8 FRANK BÖSCH
coupled with the notion of freedom, as in the title of Padraic Kenney’s
book on the transformation of Eastern Europe, The Burdens of Freedom.^43
Andreas Wirsching has also alluded to the success as well as the down-
sides of liberalization by referring to “the price of freedom.”^44 Yet the
processes outlined here cannot be simply explained by looking at the
constellations in East Germany after 1990; rather, they must be embed-
ded within their proper historical context going back for decades on both
sides of the Wall.
The increasing number of publications off ering European and global
overviews also deal with Eastern and Western Europe jointly, albeit in a
more generalized way. They usually contrast the booming postwar de-
cades in the West with the building of socialism into the 1970s, before
comparing the period “after the boom” with the downfall of socialism
in the two decades that followed.^45 In doing so, they have demarcated
similar phases on both sides of the Wall, but they continue to build their
arguments around the respective state systems.^46 Alongside these sepa-
rate “rise and fall” narratives, some studies drawing on social science ap-
proaches have stepped toward a social history of Europe. Brief accounts
such as Jeremy Black’s Europe since the 1970s have drawn a line between
East and West for some topics, such as economics, but deal with other
aspects of society—including the environment, health, and education—
from an overarching standpoint.^47 Given that these studies still work from
a Western perspective, they have focused on overarching transformation
processes that can be verifi ed statistically, pointing—as Göran Therborn
does—to a certain similarity in the erosion of a future-oriented sense of
modernity at the beginning of the 1970s.^48 Hartmut Kaelble, in contrast,
has highlighted the increasing divergence of the two states in the 1980s,
citing the deteriorating economy in the East compared to the expansion
of the welfare state and education in the West.^49 He also maintains that
globalization drove Eastern and Western Europe further apart. Although
some of their approaches and fi ndings are questionable, these European
overviews nonetheless off er a broader perspective that moves beyond
German borders.
Studies on the cultural history of the Cold War, on the other hand, have
analyzed direct links between Eastern and Western Europe. They have
devoted a great deal of attention to the exchange of elites and elements
of civil society, such as academics, dissidents, and youth groups. Like-
wise, media relations have been a major focus, especially in terms of the
exchange of television programs and images.^50 In doing so, the gaze of
scholarship has shifted to countries such as Hungary, Finland, or France
because they were particularly open to contacts from the other side of the
Iron Curtain. These examples underscore the extent to which some coun-