ABSTRACT
Regional history subverts traditional ‘school history’, oriented round the nation-state and its institutions. In a century dominated by world wars and their social, economic and cultural implications, we have taken the latter for granted. But the Second World War ended nearly fifty years ago, and the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, in a Europe closer to that of Edward VII and Wilhelm II than to the present situation: prenuclear, pre-automobile, pre-contraception, pre-television, precomputer. The present comes at us unannounced. In a ‘state of the art’ collection of essays on pre-1945 Europe, the shadow of war is everywhere. Urbanisation and welfare are marginalised; of ‘peacetime’ prototypes, Sweden figures only in relation to its strategic importance, Switzerland not at all (Hayes 1992).
