How to Conceptualize State Socialist Globalization?

This chapter discusses the plausibility of key concepts competing in the interpretation of state socialist globalization, particularly ‘alternative globalization’ and ‘socialist protoglobalization’. Throughout the state socialist era, countries in East Central Europe, as well as Eastern European nations overall, sustained moderate economic and cultural ties with the Global South. East-South trade represented only a small fraction of world trade, and the East-South relationship cannot be considered central to the Third World either. Similarly, cultural ties with the Global South had little impact on the East Central European societies. The notion of an ‘alternative globalization’, as proposed by revisionist approaches to Eastern European state socialist globalization, does not seem useful because the connections that the East Central European countries established with the Third World could not compensate for their limited links with the West. Instead of ‘alternative’, the terms ‘fragmented’, ‘selective’, and ‘uneven’ appear more valid for conceptualizing state socialist globalization. Focusing on these features of globalization in state socialist East Central Europe can bridge the gap between earlier approaches that focused on the region’s isolation and more recent revisionist research.