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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2018

Theodora Dragostinova  and
Malgorzata Fidelis
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Type
Beyond the Iron Curtain: Eastern Europe and the Global Cold War
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Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 577 - 587
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

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Footnotes

This thematic cluster originated during the workshop “Iron Curtain Crossings: Eastern Europe and the Global Cold War” organized at Ohio State University in March 2016 with the generous support of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Culture’s Paisii Fund. We thank all the participants for their insightful contributions to our discussions, which have informed the framing of this introduction.

References

1. The four case studies presented here illustrate some of the new directions in the study of eastern Europe and the global Cold War, and especially the role of experts and intellectual elites. They do not claim to offer a comprehensive reinterpretation of the east European experience during the Cold War; rather, they are part of new research that looks beyond the nation-state or the communist bloc as frameworks of analysis while also using interdisciplinary approaches.

2. The body of literature on “inventing” eastern Europe, starting with the pioneering book by Larry Wolff, is substantial. For recent works that interrogate the core-periphery tropes within Europe see, for example, Ballinger, Pamela, “Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries: Wither Europe’s ‘Easts’ and ‘Peripheries’?” in “Special Section: Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries,” a special issue of East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 31, no. 1 (February 2017): 3–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aldcroft, Derek H., Europe’s Third World: The European Periphery in the Interwar Years (Aldershot, Eng., 2006)Google Scholar; and Porter-Szucs, Brian, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. For classic accounts see Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization of the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar; and Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

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25. Historians are yet to develop a coherent theoretical framework for transnational history. Questions raised a decade ago in the American Historical Review are still relevant today in shaping the methodology of transnational history. See Bayly, C. A., Beckert, Sven, Connelly, Matthew, Hofmeyr, Isabel, Kozol, Wendy and Seed, Patricia, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review, 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Duara, Prasenjit, “Transnationalism and the Challenge of National Histories,” in Bender, Thomas, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar.

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36. For a more extensive discussion of postwar Albania and Cold War politics see Mëhilli, Elidor, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, 2017)Google Scholar.