Central Europe Yearbook

How Global Was Eastern Europe during the Cold War?

Rosie Leeming

University of Cambridge

Keywords: Modernity, Cold War, Eastern Europe, architecture

Abstract

A substantial body of scholarship recognizes the globality of the Cold War, evidencing the strategic propositioning of states favorable to the superpower ideologies divided in Berlin. However, much of the existing scholarship treats this globality as evidence of superpower strategy: economic partnerships, the provision of weapons, the courting of creatives all understood as self-consciously inseparable from the battle itself. This article argues that the Cold War, if understood as a battle fought territorially, ignores the reality of provincial connections. Eastern Europe, a slippery spatial term, welcomed and visited the spatial certainties that the Cold War was based on. The world went to Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War, and Eastern Europeans went to the world, in numerous and varied forms. These interactions challenge the perception of the Cold War as fought according to hermetically sealed spaces, and their legacy challenges the perception that the world can be divided according to historical-ideological-spatial certainties. Ultimately, the globality of the Cold War reframes how much the context of the Cold War contributed to the connectivity and fluidity of spaces.