Pan-European Economic Spaces in the Cold War: An Introduction

The articles in this special issue makes three important contributions to New Cold War History. First, they strengthen the interpretations highlighting the multiplicity and fluidity of the Cold War, which extended well beyond the interactions between superpower and formal bloc-to-bloc divisions to include a diverse array of national actors, including non-European ones such as Japan. Second, they underscore the significance of international organisations as fora for debate, exchange and expertise, as well as active agents – through their secretariats and staff – of pan-European economic cooperation. Moreover, the special issue places particular emphasis on the agency of non-state actors on the ground, including industrial and financial enterprises, business associations, experts and academics. Collectively, the contributions offer new empirical evidence on how these actors and sites structured and sustained pan-European economic spaces throughout the Cold War. Third, while the focus remains on the Cold War, some contributions emphasise the temporal dimension of pan-European economic spaces, tracking continuities from the inter-war period alongside discontinuities that reflect their reinvention during the Cold War decades. Some cases also suggest divergent post–Cold War trajectories, which point to avenues for further research on how pan-European spaces were reconfigured through the persistence, adaptation or transformation of collaborative structures and modes of engagement.