{"title":"Book Review: <i>Mussolini’s Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism</i> by Marco Armiero, Roberta Basillo and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg","authors":"R. J. B. Bosworth","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945b","url":null,"abstract":"sponsored economic growth’ (251). Two silent revolutions lay behind the economic boom of the 1880s and 1890s: the abolition of the soul tax (291), which allowed the peasantry to save, purchase and invest; and the stabilization of the banking system (298). The result was that the Russian Empire ‘lost its archaic and pyramidal structure’, but failed to replace it with new political institutions and therefore suffered from ‘microcephaly’, making it hard to find an application for its new economic strength because its small head was ‘full of contradictory thoughts, both wonderful as well as destructive’ (357). Nonetheless, Alexander III became the beneficiary of White émigré nostalgia amidst the revolutions and civil war of the early twentieth century. ‘By contrast, the times of Alexander III and the emperor himself were drawn in their heads in an idyllic light’ (227). While ‘autocratic politics gained a decisive victory’ under Alexander III, ‘the ideology of autocracy experienced a decisive defeat’ (366). Unfortunately, Akunin concludes his volume, Nicholas II would fail to correct the system and instead ‘swung wildly from the course of his father and grandfather, repeating the mistakes of both’ (380). Akunin does not quote many historians, but the one whose name appears most often is Richard Pipes, which is not surprising since the leitmotif of Akunin’s history is the ‘Horde-like [ordynskoe] government’ of Russia, the Mongol legacy that Russia never exorcised from its political culture. Beautifully written, this volume offers remarkably insightful flashes when Akunin rises above the trap of binarist judgements.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134978174","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":"Autonomy Over Independence: Self-Determination in Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol in the Aftermath of the Great War.","authors":"Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, Mona Bieling","doi":"10.1177/02656914231198182","DOIUrl":"10.1177/02656914231198182","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The end of the First World War was a crucial time for nationalist leaders and minority communities across the European continent and beyond. The impact of the post-war spread of self-determination on the redrawing of Eastern European borders and on the claims of colonial independence movements has been extensively researched. By contrast, the international historiography has paid little attention to minority nationalist movements in Western Europe. This article focuses on three regions (Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol) that experienced considerable sub-state national mobilization in the interwar period. We aim to understand whether the leaders of Western European minorities and stateless nations shared the same enthusiasm as their anti-colonial and Eastern European counterparts for the new international order that self-determination seemed to foreshadow in the months following the end of the First World War. Because the American President Woodrow Wilson stood out as the most prominent purveyor of the new international legitimacy of self-determination, the article further examines how Western European nationalist movements exploited Wilson's image and advocacy to achieve their own goals. Nationalist forces in Catalonia, Flanders and South Tyrol initially mobilized self-determination and referred to Wilson as a symbol of national liberation, but this instrumentalization of self-determination was not sustained. Large-scale mobilization occurred only in Catalonia, and, even there, it disappeared suddenly in spring 1919. Furthermore, sub-state nationalist movements in Western Europe tended to mobilize self-determination to gain regional autonomy, rather than full independence, thus pursuing internal, not external, self-determination. The willingness of these movements to privilege autonomy over full independence made them more receptive to compromise. Radical forces would become stronger only in the 1930s and largely for reasons not directly connected to the post-war mobilization around self-determination.</p>","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10558288/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41151993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: <i>The Popes Against the Protestants: The Vatican and Evangelical Christianity in Fascist Italy</i> by Kevin Madigan","authors":"Oliver Logan","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945m","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945m","url":null,"abstract":"America’s economic and financial position. Blaming competitors, disputes about monetary and economic matters assumed ‘an exceptional viciousness and were conducted in highly nationalistic terms hitherto unheard of among the transatlantic partners’ (261). In this context, Nixon’s preoccupation with re-election during his first term in office further contributed to worsening relations, as did the ongoing Vietnam War, especially Europe’s furious response to the 1972 Christmas bombing campaign. In 1973 Kissinger delivered a speech, ‘Year of Europe’, intended to improve relations. It didn’t. European leaders considered his proposed Atlantic Charter as condescending and aimed at undermining and preventing further European integration. The October 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states caused further disruption to relations. These were considerably worsened when later that month a small committee of the National Security Council put all US nuclear forces on global alert, DEFCON III, the same level of alert that had occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. France and the UK, NATO’s other nuclear powers, were not consulted. Nor was NATO informed until European leaders heard about it the next day. Despite vigorous protests, the US remained unapologetic. Europe was shocked that amid a global crisis the US took such an extraordinary and reckless measure. European trust and confidence in US leadership was shaken. Nonetheless, as Larres makes crystal clear, the fact was that however upset Europeans were, there was little they could do. They lacked the required unity and strength, especially in the security realm, to challenge American hegemony. The signing of a new Atlantic Charter some months later marked European acceptance of US authority over the Atlantic alliance. Larres persuasively argues that despite Nixon and Kissinger’s constructive détente policies towards the communist bloc, they were determined to maintain full control of the western alliance. They re-asserted a transatlantic alliance operated on a basis of subservience rather than equality or mutual respect. Today’s global crisis confirms the extent to which Washington continues ‘to insist on a pliant and domesticated Europe that pa[ys] its dues and follow[s] US policies and its guidance and advice without asking too many, if any, critical questions’ (272). Larres’ excellent scholarship presents telling insights into American attitudes toward Europe and European responses. A must-read for students, it will be of interest to all parties concerned about the direction of Europe in today’s world. Highly recommended.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937857","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":"Pierre Jurieu and the Creation of a Protestant Imagined Community in England, 1680–1705","authors":"William H. F. Mitchell","doi":"10.1177/02656914231197999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231197999","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses how Pierre Jurieu's (1637–1713) political journalism advanced the cause of pan-Protestantism in the later seventeenth century. It examines how Jurieu portrayed his Huguenot subjects as worthy of sympathy, as well as spelling out how that sympathy could manifest itself politically, by reinterpreting the Glorious Revolution as an event that enabled England to carry out a pan-Protestant foreign policy. This discussion demonstrates how Jurieu was characteristic of three trends that have attracted historiographical attention. Firstly, Jurieu's works were part of the later seventeenth century speeding up of time and closing in of space: he informed his readers of events in faraway regions in unprecedentedly quick time spans. Secondly, the reconstruction of Jurieu's patronage networks in the English print market casts aspersions on the idea of a pristine public sphere. Thirdly, his blending of religious and political ideas problematizes the divide between the two: his apocalyptic writings complemented his works on political economy, and vice versa. With these themes in mind, Jurieu is presented as a provider of one of the richest defences of pan-Protestantism, as well as a representative actor of the broader forces that were shaping English discourse in the later seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937567","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":"Book Review: <i>Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg</i> by Sean Dunwoody","authors":"Jaap Geraerts","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945g","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945g","url":null,"abstract":"ography mirrored and influenced the development of these notions, and intimates that history writing was a major conduit for their transformation. Class, for instance, seems to have acquired increasingly economic overtones and become ever more associated with conflict: at first a defining element of a harmonious society – in physiocracy – it then became that of a peacefully cooperating community marked by class oppositions – in Sieyès’ thought – to end up as the driver of national class struggle across the centuries – in Guizot’s adaptation of Thierry’s ideas. Otherwise, to demonstrate the book’s significance, it would have helped to discuss how the historical works studied were received beyond the world of scholarship, and specifically how they might have affected or reflected government policy. D’Auria could also have given a sense of his authors’ relationship to present debates on the French national past – a move that could have aided in assessing their continuing influence on, or irrelevance to, present scholarship (including his own). These, however, are small objections to what will likely become a reference on the history of French historiography, as well as a definitive work on the historiographical shaping of modern French national identity.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937572","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":"Book Review: <i>Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution</i> by Hassan Malik","authors":"Francis King","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945n","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945n","url":null,"abstract":"instance to what was meant by ‘proselytism’. Both his and Tacchi-Venturi’s argumentative strategy was to claim that what threatened Catholicism also threatened Fascism. The Jesuit and the Pope, however, were frustrated at Mussolini’s personal refusal to take the alleged Protestant threat seriously. Not only was Il Duce, like many Fascists, a veteran anti-clerical, he would also have been aware of the adverse diplomatic consequences of the persecution of Protestants. A suggestive section of Madigan’s book is that on Villa San Sebastiano in the Fucino Basin (Abruzzi). An enquiry concluded that, in this community, accusations of the bishop’s failure to combat Methodism, and indeed the mercurial fortunes of Methodism themselves, stemmed from the animosity of certain families towards the aforementioned prelate. Were similar factors at play elsewhere? The Protestant ‘threat’ was inflated and so too were claims about the success of counter-measures. Protestants remained a small but resistant minority. Observers might blame the inadequacy of local clergy, whether through indolence, ignorance or poverty, or, yet again, they might lament the lack of cooperation by the Fascist authorities. The alliance between Fascism and the Catholic Church was an opportunistic one between rival totalitarianisms, but it was one cemented, as Madigan shows, by certain shared obsessions. Catholic spokesmen had a long history of depicting ideologies condemned by the Catholic Church, including Protestantism, as alien to Italian tradition and values. Now, Fascist ideologues shared with them a hostility to ‘materialistic’ Anglo-Saxon culture and fear of Italo-American missionaries as agents of US imperialism. Madigan states, however, that, contrary to the traditional picture: ‘one truth revealed by the anti-Protestant campaign is how little unified the Fascist government was about eliminating the Protestant threat’. One might suggest, further, that the irregularity of cooperation between the State authorities and the ecclesiastical ones was partly an outcome of the complexities of the regime more broadly as a coalition of ‘authentic’ Fascists, who were radicals of a sort, and conservatives.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134978165","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":"Book Review: <i>Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II</i> by Mark Edele","authors":"Anton Fedyashin","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945h","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945h","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937564","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":"Book Review: <i>Papal Bull: Print, Politics and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome</i> by Margaret Meserve","authors":"Oliver Logan","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945o","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945o","url":null,"abstract":"lution, and what in hindsight seems a mystery: why they did not seek to disengage after the fall of the Tsar in March 1917, as the economy began to unravel. At the time, though, as Malik’s reading of the financiers’ discussions in 1917 shows: ‘Rather than seeing the budget deficits, inflation and plummeting industrial production historians point to, key investors and financial middlemen foresaw opportunity in Russia’ (141). This reveals an interestingly skewed perspective on the bankers’ part – the dire and worsening problems in the real economy were fully covered in the Russian press during 1917. Partly, the bankers were keen to retain their position in order to profit from the anticipated post-war reconstruction – motivated by both commercial and geopolitical rivalry. It is perhaps harder to see why so many banks tried to remain in Russia after the Bolsheviks had taken power in November 1917, although Malik does cite one banker who anticipated a fire sale of ‘bankrupt stock’ (148). The Bolsheviks’ eventual decision to repudiate the debt is presented as rational, and Malik argues that default would probably have been inevitable under any regime. In this he takes issue with historians like Sean McMeekin, who presents the default as primarily the result of deliberate Bolshevik malevolence. Malik’s analysis concludes that the Bolsheviks had little freedom of manoeuvre given the state of the Russian economy by early 1918, even though they presented default as a revolutionary act rather than as an economic necessity. Surveying the whole story from the 1890s onwards, he concludes that ‘the tragedy is that the financiers at first failed to appreciate the political consequences of their actions and then, in the context of the war, began to focus belatedly on the political dimension of their investments – increasingly to the exclusion of financial considerations and analysis’ (212). Although this is a rather technical study, it is lucidly written, meticulously researched and painstakingly edited. It meets its stated aim of usefully filling a gap in the historiography of the Russian revolution.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937565","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":"Adopting Public Relations-Like Strategies to Promote Labour Feminism in Finland, 1965–1975","authors":"Heidi Kurvinen","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199947","url":null,"abstract":"When public relations as a field professionalized in Finland in the 1960s, it had knock-on effects beyond the corporate world. As an example of this, I analyse various public relations-like strategies adopted by a party political women's organization, the Finnish Women's Democratic League. I show that as a radical left organization, the Finnish Women's Democratic League began to value media visibility in the mid-1960s, but it also continued to use more traditional communication forms, such as leaflets and workplace visits, to spread its ideological message. The changes of emphasis between various forms of communication were affected by the politicization of Finnish society, which caused tensions between the bourgeois dominant public and the ‘people's democratic’ counterpublic. My analysis is based on a close reading of minutes of Finnish Women's Democratic League meetings, press releases and other archival material, as well as Pippuri, the organization's internal magazine, and Uusi Nainen, a commercial women's magazine published by the organization .","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134938136","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":"Book Review: <i>Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915</i> by James M. Yeoman","authors":"Joshua Newmark","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945y","url":null,"abstract":"It is similarly implied in the characterization of his universaly, which sound more and more like legislative decrees as the book develops. Elsewhere, however, the narrative conveys something more contingent and less clearly defined, an unending attempt by Mazepa to navigate the inescapable realities brought on by the unstable geopolitics and contested borders lying between the Polish Commonwealth, Muscovy, Sweden, Crimea, and the Porte, not to mention the changing borders and complicated relationships among the various Hetmanates themselves. One way to interrogate this creative interpretative tension might be to integrate some conceptual approaches from recent empire studies, such as layered and segmented sovereignty or negotiated spaces of borderlands. A final thought: both the Russian and English edition of this unstintingly scholarly work end on a reflective and philosophical note, worth quoting in light of Russia’s current war against Ukraine. ‘One would like to believe that the time has come ... to learn from the tragedies and mistakes of our ancestors, and to listen to and understand one another’. Alas, it appears, not yet.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134938138","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}