Current historiographical production on the relationship between Eastern European communism and the environment has only superficially explored the socio-political, physical, and cultural context in which environmental concerns and management strategies of the different regimes emerged, why they materialized at specific historical junctures, and how they evolved over the years. FluidBorder will innovate the current state of the art by engaging more actively with theoretical approaches developed outside the field of political history, thus problematizing the current interpretative framework. FluidBorder builds on the assumption that analyzing communist approaches to the environment only in terms of ecocide or environmentalism risks being overly simplistic. A variety of political, ecological, economic, and scientific factors influenced how Eastern European regimes approached nature and its management. These factors considerably diverged across the region, frequently thwarting transnational cooperation schemes. FluidBorder will examine these factors, thus gaining a complete and nuanced understanding of human-nature relationship between 1945 and 1989.
Moreover, no study addressed the everyday management of a fundamental natural resource shared by two communist states, the power dynamics embedded in it, nor the active role of nature in shaping their bilateral relationships. By retracing the trajectory of the lower Danube’s management, FluidBorder will add complexity to the history of communist international relations, going beyond analysis overly focused on high politics and economics.
Lastly, FluidBorder will fill an important gap in European environmental history: the history of the Danube river in the second half of the XX century. Surprisingly, Europe’s second-longest river remains marginal to the new wave of studies on international watercourses. The Austrian section of the river has received the most attention . Even for the Cold War period, the upper and the mid-section are the most studied. As for the lower Danube, valuable monographs have appeared over the past few years, featuring specific attention to the international dimension of river management. Still, they focus on the early-modern period or the first half of the XX century. Besides a few sporadic exceptions, no study has been dedicated to the post-WWII period and the attempts to use the river as a tool of communist integration. FluidBorder will insert, for the first time, the Danube the Danube into the historiographic account of Cold War Southeastern Europe.
