Media of East/West European border traffic in times of the Cold War

The overall objective of the project "Media of East/West European Border Traffic during the Cold War" is to strengthen research excellence in the European Research Area and to promote interdisciplinary research cooperation between Western Europe and Eastern, Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe. In particular, the relationship of the countries and satellite states of the former Soviet Union in the Cold War to European integration and the values of the European Union will be investigated. The scientific objective of the research project is to analyse the constitutive nexus between European ideas of values and the circulating mediaand technical objects that transmit them, the technical infrastructure and technology of the system blocks of the time. A special focus will be the investigation of the specific characteristics of the medium "radio". In general, it will be investigated which relations can be established between social, structural and institutional networks and discursive formations on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the Cold War and the history of European integration, as well as current moods and attitudes towards Europeanization, current tendencies of Euroscepticism and populism, and changes in the media landscape of Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Hungary. This transnational perspective on the European networks and cultural and technological transfers in the Cold War not only enables an analysis of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but above all an investigation of its continued existence, its heritage and its influence today.