the while maintaining its independence from other forms of anti-communism – particularly those espoused by Nazi and Fascist forces. However, the Secretariat was only partially successful in preserving its independence. For if the Vatican campaign avoided the antisemitic and nationalistic motifs that characterized Nazi-Fascist propaganda, the key protagonists of the movement cooperated with Nazi, Fascist and proto-Fascist forces on the ground. The Vatican campaign led to joint surveillance efforts, the toning down of the Pope's public denunciations of Nazi-Fascism, and the papal sanction of violence against purportedly communist enemies. Despite its potentially damning association with Nazi-Fascist forces, the Vatican anti-communist movement would outlive both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and leave a lasting mark on Cold War politics.

This article examines an aspect of British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s during the Arab revolt there against British colonial rule and Jewish settlement: the pro-British, anti-rebel Palestinian militia ‘peace bands’, associated with the Palestinian Nashashibi family and raised with British and Jewish military and financial assistance, and with support from the British Consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth. Using Hebrew, Arabic and untapped local British regimental sources, it details how the British helped to raise the peace bands and the bands’ subsequent activities in the field; it assesses the impact of the bands on the course of the Arab revolt; and it sets out the views of the British Army towards those willing to work with them. In doing this, it extends the recent thesis of Hillel Cohen on Palestinian collaboration with Zionists to include the British and it augments the useful but dated work of Yehoshua Porath and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna on the subject. Such a study is significant for our understanding of British methods of imperial pacification, especially the British Army’s manipulation during colonial unrest of ‘turned’ insurgents as a ‘loyalist’ force against rebels, an early form of ‘pseudo’ warfare. The collaboration by Palestinians resonates with broader histories of imperial and neo-imperial rule, it extends military histories on colonial pacification methods, and it provides rich, new texture on why colonial subjects resisted and collaborated with the emergency state, using the Palestinians as a case study.

The article looks at the Group of 7 (G7) efforts to fight international terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s. It examines the G7 statement against hijacking, the Bonn Declaration of 1978, and assesses how the G7 dealt with it after the adoption of the Declaration. The article illustrates that after a short phase of enthusiasm just after the Declaration’s adoption, the G7 members’ united front against terrorism quickly eroded. The G7 failed to secure support from other countries and realized the economic and political costs that the implementation of the Declaration could produce. Therefore, it was pushed to the backburner. The Declaration was largely of symbolic and only of very little practical importance. Yet, it still pointed to the new approach of the G7 – present until today – that moved away from a purely economic agenda towards a progressively more political one.

This article presents the first comparative study of US policy towards two European neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this period, Sweden and Switzerland were integrated into the Western security regime through a series of diplomatic, economic and technological steps until certain parts of the Swedish and Swiss armed forces were hard to separate from their NATO counterparts. This pioneering multi-archival study shows not only that US policy towards the neutrals was coordinated in order to make them conform to US security demands (a fact previously unnoticed by historians), but it also points towards another surprising and previously unknown conclusion – which the article calls ‘the armed neutrality paradox’. The article argues that the transfers of military technology to Sweden and Switzerland, which were needed to make their neutrality credible, effectively undermined the very credibility that they were supposed to ensure. This technology became a conduit of foreign influence reaching straight into the nerve centre of the armed neutrals, and the more ubiquitous and advanced the technology got, the less control over its use the governments seemed to have. US policy, together with the efforts of the neutral governments to increase security, spawned this paradox.

The 1970s era of detente represented a critical period in cultural exchanges between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The 1960s set in motion socially liberalizing forces to which Soviet authorities were forced to respond. The Brezhnev era brought greater emphasis on orderly, rational consumption as a marker of mature socialism, including cultural products as well as standard consumer items, as formal state-sponsored cultural exchanges coexisted with more subterranean consumption. Musical cultural exchanges, featuring the Duke Ellington band, the Roy Clark Show, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, emerged as key sites of trust and distrust and impacted efforts to maintain a stable social order. Barbara Misztal's contention that ‘the weakness of undemocratic states lies in their lack of social trust’ paired with historian Sergei Zhuk's observations about how consumption of Western cultural products shaped identity formation under late Soviet socialism suggests the transformative power of cultural exchanges to undermine official efforts to enhance cultures of trust. As state authorities extended limited exposure to American musical performers and styles in a bid to accommodate the need for trust culture, the Soviet citizenry adapted and transformed them into opportunities for deeper expressions of identity and connection to diverse exemplars of US musical culture.

Spain was the first developing country to exploit a nuclear power plant commercially. By the early 1970s Spain had become the major nuclear client of the USA, the world’s largest reactor exporter. Despite its importance, historians are just beginning to revisit and establish the sequence of the events that make up Spain’s nuclear history. This article analyses the role played by the state in enabling one of Western Europe’s poorest countries to join the exclusive nuclear power club. In a departure from the technological approach used in previous literature, the history of Spain’s progress in the nuclear power field is retraced against the background of its political and economic evolution.