Historians often look for genealogies of nationalism in Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman imperial history. In this article, I use an inter-imperial framework to argue that the formative period of contemporary Eastern Mediterranean-European regionalism was the last five decades of these two empires. The diplomatic, economic and cultural relations between the two middle powers compose an alternative history to national narratives. I show that dualism (‘independence’ within empire) was an attractive imperial reform model for Ottoman Muslim intellectuals. I describe first a forgotten Egyptian-Ottoman dualist vision, and then I analyse the more well-known Arab-Turkish dualist plans up to 1921.

Through bilateral treaties between Moscow, Ankara, Tehran and Kabul, revolutionary diplomacy shaped the ‘Northern Tier’ of the Middle East in the early 1920s. This article argues that the infamous Young Turk leaders, though in exile after the First World War, remained at the centre of a significant moment in transnational revolutionary diplomacy in Eurasia. Based on a hitherto underutilised collection of published and unpublished private papers in juxtaposition with other archival sources, this article illustrates the working of a dual process of internationalism. While campaigning for Muslim internationalism, the Young Turk leaders were able to partake in international politics, but ironically reduced their own legitimacy and capacity as non-state actors by championing revolutionary bilateralism between Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Soviet Russia.

Under British rule Palestine gradually emerged as the new centre of Zionism. The Zionist centre shifted from Eastern and Central Europe to Mandatory Palestine through a combined process of mass migration and the creation of transnational institutions. By exploring the building of transnational institutions in the 1920's, this article shows how the Labour Zionist leadership in Palestine turned its communities of origin in Eastern Europe into their supporters. With the rapid decline of the former Russian centre under the communist dictatorship, independent Poland emerged as a new centre of Zionism and the labour movement outside Palestine. The two new centres were connected by a dual structure, with Poland as the demographic centre and Palestine the political-cultural one. The dual-centre structure was unique to Labour Zionism, building a mass movement between Eastern Europe and Palestine in the 1930s, and leading ultimately to the transition of power from liberal Zionism to a Labour hegemony.

The article examines Yugoslavia's and by extension the Non-Aligned Movement's relations with the Middle East, reflecting more broadly on the developmental hierarchies and inner divides between the oil producing and non-oil producing countries within the Movement. The ‘energy shocks’ of the 1970s had a dramatic impact on non-OPEC developing countries and sowed long-lasting rifts in the non-aligned/developing world. The article embeds these events within the debates about the ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), economic decolonisation and the nationalisation of energy resources in the 1970s, but also seeks to provide a longer-term overview of the economic and political relations that non-aligned Yugoslavia sought to forge with the Middle East, in particular with other non-aligned partners such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. New forms of Cold War developmental multilateralism emerged as a consequence of the energy crisis – the supply of Arab oil to areas which had traditionally relied on Soviet energy not only foreshadowed the emergence of a new hierarchical and dependent relationship between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, it also engendered new forms of economic cooperation and strategic economic multi-alignment through the pooling of resources and expertise from non-aligned, Eastern Bloc states and the United Nations, illustrated here through the Adria Oil Pipeline built in the 1970s and co-financed by Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Libya, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the World Bank.

This article discusses the partial integration of companies from socialist Eastern Europe into the nascent economic globalisation in the late Cold War. By focusing on the industrial slaughterhouse designed and built in Baghdad by East German and Romanian companies (1974–81), it shows how they operated within and across the political economy of state socialism and the emerging, Western-dominated market of construction services. In Baghdad, East Germans and Romanians struggled with working across differing monetary regimes, inefficient corporate structures and the requirement to comply with Western standards and regulations. This article shows how they strived to bypass obstacles and to exploit opportunities stemming from their liminal and unequal position in Iraq. By zooming into architectural and engineering documentation, it argues that petrobarter agreements, or the exchange of crude oil for goods and services, shaped programmes, layouts, technologies and materialities of buildings constructed by Eastern Europeans in Iraq and the region.

This article discusses how the Soviet Union perceived and related to Middle Eastern revolutionary movements, using a case study from South Yemen and the War in Dhofar. This specific Soviet encounter will be analysed through selected Soviet material from published and archival sources. The article highlights how Soviet representatives assessed prospects for socialism in Yemen, and how they interacted with their partners on the ground. The article is divided into three parts: the first discusses the theoretical debates in Soviet academia and the press, the second section contrasts these theoretical views with Middle Eastern ‘socialist’ theories during the Cold War and the third shows how a symbiosis developed between Soviet and Yemeni institutions and organisations. The article argues that due to an Orientalist take on South Yemen and Dhofar, the Soviet side could not appreciate the political importance and potential of socialist currents in the region, reducing cooperation to ‘pragmatism’.

Upon request from the newly established Ba'athist leadership in Syria, the German Democratic Republic sent dozens of special advisors to Damascus between 1965 and 1972 to help set up the state institutions that would move Syria from being a predominantly agricultural country to an agro-industrial one: reforming the decision-making process of national government in Damascus, setting up central planning over production and distribution and enforcing land reform were some of the key issues dealt with by East German and Syrian officials. The encounter proved highly important because the two regimes came close enough to assess their mutual assets and limits upon which they would establish a long-lasting partnership, whose institutional legacy featured in Syrian formal politics as late as the 2000s. State institutions, mass organisations and public enterprises thus became the main avenues for these two ‘Easts’ to interact during the Cold War.

This article revisits the Eastern Bloc's educational assistance provided to North Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. It highlights the political and economic premises, interests and policies at play, and investigates the role of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. It examines the creation of schools in North Africa and the Middle East and the training of students in the socialist countries. The article argues for the centrality of education in the international policy of the Eastern Bloc, further demonstrating its importance in the political economy of the relations with the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.