Abstract
The historiography on post-war Central and Eastern Europe has proven highly productive in recent years and challenges many received assumptions about state Socialism that prevail in both Western and regional scholarship and the societal representation of this history. This essay enquires into the making and unmaking of state Socialism, discusses recent and innovative scholarship, and claims that the analysis of post-war Central and Eastern Europe provides useful methodological insights beyond the region and the specific time frame. In seven interventions, the essay calls for the situational, flexible, and de-centred study of Central and Eastern Europe beyond the constrictions of methodological nationalism and Cold War epistemology and with an emphasis on the processual character of modernity. In consequence, it is held that we need to perceive state Socialism as integral to the multiplicity of modernities and should integrate Central and Eastern Europe into European and global history.
