This edited volume analyses European socialist countries' strategy of engagement with the West and the European Economic Community in the long 1970s. The book focuses on a time when the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe banked their hopes for prosperity and stability on enhanced relations with the West. Crossing the traditional differences among diverse fields of historiography, it assesses the complex influence of European and global processes of transformation on the socialist elites' reading of the international political and economic environment and their consequent decision-making. The volume also explores the debate in each country among and within the elites involved in policymaking as they elaborated this strategic view and coped with shortcomings and unexpected turns. A comparative analysis of national cases shows a shared logic and common patterns, together with national variations and a plurality of views on the desirability of exchanges with their capitalist neighbours and on the ways to promote them. The multinational coverage of seven countries makes this volume a starting point for anyone interested in each socialist state's foreign policy, intra-bloc relations, economic strategy, transformation and collapse, relations with the European Community and access to the EU. This book will be of much interest to students and researchers of Cold War Studies, European history, and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at https: //www.routledge.com/European-Socialist-Regimes-Fateful-Engagement-with-the-West-National-Strategies/Romano-Romero/p/book/9780367356170, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This edited volume analyses European socialist countries’ strategy of engagement with the West and the European Economic Community in the long 1970s. The book focuses on a time when the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe banked their hopes for prosperity and stability on enhanced relations with the West. Crossing the traditional differences among diverse fields of historiography, it assesses the complex influence of European and global processes of transformation on the socialist elites’ reading of the international political and economic environment and their consequent decision-making. The volume also explores the debate in each country among and within the elites involved in policymaking as they elaborated this strategic view and coped with shortcomings and unexpected turns. A comparative analysis of national cases shows a shared logic and common patterns, together with national variations and a plurality of views on the desirability of exchanges with their capitalist neighbours and on the ways to promote them. The multinational coverage of seven countries makes this volume a starting point for anyone interested in each socialist state’s foreign policy, intra-bloc relations, economic strategy, transformation and collapse, relations with the European Community and access to the EU. This book will be of much interest to students and researchers of Cold War Studies, European history, and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/European-Socialist-Regimes-Fateful-Engagement-with-the-West-National-Strategies/Romano-Romero/p/book/9780367356170, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures' is the first published work to offer a variety of alternative perspectives on the literary and cultural Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and emphasize the dialogic relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘satellites’ instead of the traditional top-down approach. The introduction of the Soviet cultural model was not quite the smooth endeavour that it was made to look in retrospect; rather, it was always a work in progress, often born out of a give-andtake with the local authorities, intellectuals and interest groups. Relying on archival resources, the authors examine one of the most controversial attempts at a cultural unification in Europe by providing an overview with a focus on specific case-studies, an analysis of distinct particularities with attention to the patterns of negotiation and adaptation that were being developed in the process.

This open access Palgrave Pivot explores four major aspects of globalization: foreign trade, capital and information flows, and the movement of people. The book examines how the state socialist countries of East Central Europe fit into the general trend of globalization after WWII. It focuses on three specific countries in the region: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The study also considers conceptual problems: whether recently introduced terms such as 'alternative globalization' and 'socialist proto-globalization' are plausible for interpreting state socialist globalization. Special attention is paid to the study of continuities and discontinuities in the process of globalization in East Central Europe, which is a key issue in current debates. This requires a long-term perspective, so the study covers not only the decades before 1989 but also subsequent developments. In doing so, the book attempts to find a balance between old and new mainstream interpretations: it recognises that East Central European societies experienced considerable globalization during the state socialist era; however, based on empirical findings, instead of 'alternative' or 'proto-' globalization, the book suggests other notions to conceptualize this process, including fragmentation, selectivity, and unevenness. Thus, the proposed understanding could also contribute to discussions on globalization beyond East Central Europe. Béla Tomka is a professor of Contemporary Social and Economic History at the University of Szeged, Hungary. He is the author of 16 books including Welfare in East and West (2004), A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe (2013, winner of 'Outstanding Academic Title 2013 Award' by Choice, American Library Association), Austerities and Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945 (2020), and the editor of several other volumes. He is the head of the Department of Contemporary History, University of Szeged, co-founder and board member of the International Social History Association, Amsterdam, as well as leader of the History of Globalization Research Group, Budapest-Szeged, established by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

This book breaks new ground, taking business history where it has only reluctantly gone in the past. The introduction reviews the small, but growing, literature, based on fresh archival materials, which investigates the history of business organisation in the Global East, or the Second World in the Cold War. It argues that there is already a great variety of approaches that go beyond the view of the Soviet-style firm as primarily a production function. Focusing on East Germany and Yugoslavia, seven chapters showcase new directions in the field, and demonstrate that the combination of business history with other historical and disciplinary approaches can help unpack the diversity of historical experiences, explain geographical variances, and offer new avenues for synthesis. The volume’s exploration of different historical eras, including those of postwar reconstruction, through globalisation, to transformation, also shows that the Global East should not be treated as disconnected from the rest of the world, but as part of wider, global trends. As such, the volume makes a plea for the utility of studying the Global East to business history and the utility of business history to the study of the Global East. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Business History.

This edited volume uses newly released archival material to show linkages between the development of the European Union and the Cold War. Containing essays by well-known Cold War scholars such as Jussi Hanhimaki, Wilfried Loth and Piers Ludlow, the book looks at: France, where neither de Gaulle nor Pompidou felt committed to the status quo in East-West or West-West relations Germany, where Brandt’s Ostpolitik was acknowledged to be linked to the success of Bonn’s Westpolitik and Britain, where the move towards Community membership was tightly bound up with a variety of calculations about the organization of the West and its approach to the Cold War. Nixon and Kissinger’s policies are set out as the background of US policy against which each of the European players was compelled to operate, explaining how Washington saw European integration as part of the over-arching Cold War. European Integration and the Cold War will appeal to students of Cold War history, European politics, and international history.

This book offers an international reading of the Polish socialist regime’s history in the 1970s, and its opening up to the West. It bridges Poland’s socialist domestic history with critical developments of the global and European 1970s, including détente in the Cold War, western European integration, and globalisation. In this period of international transformations, socialist Poland under Edward Gierek's leadership multiplied its economic and political contacts with capitalist countries, especially western Europe, and became a leader of East-West cooperation among Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact members. Relying on sources from public and corporate archives in five different European states, the book demonstrates both that the global political and economic transformations of that period were critical for the decision-making process in Poland and, moreover, that the national socialist elites participated in shaping these transformations. By looking at the goals and expectations of the Polish socialist elites and their practices of political and economic exchanges with western Europe, the book explains the logic which drove the socialist regime into entanglement with the West. As is shown here, this entanglement proved inextricable and critical for the socialist regime's failure and Poland’s political and economic future. This book will be of much interest to students of European history, cold war studies, socialism studies and International Relations.

Brexit, populism, and Euroscepticism seem to have challenged old assumptions about European integration and raised the prospect of disintegration. This book re-examines why the European Union and its forerunners were created and investigates how and why they have changed. It links contemporary events to historical explanation, arguing that there were long-term sets of conditions, dating back to the 1920s, which pushed European governments to cooperate economically and to try to resolve their diplomatic differences. The failure of the French and German governments to create what Aristide Briand had called a 'European federal union' demonstrated both the precariousness of the enterprise and its connection to the domestic politics of European states. After 1945, the unexpected advent of a 'Cold War' and the military, diplomatic and economic presence of the United States in Europe facilitated the gradual development of habits of cooperation and institutional 'integration', but they also placed limits on European governments' activities, as did disagreements between political parties and the expectations of citizens. As a consequence, supranational bodies such as the European Commission have been accompanied - and often overshadowed - by intergovernmental institutions such as the European Council, with the EU as a whole functioning in important respects as a type of confederation. The volume addresses a series of large-scale historical questions which are integral to an understanding of the European Union. It asks how and why citizens of member states have identified with the EU; how matters of 'security' affected the development of the European Community during and after the Cold War; whether economic and social convergence have taken place, and with what consequences; and why European institutions have come to function as they have. The study is thematic, focusing on the most important aspects of European integration and explaining why member states have decided to carry out - or have consented to - the unique experiment of the European Union.

How democratic regimes should engage with authoritarian regimes, or self-proclaimed authorities in states under occupation, has long been a subject of debate. The work examines Canada's relations with member-states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Central and East European communist states were nominally independent but established under occupation. Canadian leaders explored whether engaging in foreign relations with these countries would encourage liberalization or embolden dictatorships. Over time, Canada's position evolved as a policy of encouraging bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, while calling for the respect of human rights. However, Canada's economic relationship with East European states was at times at cross-purposes with its democratic principles. Andrea Chandler concludes that while Canada did play a role in encouraging democratization, the country's leaders did not sufficiently consider the impact of these policies on the citizens of Warsaw Pact countries. This book treats Canada’s engagement with Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakiaduring the Cold War, in which the Western countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (including Canada) had an adversarial relation with the Soviet bloc nations.

Offering a fresh take on a crucial phase of European history, this book explores the years between the 1980s and 1990s when the European Union took shape. Whilst contributing to existing literature on the Maastricht Treaty and European integration at the end of the twentieth century, the book also brings those debates into the twenty-first century and makes connections with longer-term issues. The transformation of the European political climate in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008, and the watershed Brexit vote in 2016, has made it all the more urgent to reconsider the way scholars and opinion-makers have looked at European integration in the past. Drawing from recently released archival documents, the authors analyse European cooperation as part of the broader international history in which it unfolded, taking into account the changes in the Cold War order and the advance of a new phase of globalisation. Comparing and contrasting the debates, objectives and achievements of the 1980s and 1990s with the current political landscape of the European Union, this book proposes a novel interpretation of the choices that were made during the Maastricht years, and of their longer-term consequences.