The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have gone from being among the world's most closed, autarkic economies to being some of the most export-oriented and globally integrated. While previous accounts have attributed this shift to post-1989 market reform policies, Besnik Pula sees the root causes differently. Reaching deeper into the region's history and comparatively examining its long-run industrial development, he locates critical junctures that forced the hands of Central and Eastern European elites and made them look at options beyond the domestic economy and the socialist bloc. In the 1970s, Central and Eastern European socialist leaders intensified engagements with the capitalist West in order to expand access to markets, technology, and capital. This shift began to challenge the Stalinist developmental model in favor of exports and transnational integration. A new reliance on exports launched the integration of Eastern European industry into value chains that cut across the East-West political divide. After 1989, these chains proved to be critical gateways to foreign direct investment and circuits of global capitalism. This book enriches our understanding of a regional shift that began well before the fall of the wall, while also explaining the distinct international roles that Central and Eastern European states have assumed in the globalized twenty-first century.

Globalization has become synonymous with the seemingly unfettered spread of capitalist multinationals, but this focus on the West and western economies ignores the wide variety of globalizing projects that sprang up in the socialist world as a consequence of the end of the European empires. This collection is the first to explore alternative forms of globalization across the socialist world during the Cold War. Gathering the work of established and upcoming scholars of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, Alternative Globalizations addresses the new relationships and interconnections which emerged between a decolonizing world in the postwar period and an increasingly internationalist eastern bloc after the death of Stalin. In many cases, the legacies of these former globalizing impulses from the socialist world still exist today. Divided into four sections, the works gathered examine the economic, political, developmental, and cultural aspects of this exchange. In doing so, the authors break new ground in exploring this understudied history of globalization and provide a multifaceted study of an increasing postwar interconnectedness across a socialist world.

Framed by critical globalisation theory and David Harvey’s ‘co-revolutionary moments’ as a theory of social change, this book brings together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to empirically analyse how socialism is being constructed in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond. This book uses the case of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) to invite to a re-thinking of resistance to global capitalism and the construction of socialism in the 21st century. Including detailed theory-based ethnographic case studies from Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the USA, the contributors identify social and structural forces at different levels and scales to illuminate politics and practices at work. Centred around the themes of democracy and justice, and the more general reconfiguration of the state-society relations and power geometries at the local, national, regional and global scales, ALBA and Counter-Globalization is at the forefront in the trend of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of social phenomena of global relevance. Counter-Globalization and Socialism in the 21st Century will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American politics, global governance, global regionalisms and rising powers.

The two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought great changes to the new nations on its periphery. This text offers a detailed ethnographic look at one area of change - the use and understanding of public space in the region's cities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that the only option for developing countries was integration into the world economy. Written by a group of international experts, this book investigates the strategies deployed by Cuba and Vietnam to consider whether 'socialism', in some form, offers a viable development alternative.

This collectively written monograph is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'. At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.

This book is the result of a research sub-topic, titled as "The Relations of the Two Systems and China's Foreign Strategies in the Process of Globalization in the Post-Cold War Era." The main research project topic was "International Political Economy and China's Diplomatic Strategies in the Era of Globalization" (Project 211) undertaken by Renmin University of China. This Research had started in 2003 with group members from World Socialism Research Institute, School of International Studies under Renmin University of China. Globalism is a new objective trend motivated by capitalism and poses important and new challenges to both capitalism and socialism since its vigorous development in 1990s. Its content, modes, prospects and relation to capitalism and socialism has been a major pressing and controversial issue debated between and among socialist movements. It demands a creative renewal of ideas and the socialist mode of development and also prepares new conditions in which socialism can flourish. The last two decades of the 20th century recorded dramatic and radical changes in capitalism, the world political configuration and especially the world socialist and left movement. As the main part of the world socialist movement, the countries struggling for the cause of a socialist and communist future fell into grave setbacks and diverse forms of crises and many of them could not cure the deeply rooted problems posed in their development and construction efforts. One major root of the problem had been the relationship of socialist construction to existing capitalism and its realistic capabilities. Some countries through trial, error and tortuous efforts opened a brand new mode of socialist construction and a new type of engagement with external capitalism contrasting the previous mode of socialist construction. This transformation-with variations in time, pace and other characteristics-was generally carried out gradually and cautiously. This was called reform and opening up in China, Vietnam and Cuba. As compared to the previous mode-under their sovereignty-they have been allowing a certain degree of external capitalism in their territories and have adjusted the ideological and political superstructure to the whole new mode of socialist construction and reform. The socialist and left movement in the rest of the world had greatly reflected developments in the socialist countries since the establishment of the first socialist power in 1917. And since diverse modes of socialist movements have continued to co-exist in the world socialist movement-most of the time-unable to bridge the differences and severe conflicts. Even socialist countries have had severe ideological, national and international disputes. After the collapse of Soviet Union and many other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, nearly all schools of world socialist movements and thoughts suffered an unprecedented setback or difficulties and have paid with high losses. Many socialist parties and left movements were dissolved and some were unable to resist capitalist arrogance arising after the "victory" of capitalism won without battle. The shiny aspect of capitalist development had seemed unmatchable and ideas about its demise had lost its relevance. Thanks to intrinsic development of motive forces inherent in socialist reality and its subjects, things have started to change and signs of recovery, rectification, re-exploration, reform and revival have soon started to emerge and even recorded some important achievements in many parts of the world. Many important schools including (social) democratic socialism, autonomous socialism-Trotskyism, new-left, green-left, post-Marxist left, Western and Eastern communism and critical-Western Marxist thought have scored certain remarkable achievements.