Trends in Research on State Socialist Globalization: The Old and the New Mainstream

This chapter reviews recent developments of research on the history of globalization in post-war East Central Europe, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, and deconstructs the arguments presented in the revisionist perspective on state socialist globalization. Several influential works have undertaken a thorough revision of conventional approaches to the globalization of European state socialist countries. It is contended that the region became much more globalized in the three or four decades following World War II than previously thought. This new understanding highlights distinctive structural and temporal patterns of globalization within the region. In particular, the globalization of this region was shaped by its relations with the Global South, as the expansion of East-South links largely offset the deficits in their relations with the Western world. Furthermore, the year 1989 assumes a new role in the globalization process; several authors explicitly refute the notion that the regime changes accelerated the region's globalization, arguing instead that these changes only altered the nature of the region's globalization.