East European Politics and Societies

The 2010s and the 2020s have seen a revival of research on globalization in state socialist Eastern Europe, making it one of the most extensive areas of study in the region’s contemporary history. The new wave of research has produced a wealth of novel approaches and findings, often directly challenging the long-standing narratives that had argued for a Western-led globalization process and emphasized the isolation of state socialist countries. Increasingly more historians turned their attention to entanglements with the Global South, through which Eastern European countries achieved a much deeper globalization than previously assumed. This special section aims to contribute to this ongoing discussion by showing that the interactions between Eastern Europe and the Global South did not conform to the traditional assumptions that these relations were mainly driven by ideology or that they should be interpreted primarily as centrally managed projects under Soviet hegemony. Reflecting on the new wave of research, the contributors suggest that incoherence, unevenness, and friction should be considered as defining features of East-South relations. We address various aspects of Eastern Europe’s global interconnectedness, based on case studies focusing on Czechoslovakia, Hungary (including a comparison with Austria), Poland, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation.

This article analyzes the impact of economic globalization on the decline of the footwear industry in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Rather than presenting the story of increasing integration into global economic structures, it focuses on one industry (footware) and one large firm (Svit Gottwaldov/Zlín) to highlight the contradictions, discontinuities and frictions between different globalization projects and to examine the clash between socialist and capitalist regimes of economic globalization in the 1980s and 1990s. The globalization that affected the former socialist countries and their economies accelerated in the 1990s could have led to opposite consequences – the rupture of the long-standing and intense transnational economic relations in either those countries’ industrial sector or at the level of a particular industrial enterprise. This case study shows that capitalist globalization could also cause discontinuity, producing effects contrary to those suggested by the narrative of an increasingly interconnected world.

The study examines Hungary’s failed civilian housing construction project in Libya (1980–1984) as a case study of socialist globalization, reassessing relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South during the late Cold War. It argues that socialist states were not passive Soviet satellites but active actors pursuing alternative forms of globalization driven primarily by economic necessity rather than ideological export. Drawing on extensive archival sources from ministries, party organs, financial institutions, and state security reports, the article reconstructs decision-making within Hungary’s party-state system. It demonstrates that engagement with Libya emerged from three overlapping motivations: the need for convertible-currency revenues amid mounting debt, surplus domestic construction capacity, and expectations of politically favorable cooperation based on perceived ideological proximity. The project’s collapse—Hungary’s largest financial loss of the socialist era—revealed structural weaknesses in socialist economic governance. Hungarian actors misjudged Libya as a politically friendly, quasi-socialist environment, while Libyan authorities operated according to strict contractual and market logic. Persistent communication failures and incompatible diplomatic and business cultures produced mutual misunderstandings rather than simple bad faith. A central innovation of the study lies in showing how daily cooperation reshaped Hungarian perceptions of globalization: optimism about “socialist brotherhood” gave way to economic pragmatism. The crisis exposed the inability of centrally planned companies to compete internationally, prompting debates over adaptation, corporate reform, and increased state control. Ultimately, the response favored withdrawal and institutional mimicry rather than genuine transformation, while simultaneously fostering a new generation of financial experts better prepared for post-1989 global integration.

Recent literature on globalizing Eastern Europe dedicates much attention to the relationship between ideological commitments (socialist internationalism) and economic interests in the countries’ outreach activities toward various regions of the Global South. This article zooms in on one such aspect of Poland’s engagement, as it offers an analysis of Polish propaganda outreach through the publications of a major publishing house, with readerships in various Asian and African settings. The Polonia publishing house was one of the most important institutions that disseminated Polish foreign propaganda in the 1960s, closely following the institutionalization of the Non-Aligned Movement. It published various journals in foreign languages, including the Polish Review/La Revue Polonaise. The journal was distributed for about a decade in Asia (1961–1972) and Africa (1962–1972). Drawing on the journal’s content but also the letters to editors, contributions to various competitions organized by the journal, and internal communication, the article interprets the desired image of Poland in Africa and Asia in the 1960s as it was being transmitted in these platforms. Furthermore, the article also focuses on the readership: assessing their social status and beliefs, identifying the issues that were meant to resonate with them, as well as analyzing their composition and motivations. Thus, the analysis situates the Polish propaganda efforts within the global discussion on print culture, cultural wars, and decolonization. The inclusion of issues targeting audiences in these different geographies opens up the opportunity to compare the African and Asian cases.

This article contributes to the discussion on global women’s rights during the Cold War period by examining how improving the situation of mothers, and education and literacy for women, was presented in the documents and publications of the transnational Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It shows that while the WIDF’s ideas concerning motherhood and education positively influenced the global discussion on women’s status and welfare in early Cold War period, technological innovations, together with the development of feminist thinking around reproduction and new pedagogical theories and methods that emerged in the late 1960s–1970s, diminished their global importance. The article is based on the analysis of the WIDF periodical publication, the journal Women of the Whole World, and on archival sources.

This article examines globalization in Hungary and Austria, two equal-sized, landlocked Central European countries without an overseas colonial past, and their relationship with the Global South from the 1960s until the 1990s. Recent literature assumes that belonging to the Eastern Bloc gave the socialist countries an advantage in terms of their presence in the Global South. However, a comparison of their relations with the Global South shows that Austria, a non-communist country, had a wider diplomatic room and broader, better structured, and more durable economic, cultural, and political relations with the Global South than the socialist Hungary. Therefore, the article shows that the present day tendency of Central and Eastern European countries—Hungary in particular—to diverge from Western institutions cannot be considered as continuation of their communist-era weak global positioning, which also opposed the West.

Lithuanian prisons are known for their communal dormitory-style living, informal prisoner hierarchies, and dispersed authority, with little staff presence in prisoner housing areas. In such an environment, some incarcerated women have developed a strategy to maintain their individuality and autonomy while resisting the pressure to conform to institutional identities by (re)constructing femininity. This research explores the connection between the prison environment and femininity, the value of femininity and the female body within the Lithuanian women’s prison. Some women in prison embrace traditional femininity, using it as cultural capital and a kind of achievement. Others place little importance on femininity, believing that being clean and tidy is what matters most and that investing in femininity to be pointless, as the rewards are limited. The ambivalence toward femininity is reflected in the way women view institutionally acceptable feminine behavior and adherence to prison rules. Women internalize institutionally accepted narratives of femininity despite facing significant constraints in their ability to fulfill institutionally prescribed objectives.

This study explores gender differences in public issue salience—the relative importance that men and women place on various public issues—focusing on how assets like wealth, education, and marketable skills shape these priorities within the Czech social context. This study is rooted in Iversen and Soskice’s theory of assets as well as in the Iversen and Rosenbluth’s theory of political preferences, which help to explain gender differences in the issue salience among subgroups of women who negotiate their positions in the labor market. When data from the Czech Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM) were analyzed with binary logistic regression and predictive margins, the findings revealed that assets affect the salience that men and women assign to social protection issues. Women are more likely than men to view social protection issues as the most important issue domains. This is explained by the potential of social protection policies to enable women to invest in their marketable skills, use their skills in the labor market, and emancipate themselves. Health issues are highly gendered, with men consistently assigning low importance to health concerns, irrespective of their background. This study contributes to the understanding of gender differences in issue salience, political attitudes, and agenda-setting.