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Having for a long time been an area of research mainly reserved for specialists in international relations and political scientists, the international organizations (IOs) that first emerged in the twentieth century's pre-World War II decades have also attracted renewed interest of historians for the past several years. This development has its place in a movement of 'globalization' within the discipline, evident in both themes and practice. The nation, the region, and the village remain pertinent units for study, but the historian interested in global history approaches them in relation to other spaces, reflecting renewed attention to connections and forms of circulation traditionally neglected in specialized studies. As will be argued below, in their role as observation posts, the IOs and international associations here comprise an especially productive area of research, in effect opening access to work on complexly intermeshing 'circulatory regimes'.

Résumé L'étude d'un cercle d'experts de l'OIT permet de « dénationaliser » doublement les politiques sociales. Le recours aux experts qui accompagne un processus de « scientifisation » du social, caractéristique des années de l'entre-deux-guerres a constitué une des conditions de cette « internationalisation ». Toutefois, le savoir expert lui-même n'est pas réductible à une parole consensuelle formulée au sein d'une « communauté épistémique ». Celle-ci s'impose au terme d'une concurrence entre divers types de savoirs sur les scènes nationales, comme à l'OIT, constitué en arène internationale.

International audience ; According to S. Kott, there are two ways to understand working groups in Honecker's GDR: as a way of regimenting the citizens, or as a way for them to access a protected space in order to assert their social demands. Both visions however are biased, in the sense that they presuppose the existence if an autonomous social body crushed by an independent political power. Thus, Kott asks the question of the means by which political power may take roots in the "social nexus" through the work groups. First of all, she brings out how the work group movement was built up gradually in response to political objectives, and then highlights the limits of their capacity to mobilize. She finally stresses the importance of their role in the control and discipline of citizens.

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.Annegret Schüle, 'Die Spinne'. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

Après guerre, dans la nouvelle Allemagne socialiste, la séparation des pouvoirs politiques et judiciaires est abolie. Pour l'heure, il importe d'édifier une justice nouvelle, en rupture avec la tradition libérale que les nouveaux dirigeants récusent, incarnée par les commissions des conflits (Konflikttkommissionen). Créées en 1953 dans les entreprises employant plus de 200 personnes, ces dernières ont en charge les conflits du travail puis, par la suite, les « petits délits ». On peut se demander si la justice d'entreprise est une expression de l'atomisation du corps social ou si, au contraire, elle est plutôt l'expression de la défiance à l'égard des élites politiques de l'Allemagne socialiste, et ce bien avant la chute du mur de Berlin.

Sandrine Kott
The GDR in German historical research : from the "Second Dictatorship" to a political history of daily life.
The first works on the GDR were largely written in response to a social demand. The totalitarian approach has proven, in this context to be most powerful. But lately the research has became less political and has taken on new directions. Works using anthropological approaches and everyday life patterns are increasing in number and have revealed a lot about the reality of the German socialist regime.

In Communist societies in general and East Germany in particular, state companies were a key institution. Their independence was limited through planning and the single party's omnipotence. State firms also considerably influenced society owing to their role in redistributing wealth. But for those who lived in East Germany, this influence was also felt because these firms were less well managed; and planning proved incapable of running the economy effectively. The survival of this key communist institution depended on informal networks and practices, which arose as political authorities "gave up", sometimes even encouraging their formation. This twofold dimension of the reality of East German firms can turn history into a resource for our own times.