Together but Apart: Balkan Historians, the Global South, and UNESCO’s “History of Humanity”

by Bogdan C. Iacob

at New Europe College, Bucharest, 3 May, 2017.

The presentation showed how AIESEE (International Association for Southeast European Studies) and pressures from local political regimes propelled Balkan scholars into high profile positions within UNESCO’s project for a new world history entitled History of Humanity. I focused on the Cold War time frame of implementation of this global initiative: 1978 to 1989. History of Humanity aimed to create a universal narrative that reflected the radical transformations which had taken place since mid-1950s: de-colonization, the rise of the Global South in the UN-system, the critique of Eurocentrism/Westerncentrism, and, most importantly, the ever-growing emphasis on the originality of national cultures. This was UNESCO’s second attempt at a world history. The first was History of Mankind, which had been published from 1963 to 1976. I argued that the new edition created two horizons of opportunity for Southeast European scholars. First, the visibility they acquired within AIESEE consolidated their international academic status. Second and more importantly, many of the general issues debated within AIESEE were exported into the preparatory meetings for History of Humanity and later in its published volumes. Taking advantage of UNESCO and Romanian archives, the presentation discussed multiple levels of political and intellectual interaction – national-regional-global. History of Humanity was a context of epistemic internationalization within which Balkan historians could affirm regional and national identity on the basis of pre-existent conceptual, institutional, and personnel alignments. However, this cross-fertilization between local and international contexts cannot be detached from the tumultuous years of the late Cold War. By 1989, both Southeast Europe and UNESCO had suffered shocks that radically affected Balkan historians’ patterns of self-representation, both at home and abroad.

Between Global and Regional. The Balkans, UNESCO, and History of Humanity

by Bogdan C. Iacob, at the Institute of Contemporary History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, October 19, 2015.

During the postwar period, the Balkans were the underbelly of the Cold War order. Such ambivalence was owed to two factors. First, before 1962, the region was one of the most dangerous fault lines of bipolarism. Second, during détente, the translocal outlook underwent a radical reversal: Southeast Europe seemed to have become a symbolic geography alternative to the borderlines of the Iron Curtain. The new Balkans, as a space of ambiguous cultural and political entanglement where the East-West and North-South axes met, was the result of a complex negotiation by the area’s countries of regional and global agendas.