ABSTRACT
The introduction presents the rationale behind the ERC-funded research project, the results of which are presented in this book. It discusses the state of the art in the team’s fields of enquiry – the Cold War, the history of communism, international economic history, European integration history – and introduces our main research questions: What were the European socialist regimes’ expectations concerning East-West trade and pan-European cooperation in the 1970s? How did European socialist regimes assess the impact of the EEC on their economies and deal with it? Who in the political and economic elites advocated or opposed higher levels of East-West economic exchange? Which factors explain the eventual failure of these national strategies? We also present the template common to the book chapters and explain our methodology choices about the time span (the “long 1970s”), the approach (not socialist bloc analysis, but a focus on the individual socialist regimes’ experience) and the subjects under scrutiny (not monolithic party-controlled regimes but a plurality of elites involved in policymaking, their diverse views and their complex debates).
