Dr. Sarolta Klenjansky will present her research proposal on the topic: "Cooperation of Hungarian and Bulgarian Cities and Departments with the Capitalist West during the Cold War" on 1 December 2016 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Summary:

There is already an amount of scholarship within the field of the Cold War studies which analyse the process of détente in Europe in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, they have in common the "bird's eye view" (Ulrich Pfeil) afforded by dealing with diplomacy, in consequence of which they show a low level of interest in the regions and in the cities. This project shifts the focus from the national level to the local level and aims to rehabilitate the political value of the cooperation between cities and departments in the Eastern European setting.

The unique form of international cooperation available for towns under communism, the town twinning, was introduced in Eastern Europe a couple of years after the death of Stalin. Deeply annoyed by the growing popularity of the bilateral city partnerships within the Atlantic Alliance, Moscow requested the Soviet and the Eastern European cities to start building contacts with towns in Western Europe and in the Third World. The communists stressed the apolitical character of the initiative to prevent any accusations of interference on the side of the Western powers, which is also reflected in the official name of the enterprise: "people's diplomacy". There was an international federation based in Paris, a "bourgeois" organization which proved receptive to this idea, the United Towns Organization, and therefore, the first contacts established between its leaders and the Soviet leaders were soon to be followed by the adhesion of all socialist countries from Europe to this organization.

The project applies a comparative perspective to the topic of town twinning and focuses on the cooperation established by cities in Hungary and in Bulgaria during the period stretching from 1957 to 1989. The international relations of the cities of both countries were subjected to the monopoly over the foreign policy claimed by the State and so formed part of the cultural activity that the respective government carried out in Western Europe. The objective of the analysis is to understand how the political elites of these two countries used the town twinning as instrument for their foreign policy, adjusting it to their needs and to the capacities of their country, and, in particularly, how their divergent visions on the issue of détente shaped the ways in which the cities established and treated their partnerships in the capitalist countries.

Moreover, the gradual opening of the cities of Eastern Europe and their turning towards West unfolded against the background of globalization, which made a profuse city networks rise across the globe. Prevented by the ideological constraints and the limited resources from participating in this innovative movement, the Eastern European socialist elites were nonetheless aware of the fact that cooperation between cities had a strong political and economic potential in the modern world and took part in lively discussions on these issues within the Bloc. The ideological considerations were overall dominant in these meetings. The regimes confronted always the same dilemma: the contacts established with the capitalist world brought discredit on their dogma of self-separation from the West and forced them to search for a balance between interconnection and demarcation. This dialectic is the principal thread that connects the three main axes of the investigation, namely:

– The first axe targets the attitude of the Bulgarian and Hungarian elites vis-à-vis the United Towns Organization, which played an important role as coordinator and diffusor of contacts. The fact that both Bulgaria and Hungary maintained their membership in the organisation until the fall of the regimes despite their growing financial problems in the 1980s testifies to the importance they accorded to it in their international relations.
– The second axe is concerned with the bilateral relations built by Bulgarian and Hungarian cities and departments with the West and examines the transnational infrastructures, extension, practices, goals, and the limits as well.
– Finally, I will make case studies in both countries to take a look at the institutional and narrative frameworks (local myths, toponymy, city's structure) which ensured that the capitalist partnerships were successfully integrated into the life of the cities and their residents. Most of them survived the collapse of the socialist system.

In my talk, I also will address these three issues.

The ultimate and at the same time the most intriguing question raised by the project concerns the character of the relations and its evolution: did the weakening of the state control allow councils to develop transnational exchanges with Western cities, which relationships then would have helped their emancipation in return? Did town twinning in the East-West relations contribute to undermine the Iron Curtain or was it rather a means for preserving the status quo, a simple piece in the system? None of the fields covered by the movement's activity makes exception to the rule that exchanges were extremely politized in the Cold War era. Nevertheless, the question of whether this fact precluded any genuine meetings between people from East and West on the common ground of regional or professional interests, esthetical or emotional motives, remains to be addressed in this specific framework. On the one side, my intent is to break away from the academic tradition that focuses on the role of the intellectuals in the East-West dialogue and, on the other side, I hope that the study will give further insights into the socio-cultural depths of the intra-European rapprochement in the Cold War.

The project uses a vast array of documents from party and governmental instructions and accounts from archives in Hungary and in Bulgaria to the contemporary press. To complete the case studies, I will possibly make interviews with former local network members.