Italy and the World Bank: The European Foundations of Development Lending, 1947–51

Foreign financial assistance for economic development and the discipline of development economics have traditionally been associated with US Cold War policy toward the Third World. This article, however, suggests that these practices were also shaped by the experiences of foreign aid for European reconstruction after the Second World War. The article traces loan negotiations between the World Bank and the Italian government, and argues that this process played a substantial role in shaping not only the World Bank's lending policies, but also the way its staff understood the institution's mission. The article emphasises Europe's significance as a site in the early history of development, suggesting new ways of understanding the evolution of development ideas, practices, and institutions after 1951.     

Extraterrestrial encounters: UFOs,science and the quest for transcendence, 1947–1972

Beginning in 1947, with the first waves of UFO sightings, and continuing in the subsequent decades, debates on the existence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life gained unprecedented prominence. Initially an American phenomenon, flying saucer reports quickly became global in scope. Contemporaneous with efforts to legitimize the possibility of spaceflight in the years before Sputnik, the UFO phenomenon generated as much sensation in Europe as in the USA. In the public imagination, UFOs were frequently conflated with technoscientific approaches to space exploration. As innumerable reports of sightings led to a transnational movement driven by both proponents and critics, controversial protagonists such as ‘contactee’ George Adamski became prominent media celebrities. Incipient space experts including Willy Ley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Wernher von Braun sought to debunk what they considered a great swindle, or, following C.G. Jung, a modern myth evolving in real-time. Yet they failed to develop a response to the epistemic-ontological challenge posed by one wave of UFO sightings after another. Studying a phenomenon whose very existence has been non-consensual since its genesis presents a particular challenge for historians. Posing complex questions of fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion, this article analyzes the postwar UFO phenomenon as part of a broader astroculture and identifies transcendental and occult traditions within imagined encounters with extraterrestrial beings.     

The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.     

The culture of reconstruction,European literature,thought and film, 1945–1950

John Trenchard's and Thomas Gordon's ‘Cato’ has generally been seen by historians as the embodiment of neo-Harringtonianism and the polar opposite of Bernard Mandeville's thought. This paper addresses that misreading and places Trenchard and Gordon within a tradition of liberal republican political thought, rather than a civic humanist or neo-roman tradition. It examines the relationship between the political, philosophical and religious beliefs of Trenchard and Gordon and those of Mandeville, arguing that they shared a common framework with respect to the problems of politics.     

Habermas’s Theological Turn and European Integration

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue that the early history of European integration has important implications for Habermas’s conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious justifications from discourse within state institutions. I question this exclusion of faith by reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the foundation of the European project. By focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive, postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation.     

A ‘German Invasion’? Irish Rural Radicalism,European Integration,and Irish Modernisation, 1958–73

Land hunger was a pervasive feature of Irish rural society which had not disappeared with the attainment of national independence. Rural agitation for land redistribution was conducted by many small indigenous farmers and it acquired an extraordinary anti-German tone after 1960. This was partially fuelled by a wave of international media speculation about Ireland as a base for Nazis eluding justice, but it was also driven by the notable success of Irish agencies in attracting German investment to Ireland. Consequently, the land question spilled into Irish efforts to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Ireland's application to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Governments were slow to respond to the demands of the rural radicals: heavy-handedness against foreign landholdings might endanger Ireland's international reputation at the very time that the country was seeking to shake off an anti-progress and insular image. Militant republican involvement in land agitation stirred additional concern. When the Irish Land Commission compulsorily purchased the properties of a handful of West Germans in 1969, the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) debated the matter. This ostensibly served as the rationale for vandalism, arson, and bomb attacks against foreign-owned farms and properties at a critical point: Northern Ireland was careering out of control and Dublin's priority was to join the EEC. The government defended the right to private property and it could not halt the EEC's liberalisation of agricultural land purchases after 1970: membership of the EEC was the overriding strategic objective. In sum, land ownership had formed part of the bedrock of Irish nationalism since at least the nineteenth century and Irish adaptation to the liberal international economy generated predictable resistance. The linkage between land ownership and national citizenship was not unique to the Irish, as the Danes, the Dutch, and several countries bordering West Germany experienced comparable difficulties in the 1960s and the 1970s.     

The Field Artillery Revolution and the European Military Balance, 1890–1914

ABSTRACT

This article centres on the introduction of the French 75mm light field gun, and its impact on the European military balance in the two decades before the First World War. It argues that the 75mm (and particularly its new recoil-absorption mechanism) dramatically accelerated the rate of fire and gave France a major military advantage over Germany between c. 1899 and 1906. Subsequently the application of the new technology to howitzers and heavy artillery enabled Germany to redress the balance. On the eve of war, however, Germany's leaders feared a new round of French and Russian emulation, and this fear influenced their policy in the July 1914 crisis. The article also examines the failure to forestall the quick-firing revolution at the First Hague Peace Conference; the new technology's role in the First Moroccan Crisis; its dissemination across Europe and the Franco-German competition to amass reserves of shells.