Making and Breaking Markets across the Iron Curtain

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Western political scientists and officials studied economic statecraft behind the Iron Curtain while the Cold War raged because the topic had policy relevance, but historians generally neglected the subject after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In recent years, however, scholars have challenged the characterization of the economic Cold War as a second-order foreign policy issue and have argued not only that it is a field worthy of study, but also that the security and political dimensions of the conflict cannot be understood in isolation from the economic architectures.

Building on new directions in international history and drawing on archival evidence from both sides of the Iron Curtain, this panel examines the role of markets—both opened and closed—in shaping relations between the West and the Soviet bloc. The three papers in this session offer diverse thematic, methodological, and chronological approaches ranging from the impact of Western sanctions on the Soviet bloc in the early Cold War, to the diffusion of nuclear technology across the ideological divide, and to Western debates about providing financial assistance to the former Soviet bloc countries in the effort to facilitate the transition to democracy and capitalism during the 1990s. Collectively, the papers emphasize the importance of inter-bloc flows of goods, capital, and technology in both shaping the contours of the Cold War as well as providing historical analogies for the contemporary moment.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Lorenz Martin Luthi, McGill U (Canada)

Papers

• The Geoeconomics of Containment: Rethinking Economic Warfare in the Early Cold War - Michael De Groot, Indiana U Bloomington

• The Evolution of Nuclear Industries and Nuclear Markets - Eliza Gheorghe, Bilkent U (Turkey)

• Why There Was No Marshall Plan after the Cold War - Fritz Bartel, Texas A&M U

Discussant

• Lorenz Martin Luthi, McGill U (Canada)

Session Manager

• Jelena Dureinovic, U of Vienna (Austria)