This article focuses on how Spanish Civil War was experienced and understood by those who in the previous years declared themselves pacifist or antimilitarist, mainly the pacifist movement around War Resisters´ International (WRI) and the antimilitarist and anarchist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). In the article we will deal with the different ways in which this men and women analysed war reality, starting with the use of violence and the attitude towards the creation of an army, following with recruitment and finishing with the ideological repression in the rear guard. These perspectives will help us understand the militarization process occurred in in the Republican Side, the way war culture was present there and the strategies that sometimes were carried out to prevent some of its consequences.

The activities of the international trades union movement extend far beyond the narrow confines of collective bargaining. They play a crucial, if less public, role in the conduct of international relations. Union organisations are, in virtually every nation, a major political force. Their leaders are intimately involved in political parties and frequently assume high governmental offices. Unions provide the backbone of innumerable socialist, social democratic and communist parties. Throughout their histories, the trades unions of Europe and North America have participated in the political process. In the Third World their role has been even more political. During the nationalist campaigns for independence the unions provided an alternative for nationalist activities when political parties were banned. Scores of Third World leaders (among them Gandhi, Toure, Mboya and many others) rose to power through the vehicle of their national unions. Inevitably, this close relationship between unions and the political process has attracted the attention of competing intelligence services seeking to influence the political affairs of those nations in which the unions are active. One of the major battlegrounds of the Cold War has been the international union movement. As the unions seek to establish a role in the face of the new demands of the multinational corporations and the strong economic challenges posed to unions by the spread of free trades unionism in Eastern Europe, they have sought to build new institutions of international labour cooperation. This book describes the development of the international trades union movement in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America and the competing political influences which played a major part in this process.

This thesis investigates the anti-communist cooperation between the social democratic parties of Norden in the early Cold War (1945-62). The animosity between social democrats and communists dates back to the 1920s but recieved new actuality with the relative rise in communist popularity after WWII. As the Cold War froze over, the social democratic party secretaries started meeting once or twice a year to echange information about communism and plan how to counter it. The party secretary meetings went on for a decade and died out in the late 1950s/early1960s as communism ceased to be a threat and the Cold War settled. The party secretary meetings were marked the the securitisation of the communist problem, which caused social democratic parties, mainly in Scandinavia, to cooperate with state security services on containing and fighting communism. The meetings were marked by this cooperation as they not only discussed communism in the labour movement but also in terms of national security. The Nordic labour movements have cooperated since their establishment in the late 1800s and early 1900s; hence it was only natural that they cooperated on this common problem as well. During the early Cold War the social democratic parties of Scandinavia were politically dominant. They built welfare states which they identified themselves with to such an extent that seperating party and state became increasingly difficult. They were social democratic states. This identification was a contributing part in the social democratic view of national security as a party problem. Since the end of the Cold War, new research have increasingly shown the Scandinavian countries to have cooperated militarily and in intelligence. Hence, the failure to establish a Scandinavian defence union in 1949 did not mean a division of Scandinavia, to the extent that traditional research has looked at it. A new picture of Nordic security is emerging, to which this thesis is a contribution: the picture of a region that was bound together not only by culture, values and language, but also by security issues. The governing parties were a part of this cooperation as well, as I show. They were, in all practicality, brothers in arms. Hence, I propose that research in Nordic security re-evaluates the picture of a divided Norden.

The far left in Australia, as has been revealed by scholarship on its equivalents in the UK, USA and elsewhere,1 had significant effects on post-war politics, culture and society. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) ended World War II with some 20,000 members, and despite the harsh and vitriolic Cold War climate of the 1950s, seeded or provided impetus for the re-emergence of other movements. Radicals subscribing to ideologies beyond the Soviet orbit – Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists and others – also created parties and organisations and led movements. All of these different far left parties and movements changed and shifted over time, responding to one political crisis or another, but they remained steadfastly devoted to a better world.