Reframing globalization in european peripheries: intellectual and expert networks facing political and economic transformations (1975-2022)

The project intends to reframe, from a European perspective, the understanding of the entangled dynamics of globalization and democratization and of their flaws and backlashes. Starting from the mid-1970s, the research will reconsider the political, social, economic, and intellectual continuities between the late and post-Cold war period well beyond the 1989/1993 transitions. A specific focus on East Central and Southeastern European peripheries which will shed new light on regional approaches and responses to the challenges of globalization. In the light of the COVID pandemic and the Russian attack on Ukraine and their global backlash, it seems high time to put under historical scrutiny the entire period starting with the summit of Rambouillet and the conference of Helsinki (1975) as symbolic moments of an international settlement allegedly based on global trade and human rights. Despite deep entanglements, this period can be divided into two shorter subperiods. Starting from the crises of the 1970s and their overcoming in the 1980s, the expansion of global value chains and liberal democratic institutions created the preconditions for the end of the Cold War and of the East/West divide, for the transition to the post-communist regimes, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the European integration: despite difficulties and drawbacks, economic and political reforms ran parallel in the 1990s and early 2000s, until 2008/2010. Then the paths of globalization and democratization increasingly diverged, in the wake of the transatlantic and European financial and economic meltdown and its political disruptions, as well as to the new geopolitical challenges put forward by Russia and China on global scale. This research aims to rethink the period 1975-2022 by showing the multiplicity of subjects and approaches, even divergent ones, that acted under the label of globalization, reinterpreting it as a new hinge age between the bipolar and a new multipolar international order. In this regard it will reframe understanding of the processes of globalization, democratization and Europeanization and their drawbacks and backlashes from a bottom-up perspective of local agency. Notably, it will investigate intellectual conversations and political cultures, as well as economic and business strategies in European peripheries by analyzing informal and institutional networks involving intellectuals, economic experts, policy makers, and business communities. The project will follow three main research agendas: 1. transnational debates and ideas of “Europe”, “Central Europe” and “the West”, as well as of processes of Europeanization and Westernization (with special focus on Italy, Hungary, and Romania); 2. visions and practices of democracy and democratization with special regard to Ukraine and the post-Soviet countries ; 3. perspectives of economic reforms and liberalization, as well as business strategies between Italy and East Central and Southeastern Europe.