Central European History and the Opening up of Europe

Extract

Since its creation in 1992 the journal Contemporary European History (CEH) has actively sought to bridge Cold War divides and to bring the histories of Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe into the same frame of analysis. In the journal's twenty-five-year history there has probably been no single institution that has played as significant a role in training new generations of historians as the Central European University in Budapest (CEU). Founded just a few months before the journal, CEU and CEH are products of the same sweeping changes set in motion with the fall of the Berlin Wall. CEU was founded with the explicit task to shed light on on-going processes of ‘democratisation’ and to train a new cohort of regional thinkers and leaders that could understand and direct them. CEH was created to provide a forum for the development of a new kind of history of Europe and its constituent parts, freed (at least in aspiration) from the shackles of Cold War divides.