As East–West détente flourished in the early 1970s, discussions on pan-European economic trade and cooperation revived. Yet an ‘EC question’ soon arose as socialist countries saw the European Community as an expanding protectionist entity that hampered pan-European trade and insisted on denying it recognition, let least a role in it. This article argues that, facing this predicament, the EC endeavoured to assert itself in the continent through a careful action aimed at becoming embedded in pan-European economic cooperation and shaping its features. It explores the EC’s tactics to gain its own place and weight in the two major fora of East–West discussions on the matter in the 1970s – the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – and shows its contribution to defining the agenda and proposals on trade and economic cooperation. In investigating the EC’s manoeuvres and the people instrumental in these efforts, the article reveals the EC’s collaboration with the UNECE Secretariat, sheds new light to the socialist states’ evolving policy towards the Community and provides an unprecedented study into UNECE’s life in the 1970s and its connection with the Helsinki process. By weaving these aspects together, this article characterises the EC as one of the key makers of pan-European cooperation decades before the European Union came to dominate it.

This article examines the reform of history education in post-Soviet Russia, paying particular attention to the influence of George Soros’s foundations. It demonstrates how education reform in the field of history, particularly the production of new school textbooks, was characterised by a confrontation between liberal and nationalist forces, which echoed the clashes between these groups in the political arena. The article demonstrates that, in contrast to President Boris Yeltsin’s government, liberals prevailed in the field of education and were able to promote new history textbooks despite nationalist opposition. George Soros’s foundations supported Russian liberals financially but left them to lead the reform process. Despite liberal reforms in history education being a homegrown affair, the nationalist backlash concentrated on attacking foreign philanthropists such as Soros. These critiques, which were built upon the widespread rejection of Western models in the late 1990s, contributed to the discreditation of liberal politicians and their reforms in post-Soviet Russia.

This Spotlight argues that Holocaust historiography stands at a critical impasse. Decades of groundbreaking research have produced an era of unprecedented empirical richness – but also profound fragmentation: a tension masterfully documented in The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (2025). As the field has matured – dethroning German exceptionalism, re-centring victim experiences and expanding its temporal and methodological horizons – the frameworks that once provided coherence, from Berlin-centrism to national containers, have been exhausted. In response, this article proposes a new methodological scaffolding: relational Europeanism. This approach shifts the analytical focus from where events occurred to how they unfolded, privileging interaction over location, proximity over typology and the methodological practice of entanglement. By tracing these dynamics horizontally across borders, vertically through scales and temporally through pre-war and post-war periods, relational Europeanism rethinks the Holocaust as a continental process woven from irreducibly local contexts. It offers a viable path to hold the field’s dazzling plurality together without imposing a new synthesis. In an age of nationalist memory politics and eroding historical knowledge, this method is not merely an academic exercise but also an ethical imperative – providing the connective tissue to write European histories as transnational as the experiences themselves.

Based on new archival material, mainly police and judicial records and court sentences from the late 1940s, this article examines the legal and political background of the trials against homosexuals in post-revolutionary and early socialist Yugoslavia. During those years, at least two hundred men were convicted on prison terms for ‘unnatural fornication’ and some four hundred more were arrested and detained in police stations with their names entered into police registries. The year 1949 was particularly harsh for homosexuals in Yugoslavia. Two major anti-homosexual trials were held in Dubrovnik and Zagreb, when groups of homosexual men were accused of creating hotbeds of vice and debauchery. Perceived as a threat to the youth and their socialist upbringing, homosexuals were condemned as not only criminals but also renegades of the new socialist order and in some cases even as its saboteurs. Verdicts expressed a glaring ideological prejudice rooted in the notion that homosexuality was an expression of class exploitation, petty-bourgeois individualism and a visible sign of degeneration inherited from the old regime. The proper moral and sexual development of the youth, the first generation of the new socialist men and women, was consistently at the forefront of the reasoning behind guilty verdicts. This paper offers new insights into the legal history of homosexuality in Yugoslavia and contributes to the historiographical interpretation of ideological and political underpinnings surrounding homosexuality in early socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe.

Emotions are everywhere.Countries are now ranked based on their level of 'happiness' , voters' choices are influenced by feelings of anger and fear and recent research even suggests that feelings of joy and optimism can lead to a longer life. 1 Historians have also become preoccupied with the impact of emotions on the course of history itself and the processes of historical writing and remembering. 2One of the most emotionally wrought events in modern European history is the Holocaust.Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered nearly six million Jewish individuals and five million non-Jewish civilians. 3These numbers do not account for the extremity of emotional lives during the Holocaust.In Eastern Europe, shooting squads called Einsatzgruppen combed the countryside, rounding up, humiliating and killing Jews at point-blank range.In the West, Jewish families were crammed into rail carriages and sent on brutal journeys plagued by starvation and fear.

Through archival research, this article examines the relationship between the UK government, UK banks and the Bank of England during the development of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) sovereign debt crisis in Poland, Romania and Hungary. UK banks played a key role in the development of East–West relations during the Cold War through actively developing business ties with CEE countries. This article reveals that the UK government saw these relationships as a means to further its foreign policy goals towards the region and strengthen East–West European political and economic ties, which it sought to encourage through the use of export credit guarantees. It also illustrates how these foreign policy goals were the motivation for the UK government to encourage continued lending to Poland, Romania and Hungary during the outbreak of the CEE sovereign debt crisis through the Bank of England in its role as an intermediary between the government and banks. The article contributes to the underexplored role of export credit agencies, specifically the UK’s Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD), in the development of the sovereign debt crisis and demonstrates how UK banks helped finance the UK’s foreign policy toward CEE during the Cold War with the support and encouragement of the UK government.

This article examines the role played by Serbian demographers in the lead-up to the Yugoslav Wars. I argue that demographic research contributed to nationalist narratives and territorial claims. Demographers propagated concepts such as the ‘demographic threat’ posed by non-Serb populations, particularly Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, and the notion of ‘genocide’ against Serbs. They linked fertility, ethnicity and territory. By focusing on the most prominent Yugoslav/Serbian demographer, Miloš Macura, and the research institutions he set up, the article traces the radicalisation of demography during the 1980s. I argue that demographers used nationalism to reframe demographic processes in ethnic terms and thereby increase their status. The work of these demographers influenced political leaders and was widely disseminated to the public, shaping collective consciousness and preparing the ground for conflict. The analysis is based on contemporaneous expert literature, policy documents and archival information. It also highlights the role of international debates about the connection between demography and development.

While the impact of the two world wars and other inter-state conflicts on the history of humanitarianism has been a major area of research for some time now, comparatively little work has been done on the question of how internal wars impacted on the ways in which transnational actors and institutions approached the issue of offering relief to populations caught up in armed conflicts. Through seven articles and a thematic introduction, this collection covers conflicts that occurred in the years 1917–1949 when Europe experienced a remarkable spike in civil war violence, from Russia to Spain, and from Ireland to Greece. Collectively, these articles offer a fresh analysis of the connections between civil wars and the evolution of modern humanitarianism during Europe’s mid-twentieth-century crisis, highlighting transnational connections between humanitarian practices and actors across several conflicts.

This article explores the evolution and shifting interpretations of the dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary and the creation of its successor states as reflected in the historiographies of Central European nations. It analyses the complex interaction between politics and the socio-cultural milieu, on the one hand, and historiography, on the other. A palpable tension exists between the national narratives and the efforts to construct a commonly accepted story. Inspired by the entangled history approach, the paper identifies common features within these historiographies, which exist despite ostensibly distinct points of departure. Additionally, major interpretative trends in the area up to the present day are characterised, and the impact of the socio-cultural turn and the recent centenary of the First World War critically assessed. The article argues for the practicality of moderate national narratives, which should take into consideration recent developments in the discipline and can help bridge the divide between nation-states on sensitive issues.