During and after the First World War, the United States provided very substantial amounts of humanitarian and economic aid to war-torn Europe. All compassion aside, international historians have long recognised the strategic and social expectations attached to such foreign aid. US generosity was to build trust, reverence and influence abroad and, by inspiring ‘gratitude’ among recipients, to translate into a foreign policy advantage. But what happened when these expectations were disappointed? This article looks at transatlantic relations after the First World War to explore the role of gratitude in interwar international politics. It shows just how difficult it often was for Europeans to be appropriately ‘grateful’ and how emotionally the US public could react to such displays of perceived ‘ingratitude’. US aid – and the expectations and obligations that came with it – could excite distrust and resentment on both sides of the Atlantic.

Drawing on corporate and business association archives, this contribution investigates how Swiss multinational enterprises from the pharmaceutical industry (Ciba, Geigy, Hoffmann-La Roche, Sandoz) navigated governments’ interventions in France to preserve their profitability. Our analysis shows how diplomatic talks were crucial for Swiss firms having to cope with rising inflation and the freezing of drug prices, as well as increased customs controls targeting multinationals’ transfer prices. In particular, promises of future R&D were used as a tool in negotiations, and secrecy about prices and profits formation was key in maintaining pressure on the French government. The article also highlights that from the mid-1980s onwards, pharmaceutical multinationals promoted the creation of the Single Market, since it had the potential to enforce supranational rulings over national discretionary pricing policies.

The Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), established in October 1914 and overseen throughout the war by Herbert Hoover, played a pivotal role in saving millions of Belgians and hundreds of thousands of French from starvation. The proposed article aims to address this gap by examining the phenomenon of an ambivalent, even asymmetrical, diplomacy of gratitude. Herbert Hoover and his Belgian counterpart (and humanitarian rival), the financier Emile Francqui, had initially devised a strategy of remembrance of their wartime collective action, which centred on children, youth and higher education. Nevertheless, while their endeavour to establish a unified Belgian-American foundation ultimately failed due to their diverging postwar agendas, the dominant narrative of US aid encountered mounting opposition within Belgian political and academic circles. In the context of competing national memories and shifting feelings of gratitude, American philanthropy played a seminal role in the co-construction of modern higher education infrastructures in Belgium.

This article proposes a global history of the development of European cooperation in the field of public health from 1945 to the 1960s. It examines the way in which the idea of the decline of Europe fuelled the development of regional cooperation in the public health field. The institutional form and central themes of this cooperation are results of an effort by Western European powers, especially France, to fight their own decline in the face of the threats of decolonisation and of the rise of the US and Soviet superpowers. Geopolitics as well as international institutional competition explains why the Council of Europe decided to focus on ‘lifestyle diseases’ at a time when the WHO was primarily conducting campaigns to eradicate infectious diseases in developing countries.

Historians have traditionally studied Spain's transition to democracy (1975–8) through the point of view of its protagonists, especially King Juan Carlos I and Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez. The figure of Miguel Primo de Rivera y Urquijo (1934–2018), who despite being José Antonio's nephew and Franco's protégé defended the Political Reform Act which restored democracy, is one that however has barely received attention from historians. This is mainly due to the lack of sources on him, apart from his memoirs, published in 2002. The unprecedented access to his personal archive reveals that Primo de Rivera had a crucial role in the transition: although apparently an outright Francoist, he dedicated all of his efforts to accomplishing the succession of Juan Carlos and the eventual restoration of democracy. This paper rediscovers his figure, revealing him to be a convinced democrat and a crucial member of the strategy that brought down Francoism.

One of the ways in which Wilsonianism permeated Europe during the Great War was through the activities of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Historians are still discussing the effectiveness of the CPI's propaganda abroad. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on and problematising the case of Italy. The Italian scenario confronted the CPI with a series of challenges that exposed the limits of America's germinal public diplomacy. The author's argument is that, in spite of its numerous attempts, the CPI's activities in Italy resulted in a substantial failure, which was mostly due to an inter-institutional conflict of interests and competences between the CPI and the US embassy in Rome. Such a short-circuit prevented US propagandists from developing a genuine understanding of the Italian public's preferences and resulted in what people in the Peninsula perceived as a general lack of empathy.

This article examines the Young Socialists, a left-wing dissident circle of intellectuals from the last Soviet generation, and focuses on their contacts with Solidarność during 1980–81. These dissidents, located in Moscow and Minsk, interpreted the Polish strikes as the possible beginnings of a wider move to socialist reform in the Eastern Bloc. Using oral history and samizdat materials from the Russian and Polish archives and the former archives of Radio Free Europe, the article demonstrates how the Young Socialists’ interactions with Poland developed in the wider context of the transnational history of dissent in the Eastern Bloc at the turn of the 1980s. It argues that a combination of internationalist values and bloc-wide dissident solidarities caused socialist dissidents to view nationalist movements on the Soviet periphery and Eastern Europe as potential drivers of socialist reform on the eve of Perestroika.

This article conceptualises a transatlantic diplomacy of gratitude that developed in the context of the Marshall Plan as a case of emotional diplomacy by focusing on a Dutch commemorative tradition that celebrates the US aid programme. It shows that US Marshall Planners carefully refrained from explicit demands of gratitude and that it was the Dutch government, rather, that initiated a discourse of gratitude for US aid. Through the ways in which they invoked and embodied expressions of gratitude, the Dutch mediated and reframed their country's post-war demotion from a global empire to an aid-dependent country. This case, then, allows us to understand how the Netherlands strategically reconceptualised its position in a post-Second World War power structure dominated by the United States, while demonstrating how the careful navigation of the international emotional landscape played an important but as yet underexplored role in the diplomatic interactions of the post-war years.

The US-American presence in postwar Germany and its role in West Germany's re-education and democratisation have fuelled a discourse of gratitude that has lastingly shaped the transatlantic alliance. German politicians and other policy actors continue to rely on proclamations of ‘thankfulness’ as a means of what Todd Hall has termed ‘emotional diplomacy’. In the process, they affirm a collective memory of the postwar years that emphasises friendship and contains social conflicts, political tensions, and ambivalent affects. They draw on iconic tropes and powerful narratives – ranging from the GI handing out chewing gum to CARE packages and the ‘gift’ of democracy – which have cast German-American relations in terms of generosity, gift-giving, and gratitude. This article traces the roots of this discourse to (the popular memory of) the postwar moment and situates it vis-à-vis the multifaceted affective landscape of early postwar Germany with a specific focus on its gender logics and with an eye to its benefits and the risks it entails.

By analysing new archival evidence, this article reveals how in the late 1980s, the legal principle of subsidiarity came to be seen as a tool for demobilising opposition to further European integration. At the same time, it also became a projection screen for competing visions for Europe's future: while the European Commission saw subsidiarity as an important foundation for a future European federation and the German government as an essential part of a ‘Europe of the regions’, the British government hoped to use it to achieve a renationalisation of the European Community. The French government was much more sceptical towards subsidiarity, pointing to the paradox that subsidiarity actually required a strong central authority to achieve its decentralising ends. The article concludes by arguing that the debate on subsidiarity reveals how ambitious and yet contested European integration had become by the early 1990s.

This essay explores how Iceland, a newly independent state on the northern European periphery, responded to the international agenda for post-war stabilisation set out by economic experts after the turmoil of the First World War. It shows that the government of the so-called Austerity Alliance, led by Jón Þorláksson, adopted austerity policies devised at the international financial conferences in Brussels (1920) and Genoa (1922). To please external experts and creditors, it implemented a comprehensive fiscal and monetary policy of austerity and created a new central bank that was independent of politics. The aim, however, was not to divorce markets from government in a return to a pre-war era of laissez-faire as the scholarly literature suggests. Offering the first analysis of ‘the Icelandic business cycle’, the Þorláksson government enforced austerity by carving out ‘the economy’ – a measurable entity legible to expert management – that greatly expanded the role of the state.

This article argues that practices of gratitude were central to Franco-American relations in the early Cold War. Through the story of the French Gratitude Train to the American People in 1948–1949, it brings the diplomacy of gratitude to the heart of the post-war years, reflecting on the complicated relations between the two countries and on the ability of emotional performances of gratitude to shape as well as nuance post-1945 dynamics. Rather than focusing on political elites, this is a grassroots story which revolves around lace doilies and metal toys; women, children and veterans; lingering traumas mixed with genuine amazement. Through the lens of gratitude practice and performance, the article highlights the importance of ordinary citizens, material culture and feelings in the ideological battles and geopolitical reconfigurations of the mid-twentieth century.

The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.

On 7 March 1966, when President Charles de Gaulle announced France's withdrawal from the military, leadership of NATO, he also called for the removal of American troops from French soil. To this the American Secretary of State retorted, ‘and those in French cemeteries as well?’ The United States saw de Gaulle's action as an insulting and traitorous rebuff of Allied commitments forged during and after the war. For the French, however, the move was considered a justifiable assertion of national sovereignty, having little to do with the Allied ‘Liberation’ of France some twenty years earlier. In this article, I explore French and American perceptions of the Liberation using French anthropologist Marcel Mauss's pathbreaking 1923 work, The Gift. How can applying Mauss's ideas at the transnational level make sense of the meanings, (mis)interpretations, and implications of the Liberation for state actors on both sides of the Atlantic?

This essay analyses the Holy See's engagement in the postwar discourse surrounding displaced minors by focusing on the case of displaced Italian children from Libya. Separated from their families and evacuated to Italy at the onset of the Second World War, they were placed in Italian Youth of the Lictor (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio; GIL) camps. In the aftermath of the war, these displaced children petitioned to return to their families who had remained in territories no longer part of the Italian empire. This article shows how the Papal Aid Committee for Assisting Refugees took part in the relocation efforts and contributed to the conversation on family reunification. By navigating postwar aid and forming unexpected alliances, the Holy See not only contributed to reshaping Italy's geopolitical presence in the Mediterranean but also solidified conservative family norms within the international discussion on humanitarianism.

The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusing on the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning of tourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to national security in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange and human contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

This article explores the making of a unified Muslim community in interwar Austria and its ultimate failure. It argues that while the Islamischer Kulturbund Wien represented a visionary idea which aimed at establishing a Muslim community, rooted in both faith and Austrian society, it ultimately remained the dream of only a select few individuals. The association succeeded in strategically positioning itself as the representative body of Muslims in Austria; however, due to a lack of commitment from its members and the rise of fascism in Austria, this early attempt to establish a unified Muslim community in Austria eventually failed. By incorporating unofficial sources in various languages, including private letters, oral history interviews, and newspapers, alongside official archival material, the article amplifies the voice, perspective and agency of key Muslim figures involved, allowing for a more fully developed understanding of the internal and external dynamics of Muslim activism in interwar Vienna.

What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances? This article focuses on and advocates for further analysis of an unstudied discrete phenomenon: ‘the moment of discovery’ in early twentieth century Germany and Austria. The article's four empirical sections analyse various facets of this moment: the clues which pointed towards the Jewish ancestral secret, missed by many non-Jewish ‘Jews’; the reaction of antisemites to becoming the object of their own hatred complex; the deep despair felt during the moment of discovery; the mitigatory actions which could ameliorate the latter; and the minority who reacted positively to the news. Collectively, the piece displays the terror associated with being ‘Jewish’ at the time, the extent to which non-Jewish ‘Jews’ were truly separated from the Jewish community and, crucially, the radicalisation of moments of discovery under Nazism, when they became more devastating than ever.

This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign refugees in post-Second World War Sardinia undertaken by two idealistic Americans with the support of the Brethren Service Committee and the fledgling UNHCR. Focusing on individuals rejected for immigration, the initiative aimed to integrate these ‘hard core’ refugees by rendering them agents of development of a ‘backwards’ region of the Italian South and to overcome Italian reluctance to serve as a country of permanent resettlement for the displaced. The history of this project reveals the contradictory impulses of early Cold War refugee relief and humanitarianism: the competition between intergovernmental and voluntary agencies, of secular and spiritual enterprises, and of images of refugees as dependent and difficult to settle and yet capable of self-sufficiency. Many of the ideas piloted in Sardinia, notably the linking of self-sufficiency and development, later became prominent in the UNHCR's work in the Global South.

This article proposes a re-examination of one of the most controversial cases of reparations: the Treaty of Versailles. By focusing on Article 238, which stipulated the restitution of objects stolen or displaced by the German army during the First World War, we can see that the treaty helped to solidify norms concerning the protection of civilian property in wartime and gave civilians a right to have a voice in international law. However, the process of restitution was beset with both practical and political challenges and its success hinged on the role of public authorities, the nature of the objects returned and the impact of social class dynamics. Through this study, we are able to gain a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of restitution, its potential as well as its limitations.