Transformations in Most Recent History

Project Overview

Since a couple of years, scholars explore recent contemporary history since the 1970s as an era of groundbreaking global and regional transformations. Rapid technological developments, new economic uncertainties and dynamics following the post-war boom, far-reaching social changes and socio-cultural upheavals, for example in dealing with sexuality(ies) or ecological awareness, shaped this period and are key to understanding the present.

These transformations intersected with far-reaching political changes in the late 20^th century, particularly in Eastern European countries: The end of the Cold War not only ushered in the transition from socialist planned economies to capitalist economic systems, but also the transition from totalitarian or authoritarian to democratic regimes, whereby in the long term, more contradictory developments towards ‘hybrid’ democratic-authoritarian systems can be observed. The fundamental upheavals in Eastern Europe have often led to a gain in freedom, but also to an increase in uncertainty and the emergence of new constraints - developments that had a long-term effects on political culture, especially in Eastern (Central) Europe, but also on the political culture of the ‘old West’ in the sense of co-transformational effects. The integration process of the European Union intensified as part of this process and thus should hardly be underestimated in its long-term effects as well in its own dynamics. Not least did the spread of new digital media and forms of communication have contribute to the change in political culture, not only in Europe, but globally. 

The cluster ‘Transformations in Recent Contemporary History’ explores the political, social, economic and cultural history of these closely interrelated socio-economic, socio-cultural, post-socialist and socio-ecological transformations since the 1970s. German and European perspectives are usually in the foreground, but the global contexts are always present. A broadly understood concept of transformation serves as the central analytical category, which includes cultural, social, economic and ecological dimensions and is at the same time aware that transformation processes are always not determined in their results.