On any conventional periodization of modern Southeastern Europe, two intertwined lines of development are clearly visible. The first one is political, and describes a temporal arc shaped by the collapse of landed European empires around 1918 and the struggles – before and after the First World War – to erect nation-states in place, down to 1989. This has been a narrative of sovereignty in a double sense, of the ideas that inform state-making and of the infrastructure that underpins it. The second one is economic and inquires about the terms of the region’s integration into the broader, continental and global modern economies. The latter mainly revolves around the making of national economies, often under the influence of various doctrines of economic nationalism, import substitution, corporatism, and finally state socialism.

This workshop aims to challenge these narratives by placing two historical phenomena that transcends national and chronological boundaries, capital and empire, at the centre of our understanding of modern Southeastern Europe. We understand capital and empire in a broad sense, as processes of social change carried out by a diverse set of actors but also as embedded practices, to be located in various institutional settings, national and transnational (or global) alike. Bringing capital and empire to the fore of historical research, then, poses a number of methodological and empirical challenges, which we hope to address in the workshop, from issues of selecting or controlling evidence and the resilience of methodological nationalism to devising scales of analysis and strategies of narration. Yet we are convinced that the imbrication, always conflictual, of capital and empire, as well as their entanglement beyond national borders, opens up new avenues of research, leading not merely to a change of topics but also of optics. As such, the workshop contributes to a new body of historiography of the region that shifted our attention to the transnational resilience of economic elites after Versailles, to issues of informal imperialism during the interwar epoch, to the long durée configuration of Southeastern Europe as extractive periphery for raw materials, or, closer to us in time, to the global entanglements of the state socialist regimes after Stalinism. Moreover, by giving pride of place to capital and empire, we also aim to open Southeastern Europe to new historiographies, notably the bourgeoning field of the history of capitalism and of empire. Bringing regional empirical material in dialogue with these approaches might prove useful, we contend, not only in thinking through new periodizations but also in ferreting out new objects of research sidelined in older economic and political histories.

How did international banks assess the creditworthiness of the socialist states of Eastern Europe? Were macroeconomic data sufficient to value the financial reputation of communist governments? How did private lenders factor in politics in their country risk reports on the emergent East European market in sovereign borrowing? This project explores the changing metrics used by international banks to assess the creditworthiness of Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia from the 1970s to the 1990s. I argue that the debt crisis of the early 1980s was a pivotal moment that pushed international banks (often in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) to factor ongoing economic and political reform into their evaluations of creditworthiness. This language of social change, I show, expressed at one and the same time the increased supervisory role assumed by the IMF and the banks’ loss of confidence in “totalitarianism” as a guarantee of Eastern Europe’s financial reputation, with consequences for the ways in which the post-socialist transition was understood by financial markets.

A full-length study is available here.