{"title":"Leopold II, Kimpa Vita and the Local Decolonisation of the Belgian Public Space","authors":"Idesbald Goddeeris","doi":"10.1177/16118944251348781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251348781","url":null,"abstract":"Belgium's relationship with its colonial past is a complex one including celebration, forgetting, and recently re-evaluation. This article argues that, unlike what’s often thought, decolonization has not stopped in the past few years, but that especially the public space has gradually developed and reached new dimensions. Rather than at the national level, this development has taken place on a regional, and particularly local, level. This article examines a wide range of municipalities and cities, as well as the three regions within the Belgian federation (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels). Based on media articles and official documents, it analyses how local councils and regional governments have responded to frequent acts of protest against colonial monuments and street names, to what extent policies have changed, and which factors have contributed to these developments.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144515422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toppling Statues: Public Spaces, Heritage and Memory Cultures of European Colonialism. Introduction","authors":"Janne Lahti, José M. Faraldo","doi":"10.1177/16118944251349329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251349329","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colonial Grandeur, Decolonisation and the Contested Histories of O Padrão dos Descobrimentos in Lisbon","authors":"Lotte Claerhout","doi":"10.1177/16118944251348782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251348782","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the complex legacy of colonialism in Lisbon, using the <jats:italic>Padrão dos Descobrimentos</jats:italic> monument as a focal point for contemporary debates on decolonisation and collective memory. By analysing this monument, which was originally erected during the authoritarian <jats:italic>Estado Novo</jats:italic> regime (1933–1974) to commemorate the Portuguese ‘Age of Discoveries’, this paper delves into the broader discourse of how colonial history is memorialised and its implications for Portugal's present-day attitude towards its colonial past. By critically examining the monument's narrative, symbols and the public's interaction with it, the study explores the tension between the historical valorisation of colonial achievements and the contemporary efforts to create a more nuanced understanding of the colonial era. It highlights the role of monuments in shaping collective memory, and the efforts to reinterpret and challenge the colonial narrative through activism and artistic interventions. The conclusion posits the <jats:italic>Padrão dos Descobrimentos</jats:italic> not just as a relic of the past, but as a dynamic site of memory that reflects ongoing debates about history, identity and decolonisation in Portugal. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial legacies are navigated in public spaces and memory, shaping national identity.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144479252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Putting Women on a Pedestal: Rethinking Female Inclusion in Colonial Monuments","authors":"Emma Dhondt","doi":"10.1177/16118944251348776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251348776","url":null,"abstract":"As with many other types of public sculptures, there is a near-total absence of colonial monuments showing women, demonstrating a public failure to recognise their impact as colonisers and colonised people. When included at all, women are often portrayed as allegorical figures in colonial monuments. Their place is at the side-lines, serving and celebrating male colonial heroes. Indeed, very rarely is a woman at the centre of a colonial monument. But there are such monuments too. Two statues of Hannah Duston, an English colonist in North America, are illustrative examples of this; they have also become contested after the Rhodes Must Fall protests. However, recent attempts to decolonise public spaces have also increasingly tried to feminise them, not only by replacing contested monuments but by adding new female figures. This article examines how women have been included in colonial monuments by addressing both past and recent portrayals in different countries. It addresses questions of and relationships between colonial power, identity and gender, showing parallels and divergences in female inclusion in colonial monuments across different places and times.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144479230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘To the Homeland’: Settler Monument, Memory and the Finnish Colony of Petsamo on the Finnish–Russian Borderlands","authors":"Janne Lahti","doi":"10.1177/16118944251348777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251348777","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a set of entanglements between settler memory and a monument in a nation that does not acknowledge that it ever had a colonial history. It looks at the efforts of exiled Finnish settlers to keep alive the memory of Petsamo as ‘their homeland’ through a monument they set up in Ivalo, Northern Finland, in 1985. Before being forced out of Petsamo, a province on the Arctic Ocean, by the Soviet Union in 1944, Finnish settlers tried to reshape Petsamo from a multi-ethnic borderland into a Finnish homeland for over two decades. Their settler memory is inscribed on and funnelled through this Ivalo monument, via claims of belonging and connection to a lost homeland. The monument set up by the settlers is meant to speak to their specific stories, their version of the past and of themselves. It serves settler purposes, declaring settler belonging to the broader public, to the nation and even to the world. It maintains and channels settler memory to future generations and remains uncontested and largely ignored in today's Finland.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144479298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Histories of the European Parliament during the Cold War: Transnational Democracy in the Making?","authors":"Wolfram Kaiser","doi":"10.1177/16118944251349327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251349327","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces and discusses the incipient historiography of the European Parliament. It argues that more systematic research in this direction has strong potential to overcome limitations of research both on European integration and the member states. It can encourage and support those working on national history, or histories, to leave their intellectual ghettos and explore both vertical and horizontal connections in contemporary European history. Researching and writing about the history of the European Parliament can also contribute to a broader interdisciplinary debate about transnational democracy beyond the state, in what is now the highly institutionalised and legally integrated European Union. Focussing on the period of the Cold War, the article sets out a research agenda for addressing the internal politics of the European Parliament, its role in post-war European democracy and polity-building; and its underrated contribution to the Europeanization of policymaking. What could result is, befitting for a pluralistic democratic institution, not one, but several histories of the European Parliament and transnational democracy.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144371284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vanished Institutions: The Life and Death of Europe's International Organisations – Introduction","authors":"Kiran Klaus Patel, Kenneth Weisbrode","doi":"10.1177/16118944251332095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251332095","url":null,"abstract":"Why do international organisations die? Their causes of death deserve attention and analysis. Europe in the 20th century with its plenitude of international organisations provides a rich ground for studying why some of them died, why some lived, why some were resurrected from near-death and why some survive as institutional shells, or zombies. The introduction to this special issue summarises the cases that follow in order to discern a pattern or logic of institutional death in modern European history. A pattern is elusive because causal and conditional factors are almost impossible to separate in cases of institutional death. Yet they show that, in contrast to state collapse, international organisations more often die from without – that is, for external, contextual reasons – than from within. However powerful some external factors, such as war, can be, institutional death is rarely predetermined. In one form or another international organisations possess a strong will to live.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"282 1","pages":"116-128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143910548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"NATO’s ‘Near Death’ and the Study of ‘Vanishing Institutions’","authors":"Seth A Johnston","doi":"10.1177/16118944251331411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251331411","url":null,"abstract":"A newly elected president declares NATO ‘obsolete’ and announces his country's withdrawal from parts of the transatlantic Alliance. Some European leaders fear a more complete abandonment. Although France remained a treaty ally after Charles de Gaulle's 1966 announcement, this episode remains the most significant rejection of NATO's organisation in its history. And yet, the potentially fatal crisis catalysed adaptations in the Alliance so successful that they endured through the end of the Cold War. This case offers lessons about institutional endurance in the face of such crisis. NATO adapted boldly, but also prudently; slowly perhaps, but effectively. The high politics of competing national interests and the high stakes of nuclear deterrence demanded change but could not afford catastrophe. How institutions adapt – and by whom – can mean the difference between vanishing and revitalising.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"35 1","pages":"246-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143910552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fascist Internationalism: From a Vanished Institution to a Failed Concept?","authors":"Daniel Hedinger","doi":"10.1177/16118944251331427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251331427","url":null,"abstract":"During the early 1930s, a number of fascist international organisations emerged in Europe and East Asia. Italy's ambition to universalise fascism led to the establishment of the Action Committees for the Universality of Rome (Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma, CAUR) in mid-1933. Meanwhile, some months earlier, Japan's continental expansion and the founding of Manchukuo brought about the creation of the Greater Asia Association (Dai Ajia Kyōkai). For a moment, it seemed that the time had come for a proper fascist international aimed at an ultranationalist revision of the League of Nations and at fighting the Comintern on a global level. During the 1930s, fascist internationalism was the ideology-driven motor beyond such projects. However, by the latter half of the decade, all of them had failed. In Europe, heightened competition between Germany and Italy left little space for a pan-European fascist organisation. In Asia, the colonial context of the region and Japan's expansion placed almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of an East Asian fascist international, and it turned out that the connection between the two centres of gravitation in Asia and Europe would not be established through any kind of fascist international organisation. This article discusses how and why the fascist internationals of the early 1930s vanished, stressing that, in the end, the rising Axis alliance was much more driven by transimperial radicalisation. In other words, Italy, Germany and Japan did not rely on a proper fascist international institution to plunge the world into a new world war. Nonetheless, as this article shows, the manner of the failure and vanishing of fascist internationalism is essential in understanding the scope and nature of global fascism in the interwar years.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143884357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"European Lives and Deaths – Atlantic Revival? The Europeanness of the League of Nations’ Protracted Demise","authors":"Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon Andreas Ikonomou","doi":"10.1177/16118944251331415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944251331415","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we revisit the story of the League of Nations’ (1919–1946) death. Throughout its existence, the League served as an instrument for a series of important experiments in organising European politics and negotiating Europe's place in the wider global order. To understand the League's demise and legacy, we need to study these different conceptions of Europe, their shortcomings, failures and legacies. The article explores three such conceptions: (1) the Eurocentric civilisational order that played a foundational role in the early 1920s; (2) the European regional agenda that rose to prominence as a product of the French-German rapprochement of the late 1920s; and (3) the new technocratic visions of regional European cooperation that were associated with a deteriorating international political climate in the 1930s. The Atlantic heritage, with the transfer of experiences, functions and personnel from the League to the UN during and after the World War II, is addressed in the article's fourth and final sections. Our argument is that these European visions were attempts to manage the turbulent and skewed post-war world order by an Eurocentric organisation that from its very inception was hampered by the fact that one of its chief designers, namely the United States, opted not to join. In a broader perspective, we show that in order to understand how international organisations die, we should work with a deeper historical perspective that considers the effects of their various life stages.","PeriodicalId":44275,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern European History","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143872808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}