The “Soviet bloc” and the World: Socialist Globalization or Rebellion Without a Cause? 

Seminar Lecturer: Dr. Jan Zofka (GWZO)/ Dr. Max Trecker (GWZO) 

Time: Wednesday, 3:15 pm – 4:45 pm Place: GESI, room 3.16 (Emil-Fuchs-Straße 1) 

Description: Western scholarship during the Cold War and in the 1990s depicted state socialism as a monolithic, close-knit world behind an “Iron curtain” unitarily controlled by Moscow. Yet recent global history approaches have challenged this narrative, by taking border-crossing interactions, flows and entanglements with countries in the Global South, with the “West” and between the socialist countries “within” the bloc into account. This research has detected a relative autonomy and room for manoeuvre for actors below leadership level and a variety of interests and decision-making structures. Last but not least, economy and society in socialist states were highly integrated in, dependent on and entangled with capitalist world markets. These processes of “socialist globalisation” and the socialist bloc “as a distinctive location of transnational exchange” shall be examined and discussed in the seminar. In our course we generally – but not exclusively – focus on economic history.

As a basis for the course discussion we will start with an introduction into the characteristics of the planned economies and their foreign economic relations. We will focus on understanding how the state socialist economy worked and on discussing the more recent (transnational or global) perspectives. Therefore, the first sessions concentrate geographically on Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War and the geographic focus will be enlarged on nonEuropean socialisms in the second phase. In the last sessions of the course we will take a look at the most recent history and the present and ask what has remained from “socialist globalization” after the demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989/1991.

Semester: WiSe 2021/22