Introduction

Europe(s) since 1945

In 1945, there was no pre-determined path to the kind of Europe(s) that can be said to exist today. Even now, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes, it is essential to stress that ‘there is not “one Europe”’, but ‘rival and contrasting European identities, depending on where the boundaries of Europe are drawn and how the nature of “European-ness” is perceived’.³ Such diversity, resulting in tensions and competing narratives, is something that the contributors to this volume are very alert to, as were several of the individuals whose engagement for social democracy they trace. While the ‘new cartography of Europe’ de Sousa Santos calls for is undoubtedly limited here by the focus on European archival material, several of the contributions investigate the ways in which ‘the colonial world [as] a multifaceted site of resistance and survival ingenuity’⁴ was taken into account – to what extent and with what intellectual and practical consequences – by the individuals and groups that sought to build a more open Europe. The various ‘Europes’ which they dreamed of and tried to establish, and those which eventually prevailed, need to be situated within the broader political spectrum of post-war politics.

The conservative right of European politics, especially that associated with the ideas generally known as ‘Christian Democratic’, and even much more overtly nationalist parties, were massively backed by US think tanks and wealthy organisations well versed in the wiles of Madison Avenue.⁵ Parties started by liberals were built on pre-existing democratic foundations, ones that had often succumbed to Adolf Hitler’s Neuordnung or, as with the communists, the allure of the Soviet Union.⁶ The Gaullists in France, who captured large portions of the vote, had their counterparts in most European countries. De Gaulle needs no introduction of course, but his ideas and personality towered above every party in France, with the exception of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), who called itself ‘le parti des fusillés’. These two major contributors to the Resistance thus partially squeezed out the French socialists, who did make a significant contribution in spite of the overwhelming noise emanating from the Gaullists and the PCF. Notwithstanding their ‘past imperfect’, as Tony Judt put it,⁷ the PCF managed to dominate much of the discourse of what Europe (as well as France) should aspire to, often in direct challenge to the more liberal desire to stay close to the United States and Britain. As a similar pattern was played out in other parts of Europe, how could socialists make their voice heard?

An important part of post-1945 Europe that needs to be mentioned here, but that space and the logic of this book rather excludes, is the role that has been increasingly played by liberal thinking about Europe in competition with socialist thought. In 1945, as we show in this volume, socialist and broader state interventionist thinking dominated the debate about how a future Europe should evolve. This was termed ‘Keynesianism’ across Europe and denoted the broad consensus that the ‘planning’ that had dominated state thinking during the war should be continued into the peace. Hence in France le commissariat général du Plan established under Charles de Gaulle’s presidency (1944–46) was embellished and extended under subsequent governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. In Britain the term ‘Butskellism’ was used to denote a consensus – albeit an incomplete and contested one⁸ – between the Labour Party of the 1950s (under Hugh Gaitskell) and the Conservative Party of ‘Rab’ Butler on how to best reconstruct the British economy. This was not seriously challenged across Europe until the advent of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain in 1979 where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ditched Keynes in favour of what are now termed ‘neoliberal’ free-market policies. These were in turn adopted across Western Europe, even by most socialist parties, and certainly by the Labour Party after Tony Blair became leader in 1994. But neoliberalism had been touted by thinkers like Friedrich Hayek at the London School of Economics from the publication of his book, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944.⁹ Hayek, Ludwig van Mises and the majority of the ‘neoliberal’ ‘Mont Pelerin’ group were nostalgic for their native Austro-Hungarian Empire, an entity which had been multi-ethnic with fully open internal borders, a model which can be said to characterise – up to a point – the present-day European Union.¹⁰ This process, aided by the conversion of the United States under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s has been examined by authors such as Alain Laurent with some distaste.¹¹ Sidelined by most states and in international organisations until the 1980s, neoliberalism thus emerged as a direct counter to socialist ideas about planning and has been dominant in Europe ever since at least the Treaty of Maastricht which came into effect in 1993. Thus, while socialism was dominant as one form of ‘globalism’ until the 1970s, this has been on contested ground since the 1940s, and still is today.

During the period covered by this book, outside France and Western Europe as a whole, the siren drums of collectivist communism and individualist capitalism were amplified by expert propaganda disseminated by entities in Washington and Moscow, both proposing an opposing and compelling set of arguments. European intellectuals and diplomats were not alone in being impressed by the astonishing material progress of the United States and the heroic defence of both Stalingrad and the former European colonies by the Soviet Union, the ‘homeland of the proletariat’. De Gaulle himself went to Moscow in his first foreign foray as head of the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République française in late 1944, an initiative that impressed neither Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor Josef Stalin.¹² Others looked to a partly functional, and partly mythical Europe based on liberal democratic principles – what we now call ‘neoliberalism’ originated in dreams of a borderless Europe where the realities of the market would eventually overcome nationalist fervour, as mentioned above.¹³

Trans-nationalising international policy making

In considering why thinking and acting across borders mattered to a number of European socialists, and how socialism was embedded – only partly, or fully – in their initiatives for international policy in Europe, this volume takes stock of the fact that in recent years, the study of international policy has largely been renewed in four ways.

First, scholars have turned their attention to the connected evaluation of the decolonisation and globalisation processes, the internationalisation of colonial issues and transnational anti-colonial mobilisation, and the expansion of new international norms during colonial retreat.¹⁴ Historians of European integration and global financial networks have demonstrated that the history of the European Union is intrinsically linked to decolonisation processes,¹⁵ and that the ends of the colonial empires have had a tangible impact on the former imperial powers of the EU.¹⁶ The history of Europe more broadly has also benefited from the study of migration, diaspora and struggles for equality and liberation in challenging and redefining cosmopolitanism, which resonates with some of the aspirations and issues in this volume. ‘European cosmopolitanism’, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Narayan note, can only be properly understood if ‘those multicultural others who come to constitute European polities through imperial endeavours’ are considered.¹⁷ Even then, the very concept of cosmopolitanism, as underlined by Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer, is so strongly ‘connected in European intellectual traditions with humanism and the Enlightenment that it seems to suggest an open, tolerant and intercultural approach to transnationalism’ that risks obscuring others.¹⁸ It is therefore important to state that the following chapters, despite their primary reliance on Western and Northern European sources, take full stock of the criticism that European socialists, including those who sought to work across borders and imagine an alternative Europe and fairer world order, faced from within the empires and ex-empires. As two Algerian members of the new independent assembly told their Italian hosts in Milan in 1962: ‘A shared future for Africa and the European left was only possible under the banner of an “unconditional anticolonialism”. […] The problem is therefore whether the European Left is hereafter truly determined to understand our reality’. What for an Italian delegate was merely ‘the myth of Bandung’ was to the Algerians ‘not a myth [but] the crystallisation of the efforts of Africa and Asia in the struggle against colonialism’, which had given the Algerian movement for liberation material assistance and a diplomatic platform.¹⁹ We also acknowledge the pitfalls associated with ‘the Anglicising of intellectual lives around the world’ and the dangers of narratives of ‘encounters’ being reduced to ‘Westerners and Resterners’, in the words of Jeremy Adelman. By being critically aware of the sources used in this volume – in a range of languages and locations, but European ones – the contributors try to take fully into account Adelman’s suggestion that ‘understanding inter-dependence means seeing how it expands personal and social horizons for some, but also thins bonds with others’.²⁰

Such debates also point to the need to unpack forms and meanings of ‘internationalisation’, which, as Rob Skinner has shown in his recent study of peace networks, has often ‘in the context of post-war peace movements tended to mean transatlantic cooperation and communication rather than a form of globalization’.²¹ It is at the very least, as suggested by Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, ‘the search for intergovernmental agreements and conventions; the practice of international assembly; the projection of national agendas across the globe; or the transfer of ideas, objects or people across national boundaries’, as well as ‘the shared agendas of particular international movements or organizations – both as an aspiration to universalism and as a much more limited, less ambitious attempts at cooperation’.²² What we are particularly interested in, in socialist circles of various sizes and shapes, is the extent to which these forms of internationalism intersected, and how the practice of cooperation across borders resulted in transnational projects. Several of our contributors thus trace transnational actions and narratives as means of ‘reveal[ing] the ways in which processes of modernity, including decolonization “occur in varied and often unpredictable ways”’.²³ While it is not always possible to determine exactly how transnational endeavours were ‘adopted, adapted and reinterpreted in particular national and local contexts’,²⁴ the chapters show instances in which for individuals, groups or networks, earlier encounters, debates and trips across borders influenced specific policy decisions or understandings of what European socialism could or should be. Some of the contributors also take inspiration from a series of studies that have emphasised the porosity of cooperation across Cold War borders in Europe. This would include alternative agencies such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (1947–64), whose first secretary, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal – who surfaces in Lubna Qureshi’s chapter – ‘refused to accept Europe’s split into East and West as a lasting geopolitical reality’;²⁵ cultural forums such as the European Society of Culture, formed in 1950 as part of a wider ‘powerful, if generally overlooked, international response from intellectuals because of the global challenge [the Cold War] presented to peace’;²⁶ and less organised forms of intellectual solidarity which covered a wide range of political sensibilities.²⁷

Second, histories of European socialist parties have been revised by scholars locating their analysis in alternative spaces (such as Neville Kirk’s work on labour movements in the British world²⁸ or Claire Marynower’s study of French socialism – the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, SFIO – in Algeria²⁹), in multilateral bodies such as the Socialist International,³⁰ and by connecting anti-colonial activity across the empires and ex-empires.³¹ Equally important has been the mapping out of socialist activism in Africa after empire and in Latin America, with the actions of individuals and non-governmental groups shedding light on the shifting conceptions of social democracy and democratic socialism, fairness and equality, as well as reform and revolution as a means to achieve individual and collective emancipation and freedom.³² Part of this renewal has focused on a broad conception of socialism, encompassing both democratic socialism and communism.³³ New studies of the global socialism of the Soviet Union, for instance, also bear on the reading of the contributions in this volume. As the team around James Mark and Paul Betts has shown, in the period after 1945, ‘socialism’s importance as a globalizing force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the “Second” and “Third Worlds”; and the processes of European integration and enlargement from 1989 ‘brought an end to many internationalist paradigms and linkages’, resulting in Eastern Europe in ‘a process of de-internationalization from a world which had opened up through the decolonization of Western European empires’.³⁴ As Françoise Blum and the authors of Socialisms in Africa have recently argued: ‘The history of socialism is also the history of travel and circulations across the globe: the travel of practices and concepts, the travel of a word across the languages of the world’.³⁵ Taking stock of the wide remit and uses of ‘socialism’, Blum and her co-authors suggest that socialism is at times perhaps best defined in the negative, as ‘any doctrine which is not animated by a quest for social justice or does not promote an emancipation project for the human race’, they argue, ‘is not socialist’; and the ‘socialists’ who inhabit their volume are those who ‘used the term themselves to identify their practice or the ideologies in which it was rooted’.³⁶ This applies to some extent to the European socialists of this volume, who all shared membership of, or a willingness to join, the Socialist International as the embodiment of a democratic, parliamentary version of socialism and a socialism experienced across borders. This does not imply idealising intentions or processes.

As the contributions show, the ‘emancipation project’, particularly in its colonial sense, was deeply contested and not collectively embraced. Where French socialism is concerned, and for a time at least, ‘[a] marginalization of socialist internationalism was part of the “remaking of France” during the “invention of decolonization”’, with the conflict between an older, SFIO Europeanism and the more recent ‘Third Worldism’ ultimately resulting in ‘internationalism largely vanish[ing] as a guiding principle of French socialism’.³⁷ Such debates were not confined to the French. At the level of both European institutions (EEC/EU) and wider (but still largely European) networks such as the Socialist International, European socialists grappled with the critique formulated by other socialists like the Jamaican Michael Manley, for whom the world was divided along a North–South, rather than an East–West divide: ‘When viewed from the “tropics”’, as Adom Getachew has put it, ‘the world was not bifurcated by ideology, but by a global economy whose origins lay in the project of European imperial expansion’.³⁸ Following the call for a New International Economic Order, the ‘Programme for Survival’ issued by the Independent Commission on International Development chaired by Germany’s Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) leader Willy Brandt – a recurring figure in this volume – was one response. It ‘fused the hope for global redistribution with a dream of global peace and disarmament’, in the words of Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman,³⁹ but it also, as Mathieu Fulla’s chapter shows, led to significant discussions – albeit not straightforward or necessarily conclusive ones – among European socialists on ‘common security, North–South dialogue and human rights’.

For Blum and her co-authors, it is particularly worthwhile for historians to focus on ‘how ideas circulate (materially and symbolically)’, and on ‘the lived experience, the ways of being and thinking of oneself as “socialist” depending on spaces and historical periods’.⁴⁰ This is particularly fruitful, in fact, when thinking of socialism in connection with other ‘-isms’, notably, for this volume, transnationalism and internationalism, and when considering the importance of emotions – including trust. A remarkable demonstration of this in recent months is Su Lin Lewis’s study of hospitality in women’s international socialist networks across Europe and Asia, which also – incidentally – notes that Northern Europe (not Britain) dominated as a possible model of welfare and socialist equality in many of the discussions held in Asian socialist circles in the 1950s.⁴¹ These concerns, which prompt historians to think ‘against the grain’ more decidedly, are also evident in a renewed attention given to space, which is our third area of inspiration.

It is the primacy of ‘place’ that has led us to focus on European socialists ‘across borders’. In many ways, ‘across borders’ encompasses the wide range of meanings that Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla have given in their recent book to ‘internationalism’, as ‘a functional umbrella definition for a vast array of practices of transnational political organizing, cooperation and solidarity; cross-border circulation of political actors, information, ideas and experiences; engagement with international organizations and internationalizing initiatives’.⁴² We concur with them – and Mathieu Fulla is one of the contributors to this volume – on the importance of ‘interactions and hybridizations’, and on the fact that for many of the socialist individuals studied here, ‘these practices also involve significant symbolic dimension, epitomizing allegiance to specific political cultures and transnational “imagined communities”’.⁴³ Taken together, the contributions in this volume also speak to the role of individual men and (to a lesser extent in our case studies) women for whom crossing borders was an essential, fundamental part of identifying as socialists. This means crossing both physical borders (going into exile, networking across Europe, travelling to Africa in support of liberation movements, serving as diplomats abroad) and symbolic borders (crossing the line in a sense, by speaking out, or writing against, torture in Algeria, challenging Eurocentric and racially restrictive visions of European construction, identity and mobility, or contesting the domination of English and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ tropes in world politics). But the contributions also consider the practice of crossing borders in the form of ‘transnational social democratic politics’ discussed by Di Donato, or the organised transnational networks analysed by Christian Salm,⁴⁴ with both scholars focusing on the Socialist International, its contribution to European construction and Europeanisation – and it remained, after all, as Di Donato notes, despite ‘efforts to overcome Eurocentrism […] a predominantly European organization’.⁴⁵

The importance of place in the act of crossing borders or acting across borders is also brought to light by the work of historical geographers on international conferences and the ‘placing’ of internationalism. Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe show that ‘internationalism and the international conference were co-constitutive’ and that ‘modern internationalism reflects the ephemeral, messy and unpredictable nature of international conferences’.⁴⁶ Likewise, tracing shifts in cooperation between European socialists means reflecting on ‘physical locations’; on ‘the cultural and social content’ of meetings; and on meetings as ‘nodes’ of networking,⁴⁷ which also implies focusing on mundane but vital considerations of transport and language, and – as several of the contributions show – on what people read or listened to. This also helps us as scholars ‘to consider carefully the kinds of global stories, mobilities, and networks we choose to foreground’, partly because ‘the choice to emphasize connection and mobilities can have distorting effects on the way we understand the world of the unconnected and the immobile’, in the words of Kristin Roth-Ey.⁴⁸

Fourth, the study of European integration itself has benefited from a wide range of studies into these processes of cross-border and transnational socialisation, focusing on non-state actors with diverse humanitarian, business and other motives,⁴⁹ and internationalisms.⁵⁰ It has also been served by new studies of the transnational relations of European socialist parties since the Second World War⁵¹ and of the intellectual history of European relations and planning,⁵² reflecting on the interplay between international relations theory, history and political thought.⁵³ The last two chapters, in particular, provide important contributions to the research questions posed by Christian Salm in his work on transnational Europeanisation: ‘firstly, what transnational political networks including other societal actors such as experts and non- governmental organizations (NGOs) did the socialists establish and use? Secondly, to what extent was the ongoing debate on the future of EC development policy shaped by the transnational cooperation of the European socialists?’⁵⁴ The volume also contributes to the debate on ‘polity-building’, defined by Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer as ‘the creation of institutions, procedures and institutional working patterns, and on policy making’.⁵⁵ Several of the chapters also show that for a number of European socialists, cooperation across borders was a means to critique, and hopefully ultimately prevent, processes of supranationalisation within a restricted Western European framework. Even if results fell below expectations, this did not stop transnational networks, even in fairly loose forms in the post-war years, from seeking, and achieving on occasion, ‘an important, pro-active agenda-setting role’.⁵⁶ All chapters shed light on the functional role of those European socialists for whom the remaking of international policy after the Second World War, during the Cold War and decolonisation, necessarily entailed crossing borders. As European construction generated a greater number of formal institutions working at the supranational and infranational levels, European socialists also acted via ‘epistemic communities’, defined as ‘a network of experts who share a common understanding of the scientific and political nature of a particular problem’, and advocacy coalitions, whereby those ‘who share a similar perspective will forge coalition type relationships with each other’.⁵⁷ Taken together, the contributions gathered here assess, in different ways, how the successes and failures of socialist endeavours resulted from the feasibility of networking, i.e. ‘a degree of geographical or communicative proximity […] a degree of shared cultural norms and values and the availability and/or willingness of organizations to devote sufficient time, capital and personnel resources to the network’.⁵⁸ The multiple circles in which the European socialists studied in the chapters lived, militated and made policy, could therefore turn out to be, as the chapters show, a strength or a hindrance depending on structural factors, ideological preferences and personal choices.

Europeanisation, globalisation and decolonisation, from the travails of the Second World War to the grey areas of the Single European Act

While the title of this volume focuses on the post-1945 period, we do not suggest that the end of the Second World War was a hard turning point. In many ways, the contributors seek to trace longer-term trends, in the memory and practice of democratic socialism. As recent research has emphasised, for instance, the Spanish civil war was key in shaping ‘an anti-fascist public sphere that momentarily served, with all its contradictions, as a functional equivalent of a global left’, but one which also suffered from many illusions, in ‘hyper-fragmented political environments and a deeply unequal state system’, and left divisions, between European socialists, and between them and anti-colonial activists on account of Spain’s colonial possessions.⁵⁹ Conversely, in the post-war world, cooperation across borders was significantly hindered from 1947, as shown for instance by the experience of transnational resistance fighters in Europe, whose travels were now impeded and whose allegiances became suspect.⁶⁰ It should also be noted that not all of the actors considered in this volume (far from it) come under the label of the ‘activist’, defined by Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring as ‘a social figure that was loaded with symbolic meanings that reflected and refracted struggles over power and other political contestations’.⁶¹ But the five areas of debate and interest listed by Berger and Sean Scalmer in their study of ‘the transnational activist’ are all heeded, in different ways, by the contributors: ‘periodisation, context, action, form, and dynamics’.⁶²

By focusing on relations between European socialist parties and groups in an international context and tracing the impact of these connections on political thought and on policy practices, this volume reflects on the successes and failures of trans-border and transnational processes of socialisation. Authors pay particular attention to connections beyond the state, both above (through supranational, transnational and global frameworks) and below (with grassroots movements acting in parallel to, support or defiance of official institutions), to analyse the drivers and limits of socialist and European identities. The contributions presented here investigate four main areas. First, the extent to which ideals of European cooperation have trickled down into more daily, routine and domestic politics and, in turn, the extent to which power, welfare and employment politics at home have shaped European policies among socialists. Second, the shifting definitions of political elites and popular understandings of Europe, including the influence of people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent on the transformation of socialist thought, policies and practices in the European (ex-)imperial powers and their agency in connecting socialist groups across national boundaries. Third, the extent to which European socialists attempted to propose a post-colonial, post-imperial agenda for Europe and to grasp the nexus between ends of empire and new international orders, through campaigns of international solidarity, and reflecting on the ways in which the later ends of the European colonial empires affected both socialist and European identities and politics. Finally, some of the contributions consider the extent to which European institutions were used, with what ends and with what results, by European socialists and their contacts. All four areas also shed light on how the material and symbolic resources available to individuals and groups mattered, and on the extent to which interdependence was both a constraint and a vector of socialist activity.

The first section of this volume examines the attitudes and actions of various European socialist parties during the war and immediately after it, reconsidering its historical significance. Andrew J. Williams looks at the Labour Party and the SFIO, a significant section of whose leadership found itself in London in the 1940s in what was on occasion a difficult relationship with the British Labour Party. This ‘uncomfortable’ situation arose because the British government was one which saw the Labour Party as an equal partner with Winston Churchill’s Conservatives and as one of the key Allied Powers of the war. Churchill spent most of his energy as it concerned France, already a much-diminished force, in a difficult relationship with de Gaulle. The SFIO was divided between those who had decided to follow de Gaulle’s line in all (or most) things and those who saw him as a boulangiste, a dangerous proto-dictator. The chapter traces the course of the socialist Groupe Jean Jaurès, a colourful collection of what were often seen by their Labour counterparts as Gallic misfits whose views could be either ignored or condescended to. They had lost their country and were subject to the same humiliation as that experienced by other French exiles, notably de Gaulle. The Groupe, and many in de Gaulle’s orbit, were nonetheless very drawn to Labour’s ideas about welfareism (reforms of education, health, and planning) and carried out extensive research into how these ideas might translate to a post-war France and Europe. Building on the pre-existing ideas inherited by both Labour and the SFIO from the pre-war period, the experiences of wartime gave rise to many personal relationships that persisted long after the war ended. Personal relations could be difficult, as when André Philip was scathing about French alternatives to Gaullism (a position he later modified). Labour Party members were often equally ambivalent about some of their new French comrades. Britain’s generally ambiguous relationship with both the European project and its colonial past was mirrored with mixed feelings about both subjects outre-Manche. The Labour Party, then as now a ‘broad church’, had members who spanned a number of factions, some of them more pro-European than others. This experience laid the groundwork for what was to be a post-war (mostly) friendly rivalry that still exists today.

Ben Heckscher and Tommaso Milani’s chapter on the Mouvement Socialiste pour les États-Unis d’Europe (MSEUE, and its predecessor the Movement for the Socialist States of Europe, MUSSE) explores the socialist networks that emerged after 1945 to promote European integration in the light of the developing Cold War. A study of ‘a pro-federalist, left-wing, anti-Stalinist organisation’, so very different from the aims and ambitions of Stalin’s Comintern, the chapter shows very clearly the continuities in contacts between socialist parties, as explored in the previous chapter, as well as the ways in which pre-war debates informed post-war thinking about Europe. It examines how and why the path to cooperation did not always run smoothly, and traces how many avenues for cooperation came through London during the war, in the aptly named ‘London Bureau’, in which André Philip played a key role. It also highlights the importance of British socialists, like Fenner Brockway of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who were leftist socialists, outside the mainstream but very vocal critics of both colonialism – intersecting with platforms and individuals whose main engagement lay in overthrowing empires – and any hint of Stalinism, and who flirted with the Soviet alternative of Trotskyism. This criticism was vitally important in the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s, in Spain for example, and it provided a left alternative after the war. The MSEUE is presented as a bridge towards a new kind of socialist Europe. It collided with the realities of the Cold War, with the Labour Party taking a generally very pro-American attitude and the MSEUE was itself eventually forced to take sides, again against Stalinism in uneasy cooperation with the United States. The organisation provided a vital part of what became the ideas that emerged in the European Economic Community, one that this chapter explores in some detail.

The next three chapters examine European socialist attitudes to the question of the end of empire, a development that happened in some areas very rapidly and to some extent unexpectedly in the late 1940s and 1950s, but also protractedly in many others. The violence of imperial and colonial domination, as well as the need to resort to armed force to overthrow the occupying European power, gave rise to many debates among socialists, and generated comparisons across the empires. Also at stake were major questions of international order and diplomacy. What kind of world would emerge from an international system and society that had lost one of its most hitherto enduring aspects? Again, the re-imagining of that system and society passed through and with the emergence of an equally new idea, that of Europe, approached from very different perspectives among European socialists.

In the first chapter of the three, Mélanie Torrent examines the role of Claude Bourdet in the re-imagination of Europe in the context of the war of Algerian independence. His influence among anti-colonial British socialists, with many of them again coming from the diminished ranks of the ILP like Brockway, lay in his wartime role in the Resistance and in his reputation as a journalist and co-founder of France-Observateur, as well as his broader political activities. Acting as a broker across the Channel, aided by his good command of English, Bourdet had hoped that the Labour Party would play an important role in world peace and in pan-European dialogue after the war, and in the withdrawal of Britain and France from their colonial possessions. Tracing the use of trans-Channel cooperation to counter press censorship in France, and various intellectual and practical attempts to stimulate a new socialism against empires and against a ‘neo-colonial’ integration process in Europe, the chapter shows that Bourdet played a vital role in circulating and mediating information. It argues that he was able to do so because he acted in several networks and entertained friendships in and beyond socialist circles, such as within the Society of Friends. Ultimately, the alternative Europe that was imagined in opposition to the war in Algeria did not lead to effective, alternative, pan-European structures. But the debate over solidarity did challenge Western European interpretations of what being European and being socialist meant, and what European socialists should practice.

Another important expression of solidarity in another part of Europe is explored in the next chapter by Pedro Aires Oliveira. The focus of Oliveira is the activities of British historian and journalist Basil Davidson and his support for the liberation struggles in Lusophone Africa. Davidson brought to a much wider section of European public opinion the full horrors of what the Portuguese fascist regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was doing in Africa. Davidson acted as a standard bearer for European socialist opinion and was able to influence the Labour Party’s policies in important ways until independence was achieved in 1975. His intimate knowledge of Africa and his linguistic competence allowed him to act as ‘a cultural intermediary’ between British socialists and local revolutionaries. He was also able to explain in London why support for Salazar’s Portugal, which was a member of NATO, was not in the interests of Britain given that Salazar was anti-democratic in the extreme and not likely to survive. Davidson straddled a number of networks, socialist and even military (he was a former member of the Special Operations Executive and achieved the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel) as well as being a valued correspondent for the Economist and other prominent publications of continental reach, notably the New Statesman and Nation, then as now the principal authoritative voice for the British left. His denunciation of both the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 showed him to be a democratic socialist, and one who could ‘sens[e] a sea-change in the political situation of the continent’. Tracing Davidson’s activities before and after the transfer of power agreements, the chapter shows the complexities of his relations with, and analysis of, the new regimes of Lusophone Africa, at a time when the political fractures of the Cold War were exacerbating the difficulties which the new states were starting to face while engaging with top-down nation-building processes.

Nowhere was a sense of ‘sea change’ so evident as in the case of Sweden. As Lubna Z. Qureshi shows in her chapter, Swedish socialist Prime Minister Olof Palme went further than any other European politician to disavow any ‘neo-colonial’ actions, notably those of the United States in Vietnam. Qureshi provides a rich analysis of Palme’s political views and shows how Palme often made statements that were seen with great hostility in Washington. His moral stand was courageous in the extreme, which explains that he is a hero of the European left, and beyond, to this day. The Swedish Foreign Minister, Krister Wickman, also made speeches denouncing US actions such as the bombing of the North when British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was far more circumspect. Palme had close personal relations with Austrian socialist Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and German Chancellor Willi Brandt, dating back to the period when they had lived in exile in Sweden during the war. Kreisky and Palme were both leaders of neutral countries while Germany was occupied in the 1960s by nearly half a million US troops, a situation that limited German and Austrian room for foreign policy manoeuvre. Palme’s friendship with the two men meant he was able to voice a non-aligned but morally important view on the Vietnam War, which gave an important impetus to the European, and American, anti-war movement and through that to other struggles against neo-colonialism.

The last section of the volume has three chapters which deal with issues of intense contemporary, as well as historical significance. They all raise questions about what Europe means in terms of its international identity, reflected to some extent in the literature on ‘normative Europe’.⁶³ They examine the questions of cultural, racial/ethnic, gender and national identity that are constantly in the headlines as this book goes to print. The first of these contributions is by Thomas Maineult on how European socialists came to increasingly stress international solidarity with Palestine, in particular in the 1970s and 1980s. From the vantage point of the French case, Maineult traces the socialist parties of Europe from their initial enthusiastic support of the new state of Israel after 1948 to the growing disillusion that followed the realisation that the democratic socialist entity they had all applauded seemed to deny that to the Palestinian populations who had left after Israel’s creation. The change of heart was not sudden or complete. There are still supporters of Israel in all socialist parties in Europe, and all these parties are sensitive to any claim that criticism of Israel is in any way antisemitic, as has been demonstrated in Britain in recent years and which the situation in Gaza, as we write this introduction, is putting to the test. Mollet’s support for the Suez invasion in Egypt was partly due to his support for Israel. French socialists like Robert Pontillon were great supporters of Israel throughout the 1970s. The Labour Party of Harold Wilson was largely in step with this sentiment. Again, the wartime experience in the Resistance and in London dictated a strong vein of personal support for Israel. A change in emphasis was noted in the late 1960s in both France and Germany, especially with Willi Brandt’s ‘policy of even-handedness (Ausgewogenheit)’ towards Israel and the Arab states. As the leader of the new French Socialist Party (Parti socialiste, PS) François Mitterrand declared support for both Israel and the ‘Palestinian national fact’. The plight of the ordinary Palestinian people became more evident as the 1970s wore on, and Mitterrand’s perspective evolved after his visit to Gaza in 1972, and again after meeting Yasser Arafat in 1974 and 1976. Overt support for a Palestinian state increased over the next ten years and has continued to do so, in the event marginalising Pontillon’s pro-Israeli policy. European social democracy became ever more pro-integration and tiermondiste in the 1980s, and the Palestinian question grew in salience. Maineult’s chapter shows that, here again, Bruno Kreisky in Austria and Olof Palme in Sweden were opinion leaders, and ultimately reflects on the division of opinions across party lines in European socialist politics.

Turning to the issue of racism and antiracism in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, Pamela Ohene-Nyako examines the activities of Black British Labour leaders and their role in helping to formulate policies and practices that have since become much more mainstream within European socialist circles. She identifies the recent and ongoing change of tone in Europe thus: ‘In 1986, the announcement of a Single European market to be implemented by 1992 led to the formation of a number of local and transnational initiatives for social justice led by people of colour in Europe.’ This seminal development for European integration was thus the trigger for a concerted push among, particularly, British Labour leaders for a much more antiracist Europe. Ohene-Nyako concentrates her analysis on the activities of a number of key activists, among whom Labour MP Bernie Grant and Labour councillor and campaigner Martha Osamor (now Baroness Osamor). Their focus was on the emerging legislation being created by governments and EU institutions on migration, asylum and equality. She looks at how the Single European Act became a focus for their attempts towards a transnational antiracism and how they organised these efforts. Would the Single Market create an exclusionary ‘Fortress Europe’ or one of much more humanity? The period since 1986 seems to indicate the former rather than the latter. In Britain itself, Commonwealth but also British citizens have found themselves in dire situations, as in the notorious ‘Windrush’ scandal and the subsequent deportations that have still not all been resolved – to say nothing of the controversial ‘Migration and Economic Partnership’ signed by the former Conservative government with Rwanda; that Labour scrapped it on returning to power in July 2024 is a hopeful sign, but much remains to be done. Several high-profile movements were created thanks to Grant, Osamor and others, continuing the fight for equality. The chapter provides a detailed examination of the discussions of these groups and shows that the existence of pan-European networks has been of great utility in this struggle, damaged to some extent by Brexit in 2016.

Lastly Mathieu Fulla addresses the problem with which Europe as a whole has been grappling for many years, possibly dating back to 1975 and the end of les trente glorieuses, that of unemployment. He outlines two European socialist employment initiatives, established to try and cope with the results of neoliberal policies, that have outsourced employment and production and are now showing the limits of globalisation. Fulla takes as his starting point the Confederation of the Socialist Parties of the European Community (CSPEC), established in 1983 and which first rang the alarm on the de-industrialisation of Europe and its consequences for traditional working-class communities and jobs. This was followed by a European Employment Initiative in 1993, while the issue of the end of the Cold War and the arrival of a potentially huge number of new workers from Eastern Europe rang more alarm bells. There is clear evidence that the neoliberal elites in Western Europe either downplayed the risks presented by this development and the emergence of more ‘offshoring’ in an increasingly globalised world or ignored them. Even French socialist Jacques Delors, then Head of the European Commission, downplayed the risks but still inserted a clause in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty to give the issue some prominence, in theory at least. The chapter analyses in much detail why European socialists were so wrong-footed by the employment implications of the post-Cold War era. Fulla uses a wealth of archival material to show how this process evolved in an atmosphere which ‘was one of resignation rather than enthusiasm’. The chapter ultimately reflects on the role of economic policy and economic thinking, and on the interplay between the domestic and international changes of the early 1990s in the redefinitions of European socialism.

Cultural intermediaries, bridge-builders – and stock-takers?

By way of conclusion, we can point to a number of perspectives that we think contributors have helped refine. The first relates to the very meaning of ‘socialism’ and its conceptions: is it contingent on the challenges it faces and the agendas it espouses? The challenges of the pre-war Depression were maybe quite different from the wartime burdens and those of the period of reconstruction after it, in Europe and internationally. The case studies reflect on the extent to which physical and intellectual circulations generated a certain memory of socialist achievements, failures and duties, and informed plans for the future. Individual connections – between Philip and Labour leaders, between Bourdet and Brockway or Davidson, between Brandt and Kreisky – certainly stimulated a socialist imaginary, ‘a politics of network-making’ to borrow Rob Skinner’s words, which resulted (although not systematically, as shown) in ‘a collective enterprise’.⁶⁴ They acted as ‘transnationally networked “cultural brokers” who are culturally and linguistically versatile’; and while linguistic ability varied, even within already small groups, they did provide ‘translation between different socio-economic, political and cultural contexts’.⁶⁵ Such activities were intimately tied to their socialist beliefs but not dependent on it. As the case of Olof Palme shows, the practice of diplomacy (if not foreign policy) was distinctly shaped by a Swedish tradition of neutralism, informed but not entirely guided by socialist connections and sentiments, while North Vietnamese perspectives on the Swedish prime minister suggest he was primarily identified as European, and compared to other European rather than socialist leaders. Influence also came from those who moved across several transnational circles, either within socialist groupings (the Socialist International and the MSEUE, or Keep Left, or the Party of European Socialists), across party affiliations (Labour and the European Greens, as shown by Osamor and French Member of the European Parliament Djida Tazdaït), or outside party affiliations (with connections with, for instance, the Society of Friends, the World Council of Churches and, in Britain, the Commission for Racial Equality). As Kiran Klaus Patel has recently argued, there was and is ‘a multiplicity of internationalisms in Europe’, which cooperated but also ‘compet[ed] with each other over which vision would dominate and consequently be identified as “European” within and beyond its shores’.⁶⁶ Navigating a diversity of networks was therefore also important for those kept out of the Socialist International – like the PSU in France – by the politics of the left in their home nation, or for those who militated at transnational local levels.

The second broad question addresses whether socialist dilemmas all have a common thread, that of finding pragmatic and moral solutions for pressing continental and global problems. Whereas ‘planning’ and welfare policies started the period of this book in having precedence by the 1950s, it was evident that the collapse of the European empires necessitated a change of focus for the whole continent. Several of the contributors reflect, in the words of Milani and Heckscher, on the ‘blueprints’ of both European unity and European socialism, changing readings and understandings of old ones, and the ideological and practical obstacles in defining new versions. While they offer insights into how international questions influenced conceptions of socialism, or led to divisions between generations along national or transnational lines, they also suggest that the heterogeneity of European socialists – socialistes, social democrats, Labour Party members and others – requires further collective study. So does the practice of socialism in Europe and of European socialists anywhere, if one follows Christoph Kalter’s interest in ‘globality’, which he defines as ‘the relationships – extending across great distances – of certain actors to other people, spaces, institutions, and things, as well as the awareness of these relationships and their intellectual localization within a picture of the world as a whole’.⁶⁷ While the selected chapters cannot embrace such a vast horizon, what they delve into and confirm is the value of assessing ‘the transformative dimension of translocal encounters (and clashes)’, as noted by Andrea Brazzoduro.⁶⁸

The geographical limits of ‘Europe’ were themselves the subject of intense debates, as was the redefinition of metropolitan identity/identities after the formal end of empire, with no agreement on what policy to pursue as ‘Europeans’ within the EEC and the EU. One recurring, if not dominant actor, in this volume is Britain – its governments, its Labour Party and various promoters of peace and cooperation in and out of Labour circles. While there has been no lack of studies on Britain, contributors shed here additional light on at least two aspects of the complicated relationship between Britain, Europe and the wider world: a certain (albeit fluctuating) sense of superiority – including Labour superiority – that came with the rising expansion of English, as shown for instance by Fulla in the tensions with the Dutch and the Portuguese socialists; and the importance for historians of centring on the British context if the complex Europeanisation of ‘political blackness [as] a concept and strategy’, as Ohene-Nyako shows, is to be properly understood. Several of the British socialist activists discussed here thus denounced what Patricia Clavin has called the ‘processes of delimitation and “othering”, fragmentation and conflict’ inherent in European integration and ‘Europeanisation’.⁶⁹ A common thread in the volume is the socialist critique of the European project that gave birth to the current EU. The contributions show that in this sense, cooperation across Europe’s borders, and with a view to fostering closer relations among those living in Europe/the EEC/EU, was also intended to reform, or even alter altogether, European integration as it had been conceived. A wealth of knowledge was produced in the process, but not always – and this in itself requires further collective forays into the fabric of policy making – acted on.

Such processes of redefinition and adaptation are still not complete, and may indeed never be, given the plethora of ideological and contending pressures encompassed in Europe. With the rise since 1945 of new ways of thinking about who we are as human beings and how we relate to the state and each other, the agenda often called ‘human rights’ has emerged as a vital component of European identity, especially given Europe’s troubled relations with its former colonies and the racial tensions and exclusions that have accompanied and resulted from that relationship. As Wolfram Kaiser wrote almost twenty years ago of transnational Western Europe since 1945, ‘ “Europe” was neither made then nor is now by governments alone’.⁷⁰ Looking in turn at successes and failures, at the role of cultural intermediaries and bridge-builders, and at the reasons behind misunderstandings, failed projects and missed opportunities for peace and equality, the chapters that follow examine how socialist politicians and activists conceived of Europe’s role in worldmaking in the transition out of, and after, conflict and empire. In doing so, this volume will have contributed, we hope, to a better understanding of, and support for, cooperation across borders.

Notes

1. 1.  Daniel Gorman, Uniting the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 185, quoted here in Mélanie Torrent’s contribution to this volume.

2. 2.  One excellent study of the issue of retribution is István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). On France, see Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Vichy en prison: Les épurés à Fresnes après la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). On reconstruction see David A. Mayers, America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945–1956 (London: Routledge, 2018); Andrew J. Williams, Liberalism and War (London: Routledge, 2024, 2nd edition, forthcoming), especially Chapter 4, ‘Reconstruction until the Marshall Plan’.

3. 3.  Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Epilogue. A New Vision of Europe: Learning from the South’, in European Cosmopolitanism. Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies, ed. Gurminder Bhambra and John Narayan (London: Routledge, 2016), 175.

4. 4.  De Sousa Santos, ‘Epilogue’, 175.

5. 5.  Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy (London: Palgrave, 2004).

6. 6.  The father of one of the editors of this volume was a junior member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (he defected after the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939). For John Williams, there was no choice – he had to wear a red or a black shirt. Andrew Williams never wore a black one in his presence.

7. 7.  Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (New York: New York University Press, 2011); see also his The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).

8. 8.  Richard Toye, ‘From “Consensus” to “Common Ground”: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and its Collapse’, Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 1 (2013): 3–23.

9. 9.  Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 2001 [1994]); Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (London: W.W. Norton, 2011).

10. 10.  Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

11. 11.  Alain Laurent, Le libéralisme américain: Histoire d’un détournement (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006).

12. 12.  Andrew J. Williams, ‘France and the Origins of the United Nations, 1944–1945: “Si La France ne compte plus, qu’on nous le dise”’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 28, no. 2 (2017): 215–34.

13. 13.  One advocate of a Christian Democratic Europe was the Franco-Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont, whose writings were deeply embedded in the thinking of the 1930s and his experiences of Swiss Confederation: Denis de Rougemont, Amour et Occident (Paris: 10/18, 2001 [1938]), and Nicolas Stenger, Denis de Rougemont: Les intellectuels et l’Europe au XX^e siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015). The most celebrated liberal of all can be said to have been Jean Monnet, widely seen as the architect of the EEC and the Treaty of Rome: Sherrill Brown Wells, Jean Monnet: Unconventional Statesman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011). On neoliberalism see Slobodian, Globalists.

14. 14.  Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, ‘Empire and Globalisation: from “High Imperialism” to Decolonisation’, The International History Review 36, no. 1 (2014).

15. 15.  Marie-Thérèse Bitsch and Gérard Bossuat, eds. L’Europe unie et l’Afrique: de l’idée d’Eurafrique à la convention de Lomé 1 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2005); Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

16. 16.  Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Berny Sebe and Matthew G. Stanard, eds. Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire (London: Routledge, 2020).

17. 17.  Gurminder Bhambra and John Narayan, eds. European Cosmopolitanism. Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Societies (London: Routledge, 2016), 2.

18. 18.  Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer, ‘The Transnational Activist: An Introduction’, in The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 6.

19. 19.  Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 254–5.

20. 20.  Jeremy Adelman, ‘What is global history now?’, Aeon, 2 March 2017 [accessed 21 July 2024], https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.

21. 21.  Rob Skinner, Peace, Decolonization, and the Practice of Solidarity (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 27.

22. 22.  Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, eds. Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

23. 23.  Skinner, Peace, 212.

24. 24.  Skinner, Peace, 212.

25. 25.  Daniel Stinsky, International Cooperation in Cold War Europe: The United Nations Economic Commission, 1947–64 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

26. 26.  Nancy Jachec, Europe’s Intellectuals and the Cold War: The European Society of Culture, Post-War Politics and International Relations (London: Bloomsbury, 2020 [2015]).

27. 27.  See for instance Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, ‘Race across the Atlantic: Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright’s Transatlantic Network in 1940s Paris’, in Transatlantic Intellectual Networks 1914–1964, ed. Hans Bak and Céline Mansanti (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).

28. 28.  Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

29. 29.  Claire Marynower, L’Algérie à gauche, 1900–1962. Socialistes à l’époque coloniale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2018).

30. 30.  Guillaume Devin, L’internationale socialiste: histoire et sociologie du socialisme international, 1945–1990 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1993); Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

31. 31.  Pedro Aires Oliveira, Os Despojos da Aliança: A Grã-Bretanha e a Questão Colonial Portuguesa, 1945–1975 (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2007); Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, eds. Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk, eds. Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

32. 32.  See for instance Catherine Simon, Algérie, les années pieds-rouges: des rêves de l’indépendance au désenchantement, 1962–1969 (Paris: La Découverte, 2009); and George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

33. 33.  Constantin Katsakioris and Alexander Stroh, ‘Africa and the Crisis of Socialism: Postsocialism and the Left’, Special Issue: ‘Africa and the Crisis of Socialism’, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 55, no. 2 (2021).

34. 34.  James Mark and Paul Betts, ‘Introduction’, in Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation, ed. James Mark and Paul Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 4, 24.

35. 35.  Françoise Blum, Héloïse Kiriakou, Martin Mourre et al., ‘Introduction. Pour une histoire des socialismes en Afrique’, in Socialismes en Afrique. Socialisms in Africa, ed. Françoise Blum et al. (Paris: Éditeur de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2021), online edn.

36. 36.  Blum, Kiriakou, Mourre et al., ‘Introduction’.

37. 37.  Brian Shaev, ‘The Algerian War, European Integration, and the Decolonization of French Socialism’, French Historical Studies 41, no. 1 (2019), 90.

38. 38.  Adom Getachew, ‘When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation’, Boston Review, 5 February 2019. See also Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

39. 39.  Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman, ‘Introduction: Imagining the Third World: Genealogies of Alternative Global Histories’, in Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, ed. Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 21.

40. 40.  Blum, Kiriakou, Mourre et al., ‘Introduction’.

41. 41.  Su Lin Lewis, ‘Women, Hospitality and the Intimate Politics of International Socialism’, Past & Present 262, no. 1 (2023).

42. 42.  Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla, ‘Introduction: Leftist Internationalisms in the History of the Twentieth Century’, in Leftist Internationalisms: A Transnational Political History, ed. Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla (London: Bloomsbury 2023), 6.

43. 43.  Di Donato and Fulla, ‘Introduction’, 6.

44. 44.  Christian Salm, ‘Shaping European Development Policy? Socialist Parties as Mediators from the International to the European Level’, in Societal Actors in European Integration: Polity-Building and Policy-Making, 1958–1992, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

45. 45.  Michele Di Donato, ‘The Socialist International and Human Rights’, in Leftist Internationalisms, ed. Di Donato and Fulla, 171.

46. 46.  Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe, ‘Introduction’ in Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe (London, Bloomsbury, 2022), 4.

47. 47.  Legg, Heffernan, Hodder and Thorpe, ‘Introduction’, 4 .

48. 48.  Kristin Roth-Ey, ‘Introduction’, in Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular: Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War, ed. Kristin Roth-Ey (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 9, 6.

49. 49.  Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Michael Gehler, eds. Transnational Networks in Regional Integration: Governing Europe, 1945–83 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, eds. Societal Actors in European Integration: Polity-Building and Policy-Making, 1958–1992 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Christian Salm, Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s: European Community Development Aid and Southern Enlargement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

50. 50.  Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds. Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

51. 51.  See for instance Noëlline Castagnez et al., eds. Les socialistes français à l’heure de la libération: perspectives française et européenne, 1943–1947 (Paris: L’OURS, 2016); and Mathieu Fulla and Marc Lazar, eds. European Socialists and the State in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

52. 52.  Tommaso Milani, Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy: The Idea of Planning in Western Europe, 1914–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

53. 53.  Ian Hall, ed., Radicals and Reactionaries in Twentieth Century International Thought (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

54. 54.  Salm, ‘Shaping European Development Policy’, 40.

55. 55.  Kaiser and Meyer, ‘Beyond Governments and Supranational Institutions’, 2.

56. 56.  Wolfram Kaiser and Peter Starie, ‘Introduction: The European Union as a Transnational Political Space’, in Transnational European Union: Towards a Common Political Space, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Peter Starie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 2.

57. 57.  Karen Heard-Lauréote, ‘Transnational Networks: Informal Governance in the European Political Space?’ in Transnational European Union: Towards a Common Political Space, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Peter Starie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 41, 43.

58. 58.  Heard-Lauréote, ‘Transnational Networks’, 46.

59. 59.  Hugo García, ‘ “World Capital of Anti-Fascism”? The Making – and Breaking – of a Global Left in Spain, 1936–1939’, in Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities and Radical Internationalism, ed. Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and David Featherstone (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 242, 247. See also Robert Shilliam, “Ah, We Have Not Forgotten Ethiopia”: Anti-Colonial Sentiment for Spain in a Fascist Era’, in European Cosmopolitanism, ed. Bhambra and Narayan, 33.

60. 60.  Robert Gildea and Olga Manojlović Pintar with Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo et al. ‘Afterlives and Memories’, in Fighters across Frontiers: Transnational Resistance in Europe, 1936–48, ed. Robert Gildea and Ismee Tames (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

61. 61.  Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring, ‘Series Editors’ Preface’, in Transnational Activist, ed. Berger and Scalmer, viii.

62. 62.  Berger and Scalmer, eds. Transnational Activist, 7.

63. 63.  See for instance Zaki Laïdi, La norme sans la force: L’énigme de la puissance européenne (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008); Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 2 (2002), and Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Approach to European Union External Action’, in The External Action of the European Union: Concepts, Approaches, Theories, ed. Sieglinde Gstöhl and Simon Schunz (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); and Laurence Badel, Diplomaties européennes, XIXè-XXIè siècles (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2021).

64. 64.  Skinner, Peace, 53.

65. 65.  Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Transnational Networks in European Governance’, in The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity 1950–72, ed. Wolfram Kaiser, Brigitte Leucht and Morten Rasmussen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 18.

66. 66.  Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Afterword: On the Chances and Challenges of Populating Internationalism’, in Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, ed. David Brydan and Jessica Reinisch (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 267, 265.

67. 67.  Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 419–20.

68. 68.  Andrea Brazzoduro, ‘Algeria, Antifascism, and Third Worldism: An Anticolonial Genealogy of the Western European New Left (Algeria, France, Italy, 1957–1975)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 5 (2020), 964.

69. 69.  Patricia Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010), 631.

70. 70.  Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Transnational Western Europe since 1945: Integration as Political Society Formation’, in Transnational European Union, ed. Kaiser and Starie, 32.

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