Communist East Central Europe

This course offers an introduction to the history of East-Central Europe during the period when the region’s countries were ruled by communist parties and allied with the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact and the COMECON. The course will also touch briefly upon the interwar period and the post-communist transition. One of the central issues to be addressed is the nature (and failure) of the state-socialist modernization effort and its ramifications still affecting life in these societies.

Students successfully completing this course will be in the possession of the knowledge necessary (a) to see the history of the Cold War era within and from the point of view of Communist East Central Europe; (b) to be familiar with the general history of the region between 1945 and 1989; (c) to have some orientation as to the region's interwar era history and the changes those societies underwent since 1989; and (d) to understand the intimate relationship between problems of modernity and modernization in contemporary Europe and tendencies of illiberal and non-democratic politics and ideologies. Motivated and interested students will have an improved competence to articulate and reflect upon the most central problems and contradictions of late-modern societies (development and backwardness, modernity and authenticity, democracy, authoritarianism and dictatorship, the role of state and market in the modern development) and to develop and consolidate an understanding of -- and the differences between -- the different (discursive, political, everyday) domains of social practices and an appreciation of its significance for our interpretation of our sources about and from the past.

Lectures and seminars. An approved exercise and a four-hour final exam.