Introduction: Critics of Global History

Despite the rise of nativism and populism, recent years have witnessed the skyrocketing success of global histories of states and regions that have not been the traditional foci of global history. Since 2017, a series of volumes has appeared on the global history of Sicily, Catalonia, Spain, Italy and Hungary, among others. These texts have been published in the wake of the first volume of their kind, World History of France, edited by Patrick Boucheron. This collective enterprise primarily aimed to challenge French national(ist) narratives by showing how France developed in connection with the rest of the world.Footnote ¹ Historians of Southern and East-Central Europe have since articulated their research agendas in global terms, exploring the involvement of firms, adventurers, soldiers, experts, explorers and states from these regions in the global landscape. However, as these volumes were written in local languages for domestic audiences with the aim of correcting nationalist accounts, they have proven to be less effective in articulating their agenda to a global audience and the field of global history more generally, or challenging the still prevailing position of former Western colonial powers as the prime movers of global history.Footnote ²

In this article, we offer some cautionary tales and challenges; we explore emerging directions in the field, as well as its potential limitations, and advocate for a dynamic approach, which allows us to see how East-Central and Southern European societies played a crucial if not always glorious part at specific historical turning points and eras, be it before 1914, during and after the First World War or in the Cold War. In the absence of the Southern and East-Central European perspective, the global history of colonialism, decolonisation or modern warfare is at best incomplete; at worst, skewed. The article focuses on Spain and Hungary, yet we also address challenges of writing the global histories of Southern and East-Central Europe more generally, as we contend that the Southern and East-Central European ‘semi-peripheries’ face common challenges in their engagement with global history.

There are at least two significant challenges to writing the global history of East-Central and Southern Europe. One is the temptation to integrate them into global history, but in a passive role, as a perennial receiver of Western influences on the ‘semi-periphery’ of Europe. The other lies in too enthusiastically debunking the West and foregrounding these regions disproportionately as drivers of modern history, which could result in writing ‘fake global history’, as some have warned.Footnote ³ Moreover, global historians of East-Central and Southern Europe often find themselves in a no man’s land: marginalised within their own national historiographies, sidelined by a global history field that remains predominantly Western-centric and increasingly scrutinised by critics who question the very premises of global history as an approach. Kiran Patel has argued that ‘instead of focusing on roots, it is more interesting to investigate the routes of historical phenomena’. He applied this to the history of the New Deal. However, it can be turned into a general principle that echoes Marc Bloch’s criticism of the ‘embryogenic obsession’ of focusing on how and when a given historical phenomenon originated as a definitive explanatory key.Footnote ⁴ The ‘route’ of global history passed through East-Central and Southern Europe, and as such, these regions contributed to shaping global phenomena like modern capitalism, colonialism, medicine, decolonisation or neofascism.

Ironically, as the global histories of Southern and East-Central Europe emerge as a field, so does criticism of global history, as many historians who had championed global history have turned out to be its critics. Academics have criticised the global history approach for lacking a precise definition, conflating its subject matter with its methodology, reaching a point of ‘diminishing returns’, perpetuating a rebranded version of narratives centred on Western Europe and even reinforcing nationalist perspectives instead of challenging them.Footnote ⁵ This battle on multiple fronts can hardly be won, especially as the right- and left-wing critiques of purportedly ‘liberal’ global history overlap. The former emphasises the exclusive development of a ‘national essence’ allegedly uncontaminated by ‘global’ phenomena spilling over from the West or elsewhere, whether liberalism, capitalism or, more recently, any historical trends associated with so-called woke values.Footnote ⁶ The latter argues that global history is merely a continuation of traditional narratives, now scaled up to show how ‘the West’ has influenced ‘the rest’, as well as a glorifying account of global capitalism.Footnote ⁷

In the meantime, claims about global processes in modern history, such as colonialism, decolonisation, genocide or war, are increasingly abused and translated into geopolitical agendas that revive the nineteenth-century imperialism of the Great Powers, now directed at Canada, Greenland, Ukraine or the Middle East. This weaponisation of history makes the emergence of a nuanced and ‘truly global’ history all the more pressing. Populists and nationalists have also selectively drawn on the tenets and terminology of global history, including that of its left-wing critics. They lament the domination of Great Power-centric accounts to extoll the excellence of small nations and the victimisation of the ‘semi-periphery’. Populists are also keen on deploying the criticism of Great Power imperialism in short-term political battles. ‘We are the Indians’ – noted the Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, drawing parallels between the experiences of native Americans facing the influx of settler colonialists and East-Central Europeans facing Middle Eastern refugees allegedly allowed in to the European Union by guilt-stricken former colonial powers during the migration crisis of 2015.Footnote ⁸ Orbán’s remarks also echoed the cliché popular during Stalinism, according to which Hungary had been the ‘semi-colony’ of ‘western’ Austria. In the Orbánist view of the past, Habsburg subjugation was followed by Berlin’s, Moscow’s and, in the present, Brussels’s imperial domination over Hungary, rendering it a mere victim of global history. Both in the 1950s and today, the otherwise sharply divergent political agendas necessitated the abuse of global history to distance Hungary from the West and from a shared – if geographically uneven – European colonial legacy.

Although populists claim to defend national sovreignty, they often reproduce great-power imperialism, generating contradictions when their global foreign-policy agenda conflicts with regime-sponsored national history. Orbán’s political director, for instance, has recently drawn parallels between the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Ukraine’s resistance to Russian incursions, recommending Ukrainians to surrender to Russian imperialism, implicitly claiming that resistance to Soviet rule over Hungary was futile.Footnote ⁹ The ensuing scandal prompted Orbán himself to intervene by defending the 1956 Revolution from comparisons claiming it was a unique phenomenon of Hungarian (and not global) history that thus resists historical comparisons. As the premier maintained, ‘the events and heroes of Hungarian history are sacred and inviolable to us, such as 1956 and the heroes of ‘’56, and should not be brought into the debate on war and peace [in Ukraine and beyond], but rather kept out of it’.Footnote ¹⁰

For the Spanish case, conservative scholars and politicians are eager to situate their country in global historical narratives, but only if these extol national excellence and place it at the centre of a global story. In 2022, the documentary Spain: The First Globalization swept through Spanish cinemas, unveiling a distinctive interpretation of global history. The film wove a narrative that reverently celebrated the Spanish empire as the pioneering force behind the world’s first globalisation. Spain, it claimed, orchestrated an unprecedented union of diverse cultures and continents, which positioned it as the original architect of a truly global era.Footnote ¹¹ While the documentary effectively underscored Spain’s marginalisation in Western global historiography, it ultimately amounted to an unabashedly nationalist narrative. Global historians thus find themselves in a conundrum: on the one hand, they attempt to produce critical accounts that challenge historical hierarchies that prioritise the history of Great Powers, but on the other, they easily fall prey to instrumentalisation by populist narratives if they do so.

Recently published global history volumes on Southern and East-Central Europe laudably adopt a focus that conceives of the plurality of experiences taking place on the national soil. The Spanish volume opts for uncovering the multiplicity and diversity of Spain – referred to in the plural as ‘the Spains’ (las Españas) – in a narrative that explicitly aims to undermine exclusive or chauvinistic accounts.Footnote ¹² The second volume of the Global History of Hungary (Magyarország globális története), the only such undertaking east of the former iron curtain, explicitly begins with the pre-human geographic formation of the Carpathian Basin, aiming to denaturalise the connection between the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and Hungarian ethnicity.Footnote ¹³ The Portuguese volume affirms that ‘Portugal is the result of countless dialogues and clashes with other places’.Footnote ¹⁴ The global history of Sicily uses the global lens to counter ‘the endogenous conception of a closed Sicily [. . .] called upon to preserve the authentic values of a national identity that from its distant Sicilian origins found its consecration in the Norman age’. Instead, it presents a version of an ‘open Sicily’, where global currents cross-pollinated and shaped a Sicilian identity marked by diversity and multiculturalism.Footnote ¹⁵ The sharpest contrast is to be found in the World History of Catalonia (Història mundial de Catalunya), which, unlike the complex accounts of the other volumes promoting a constructivist account of national and regional identities, presents an identitarian version of Catalonia: ‘The reader will witness the complex process of construction and persistence, not only of a specific language and culture [. . .] but also many historical experiences that reflect the existence of a particular way of feeling as a collectivity’,Footnote ¹⁶ which makes the volume a traditional national(ist) narrative, only told on a larger, global-historical scale.

Global history can thus, in some cases, serve to counter nationalist accounts of state-centred histories; however, how have discussions of Southern and East-Central Europe further advanced the field of global history? The volumes remain global histories aimed at national audiences and stopped short of intervening in debates on mainstream global history – a field that ignored or misread them as yet another example of a ‘we were global, too’ narrative. The danger with this modest approach is that it reinforces a deterministic view – widespread in modern social theory and influential within the regions themselves – that casts the histories of small nations and so-called semi-peripheries as locked in a state of timeless marginality, irrespective of their specific historical trajectories. Crucially, this narrative of marginality is not simply imposed by dominant Western perspectives but is also often internalised, reproduced and mobilised by intellectuals and institutions within East-Central and Southern Europe themselves.Footnote ¹⁷ The authors of the Portuguese volume argue that, unlike the early modern Portuguese empire, the modern Portuguese state ‘became more about receiving than about creating or sowing innovation’, similar to arguments made by the authors of the Hungarian volume.Footnote ¹⁸ Spanish developments are presented as ‘local translations of universal trends’. Even when acknowledged, Spaniards are ‘not only contributors to progress or a supposedly better world but also its wounds and scars, from massacres against other peoples to the slave trade or the persecution of religious, political, or cultural dissidents’.Footnote ¹⁹ At their best, these global histories of nations and regions do not fundamentally challenge mainstream narratives of critical global history; instead, they amplify them on a larger scale and show how even the remotest villages from Portugal to Hungary had to face the impact of commercial, military and political processes that had initiated elsewhere.

We argue that it is possible to write a compelling global history of Southern and East-Central Europe that challenges the powerful tradition of national histories without downplaying the significance of actors that have not traditionally been at the centre of global history. The aim is not to debunk the West but to reposition actors from diverse locations as contributors to global developments. In the following, we focus on two historical periods that bore witness to an upsurge of global connections: the first era of globalisation in the decades prior to the First World War and the era of the Cold War.

Colonialism and the First Era of Globalisation

Even as the coming of the social and cultural turns in the 1960s and 1970 shifted the attention of historians from states to societies, global history retained traces of its original focus on overseas empires. Paradoxically, the marginal position of East-Central and Southern Europe in the global histories of the first era of globalisation serves the agenda of resurgent national histories well, as global history appears as a threat to right-wing populists who interpret it as a means to unfairly push the burden of colonialism and imperialism to the ‘innocent’ East and South.Footnote ²⁰ In Spanish public education curricula, for instance, slavery is typically only about the United States and the American Civil War. In this sense, it is easy for populists to shift the primary responsibility for colonialism to north-western Europe and the United States, conforming to a history in which the darker aspects of modern history and globalisation are often relegated to ‘the history of others’, as historian José Antonio Piqueras put it.Footnote ²¹

However, the first era of globalisation was ripe with actors from minor or declining colonial powers and from states that possessed no colonies at all. As John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have pointed out, in the wake of decolonisation, the era of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ allowed for state and non-state actors to engage in ‘informal imperialism’ without acquiring sovereignty over territories.Footnote ²² Informal imperialism also meant that East-Central and Southern European governments, firms, adventurers, settlers and experts were able to participate in and benefit from the era of colonialism, even as their formal colonial empires were less significant or lacking. While these actors may have been less numerous than those from major colonial powers, what mattered was that entire, formally non-colonising societies shared the ‘white men’s burden’. For instance, they regarded colonial wars against the indigenous populations as their own civilising mission. Paradoxically, while Hungarian nationalists were critical of France’s role in the Trianon Treaty of 1920 that led to massive Hungarian territorial losses, they had no trouble actively supporting France’s colonial wars as members of the French Foreign Legion, or praising the ‘formidable service [of France’s colonial empire] to human civilization’, as one observer poetically waxed after a visit to the 1931 colonial exhibition in Paris.Footnote ²³ In the meantime, in towns large and small, people enjoyed the products of ‘colonial’ stores (gyarmatárú, Kolonialwaren), which reached the region through the ports of Hamburg, Trieste or Rotterdam. A broad sweep of the population read colonial adventure literature while governments kept domestic populations of colour, like the Roma, on the margins; furthermore, the geographically marginal and less developed areas, like Dobruja in the case of Greater Romania, emerged as sites of medical and economic experimentation, often through the deployment of knowledge generated in the Global South.Footnote ²⁴

What we thus need is a change of perspective: less focus on imperial states and more emphasis on informal imperialism as the norm rather than the exception in how Europeans interacted globally during this period.Footnote ²⁵ This perspective would acknowledge the regional and temporal variation within European societies’ engagement with the global and avoid a skewed global narrative focused entirely on the ‘other Europe’ as well as one that negates this engagement. What remains one of the cheap alternatives to a nuanced integration of the history of East-Central and Southern Europe to global history is a mixture of imperial nostalgia with national victimhood. A new First World War Museum with cutting-edge design features in Budapest, for instance, puts Greater Hungary (and not Austria-Hungary) at the centre of modern European history and culture, yet paradoxically refuses any agency and responsibility of the Hungarian state in an otherwise turbulent era that led to the collapse of Hungary’s ‘little empire’ within Austria-Hungary between 1867 and 1918. The 2015 exhibition ‘A New World Was Born’ was curated by Mária Schmidt, the prime minister’s advisor and director of the House of Terror Museum. The exhibition aimed to be ‘the most ambitious effort to date, even on a pan-European scale, to revisit the tragic sequence of events that shaped the twentieth century. Rather than relying on the narratives imposed by the war victors or totalitarian regimes, it seeks to present these events through new and alternative perspectives.’Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, the exhibition’s ‘new perspectives’ ultimately fell back on old clichés of inter-war nationalist historiography, including the victimisation of Hungary by the Great Powers, which purportedly was the main reason behind massive territorial losses after 1918. The controversial role of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans prior to 1914, the empire’s responsibility during the July Crisis, the alienation of ethnic minorities from the Hungarian state that peaked during the First World War or the collapse of the state administration under the duress of total war are not featured in the exhibit, even as these were among the prime domestic reasons of imperial collapse, far surpassing the meddling of ‘Great Powers’ in importance.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, in Spain, populists are eager to emphasise that Spain launched the world’s first global vaccination campaign in the early nineteenth century, beating the British Empire.Footnote ²⁸ However, they seem far less inclined to mention that Spain also beat the British to pioneering concentration camps a few decades later.Footnote ²⁹

This contrast highlights the different approaches and methods of critical global historians and populist national(ist) historians. Whereas the former underline the ‘dark’, underlying and often hidden dimensions of global and transnational actors and states, and also show how they spread violence and exploitation beyond their achievements, the latter focuses on the positive, visible contributions of empires and downplays the experiences of colonial populations and racial and class oppression in general.Footnote ³⁰ While the ability to observe these hidden ‘dark’ realities takes a considerable investment of time and energy, right-wing accounts that glorify empire and national grandeur come with lower barriers to entry and can rely on established narratives in popular films, novels and television, also amplified by social media.

Over the past two decades, significant changes have occurred in scholarship on the first era of globalisation. Major works, such as those by Jürgen Osterhammel and Christopher Bayly, have done a remarkable job of decentring world-making narratives, shifting the focus away from Western Europe.Footnote ³¹ However, while these monumental accounts have shifted the narrative from the West to the Global South, they overlook how the ‘route’ also passed through the – theoretically – lesser players of East-Central and Southern Europe. In a review of Bayly’s global history, Spanish historian Josep María Fradera stated, ‘such an omission of a fundamental part of the world conditions the structure of the book as a whole’, noting that Bayly had not fully accounted for the truly global dimensions of nineteenth-century capitalism and colonialism.Footnote ³²

Global historians can both add to the omissions of Western global histories and help to deconstruct populism’s paradoxical relationship with the past, prompting us to rethink the first era of globalisation and the persistent shadow of colonialism. Modern Barcelona, a cosmopolitan and economically advanced city that connects the Iberian Peninsula with Europe and the world, was built with capital derived from the slave trade of the colonies, primarily Cuba, a thriving economic activity till the 1880s. These funds enabled reinvestment in the colonies, modernising Barcelona’s infrastructure and refining industrial production. The resulting large sugar plantations of the Antilles, particularly in Cuba, were thus not backward remnants of a bygone era but highly productive assets of modern capitalism.Footnote ³³ Despite the formal abolition of the transoceanic trade, slavery persisted and transformed into what has been called the ‘Second Slavery’, marked by modern plantations that continued to depend on unfree labour. Cotton from the plantations in the southern states of the United States, coffee from Brazil and sugar from Cuba became three interconnected components of a globally integrated market. However, while the United States abolished slavery after the Civil War in 1865, slavery persisted in Cuba until 1886.Footnote ³⁴

Cuba was a source of wealth for the colonisers and a laboratory for colonial operations. As such, it is also a central place to investigate the history of modern violence. Spanish historians have contributed to rewriting the patterns of colonial domination and exclusion within Europe by exploring the actions of the Spanish state in Cuba and how they flowed from the colony to the metropole. Recently, historians have revisited the history of Spanish rule in Cuba, with a focus on the anti-guerrilla strategies of General Valeriano Weyler, who pioneered the use of concentration camps in 1896–7, as the Cubans fought for independence, which they ultimately achieved a year later. Some of these repressive tactics were later employed to repress the working-class movements in Catalonia, as demonstrated recently by Xavier Casals and Enric Ucelay.Footnote ³⁵ This narrative is not new but builds on a robust body of scholarship that, with some exceptions, remains peripheral in broader international debates.Footnote ³⁶ However, it could constitute a remarkable vantage point to reassess recent scholarly discussions on the transfers from colonial violence and patterns of control into fascist domination in Europe, such as the ‘From Windhuk to Auschwitz debate’, which explores to what extent legacies of German colonial violence shaped the Holocaust.Footnote ³⁷ Reintroducing Spanish practices of violence and the ‘invention’ of concentration camps does not represent a radical break in the narrative that displaces Western countries from a central position. Yet, it illustrates that transfers of colonial practices to the continent were not limited to Germany or the United Kingdom. It would be erroneous to establish a new hierarchy of horror. However, it is even more problematic to discuss colonial violence and its resonance in twentieth-century Europe without acknowledging the example of the Spanish colonies.

In East-Central Europe, recent research has highlighted the involvement of Czechs, Poles and Hungarians in a deeply entrenched global colonial system, with which they interacted and benefited well into the twentieth century. The Czech explorer Emil Holub led imperial missions in Africa, contributing to the construction of racial stereotypes and cultural hierarchies. Seeking recognition as part of the ‘civilised world’, Czechs joined the colonial race as part of their national revival in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Máté Rigó has explored how economic colonialism turned inward as early as the First World War, as Transylvanian and Budapest businesses thrived on the economic exploitation of occupied Ukraine and Southeast Europe, benefiting from German military victories between 1914 and 1918.Footnote ³⁹ The Polish state, born after the First World War, harboured significant colonial ambitions, as evidenced by politicians’ strong desire to acquire overseas colonies.Footnote ⁴⁰ After 1920, the League of Nations acted as a catalyst for the engagement of experts from East-Central Europe in the Global South, even as it cemented the massive overrepresentation of north-western Europeans and the victors of the First World War among experts and diplomats who could legitimately engage with the global, as Laura Robson and Joseph Maiolo have recently pointed out.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, Tara Zahra has innovatively integrated the engagement of the Bat’a Shoe Company in India into her recent global history of de-globalisation.Footnote ⁴² All these examples show that the inclusion of Southern East-Central Europe in the history of colonialism does not mean disproportionately assigning blame to the ‘underdogs’ of imperialism. Instead, it recognises how a European system of domination could only be sustained through the contributions and participation of various regions across the globe, extending well beyond Western Europe.

Rewriting Global Post-War History

Traditional accounts tend to portray East-Central Europe as an isolated bloc behind the iron curtain with minimal foreign policy autonomy under the domination of the Soviet Union and Southern Europe – especially Francoist Spain and, to a lesser extent, Portugal – as fascist remnants, only breaking out of isolationism when major powers, the United States and Great Britain, decided to integrate them for Cold War strategic reasons. For the Iberian Peninsula, scholarship has only recently begun to analyse its global integration, moving beyond the view of it as merely a pawn of the United States in the Cold War.Footnote ⁴³ For East-Central Europe, the arguments in favour of isolation are long gone, and scholarship now analyses how the iron curtain was, in fact, a ‘Nylon Curtain’, permeable to the exchange of ideas, experts and technology.Footnote ⁴⁴ The best approach to making sense of the ‘alternative globalisation’ of the Eastern Bloc is not so much to cast it as a viable alternative to US-led capitalist globalism, but, as Max Trecker has recommended, to look at how ‘socialist’ and mainstream ‘globalisation’ mutually impacted each other and the Third World. For instance, the International Coffee Agreement of 1962 provided higher prices to coffee producers in the Global South as a result of pressure from the Eastern Bloc. Thus, the impact of the socialist world was felt in the cafés, kitchens and on family budgets in Western Europe and the United States, while benefiting the economies of the decolonised ‘Third World’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Eastern Bloc also influenced the rest of the world indirectly. The success of the Soviet Union in launching Sputnik, for instance, contributed to the pouring of ‘Sputnik money’ into Columbia University and other US research universities, leading to the establishment of tenured positions to specialists on East-Central Europe, too, such as István Deák, who in turn trained the leading specialists of Habsburg and East European history for decades to come.Footnote ⁴⁶ The welfare policies of Eastern European states, in turn, influenced similar attempts in Western Europe. In contrast, the welfarist challenge of the communist regimes in general, including China, also influenced the core countries of the capitalist world, such as the United States or Singapore, the latter of which embarked on one of the most extensive state-led public housing construction in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the Soviet Union played a significant role in the global interactions of the socialist world, recent work on global socialism has decentred our understanding of the Cold War and decolonisation, shifting the focus away from the Soviet Union, the United States and former colonial powers. Historians have shown how Eastern European states increasingly took their foreign policy initiatives and made overtures to the Global South, which far surpassed the intensity of their involvement in the first era of globalisation in terms of investments, commerce, the number of persons involved and the intensity of diplomatic ties.Footnote ⁴⁸ What makes it easy to ‘think between the posts’ of post-socialism and postcolonialism, as Katherine Verdery and Sharad Chari suggested, is the manifold connections among postcolonial and socialist states before 1989.Footnote ⁴⁹

Recent literature on global socialism has pointed out the impact of encounters between the ‘Second’ and the ‘Third Worlds’ on millions of people. It permits reassessing the global positionality of countries like East Germany, whose diplomatic isolation in Europe contributed to its large-scale effort to compensate for diminished ties to the West by expanding its cultural and economic presence in the Global South.Footnote ⁵⁰ East German historians pioneered an approach to the history of colonialism that, among other things, was the first to define the violence of the German colonial empire in the early twentieth century as genocide. This perspective gained traction in countries such as Argentina and Namibia, and even reached the United Nations, which sponsored in 1980 the translation of an East German history book on colonialism to deploy as an argument against South Africa’s de facto domination of Namibia.Footnote ⁵¹ Filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann made a series of documentaries critical of the United States and postcolonial western European metropoles, at times by pretending to be West German journalists, such as when they interviewed ‘Kongo Müller’ in 1966, a mercenary who had committed a series of war crimes; other East German filmmakers managed to get access to the concentration camps of Augusto Pinochet and interview the dictator, too.Footnote ⁵² Such privileged access was not available to their Soviet and other Eastern European colleagues, showcasing the special role of East Germany in ‘globalising’ the cultural impact of the Eastern European version of socialism.

Recent literature has underscored the presence of East-Central Europeans in the Global South, be it through housing projects in Vietnam, a Czechoslovak dam in Mali or the tens of thousands of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and other East European doctors who gained experience in tropical medicine and also impacted the professionalisation and health standards of decolonised partner states.Footnote ⁵³ To a certain extent, socialist modernisation emerged as a viable alternative to the developing states of Africa, Asia and the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s, as it offered a more efficient and, in any case, cheaper and politically less fraught avenue of modernisation than cooperation with the United States and former metropoles.Footnote ⁵⁴ Many states of the non-aligned movement became left-leaning democratic or people’s republics (Sri Lanka, India, Laos, South Yemen, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, etc.) after independence, while Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea became integral parts of the Socialist Bloc, participating in student exchanges and guest worker programmes, which involved hundreds of thousands of people by 1989.Footnote ⁵⁵ International organisations of the United Nations employed Eastern European experts. At the same time, male and female doctors, engineers and other professionals flocked to the Middle East, Africa and Asia, seeking extra income, adventure and new experiences.Footnote ⁵⁶ Cooperation with the states in the Global South also benefited and impacted the standing of Eastern European states in the Cold War order. Ho Chi Minh’s nascent Vietnamese state was among the first to recognise East Germany outside of the Eastern Bloc. In a similar vein, the Vietnamese leader’s trip to Hungary in May 1957 helped the Kádár regime break out of diplomatic isolation following the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution with the help of Soviet tanks. Ties to the Global South, such as Vietnam and especially Latin America, extended beyond official partnerships and manifested themselves in the realms of popular music and film as well. Export items from East-Central Europe, such as the Hungarian Ikarus buses, became fixtures in the day-to-day lives of Middle Eastern populations. However, coach and city bus exports also reached the United States, India and many states in Africa, too. Just as the expansion of the Bat’a shoe company had drawn with it the deployment of Czechoslovak experts in the inter-war period, so did Ikarus’s deals abroad provide work opportunities and large salaries for Hungarian skilled workers and engineers, which fuelled the construction of holiday homes on lake Balaton and villas in Budapest.Footnote ⁵⁷

Post-war expertise became a terrain where cooperation and competition coexisted. Remarkable medical advances resulted from the exchange and cooperation between Eastern and Western experts, as seen in cases such as the creation and global spread of the polio vaccine, as well as the combat and prevention of AIDS.Footnote ⁵⁸ Southern European dictatorships also utilised medical cooperation to gain respectability in the international arena. One of the main assets of both Spain and Portugal was their proximity to the former and current colonies. In the case of Francoist Spain, institutes of colonial medicine and international Catholic medical conferences helped break the country’s isolationism, integrate it into the international community and establish new ties with former Latin American colonies that Spain sought to patronise.Footnote ⁵⁹ Portugal utilised ‘tropical medicine’, developed in its colonies, to shape medical discourses and assert its international influence.Footnote ⁶⁰ Additionally, as a by-product of colonial dominance, Portuguese experts emerged as leading figures in geography. The exploration and definition of geographical realities in the African colonies made the Lisbon School of Geography an international reference. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lisbon became a hotspot of geographical expertise and organised events like the International Conference of Geography under the leadership of Orlando Ribeiro, a pioneer in ‘tropical geography’ and vice-director of the International Geographical Union.Footnote ⁶¹

This long shadow of Southern European colonialism pushes us to reexamine other global processes of post-1945 history, such as the surprising cordiality between Franco’s Spain and Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba. When Franco died in 1975, Fidel Castro had three days of official mourning and ordered the flags to be flown at half-mast.Footnote ⁶² The ideological contrast could not have been starker between Cuba and Spain, yet cordiality prevailed. Franco’s Spain consistently rejected the isolationism prescribed by the United States for Cuba. Commercial relations and an extensive network of Hispanic associations created a solid bond between Spain and Cuba. This is significant considering that after the 1950s Franco’s Spain is portrayed in many historical accounts as the puppet of the United States. However, Spain still defied the US-imposed embargo on Cuba that had been in place since the 1960s.Footnote ⁶³ Portugal pioneered the inclusion of players from the colonies in the 1960s, following the example of the Mozambican Eusébio da Silva, the first player of African origin to play for a European national football team. Eusébio became a global icon of football and set a pattern that would later be followed by France, England and the Netherlands some fifteen years later.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Salazar regime fostered these processes, aiming to legitimise and whitewash itself and its rule over time. However, these cases show Southern Europe as a dynamic player in post-war global history. From the very beginning, and despite the UN condemnations, diplomats, politicians and intellectuals expanded Franco’s global networks across European, US and Latin American chancelleries, despite the regime’s simultaneous embrace of underground fascist networks. Spain, as a former Axis ally, became a shelter for the fascist figures who escaped the post-war trials,Footnote ⁶⁵ and also hosted and encouraged extreme right networks; Madrid became a ‘neofascist metropolis’ that worked as a platform that fed those movements so they could operate freely and form a true network that operated globally.Footnote ⁶⁶ Spain was fundamental in the making of, for instance, the French Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) that came into being as a response to the decolonisation movement in Algeria. The OAS was founded in Madrid in 1961 with the support of Spanish authorities, who hosted its leaders after they were expelled from France, assisted in their activities and facilitated their transit to Algeria, where General Raoul Salan flew to launch a coup d’état in April 1961.Footnote ⁶⁷ This case highlights Spain’s central role in the global history of reactionary movements against decolonisation and in the promotion of neofascist networks.

In sum, a post-war history driven solely by a whiggish focus on liberal networks and processes reveals only a minimal part of the global picture.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is especially true when it comes to the history of international legal expertise. Traditional depictions of the legal foundations and functioning of dictatorships often employed the paradigm of Unrechtsstaat, which was applied to both socialist authoritarian regimes in East-Central Europe and post-fascist regimes in Southern Europe. Beyond being an overtly simplistic framework, it fails to consider internal shifts in these regimes’ legal structures and, more importantly, disregards the impact of Southern and East-Central Europe on the history of international jurisprudence, which cannot be reduced to liberal thought alone.Footnote ⁶⁹ Spain and Portugal explored new legal avenues, utilising them to develop a distinct language and procedural system for managing the state that extended beyond the concept of the Rechtsstaat. These developments were part of a larger international network of conservative jurists who sought to redefine governance in ways that, though grounded in legal norms, were far from democratic.Footnote ⁷⁰ This framework continued to influence legal systems even after the fall of the dictatorships, as exemplified by the 1980 Chilean constitution, from which the strongman Jaime Guzmán derived principles of jurisprudence rooted in the authoritarian Spanish tradition.Footnote ⁷¹ Likewise, Portugal sought to reform international colonial jurisprudence, attempting to influence international law to enable Portugal to retain its African colonies. His failure is often depicted as a specific national issue, symbolising the downfall of the dictatorship.Footnote ⁷² However, when viewed from a global perspective, the Portuguese case is part of a broader landscape of international legal struggles. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of East-Central Europe in reshaping international law, such as the criminalisation of apartheid in South Africa and the promotion of laws to combat human trafficking and prostitution.Footnote ⁷³ Socialist legal experts played a key role in decolonisation, as seen in the East Timor case, a Portuguese colony that the Salazar regime tried to retain, where Polish legal scholars brought the case to the International Court.Footnote ⁷⁴ East-Central and Southern Europeans were thus an integral part of the history of international jurisprudence. Further examination is needed to explore both regions together as part of a global landscape, one that was decisive in shaping the ‘routes’ history followed during the Cold War and beyond.Footnote ⁷⁵