It was less than a year since the Second Spanish Republic had been founded. In early December 1931 parliament, which had become the focal point of national politics with the elections to the Constituent Assembly, accepted the new constitution by an overwhelming majority after three months of lively debate, and elected the first democratic state president. In mid-December the right-wing Radical Party withdrew from the Republican/Socialist coalition, which was an advantage for the reform programme advocated by premier Manuel Azaña, and seemed to pave the way for reforms to be forced through. These were aimed, above all, at modernising the economy, establishing social justice in rural areas, continuing the process of democratisation and developing federal, decentralised structures. However, the first parliamentary session of the new year, with the new government, was certainly not dominated by the reform measures fought for with such determination. Rather the central theme of the opening session was a bloody incident in a small place in the south-west region of Extremadura which stirred up public opinion to an extreme degree in Spain during the first days of January 1932.

Emerging from the Balkan wars and the London Conference of Ambassadors of 1913, the nation state of Albania frustrated the expansionist ambitions of Serbia and Greece which had planned to partition the area. Early indications suggested Albania would be, potentially, one of the most destabilising regions of the Balkans. This was primarily due to its geographical position vis à vis the Adriatic coast, and to the manner in which the Great Powers deemed Albanian independence an issue of international concern. For Britain, the proximity of the important military base of Malta and the existence of oil in Albania were further reasons why Italian domination had to be checked, and it is of little surprise that Albania quickly became the focus of attention for jealous and covetous eyes.

Why did fascism not succeed in France in the 1930s to the extent that itdid in Germany? Although the appeal of fascism increased dramatically in France between 1936 and 1938 as part of the backlash to the Popular Front, the fact remains that neither of France's two largest fascist movements – Colonel de La Rocque's Croix de feu/Parti social français and Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire française – came to power during this period. In French Fascism: the Second Wave, 1933–1939, one of the reasons (among several) that I gave for the relative failure of French fascism was the negative reaction of many French conservatives and Catholics to Hitler's repression of dissident German conservatives and Catholics in 1933 and 1934 – a reaction which indirectly diminished the potential appeal of homegrown fascism through guilt by association. Although I alluded to this reaction in my study, I did so without providing sufficient documentation. One of the purposes of this review of French press responses to Hitler's first two years in power is to correct that shortcoming.

Without a doubt the Bundesbank, the German central bank, enjoys a formidable reputation in the United Kingdom. It is seen as a most important and powerful institution, as an independent, well-functioning and sometimes even stubborn player in the realm of German, European and international monetary affairs. Therefore it is not difficult to find British newspaper headlines dealing with it. Above all, in times of monetary upheaval, the Bundesbank is understood to be an institution which ‘allows a flicker of hope’ and on which markets ‘keep a nervous eye’. Probably even more telling is the fact that some years ago a book was published in the UK which presents the German central bank in its title as ‘the bank that rules Europe’ and which maintains that ‘the Bundesbank took the place of the Wehrmacht as the most known and most feared German institution’.

A question that haunted critical minds in the West throughout the Cold War was whether the evolution of two opposing military blocs in Europe meant that the blocs, their ideologies and their strategies, were actually mirror images of one another.

By 1955, the formation of a Cold War bloc in Western Europe was complete. The Western European Union (WEU), a redesigned Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO) within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with West Germany and Italy as members, was created. The 1954 Paris Agreements that established WEU also enabled West Germany to become a virtually sovereign actor, and a member of NATO. The Agreements were effected on the rubble of an acrimonious four-year international debate over a proposed European Defence Community (EDC). This would have created a European army for France, the Benelux countries, Italy and West Germany on the model of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and a parallel political community for the Six.

As the new Labour government has declared its intention to enhance Britain's role in Europe, there is renewed interest in the chequered history of Anglo-European relations. Of particular relevance in view of the present policy reappraisal is the period between 1955 and 1963, as the challenge here is to account for perhaps the most fundamental policy reversal: from Britain's refusal to take part in the common market project launched by the six member countries of the European Coal and Steel Community(ECSC) at the Messina conference to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's effort to negotiate entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). Given that this latter effort proved unsuccessful, it is said by some that the earlier date represents the British failure to seize the opportunity to be part of the European project. The catchphrase‘missing the boat at Messina’ – though not undisputed – is most illustrative of this view.

Hungary, after the 1956 revolution, played a special part in the dispute that broke out between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and continued with varying intensity for several years. This eventful story was an important part of the process that decided the fate of the East-Central European region. The immediate cause of political contention between Belgrade and Moscow was their differences over the Hungarian question, especially the fate of Imre Nagy, who had been prime minister during the revolution. The intrinsic conflicts lay deeper, however. Although the Nagy affair remained an important factor in the disagreements throughout – from his kidnapping to the ‘war of the protest notes’ that followed his execution – it acted mainly as a catalyst. The Nagy affair was an insurmountable problem for all the players concerned. It provided ample fuel for the debates, and each side found that it could be used to put pressure on the other. Due to the system of relations between the three communist countries, the Hungarian side played the least active part. János Kádár, having come to power through the crushing of the uprising of October 1956, was left in no doubt that Hungary had to follow faithfully the Kremlin's foreign-policy line and accommodate itself to Soviet regional policy requirements. Nonetheless, the story remains interesting from Hungary's point of view as well, because it reveals more than the constraints on a small, exposed country. It also shows how Kádár, as he zigzagged between the conflicting demands of Tito and Khrushchev, trying to keep on good terms with both, was gathering experience that would be useful in his later foreign policy.

A casual glance at the display in front of the SHAPE Liaison Office in Room 1A711 of the Pentagon in 1996 might have startled an unwary observer. Throughout the year, under the slogan of 'Operation Joint Endeavor – the New NATO', there was a list of non-NATO countries, eighteen including Russia, contributing forces to NATO's operation in Bosnia. The flags of sixteen countries flanked the office, along with colour photographs of Supreme Allied Commanders Europe, past and present. They represented the old NATO. Did then the inclusion of a host of new nations, from former members of the Warsaw Pact to current members of the Arab League, symbolise a NATO ‘enlargement’ without going through the painful process of formal membership? Did their presence signal new functions for the old alliance? Conceivably, both changes were taking place, the latter openly, the former clandestinely.

In mid-July 1961 the Conservative government in Britain, headed by Harold Macmillan, decided to apply for full membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). Successive British governments had persistently opted for intergovernmental co-operation instead of supranational integration as in the case of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the EEC. Thus the application, which implied the intent to join a supranational structure and a customs union, marked an unexpected and somewhat surprising break with the well-established British post-war policy.

An older friend of mine, a man of outstanding intelligence and great novelistic talent, asked me a rather curious question: ‘Did you notice that out there in the street everybody is acting abnormally? The salesman is pretending to sell, the bricklayer is building imaginary homes, newspapers don't have any news, the children's traffic warden is waving his lollipop like crazy, but there isn't really any traffic […].’ This friend of mine remembered the pre-war years, but I later realised that even people who had never seen anything other than the People's Republic of Poland had the same kind of feeling.

Monetary policy since the Second World War has always been a politically and socially sensitive issue in France. It reflected the peculiar strength of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the unions and working class. Postwar governments relied upon monetary inflation, devaluation and administered credit to sustain growth and guarantee social peace. With the exception of the period following General de Gaulle's seizure of power in 1958, there was little choice for governments faced with weak, divided and conflicting unions, a volatile work force, and a united left threatening radical change. Where German governments responded to union challenges and the oil shock of 1974 with deflation, the French expanded the money supply. The divergence of French policy from German after 1968 made European economic and monetary union impossible.

Thirty years after its adoption in December 1967, the Harmel report can be seen as a turning point in the history of the Alliance. By postulating NATO's compatibility with the changing nature of international relations, the report's conceptual framework provided an answer to the political dimension of the Alliance's mid-1960s crisis – which, fundamentally, was a crisis of legitimacy. From then on, NATO's increasingly active role in East–West relations would complement its original rationale – the defence of its members in the narrow sense – with a new one – the management of European security writ large, thus enhancing, for at least two decades, the Alliance's raison d'être as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, the long-term significance of the Harmel report is, in fact, indisputable: how could NATO have survived the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the end of East–West conflict had it not been for the post-Cold War expansion of its ‘new tasks’ along the lines of the Harmel report?

This article tries to outline the relevance of NATO for domestic Italian politics by looking both at some of the important foreign policy decisions that the Italian government took in relation to the Alliance, and at the role that NATO may have had as an active player in Italian politics.