This volume bores fourteen holes in the Iron Curtain in an effort to dispel a distortive image of Cold War Europe. It is time for historians to acknowledge that “[s]ocieites in the East and the West” were neither “fundamentally different” nor “fully separated during the Cold War,” (4) write the editors in their introduction. More theoretically-inclined chapters like Anna Matyska's eloquent study of Polish lives in Finland in the 1970s and 80s take the idea further, arguing that Winston Churchill's “iron” and György Péteri's “nylon curtain” project a false stability and homogeneity onto the eastern bloc (273). Communist governments signed cultural, economic, and scientific agreements with western governments based on historical affinities and present-day circumstances, and capitalist states did similarly. The chapters' methodological and geographic orientation toward Europe's margins calls attention to these nuances and contingencies. The book takes place far enough away from traditional centers of power to see where and how experiments happened, and far enough from conventional archival sources to consider the responsible parties from multiple vantage points.
Regarding geography, it is hard to find any volume on Cold War Europe's “entangled histories” in which a German republic appears in just one of fourteen chapters, and even then as one of three case studies. The United States appears in two in passing. Add to this Britain's starring role in one chapter and minor part in another, and the familiar western landscape recedes from view. Granted, France and the USSR are the most conspicuous countries, with four chapters apiece. One of the Soviet count concerns Estonia, however, and as Nicolas Badalassi reminds us in the lone traditional diplomatic history in the volume, Gaullist France rejected the two-camp concept of postwar Europe out of hand. It is hard to imagine a western power more suitable to a book about gaps in the Iron Curtain than France. As for the exemplars of “positive neutrality” in western Europe, as the Soviets defined it, Finland occupies three chapters, and Austria none.
All told, nine of fourteen chapters narrate relations between two countries, among them Francesca Rolandi's empirically rich analysis of Italian popular culture's influence on Yugoslav youth at the turn of the 1960s, and the Yugoslav Communist Party Ideological Commission's feeble attempts to restrain it. Václav Smidrkal employs quantitative data regarding films screened and books published to illustrate the gradual “instrumentalization” (177) of French culture in postwar Czechoslovakia. Anssi Halmesvirta sees Hungarian scientists' trips to Finland as a window onto the stifling effect that bureaucracy and technological stasis had on research and development there. Three more chapters address NGOs as propaganda platforms, most notably Sonja Grossmann's impressive, multi-archival chapter on how west European governments handled Soviet friendship societies differently, by boycott or cooperation. Lars Lundgren documents a clear head-to-head rivalry between capitalist- and communist-sponsored broadcasting organizations, this one culminating in the détente of April 1961, when Soviet television transmitted Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight to the United Kingdom via the BBC. The remaining two chapters limit their geographic scope to one western country, the Netherlands for Giles Scott-Smith and Switzerland for Matthieu Gillabert, while expanding their view beyond a small clump of institutions to account for the high, broad uptick in east-west publications and conferences in both across the 1960s.
Methodologically, the question that hangs over at least half of the contributions to this volume is one that Scott-Smith broaches in its opening chapter. Where should we situate nongovernmental and semi-governmental institutions in the history of Cold War international relations? For state-subsidized institutions, the answers presumably lie in the archives. In one of five chapters on “person-to-person” diplomacy (as opposed to five others about media and technology, and four that treat both), Marianne Rostgaard cites a 1972 meeting between Danish and Polish diplomats, where both sides cited a seven-year-old, bilateral youth leader seminar as proof of how well bilateral contacts and exchanges can work. The statements signaled the union of “formal and informal diplomacy,” (56) writes Rostgaard—the Danish state with the autonomous youth organization that it supported. Sampsa Kaataja, by contrast, questions how reliable state archives are as gauges for transnational exchange. His comparison between Finnish state documents, which say little of substance about meetings between Finnish and Estonian computer specialists from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the meetings' participants, who recall a great deal, is telling. Helsinki might have sponsored a meeting and supplied its visas, Kaataja suggests, but the first-hand, three-dimensional “expertise” that Estonians took home with them were outside its scope.
Kaataja's skepticism toward official archives brings us to Giles Scott-Smith's quandary with respect to “non-state” organizations. It is difficult to attribute any influence to “non-state” activists and research institutions on Dutch diplomacy, despite their wishes to the contrary. The Dutch Foreign Ministry dismissed advocates of east-west dialogue as nags at best, and spies at worst. Hence, the need for a “parallel diplomacy” reserved for institutions that published policy papers, attended conferences, and talked to the press, writes Scott-Smith, but generated little to no debate among policy-makers. There are loose strings to this argument, foremost the role of the press as mediator between institutions and diplomats. Nevertheless, the sheer number and variety of nongovernmental and semi-governmental institutions cited in this volume call for a macroscopic, quantitative complement to its case studies. Vaclav Smidrkal's, Matthieu Gillabert's, and Ioana Popa's chapters all demonstrate the utility of comparative data in a book as expansive as this one, Popa's in her exhaustive study of books-by-mail into eastern Europe and manuscript extraction out of it, all at the hands of Geneva's Foundation for European Intellectual Cooperation (FEIE). Were we to compare the dates and locations of the conferences that such organizations held, for example, then the contests between them might provide a proxy for the public-private debates that Scott-Smith has not found.
The volume's concise introduction and chapters, none of which exceeds twenty pages (including footnotes), are well suited to seminar discussions along the lines drawn above, one through the Iron Curtain, and another toward, through, and around the institutions above it.
