From the Third to the Second World? Western European Social Movements and NGOs towards the Opening of the East, 1988-1997

The collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War not only dramatically transformed post-communist Europe, these events also affected societies which had been at the Western side of the Iron Curtain, and reshaped Europe as a whole. This project seeks to assess the impact of 1989 and the ‘opening of the East’ on transnational civil society in Western Europe by examining East-West contacts from the vantage point of international and Belgian social movements and NGOs. It seeks to analyze how these actors interacted with and were affected by the unforeseen changes in the ‘other Europe’, and how they aimed to ‘modernize’ and ‘develop’ the region. To do so, it examines organizations, ideologies, and activities, as well as different spaces of transnational contact, of three key fields of social mobilization – labour, environment, and development cooperation – between 1988 and 1997. It also aims to analyze in what ways these East-West movements surpassed European borders and related to campaigns with an orientation towards the postcolonial Third World. In this way, this project contributes in a substantial and innovative way to critical approaches towards the history of European integration, development aid, and ‘alternative globalizations’, and historicizes the development of transnational civil society in the 1990s.