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The end of the Great War has been long considered as a caesura, with an emphasis on the breaking point between the collapse of the Empires and the formation of the new nation-states. Recent scholarship on the post-war paramilitary violence and on the imperial transformations and transitions in the space between the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Sea (1917-1923) has challenged this approach, emphasizing continuities of the war experiences and of the imperial legacies in the context of the "Long First World War" (1911-1923). This discussion aims at drawing up a balance sheet of the recent historiography, starting from three interventions. Iryna Vushko examines the biographies of ex-Habsburg officials and politicians in the successor states and their persistent connections with the imperial past; Emily Greble focuses on the imperial legacies in the legal definition of the rights of the Muslim minority in Yugoslavia within the new international order; Matè Rigò investigates the difficulties of the economic reconstruction and of the settlement of the minority question both in Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Gerwarth summarizes the most recent historiographical trends of, reconsidering the first post-war period within a broader chronological and geographical framework, extending from 1917 to 1923 and shifting the focus from Western to East Central Europe. In this context, shaped by military defeats, conflicts between revolution and counter-revolution, collapse of the Empires, violence is considered as the key factor. However, this review emphasises the need to integrate attention to the disrupting political and social effects of the Great War with the efforts of institutional and economic reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major revision has recently transformed the Habsburg studies, by providing non-national and antideterministic approaches to the national questions and nationalism. Fostering and following this revision, Pieter Judson's important work re-writes the history of the Habsburg Empire as part and parcel of Europe as a whole. He focusses on the processes of (imperial) state-building, on the modernization of the everyday life, on the nationalist movements (and on the obstacles to them), on the long-standing Habsburg legacies in the successor states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the critical review of the third volume of Roberto Vivarelli's Origini del fascismo, this essay outlines the intellectual itinerary and the historiographical contribution of the controversial historian. Vivarelli, who always proclaimed his faith in the ideals of «democratic interventionism» and in the 1990s revealed and reclaimed his youthful engagement with the Fascist Republic of Salò, devoted all of his academic life to understanding the origins of Fascism. His research focused on controversial points such as the ideological legacy of Great War, the role of revolutionary socialism in the crisis of liberal state, the «civil war» between socialists and fascists. After discussing analitycally all of these points, this essay critically assesses the limits of the prevailing nation-centered approach to the Italian involvement in the Great War and to Fascism. An overview of recent international historiography on the connections between Great War, Russian Revolutions and their aftermath shows how the current interpretations of the Italian first post-war period, observed through a broader European lens, need to be profoundly revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]