Revisiting "Socialist Integration": Transnational Cooperation and Its Challenges under State Socialism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel will examine “socialist integration” within and beyond Eastern Europe. The concept itself was elaborated and promoted by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in its 1971 Comprehensive Program but can be broadly understood to encompass efforts throughout the Cold War by socialist states to foster transnational contacts for a variety of purposes and at different levels. The chief beneficiaries of these mostly top-down frameworks for cross-border interaction were Party members, agents of the state, technical experts, and the managers of state-owned enterprises, but tourists, workers and youth also enjoyed expanded opportunities to connect with counterparts abroad from the 1970s onward. As recent scholarship on “alternative globalization(s)” has demonstrated, socialist economic networks linked the countries of Eastern Europe not only to one another but also to partners and allies in the Global South.

The panel will explore cross-border forms of cooperation among key actors involved in “socialist integration” in the 1970s and 1980s, from Central Committee members at international congresses to socialist managers at trade expos and student workers on exchanges as well as customs agents operating at intra-bloc borders. How did these actors understand and experience “socialist integration” themselves? To what extent were they able to cooperate effectively with one another and develop shared socialist practices? How did their actions help or hinder contact among other, less privileged groups? These and other questions will be addressed by presenters bringing together perspectives from Poland, East Germany, Hungary, the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, Viadrina European U (Germany)

Papers

• 'We Should Learn to Trade in Chinese': Marketing Hungarian Products in China 1972-1988 - Isaac Bershady, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• A Culture for the Second World: Communist Bureaucrats and Cultural Integration - Kyrill Kunakhovich, U of Virginia

• Controlling 'Socialist Integration': Transnational Cooperation between East German and Polish Customs Agents - Andrew S. Tompkins, German Historical Institute Warsaw (Poland)

Discussant

• Małgorzata Mazurek, Columbia U