Journal of Modern European History

This article investigates the changing ideas of representation during one of the European upheavals of the 1830s, the Polish November Uprising. Studying the Polish Sejm proceedings, we ask about the impact of the uprising and warfare on revamping the concept of representation. A representative, parliamentary, but not yet democratic order emerged under the conditions of reduced sovereignty. We demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in times of war ushered in non-descriptive and non-imperative representation and how the struggle for legitimacy helped introduce the idea of the government's responsibility to the nation. Although the broadening of citizenship beyond the nobles was still debated only concerning possible land reform, the push and pull of the frontline situation and transnational diffusion and learning spurred on fundamental changes. The 1831 Sejm was a threshold for modern parliamentarism in Poland, bringing its earlier endogenous developments in line with European drift towards representative government.

The article presents the idea of a third unit in the Habsburg Monarchy prior to World War I as seen through the eyes of Slovenian liberals. The author presents the broader political context in which the concept emerged and then analyses the reactions of various political groups amid national tensions in the Balkans. Extracts of two liberal Slovenian newspapers, Edinost (Trieste) and Soča (Gorizia), are examined with respect to the key geopolitical dilemmas and interests of different stakeholders affected by the new geopolitical construct. It is argued that trialism was chiefly an attempt by Austria to curtail the power of Hungary. The majority of Slovenians and Croatians initially supported the idea because it implied their political emancipation. On the other side were the Hungarians, Italians and Serbs who saw the idea as a threat to their national interests. In terms of South Slavic relations, trialism represented a new battlefield for the Catholic and Orthodox visions of Yugoslavism. With further development of the concept, first and foremost due to Austria's ambitions to satisfy the Italians and leave Trieste and Gorizia outside of the imagined third unit, the idea introduced tension into Croatian–Slovenian relations and led to a fresh dispute in the Slovenian political sphere between liberals and conservatives. Finally, the advocates of trialism were unable to gain sufficient internal support within the Habsburg Monarchy, which thereby preserved the status quo and the dual regime until the monarchy's collapse during war.

In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic system. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2700 articles that mention ‘popular meetings’, folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. In the 1860s and 1870s a farmer-centred democratic critique dominated, combining proposals for widened suffrage with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the 1880s and 1890s, the social base was widened as urban workers – socialist and antisocialist – took a greater part and the ideological composition became more heterogeneous. The paper suggests that the folkmöten constituted an important arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system, creating a road forward for democratic reforms and a democratic society.

This article investigates the first generation of peasant farmers elected to modern representative assemblies in Denmark. I argue that the contributions of the first peasant farmer politicians are an important but overlooked part of the history of democratisation in Denmark. The peasant farmer members were uneducated and unable to speak in a way considered suitable for parliament. For that reason, they were deemed unfit for political participation by their contemporaries and have been similarly judged in most of the existing literature. The peasant farmer members were not as timidly passive as they have been described. Instead of speaking, they used petitions to gain a voice in parliament. The farmer members thus introduced petitioning as a form of political participation in parliamentary politics, a practice that remains central to popular politics today. The actions of the peasant farmer politicians challenged the existing boundaries of what was considered appropriate political practice and thereby expanded the repertoire of forms of political participation available to the uneducated majority of the population.

One route out of continental Europe for Jewish refugees seeking to escape Nazi and Vichy persecution was via Franco’s Spain. Yet hundreds of these refugees were imprisoned soon after arriving in the country. From prison, men of military age tended to be sent to a detention camp for weeks, months or up to three years. This camp was known as the ‘Campo de Concentración de Miranda de Ebro’, and conditions in it were harsh. Why were Jewish men sent there? They were interned in the camp because senior Spanish officials created a series of policies that spelt out what officials and officers should do with different categories of foreigners who had entered the country without all the necessary documents. These policies did not target Jews. They were influenced by large population movements within France and from France into Spain; by the pro-Axis and pro-Allies leanings of senior officials; and by pressure that the British, American and German ambassadors in Madrid put on the Spanish government. Between September 1940 and January 1943, the policy determined that provincial governors were responsible for deciding what to do with newly arrived foreigners. Provincial governors’ membership in the Falange, a Germanophile party, may have influenced their decisions. While interned in the camp, many Jewish refugees saw their visas to their final destinations and boat tickets out of Europe expire, and they endured hunger, illness, separation from their family and other conditions that were detrimental to their health.

Histories of the freedom of movement during the Cold War often focus on issues of immigration. Yet, national security frameworks set up after the Second World War also involved restrictions of the right to leave one's own country. This article takes the Federal Republic of Germany as a case study to probe the political tensions between codified constitutional rights of the individual, new human rights norms, and the Bonn government's anti-communist mobilisation during the 1950’s. The example of the right to leave shows that the state retained crucial powers to curtail basic rights in the name of national security state.