220065 Beyond Cold War binaries: Eastern European entanglements with the Global South (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

This BA seminar seeks to provide a critical re-evaluation of post-World War II global history. Moving beyond rigid East-West binaries and the assumption of isolated, autarkic state socialist regimes, it explores the dense web of economic, political, cultural, and human entanglements between Eastern Europe and the Global South.

Rather than treating these encounters as seamless expressions of "socialist internationalism," the curriculum utilizes analytical frameworks of unevenness, friction, and incoherence. Students will trace how alternative global networks were forged, experienced, and contested by a diverse cast of actors, from diplomats and engineers to middle-cadre nurses, women activists, and contract laborers. The seminar is structured around four core analytical axes:

Multiple Globalizations: Investigating parallel networks of exchange that explicitly challenged Western-led capitalist globalization paradigms.

Frictions of Development: Unpacking the pragmatic, material, and systemic limits of state socialist development aid and industrial cooperation.

The Transnational Gender & Class Lens: Centering women’s internationalist mobilities, state feminism’s global aspirations, and the distinct, non-elite labor experiences of middle cadres.

Race and the "Socialist Gaze": Critically analyzing how the official, anti-racist vocabulary of the socialist bloc frequently coexisted with persistent colonial tropes, practices of racialized othering, and domestic structural exclusions.