EastWest

‘Expert Clearing Houses’ in Vienna as Transfer Hubs of Ideas

During the Cold War, Austria obtained a special position as a permanently neutral state situated between the blocs. Therefore, academic institutes were founded in Vienna in order to enable interaction, meetings and cooperation between academics across the blocs. At these institutes, experts also worked on joint projects to find solutions for global problems and challenges. Among others, these interactions took place at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which was founded in Laxenburg near Vienna in 1972, and at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), which was founded in Vienna in 1982. These contacts and meetings continued even after the end of the Cold War and after the transformation of many former communist East-Central European states into democratic capitalist states from 1989 onwards.

The research project ‘Expert Clearing Houses’ in Vienna as Transfer Hubs of Ideas aims to examine how the exchange of antagonising political and economic concepts took place at these two institutes.