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In the slipstream of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there has been a global mobilisation around monuments and statues of famous figures involved in the slave trade and European colonial conquest. In former colonial states – such as France and Britain – and states shaped by the legacies of slavery – such as the United States – activists have defaced, damaged or torn down monuments associated with these contested pasts. This is hardly a novelty. The destruction of physical symbols is often a response to regime change. But, in this case, the mobilisation has taken a different form. Instead of legitimising a new regime and new elites, the destruction of monuments is part of a demand for justice from historically marginalised groups who are seeking to reclaim their heritage. The deconstruction of these monuments automatically entails the deconstruction of dominant national narratives that have contributed to such marginalisation.

This forum, curated by Michael Goebel (Freie Univ. Berlin), brings together twelve historians who draw on their own areas of specialization to rethink how we conceptualize the history of nationalism in our present moment of reactivated and often militant nationalist rhetoric.

A travers la figure du professeur de droit social et socialiste genevois Alexandre Berenstein, cet article livre une reflexion sur les ressorts et les formes de l’engagement en faveur de la reforme sociale au XXe siecle. Suivre le parcours d’Alexandre Berenstein permet d’eclairer et de combiner trois caracteristiques de cet engagement. Son activite permet d’abord de poursuivre la reflexion sur les echelles de la protection sociale du local a l’international. Son parcours eclaire ensuite l’evolution des formes de l’engagement social international, des mondes de la « nebuleuse reformatrice » depuis l’Association pour le progres social jusqu’a la communaute d’experts au sein de la Societe internationale de droit du travail et de la securite sociale. Enfin, socialiste de conviction, Berenstein est aussi un militant de terrain et s’engage des les annees 1930 en faveur de la reforme sociale au sein du mouvement syndical et socialiste. Etudier ses convictions et ses activites de terrain permet de contribuer au debat actuel sur le role qu’ont joue les acteurs de la social-democratie dans les projets internationalistes de la reforme sociale, les reseaux qu’ils ont constitues, les pratiques qu’ils ont deployees jusqu’a leur echec et l’entree dans la logique neo-liberale a la fin des annees 1970.

Cette introduction au dossier « Autour d’Alf Ludtke » poursuit un double objectif. Elle situe le travail d’Alf Ludtke dans le contexte historiographique et politique allemand des annees 1980 et 1990 et souligne que les choix methodologiques qui ont preside a son travail s’inscrivent dans une pratique citoyenne de l’histoire au sein d’un pays hante par le passe nazi. De maniere conjointe, elle s’interroge sur l’importance de la reception francaise et sur la maniere dont le travail d’Alf Ludtke est entre en resonance avec differents courants des sciences sociales francaises, de l’histoire des mentalites a la socio-histoire des relations de domination.

Cette contribution analyse, dans une perspective historique, les modalités selon lesquelles l’Organisation internationale du travail a pu affirmer et remplir la mission qui lui a été confiée en 1919 : représenter les mondes du travail et promouvoir la justice sociale de manière universelle. Elle montre que l’organisation s’est, dès sa création, enferrée dans une contradiction fondamentale entre la promesse de justice sociale et de démarchandisation du travail qu’elle formule et incarne et son rôle d’agence sociale de la mondialisation économique. Cette tension s’est amplifiée après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dans le contexte de la guerre froide et de la décolonisation.

Every good humanities journal emerges from and is produced by a specific scientific community that shapes its content and its style.Central European History(CEH) is no exception. For me, i.e., a French historian of Germany teaching at a Swiss university in Geneva,CEHisthejournal to read in order to follow the more recent and innovative English-language scholarship on the history of Germany and German-speaking countries. Most of the articles published in the journal are written by historians based in the United States or in the United Kingdom (and its dominions), and most of the books that are reviewed originate from the same community, with the notable exception of ones by German authors.

This article aims to explain the existence and longevity of East-West contacts across the Iron Curtain between groups of actors in various international organizations. Three particular organizations, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the World Council of Churches (WCC), were chosen, all of which were involved in social, economic, and cultural issues. The official discourses of the era were clearly built in opposition to each other on each side of the Iron Curtain. This study allows us to understand the necessary conditions for the constitution of the groups of experts in the organizations who succeeded in working together, while still acknowledging their ideological differences. A focus on individual and collective actors and their career trajectories enables us to examine a hypothesis that specific “epistemic communities” gradually formed, based on convergent conceptions of modernity. In order to emphasize the global aspects of this process, our analysis pays attention to the North-South dimension as well as the East-West contacts. It examines the roles and perceptions of recently decolonized countries inside the chosen international organizations in order to identify another element contributing to the organizations’ stability. Keywords: transnational history; international organizations; Cold War; epistemic communities DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2017.17

Based on my ongoing research in the ILO archives, this article highlights how international organisations, seen as open social spaces, can be used to write a global and transnational history which pays tribute to the role of various social actors: international networks as well as national social groups. My researches on social insurance and technical assistance programmes between 1920 and 1950 show that the fabrication, circulation, and implementation of an international knowledge or expertise is the result of a complex dynamics of internationalisation between the national societies and the international sphere. The success of this dynamics of internationalisation initiated by ILO officials depends on a complicated negotiation with various national individual and collective actors and on the support of international networks or associations.

Fighting the War or Preparing for Peace? The ILO during the Second World War During the Second World War the ILO stood for an alternative, democratic internationalism in response to Nazi international/European plans. The ILO was able to serve as an international platform and was directly involved in the Allied war effort. Moreover, examining the ILO allows us to better understand the multi-layered processes and rationales that brought about a shift in the political and social balance of power during the Second World War. After the ILO moved to Montreal in May 1940, the handful of French functionaries guarding the organisation's deserted headquarters in Geneva could only look on helplessly as the reformist labour movement, together with the vision of a social Europe that it promoted, was defeated. Meanwhile, on the campus of McGill University in Montreal, the ILO underwent a twofold transformation in exile. Dependent on British and North American funding and staff, it became the champion of the pragmatic solutions to social issues implemented in those countries. Through its work for the United Nations alliance it expanded its activities in the fields of expertise and technical assistance, to the detriment of its work in setting international labour standards. While it had been founded in 1919 to protect workers and to provide an international platform for the reformist workers movement, the ILO emerged from the war as an organisation focusing increasingly on providing economic and social expertise.

This essay reflects on the nature of the linkage between human rights and social rights in the context of labor during the early Cold War, and on the political and intellectual context that underwrote this relationship. A precise analysis of the discussion surrounding the convention on the abolition of forced labor within the International Labour Organization (ILO) between 1947 and 1957 will form a basis for my observations. A look at this discussion, in fact, has the advantage of offering a voice to a broad range of groups and actors mobilizing arguments inscribed in a range of intellectual and political traditions and reflecting the complex stakes at play in the field marked out by labor, human rights, and social rights. The documentation (printed and otherwise) attesting to the discussion has been preserved in complete form in the libraries and archives of the ILO.That organization was founded in 1919, that is, in the aftermath of World War I.1 Initially, its goal was to satisfy workers' claims and avoid revolutionary contagion by establishing an international social code, at the time largely European in scope. This European coordination of social policy was broadly supported by management, which saw it as a means to guarantee conditions for fair competition between the industrial nations. Since 1919, the ILO has organized annual international conferences with participants from each member country: two governmental representatives, together with one representative from labor, and one from employers. The ILO's governing body has been organized along the same tripartite lines. At the same time, since its inception the organization has had ties to a large range of international and national associations serving as a source of information and contact within the various societies. The ILO's primary mission is normative: its secretariat, the International Labour Office, prepares conventions and treaties at the request of the governing body; these are discussed and, if approved, formally adopted at the annual international conference.2 Finally, the conventions are submitted to the parliaments of the member states for ratification.Convention 105 of 1957 on the abolition of forced labor was part of the ILO's normative mission. More generally, it offers a good example of the way an international cause is constructed and deployed. The vote on Convention 105 was preceded by a long discussion within key international bodies: the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), international labor union bodies, and various non-governmental associations. This discussion revealed the changing power balance tied to the question of free labor and contributed to global reflection on that theme, as informed by the tension between human and social rights.In 1957, the ILO already had considerable experience with respect to forced labor, since a first Forced Labor Convention (no. 29) had been discussed and passed in 1930, offering this initial definition of the proscribed phenomenon: "For the purposes of this Convention the term forced or compuhory labour shall mean all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily."3 The definition was general enough to cover the various forms of forced labor that had manifested themselves successively or simultaneously in the course of history: servitude, slavery, colonial forced labor, debt bondage, labor in concentration camps, and more recently, the sexual exploitation of women and children.4 The definition continues to serve as an international standard.In that light, the convention of 1957 may seem surprising in that it stipulates the abolition of certain "forms of forced or compulsory labor" of a political character - forms "constituting a violation of the rights of man referred to in the Charter of the United Nations and enunciated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. …

An edited Volume of 12 chapters on the transition from war to peace in Europe

The Editors[-]Introduction: Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-1947[-][-][-]Section 1: In the Wake of War[-][-]Marcin Zaremba [-]The 'War Syndrome': World War II and Polish Society[-][-]Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann[-]Germans into Allies. Writing a Diary in 1945[-][-]Olivier Wieviorka, Gabriella Gribaudi, Julie le Gac [-]Two Paths to the Same End? The Challenges of the Liberation in France and Italy[-][-]Peter Romijn[-]'Liberators and Patriots': Military Interim Rule and the Politics of Transition in the Netherlands, 1944-1945[-][-][-]Section 2: Reordering communities[-][-]Juliette Denis[-]The Latvian Orphans Released from the Siberian Special Settlements (1946-1947): The Story of an Unusual Rescue in the Post-War USSR[-][-]Matej Spurny[-]Migration and Cleansing: Building a New Society in the Czech Borderlands after 1945[-][-]Audrey Kichelewski [-]To Stay or to Go? Reconfigurations of Jewish Life in Post-War Poland, 1944-1947[-][-]Masha Cerovic [-]Fighters Like No Others: The Soviet Partisans in the Wake of War[-][-][-]Section 3: Organizing the Peace [-][-]Sabine Dullin [-]How the Soviet Empire Relied on Diversity: Territorial Expansion and National Borders at the End of World War II in Ruthenia [-][-]Dirk Luyten[-]Social Security and the end of the Second World War in France, the Netherlands and Belgium: Social Peace, Organizational Power and the State[-][-]Polymeris Voglis [-]The Politics of Reconstruction: Foreign Aid and State Authority in Greece, 1945-1947[-][-]Sandrine Kott[-]Organizing World Peace: The ILO from the Second World War to the Cold War[-][-]Philip Nord [-]Conclusion [-]

Cette contribution vise a reinterroger les valeurs et choix fondamentaux de l’Organisation internationale du travail (OIT), a l’aune de sa relation d’opposition/complementarite avec les mondes communistes. Le pluriel se justifie ici parce que, contrairement a l’image qui en a ete construite et diffusee a des fins de propagande durant la guerre froide, le communisme est loin d’etre un « monolithe ». Trois groupes occupent des positions differentes et font entendre une parole differenciee au sein de l’OIT ; ils devoilent trois modalites de la relation entre l’Organisation et les mondes communistes qui permettent, en retour, de mettre en evidence trois caracteristiques de son action. Le mouvement communiste international temoigne d’abord d’une hostilite forte a l’egard d’une organisation dont il condamne la conception liberale de la justice sociale. Ensuite, a partir de 1934, mais surtout apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les representants des Etats socialistes militent pour des droits sociaux extensifs et favorisent ainsi la formulation d’un projet social reformateur. Enfin, a partir des annees 1960, les cadres des regimes communistes utilisent l’expertise fournie et encouragee par l’OIT afin d’accroitre la productivite du travail. Cette convergence productiviste interroge, in fine, l’idee meme de justice sociale.

L'etude d'un cercle d'experts de l'OIT permet de «denationaliser» doublement les politiques sociales. Le recours aux experts qui accompagne un processus de «scientifisation» du social, caracteristique des annees de l'entre-deux-guerres a constitue une des conditions de cette «internationalisation ». Toutefois, le savoir expert lui-meme n'est pas reductible a une parole consensuelle formulee au sein d'une «communaute epistemique ». Celle-ci s'impose au terme d'une concurrence entre divers types de savoirs sur les scenes nationales, comme a l'OIT, constitue en arene internationale.

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.