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As demonstrated in the study, a significant thrust of recent historical research has been to thoroughly revise traditional ideas about the globalization of the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including those of East Central Europe. One might argue that a new historical canon is emerging on the globalization of post-World War II Eastern Europe since many of the related publications on the subject in recent years have taken up similar positions, even if their emphases often diverge. It has been claimed that this region was much more globalized in the three or four decades following World War II than previously thought. In the new understanding, the structure and patterns of globalization in the region also took on a distinct shape. In particular, relations with the Global South defined the globalization of the European state socialist countries since this process was primarily based on the expansion of East-South connections, which largely compensated for the deficits of the links connecting the Eastern European societies to the Western world. The year 1989 also assumes a new role in globalization: several authors explicitly question whether the regime changes accelerated the globalization of the region, arguing that it was the nature of the region's globalization that changed instead; others question the significance of the regime changes more indirectly, by focusing on the continuity in global relations across the pre- and the post-1989 eras.

Studies aligned with this new understanding of state socialist globalization can boast of several important achievements. They present a more comprehensive picture than ever before of the global engagement of the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the evolution of their global commitment over time. Recent research is explicitly productive in delivering a rich and colourful account of Eastern Europe's relations with the Global South, which, for all too long, was a relatively under-researched area. Several contributions also address the reciprocal effects; in doing so, Eastern Europe and the postcolonial world are not only presented as passive recipients in globalization, but also as its shapers. In many respects, therefore, the new, revisionist direction of research may be seen as a successful correction of earlier, often one-sided narratives on the globalization of the Eastern European state socialist regimes. At the same time, several of the new approaches are also not free from one-sidedness. The imbalances and the over-interpretation of the results are evident in all three areas where the new understandings fundamentally challenge previous research findings: the dynamics of globalization in the Eastern European region, its structure, and the role that regime changes played in it.

The results of this study do not support the new, revisionist narratives. The examination of globalization in three East Central European countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia and its successor states, and Hungary show that, on the whole, the state socialist countries in this region achieved a relatively low level of globalization between World War II and the period of the regime changes, which can be clearly demonstrated by a comparison with Austria, a Western country of comparable size and similar geography. The moderate dynamism is evident in all the aspects surveyed, i.e., trade, capital links, the flow of information, and the movement of people.

At the same time, the claim in the recent literature that the degree of globalization in the region declined in the decade or two before the regime change cannot be empirically verified. On the contrary, the globalization of the three East Central European countries under study advanced slowly but steadily during this period. While the ruptures in internal political transformation and in international political relations are clearly manifest, they are less visible in the surveyed areas of globalization. Despite the serious constraints, the East Central European state socialist countries became more and more integrated into the world economy in the post-war decades; this is reflected in trade and international financial relations, their global connections, and expansions in other respects. This development can also be observed in the flow of information, as well as in the regulation of foreign travel, where slow liberalization began in the East Central European countries from the 1950s onwards, and although this process sometimes came to a halt, there was little evidence of regression. The gradual increase in openness was facilitated by the rising complexity of economies, growing consumer demands, and advancing globalization in the world at large, as well as rapid technological change, such as the spread of new information and communication technologies. Nevertheless, this resulted in only relative openness, and the closed nature of the state socialist regimes persisted throughout in many respects. In addition, from the 1970s onwards, the region also showed internal divergence in the process of globalization. The international openness of Poland and Hungary clearly increased, while Czechoslovakia's global relations expanded to a lesser extent. The divergence was most evident in the regulation of travel, but similar processes were also taking place in the information and cultural space, as the changes in government control of television broadcasting and in the import of films from non-socialist countries show.

It was not only the moderate intensity, but also the very structure of the external relations of the East Central European state socialist countries that reflected the limits of their globalization. Their global links were highly uneven: in many areas, they restricted contact with the leading capitalist countries that were at the forefront of globalization. The consequences of this are revealed not only in the fact that their foreign trade was for all too long oriented towards COMECON, but also in their position in the global telecommunications network, which even in the 1980s was much less central than that of a number of capitalist countries of comparable size and geographical location.

The extent of the economic and cultural links that the three East Central European countries under study, and Eastern European state socialist countries in general, established with the Global South remained only moderate throughout the period under review. They focused on a relatively small number of developing countries, the so-called socialist-oriented countries. This was one of the reasons why their trade with the Third World represented only a small fraction of world trade. Nor can the relationship be considered central for the Third World as a whole. Both in respect of trade and development assistance to the Third World, the entire region of Eastern Europe greatly lagged behind the Western countries and played only a marginal role in globalization, and, obviously, the contribution of East Central Europe was even less significant. Considered in a broader sense, the cultural links they established with the Global South had little impact on the societies of East Central Europe. Symptomatically, the government-controlled media of the state socialist countries did not cover the Third World any more extensively than the newspapers or television channels of the Western European countries. Moreover, the number of people travelling to or from the Global South was relatively small: there were hardly any tourists from East Central Europe visiting African, Asian, or South American countries during this period. An exception was student exchanges, or, more specifically, the hosting of students from mainly socialist-oriented developing countries, from which a significant number of students and other professionals visited Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Therefore, we cannot speak of ‘alternative globalization’, a concept suggested by revisionist approaches to Eastern European state socialist globalization; the links and flows the East Central European countries established with the Third World could in no way make up for what they missed out on because of their limited or non-existent links with the West.

Instead of ‘alternative’, the terms ‘selective’ and ‘uneven’ seem to have more validity for the conceptualization of what we refer to as state socialist globalization. Focusing on these features of globalization in state socialist East Central Europe can bridge the gap between the earlier approaches that focused on the isolation of East Central Europe, essentially neglecting the globalization of the region, and the more recent revisionist research that tends to draw conclusions about the overall process in the region on the basis of relatively intensive changes in specific aspects and directions of globalization.

Contrary to attempts in the recent literature tending towards revisionism, our study has provided ample evidence of the great significance of the regime changes for the globalization of the East Central European region. Globalization in the region slowly advanced after Stalinism, but 1989 marked a breakthrough in the globalization of most social and economic areas. This is aptly illustrated by the fact that from that watershed moment on, the total FDI as well as the activity of transnational corporations increased dramatically. The same clear trend has been demonstrated in this study with regard to the region's place in the world's telecommunications network; the most striking change in the generally very stable global information exchange system of the 1990s was the shift in the position of the East Central European countries in the global telecommunications network—in effect, their increasing centrality. There is also a wealth of evidence to show that the regime changes catalysed a huge increase in the volume of international travel from and visits to the region, including intercontinental travel. East Central Europe emerged as an important node and a destination in its own right within the international migration network. In this respect, the globalization of the region was notably less dynamic than in other aspects or in what has been observed in West European countries. The interpretation of 1989 as a ‘de-globalizing moment’ is not supported by any systematic empirical evidence.

All in all, globalization progressed in East Central Europe during the state socialist period, but very unevenly in terms of the specific dimensions, geographical scope, and time, and with limited social impact. The state socialist system shaped globalization patterns in the region to a large extent, but not in line with the recent revisionist interpretations reviewed earlier. In particular, we see no justification for the use of the concept of ‘socialist protoglobalization’ in reference to the period beginning in the 1970s, since globalization in the region had begun well before that decade—in fact, well before the emergence of state socialism. Moreover, the state socialist period, even in its final decades, failed to prepare companies and society in general for more intense globalization or to facilitate their subsequent adaptation to it. Rather, we see the opposite effect: it was the slow and uneven socialist globalization and the lack of preparedness that determined the patterns of globalization in the region after 1989. Accordingly, the significant reduction of connections to the world economy was one of the main reasons for the collapse of the state socialist economic system. In 1989, the societies of the East Central European region had no meaningful choices or alternatives in terms of how to embrace globalization; their uncompetitive firms, shortage of capital, ineffective economic institutions, and limited social capabilities, as well as a range of other legacies of state socialism severely limited the developmental alternatives of these societies and thus the available choices in terms of how they could participate in globalization after the regime changes. Moreover, the countries of East Central Europe converged on Western Europe economically as well as in living standard after the turn of the millennium, indicating that they greatly benefitted from the opening to the West, and thus there was no justification for them to seek alternatives to Western-led globalization.

The acceleration of the process of globalization in East Central Europe since the 1990s was primarily the result of the political and economic transformation of the region. Nevertheless, that transformation also coincided with the intensification of globalization worldwide, which also affected the region's post-communist transformation. One of the most important tasks for future research on the contemporary history of East Central Europe is to explore the relationship between the economic and social transformation in the region on the one hand and the wider globalization process on the other.

In order to avoid a distorted narrative, research needs to acknowledge the multidimensional nature of globalization; generalizations concerning the dynamics of globalization cannot be drawn by studying selected aspects of the process, be it economic, political, or cultural. It is also essential to examine the social consequences of globalization in state socialist Europe. Research must therefore go beyond studying contemporary discourse on, and visions of, the region's globalization. It must always probe into the weight and implications of specific elements of globalization in order to determine the impact of globalization not only on the political and cultural elites but also on wider segments of the East Central European societies.