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Research project

PanEur1970s - Looking West: The European Socialist Regimes Facing Pan-European Cooperation and the European Community

The project explores the views, debates and policies of the European socialist countries’ elites about cooperation with the West, specifically the European Economic Community, in the long 1970s. The analysis aims to incorporate the concepts, strategies and approaches of the socialist regimes.

This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement n. 669194).

PanEur1970s was a five-year project (2015-2020) to investigate the European Socialist regimes’ expectations and predicaments vis-à-vis the opening of a space of pan-European cooperation in the long 1970s.

The project provided a historical appraisal of the late Socialist élites’ views of their countries’ place and prospects in an emerging space of trans-European connections that presented them with new patterns of exchange and potential regional integration while challenging existing configurations of stability, political control and ideological self-legitimization. PanEur1970s explored in particular how the elites of the European Socialist regimes conceived and rationalised their increasing economic exchanges with, and deepening financial dependence from, Western Europe.

The PanEur19070s also developed an interactive map to illustrate the pluralistic debate about opening to the West and the EEC which took place within each socialist country in the long 1970s.

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