In the Storms of Transformation: Shipyards since the 1970s in Global Comparison

What did the transformation from ‘socialism’ to ‘democracy’ and a market economy entail? When did it begin and did it ever end? This presentation proposes a new temporality of global transformation: It argues that its beginning dates in the mid 1970s, when socialist countries tried to enter the world market in shipbuilding. Of course, the end of state socialism and the subsequent global hegemony of neoliberalism after 1989/91 remain an important watershed. But this presentation points to another important caesura, the enlargement of the European Union and of the WTO after the turn of the millennium, when China entered the world market and eventually gained a dominant position.

Philipp Ther is Professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna, where he

also founded the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET). Five of his

monographs have been published in English: Europe since 1989: A history (Princeton UP; the German original was awarded the non-fiction book prize of the Leipzig Bookfare); The Dark Side of Nation States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (Berghahn Press), Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in 19th Century Central Europe (Purdue UP); The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 (Princeton UP); How the West Lost the Peace. The Great Transformation since 1989 (Polity Press). A “multigraph” In the Storms of Transformation. Two shipyards between socialism and the EU is forthcoming by Toronto UP. In 2019 he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize by the Austrian Research Fund, the highest recognition for scientists in Austria.