Liberation through Transition: Democratic and Economic Transformation in Central Eastern Europe towards the End of the Cold War, 1975-1991

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel aims to present a comparative analysis of how some intellectuals and economic actors imagined the transition from blocked political systems towards a global community characterized by greater democracy and economic freedoms in the final years of the Cold War. At the center of attention are intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen whose reflections and actions aimed to cross the Iron Curtain to study the “other” and imagine a different future. This research shows that in the last twenty years before the collapse of Communism, there were some actors who, although not yet knowing when the socialist dictatorships would fall, were already trying to imagine and organize the transition towards more democratic political systems and towards freer, more global economic relations. These reflections involved intellectual and economic networks which came from both the East and the West, and which developed an image of the other not from the perspective of opposition but from the perspective of liberation and reunion. This panel reveals the pre-1991 ties between Ukraine and international organizations such as the Davos Forum, between Hungary and Great Britain, between Italy and the Soviet Union in the dual dimension of political and economic relations. The aim of this research is to better understand how the transition of Eastern European countries towards democracy and the free market occurred, but also how political reflection in Socialist countries could be an inspiration for a West liberated from the dictates of Cold War.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Holly Case, Brown U

Papers

• The Ukrainian Transition between Free Market and Environmentalism: Bohdan Hawrylyshyn - Simone Attilio Bellezza, U of Eastern Piedmont (Italy)

• Faces of the Same Coin?: Two Radical Critics of the Post-Communist Hungarian Neo-Liberal Consensus - Stefano Bottoni, U of Florence (Italy)

• Italy as an Eastern European Country?: Italian Circulation and Reception of East Central European Dissent Cultures (Late 1970s-Early 1990s) - Marco Bresciani, U of Florence (Italy)

Discussant

• Mate Rigo, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)