Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OPEN BORDERS (Cold War Europe Beyond Borders. A Transnational History of Cross-Border Practices in the Alps-Adriatic area from World War II to the present.)
Período documentado: 2023-01-01 hasta 2025-06-30
OPEN BORDERS project aims to rethink the history of Cold War Europe by examining the development of transnational cross-border cooperation from the end of World War II to the present. Overcoming traditional narratives of a clear-cut European separation symbolised by the Berlin Wall, a decentralised analysis of recent European history will show us that the question of a divided continent should be reframed. The final objective is to challenge a dichotomous vision of two separate Europes, “East” and “West”, from a new, border perspective. To this end, a highly qualified team of senior and junior scholars under my guidance will focus on the Alps-Adriatic region, a historical area that is now shared by Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. This case involves a relatively narrow geographical area but an unusually broad typological range of subjects. During the Cold War it was divided among socialist but non-aligned Yugoslavia, capitalist but neutral Austria, and NATO and EEC member Italy. Its development from the "southern end" of the Iron Curtain in 1946 to the "most open border" during the Cold War and a precursor to present-day Schengen Europe, represents a paradigmatic case to study an alternative attitude towards borders, frontiers and boundaries. Drawing on Cold War and borderland studies, social history and the history of European integration, which up till now have not found common ground, our innovative conceptual elaboration will demonstrate the interplay between top-down politics and bottom-up initiatives, thus offering a new, and more nuanced history of Cold War Europe from the border perspective. Reconsidering the European past from this transnational angle, both in terms of geographic and methodological perspectives, will allow us to rediscover the human face of European integration and will offer us a new platform for contemporary discussions on sovereignty, territoriality and belonging and on the future role of borders in Europe and in the world.
Challenging the notion that borders between European countries with different socio-political systems were impassable or, at best, only semi-permeable during most of the Cold War, our research work on the liberalised border regime along the Yugoslav-Italian and Yugoslav-Austrian borders significantly extended existing border studies theories and developed new conceptual apparatuses for understanding European Cold War history. Project team members promptly set out to identify case studies focused on people (agents), places, and practices of cross-border cooperation, refining these through a series of seminars and workshops conducted in collaboration with the project Advisory Board and other external experts. The main achievements related to this work include articles in peer-reviewed journals in multiple languages, participations at conferences, visiting lectures at Universities and talks involving civil society (see full list of achievements and results at the project website: https://erc-openborders.eu/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)
The project as a whole aims at challenging conventional understandings of the recent history of Europe by analysing the decades since 1945 from a decentralized perspective. Focusing on the Alps-Adriatic region all parts of the projects have advanced the state-of-the-art in their own sub-fields by combining and overlapping disciplines such as diplomatic and political history, social history, border studies and studies of European integration among others, and by scrutinizing new sources in archives in Austria, Croatia, Italy, Slovenia and Serbia.