Civil aviation and the globalization of the Cold War

The key objective of the historical project Civil aviation and the globalization of the Cold War is to describe the complex and intertwined relations between technology, globalization and the Cold War. The project approaches its subject in two parts. The first part of the project pinpoints the role which civil aviation played in the globalization of the Cold War. The project suggests that the advances in Soviet aircraft engineering throughout the 1950s triggered the evolution of the Cold War into an increasingly global conflict that gradually spread all over the world. On the other hand, since the 1970s in particular, Eastern and Western civil aviation came closer to one another through the adoption of common technical and safety norms. In the second part, the project enlarges its scope to the critical nexus between technology, the Cold War, and globalizationa subject hitherto neglected in historiography. To overcome this gap in research, the project aims to call to Vienna a major international conference which should address the topic from various disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The conference aims to instigate new research and its proceedings shall be published either with the leading English university press or commercial publisher or in a special issue of an academic journal. Beyond the conference and the proceedings, there will be two other outcomes of this project: an academic monograph on East-West civil aviation during the Cold War and a theoretically oriented article concerning the relationship between the Cold War, technological standardization and globalization. To approach its subject, this project will use a set of historical methods including archival research, printed documents and interviews. Building on previous research in the United States, Britain, Austria and Czech Republic, additional archival research will be carried out in Polish and Hungarian archives as well as in the archives of the former German Democratic Republic. Such research will make possible to increase the amount of sources for an intended monograph on East- West civil aviation. Although this project addresses the problems which were only rarely addressed by historians yet, its key ambition is to provide new stimuli for Cold War studies while pointing out how aviation and other technologies heavily influenced both the Cold War and the rise of globalization.

At the heart of this Meitner project stood the relationship between technology, globalization and the Cold War. The project progressed in two parts. The outcome of the first part was the monograph "Civil Aviation and the Globalization of the Cold War." Drawing on materials from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the book details how East-West rivalry fundamentally transformed the industry and brought about the era of global mass air travel. From the birth of the global route structure, through the development of engines to the design of aircraft, it was primarily Cold War security concerns as well as prestige and economic considerations that stimulated these processes. This in turn enabled a rapid spread of globalization in the 1990s but it was East-West technological competition that laid down the foundations which were essential for this. In eight chapters, the monograph maps key developments from the mid-1940s until the late 1980s covering large array of issues from diplomatic and international history through economic and business history to the history of technology. By taking a global approach to its subject, the monograph advances ongoing debates in the Cold War historiography and contemporary history in general. It reassesses Europe's role in the Cold War, pointing out the substantial differences in how Western Europe and the United States viewed the Communist world. In the second part, the project extended its focus from civil aviation to the technologies in general. This part of project resulted into a major international conference "Technological Innovation and the Spread of Globalization in the Cold War" which took place in Vienna on 12.-14. October 2018. It was attended by some 27 contributors coming from Harvard, Oxford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the London School of Economics and many other institutes. The topics included e.g. the export of US and Soviet computer technology to India, COMECON standardization, US scholarly exchange with the People's Republic of China, the export of Finnish icebreakers to the USSR and US, export of Soviet and American dam building technologies to Latin America and India in Latin and construction of Soviet pipeline networks. The key lecture was delivered by Odd Arne Westad of Harvard University. The conference will be followed by a volume to be published in 2021. Der Hauptvortrag wurde von Odd Arne Westad von der Harvard University gehalten. Auf die Konferenz folgt ein Sammelband, der 2021 veröffentlicht wird.