Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 4, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Mathias Fuelling, István Deák Visiting Lecturer in History. Moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
Communist governments during the Cold War emphasized national self-determination, with socialist planned economies seen as the best way to protect nationally defined peoples and units of territory from the chaos of capitalist markets. The concept of planning the economy contains a key assumption however, planning the economy for whom? Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe, via their economic planning, were engaged in forms of delineating and hardening national boundaries and national identities. Fuelling argues that after the end of the Cold War, these concepts of national self-determination, as linked to pan-ethnic and ethnonational identities, all of which had been promoted by Communist governments, became in part the sociopolitical foundation for a resurgence of right wing ethnonationalism in the region within the post-Cold War European liberal order. The preservation of national development and sovereignty were intimately connected to the process of early European unification, as influentially argued by the historian Alan Milward. These concepts, in broad terms, are also part of European far right and fascist thought, which has variously promoted the idea of Europe as a gigantic economic bloc linked via racial unity and divided into national sub-units. Fuelling expands on Milward’s work by linking concepts and practices of national development and sovereignty in Europe to the philosophy and policies of Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as to fascist thought in Western Europe, during the Cold War and after. This aims to provide a new history of concepts and practices of European unification, as opposed to the current traditional liberal narrative. In sum, this talk seeks to propose a history of the idea of Fortress Europe that we see invoked now within anti-immigrant discourse, viewing it as both an expression of the legacy of Communist national protectionism which has developed into xenophobia after the end of the Cold War, and of Western European fascist thought. Fuelling argues that practices of national formation, identity, and sovereignty under Communism continued and transformed after the end of the Cold War, becoming a core ideological foundation for the rise of intense xenophobia and right wing revanchism in the region. This project would draw upon three distinct bodies of historiography, the history of Soviet nationality policy, the history of the formation of the European Union, and the intellectual history of the postwar European far and fascist right.
Mathias Fuelling is an historian of economic planning, socialism, and the nation-state in modern Europe. He received his PhD in History from Temple University in the autumn of 2025. His dissertation, The Forgotten Plan: The Czechoslovak Two Year Plan in a European Context, 1939-1989, studied the history of economic planning in Czechoslovakia, primarily the Two Year Plan of 1946-1948, connecting it with the legacy of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and tracing its influence on domestic Czechoslovak politics across the Cold War. He is currently working on turning his dissertation into a book. He is also in the early stages of a second book project, which will study the intertwined legacies of Communist conceptions and policies regarding the nation-state, and of far-right and fascist proposals for European unification, on post-Cold War European politics.
