The aim of this special issue is to study the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including South-Eastern Europe, as one interwoven space and to use it as a laboratory to explore conceptual issues regarding modern societal transnational and state international history. A substantive introduction, by the co-editors, sorts and explains the changing relations and perceptions between the various states of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including Russia/the Soviet Union. This introduction highlights two patterns: similarly ethno-religious-linguistically heterogeneous populations and shared peripherality vis-à-vis Western Europe. The question of interplays and overlaps between nation states and empires and the proximity between Eastern Europe and the Middle East cut across these two patterns, constituting a broader framework.

The special issue covers the time from the nineteenth century to the Cold War, teasing out not only changes but also important continuities, and hence resituating the Cold War. Eight articles covering a century of history develop specific aspects of these relationship and perceptions between empires, countries and social groups in this space.  They focus on Ottoman–Austria-Hungarian interrelations, the post-First World War Northern Tier, Zionist networks between the Yishuv, in Palestine, and Eastern Europe, the role of oil in relations specially between Yugoslavia and Middle Eastern countries, Eastern European architects working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe’s unequal integration in an again globalising world economy, patterns of Soviet orientalism, an East German mission to Syria as an example of how some Eastern European states sought the role of more developed cousins vis-à-vis the Middle East and, last but not least, the centrality of education in the political economy of Eastern European relations with the Middle East.

Read all articles in the special issue

Main image: Tito and Nasser in Ljubljana in 1960