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An interdisciplinary ESF exploratory workshop on the ‘Cultures of the Cold War’ was held in Sheffield in September 2009:

’We now know’ – this is the title of John Lewis Gaddis’s authoritative study that summarises a first round of sustained empirical research into the Cold War. More modesty may perhaps be in order, and it may be altogether more appropriate to state that, after a first round of research, we can now begin to reassess the Cold War and its confrontations at a similar level of empirical certainty as World War I and World War II. Substantially, this first round of investigations has itself been framed by specifically Cold War understandings of international relations.

This is where this ESF exploratory workshop started. It interrogated the ways in which - and the extent to which - the Cold War had an influence on a variety of political, social and cultural processes across Europe. It sought to explore these experiences from an interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspective in order to come to a more critical understanding of the ways in which the Cold War influenced Europeans’ thinking about the world. While research on the two world wars in Europe has highlighted the ways in which warfare and fighting became part of the transnational social and cultural European fabric, this perspective has been curiously absent from research into the Cold War. We were not merely interested in culture in the narrow sense, such as art and literature, during the Cold War. Rather, we conceived our topic more broadly as concerned with the multitude of ways in which Europeans made sense of the Cold War within the ‘Cold War predicament’ (Thomas Lindenberger). By analysing European Cold War cultures as the structures of feelings, assumptions and experiences that were created by and perpetuated the Cold War across European societies and cultures this workshop sought to work out what the Cold War actually meant to Europeans.

[Link to the full report and programme]