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.

In the wake of the First World War there was an explosion of cultural diplomatic activity and Hungary was no exception. However, as this study shows, Hungary was very much unlike its regional and Western European counterparts. Unlike the Germans, Italians, British and French, Hungarians were not trying to spread Hungarian culture per se. Hungarians employed cultural diplomacy to alter the post-war order. Considering the weakness of its economy, the frailty of its nearly non-existent military and the lack of weight that the country carried on the international political stage, the Hungarian government saw cultural diplomacy as a promising and viable alternative for changing the post-war status quo. Demonstrating the country's contribution to European and indeed to universal culture and civilisation was the fundamental message of Hungarian cultural diplomacy. However, other regional powers also aimed to portray their contributions in the very same way. In the resulting competitive climate, the Hungarian political leadership not only believed that the international community needed to be enlightened about the historical and cultural deeds of the Hungarian nation but also aimed to prove Hungary's supposed cultural supremacy over its regional counterparts. This article traces these efforts and their main themes through domestic and international festivals and gatherings, amongst them the 1930 St. Emeric's Year, the Fourth World Scout Jamboree in 1933 and the 1937 Paris World's Fair. In the end, the essay examines the real and perceived utility and limitations of small power cultural diplomacy in the age of great power politics.

This article analyses the mechanics and the political stakes of multilateral trade negotiations in the League of Nations, in the context of the transition from empires to nation states. It examines one attempt to transfer bilateral treaty norms to a multilateral framework, the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners. This highly contested treaty addressed a policy question that was at the heart of both national sovereignty and international order – the legal treatment of foreign nationals. The attempt to regulate this question on a multilateral basis provoked intense debate about the authority of the League to mediate the relationship between international commerce and national governments.

Under the Salazar regime, many Portuguese citizens spontaneously interacted with the secret police (PIDE), sending it letters of denunciation, prospective applications and petitions. The historians of the Estado Novo, by reducing the nature of the relations between the PIDE and society to its mechanisms of top-down repression, have overlooked the significance of the phenomenon. Drawing on the inputs of the international bibliography on accusatory practices and ‘everyday life’ under dictatorship, this article looks at the PIDE through the subjective perspectives of the individual citizens who approached it ‘from below’, thereby nuancing and complementing the established narrative of violence and repression. It focuses on the instrumentalisation of the PIDE by ordinary citizens as: an influential sponsor; an appropriable device of coercion; an instrument of private conflict resolution; a platform for collaborative interaction with the regime; an economic opportunity. The article also puts forward an interpretation of these ‘everyday’ interactions as part of a broader system of governance used by the authorities of the New State.

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’.

This article analyses the relationship of mutual benefit that formed between West Berlin's local government and experimental artists in the 1980s. In 1978 the West Berlin parliament established a grant programme to support independent artists operating in what was referred to as the ‘free scene’. The grants were intended to support the goal of restoring the city's status as a capital of artistic innovation. Soon after, the local tourism office also featured these independent artists within a new place marketing strategy focused on raising the ‘experiential value’ of the city's cultural offerings. But as this article shows, experimental artists were also using city grants to pursue alternative agendas focused on engaging with local populations in urban space. Through these projects, experimental artists extended the spirit of participatory democracy flourishing within the city's counter-cultural enclaves to broader areas of the city.

The article explores the role of cultural diplomacy in Weimar Germany and France's competing efforts to win the sympathies and support of the United States after the First World War. In the post-war United States, both France and Germany used cultural initiatives to pursue their opposing visions of the new international order: France to maintain and extend wartime cultural alliances beyond the armistice and implement the provisions of the peace treaty; Germany to overturn these very alliances and build a desirable transatlantic ‘friendship’ in line with its efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty. By focusing on the Franco–German rivalry for US affinities, the article calls attention to the transatlantic dynamics of interwar cultural diplomacy. It shows that the emergence of German cultural diplomacy was strongly shaped by French competition for the affections of politically isolationist Americans and that, in general, the rapid expansion of cultural diplomacy in interwar Europe arose from mutual feelings of crisis, starkly competing ambitions as well as the rapid circulation of ideas and practices.

After the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

In the early years of the East German Democratic Republic, in particular after Khrushchev's speech breaking with Stalinism, there was hope among leading economists that new reforms would usher in a truly democratic socialist economy. The newly-founded Institute for Economics at the Academy of Sciences, under the leadership of Friedrich Behrens, put forward ideas that the party soon labelled ‘revisionist’. This article reconstructs the dismantling of this group of reformist economists using detailed documents of the secret police, the Stasi. I demonstrate how the Stasi staged a show debate analogous to the known show trials under Stalin. In spite of its forced character the show debate allowed the party to both resist reform and claim their policies to be a scientific undertaking.

This article explores the UK government's first foray into cultural diplomacy by focusing on the activities of the British Council's Students Committee in the run-up to the Second World War. Students were placed at the heart of British cultural diplomacy, which drew on foreign models as well as the experience of intra-empire exchanges. While employing cultural internationalist discourse, the drive to attract more overseas students to the United Kingdom was intended to bring economic and political advantages to the host country. The British Council pursued its policy in cooperation with non-state actors but ultimately was guided by the Foreign Office, which led it to target key strategic regions, principally in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.

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.

In his 1992 article, ‘Today, Freedom is Unfettered in Hungary,’ Columbia University history professor István Deák argued that after 1989 Hungarian historical research enjoyed ‘unfettered freedom. Deák gleefully listed the growing English literature on Hungarian history and hailed the ‘step-by step dismantling of the Marxist-Leninist edifice in historiography’ that he associated with the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) under the leadership of György Ránki (1930–88). In this article he argued that the dismantling of communist historiography had started well before 1989. Besides celebrating the establishment of the popular science-oriented historical journal, History (História) (founded in 1979) and new institutions such as the Európa Intézet – Europa Institute (founded in 1990) or the Central European University (CEU) (founded in 1991) as turning points in Hungarian historical research, Deák listed the emergence of the question of minorities and Transylvania; anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; as well as the 1956 revolution. It is very true that these topics were addressed by prominent members of the Hungarian democratic opposition who were publishing in samizdat publications: among them János M. Rainer, the director of the 1956 Institute after 1989, who wrote about 1956. This list of research topics implies that other topics than these listed before had been free to research and were not at all political. This logic interiorised and duplicated the logic of communist science policy and refused to acknowledge other ideological interventions, including his own, while also insisting on the ‘objectivity’ of science. Lastly, Deák concluded that ‘there exists a small possibility that the past may be rewritten again, in an ultra-conservative and xenophobic vein. This is, however, only a speculation.’ Twenty years later Ignác Romsics, the doyen of Hungarian historiography, re-stated Deák's claim, arguing that there are no more ideological barriers for historical research. However, in his 2011 article Romsics strictly separated professional historical research as such from ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented interpretations of the past, which leave aside professional criteria and feed susceptible readers – and there are always many – with fraudulent and self-deceiving myths’. He thereby hinted at a new threat to the historical profession posed by new and ideologically driven forces. The question of where these ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented’ historians are coming from has not been asked as it would pose a painful question about personal and institutional continuity. Those historians who have become the poster boys of the illiberal memory politics had not only been members of the communist party, they also received all necessary professional titles and degrees within the professional community of historians.

Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.

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.

While recent scholarship has highlighted how participating countries at the interwar world's fairs competed by displaying ideological versions of modernity, the alternative national projections of smaller states have received less attention. This study of the Swedish national pavilions from Brussels 1935 via Paris 1937 to New York 1939 analyses how a loose but well-connected network of communicators over the course of three fairs responded to, and used, the evolving trends at these international mega-events. In the threatening international atmosphere of the late 1930s, the network convinced the Swedish government to seize the opportunities opened up by the crises of capitalism and democracy. The 1937 and 1939 pavilions showcased Sweden at the world's fairs as an example of the successful handling of economic and socio-political crisis, and the experience had a formative impact on the post-war institutionalisation of Swedish cultural diplomacy.

It is common to consider 1989 as a kind of ‘zero hour’. This applies to East Central European and to Italian history alike. A thought-provoking book, published in 1993, evoked the image of ‘an avalanche that swells downhill, speeded up and enriched by the great landslide of the nearby great mountain’. In this way the historian Luciano Cafagna described the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Italian democracy. As a matter of fact, the Italian party system, based on the leading role of the Christian Democratic Party and of the West's major Communist Party, suddenly collapsed in the three years that followed the end of the Cold War because of a growing loss of legitimacy. In hindsight, though, I argue that the first, mostly invisible, movements of this ‘avalanche’ went further back in time, to well before 1989. The early 1990s simply marked its spectacular acceleration.

Bilateral treaties are an age-old tool of diplomacy, but before the First World War they were only rarely applied to the world of intellectual and cultural relations. This article explores the process by which diplomatic agreements on intellectual and cultural exchange came instead to be a common feature of interwar European international relations by contrasting two types of agreements identified by period observers: ‘intellectual’ accords, typified by the agreements France signed in the 1920s, and ‘cultural’ treaties, advanced by fascist Italy in the 1930s. Comparing France and Italy's use of such agreements in Central-Eastern Europe reveals that Italy's fascist regime responded to the crises and opportunities of the interwar period by developing a distinctive model of ‘cultural treaty’ that applied state power to international cultural exchange, and mobilised the idea of ‘culture’ itself, in a new and influential manner.

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

The 1975 World Conference on Women marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Women. The conference report, written soon afterwards, underlined that ‘the issue of inequality that affects the vast majority of women of the world is closely linked with the problem of under-development which exists as a result not only of unsuitable internal structures but also of a profoundly unjust world economic system’. This type of holistic and more radical understanding of (under)development has usually been lost in mainstream accounts of the history of development as a colonial endeavour or as a Western-imposed set of values and templates rooted in modernisation theory. A recent wave of scholarship, however, has sought to recover the agency of the ‘Global South’ in the history of internationalism and development, uncovering the plurality of internationalisms and the variety of political imaginaries that shaped twentieth-century ideas of development.

In the era of the Schengen Area (at least in the days before Covid-19), travel from Munich to Bozen/Bolzano or Ljubljana to Trst/Trieste is a decidedly unremarkable, albeit beautiful, adventure. Just as meaningful as the lack of border controls, travellers find all public signage in both Italian and German (and sometimes Ladin, too) upon arrival in Bozen/Bolzano. Signs in the streets of Trst/Trieste less reliably have Slovene alongside the Italian, but assistance with translation can be found with little difficulty. The Italian autonomous regions ‘with special statutes’ in which these cities reside – Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol) and Friuli Venezia Giulia (the Julian March) – are multilingual territories that, at least on an official level, embrace a multiethnic heritage and reality. In fact, Trentino-Alto Adige's consociational democracy is widely regarded among political scientists as an international role model for how states can successfully protect and give voice to minority populations. Those unfamiliar with the more recent history of these regions might be surprised to learn of these avowedly multiethnic political and cultural structures. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the regions’ two states – Austria-Hungary until 1919 and thereafter Italy – employed the ‘nationality principle’ to define policies and populations in these territories. As in most of Europe at the time, sovereignty was increasingly predicated on the contemporary ideal of the nation state, in which borders, ethnicity, language and citizenship were all bound together. Of course, as a multiethnic empire, Austria-Hungary was much more concerned about centralising state authority (and then fighting a world war) than national homogeneity, while Italy's nationalisation campaign in the interwar period became fundamental to its presence in the new provinces. Still, both states sought to classify and ultimately to control their border populations by privileging ethnolinguistic categories of citizenship.