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This paper concentrates on economic actors and their networks, exploring the process of integration and disintegration of East Central Europe through the example of Comecon international industrial organizations. Intermetal and Agromash both acted under the radar of upper-level politics. This paper is important due to the specificity of East Central Europe, where over the course of nineteenth century industrialization, numerous transnational networks of economic experts emerged in the then still nonexistent nation-states. Historians of technology Tom Misa and Johan Schot call this form of interdependence "hidden integration," a term which can be widely applied to East Central Europe in the era of state socialism. In contrast to politicians, economic experts maintained active pan-European networks during the Cold War, and that, despite the existence of the Iron Curtain. Here, I reveal how industrial experts were able to foster contacts and build networks beyond their political camp to solve urgent, systemic problems of the socialist economy (such as the poor quality of production and the low level of technological development). Thus, Comecon branch organizations can be considered (in the words of Friederike Sattler) "compensatory networks." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historiography of the last decade, there has been a boom in research which attempts from a transnational perspective to break the dominance of the “methodological nationalism” in history. Although economic history has dealt for a long time with cross-border phenomena such as foreign trade and capital movements, the “national economy” is still by and far the most important object of investigation. The position of East Central Europe in the European economy of the 19th Century is usually analyzed using the assumptions of either dependence or modernization theory. The paper provides a critical revision of the results of these analyses. The external influences on the formation and development of the Galician oil industry are to be discussed, as is the importance of integration into the Customs Union of the Habsburg monarchy for industrialization of Hungary, the development of an industrialization type that is based on the food industry as a result of globalization and agrarian crisis, and changes in foreign trade structures of the Habsburg Monarchy. The article argues for an economic entanglement history in a very broad sense. Besides the treatment of the “classical” topics, such as foreign trade and cross-border movement of capital, we shall deal with the transfers of technology, migration and trans-national operating companies history, with commodity chains and of course with the concrete actors that made these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study summarizes the information about Bohemia (and East Central Europe in general) that is given by the Western Frankish chronicles of the 10th and first half of the 11th centuries. These contributions were mostly omitted or refused by general majority of the Czech historiography. Recent changes of attitude to the relevance of these sources could bring a new view on these sources. The information about Bohemia contained in these sources could also help us to expose a possible relations and stereotypes about our region in Western Europe in the 10th and 11th century.

The paper focuses on introducing spaces of social exclusion in East Central Europe and interpreting spatial processes of the area within this framework. In order to interpret the multidimensional characteristics of social exclusion, domains and dimensions of the phenomenon are represented while territorial aspects of exclusion are illustrated by the generalization of spatial patterns. Research questions touch upon that what kind of spatial dimensions differentiate territorial aspects of social exclusion in East Central Europe, and what relationships can be discovered between them and other social characteristics. Furthermore, the paper summarize the changes in territorial patterns of social exclusion took place during the 2000s in East Central Europe.