Although few could define it, “civilian morale” became one of the twentieth century’s most lethal concepts. In its name, millions of civilians were bombed and starved, as belligerents sought to break enemy morale through air raids and food blockades. How did it become normal to wage war by attacking cities and civilian morale? From the First World War through the Second, ideas and practices surrounding morale and the “home fronts” circulated rapidly in a transnational process.

In this talk, Timo Aava will discuss the history of ways of organising ethnically diverse states. The early twentieth century was a period of intense reform discourse in the Habsburg and Romanov empires and the emergence of nation-states after the end of the First World War. All of these, however, were inhabited by a multitude of nationalities, and the question was how to address this meaningfully to guarantee the internal stability and self-governance of the nationalities.

As global politics shifts toward great-power competition and zero-sum thinking, the European Union faces a stark test of survival. Once built around multilateralism, rules, and win-win integration, the EU now confronts war on its borders, economic pressure from China, and an increasingly unreliable United States. This panel explores whether Europe can adapt to a more hostile world and defend its vital interests without abandoning its core identity and fundamental values.

The question of space has been a crucial one in the development and maintenance of empires, particularly those that claimed and exercised sovereignty over overseas territories. A similar question shaped the experiences of women’s groups and organizations at the end of the empire, in an even more urgent way, as they sought to rebuild the ties between France and its colonies after World War II and the Vichy period. This seminar examines how women’s groups framed their activism across a plurality of spaces – national, imperial, and transnational – between 1945 and the late 1950s.

This paper examines how electoral losers respond to election outcomes, a cornerstone of democratic theory in which regime legitimacy depends on the consent of the losers. Empirically, we focus on Spain, a highly polarized democracy that experienced protests during the 2023 government formation process. We analyse the factors that erode citizens’ willingness to accept electoral defeat, with particular attention to political polarization and its attitudinal consequences. The paper also explores whether electoral loss contributes to the emergence of illiberal attitudes among voters.

The term “un-American” has been wielded as a powerful tool throughout US history, from Jefferson’s vision of the early Republic to the Trump era, yet no objective definition has ever been universally agreed upon. For the first time, George Lewis’s Un-Americanism offers a long history of this term, tracing what it has meant to whom through close looks at the most prominent contests for control of its definition and deployment.

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.