Book Presentation | The Shipyard Collective | In the Storms of Transformation: Two shipyards between socialism and the EU

The ScienceCampus is pleased to invite you to a book presentation by the authors of the shipyard collective. Their latest book In den Stürmen der Transformation: Zwei Werften zwischen Sozialismus und EU (2022) has now been translated into English as In the Storms of Transformation: Two Shipyards between Socialism and the EU and published in January 2025 by the University of Toronto Press. 

Zoom Link (Meeting-ID: 695 0968 0031)

Book Description:

In the 1990s, states in what would become the eastern edge of the European Union transformed their political systems and economies, leaving state socialism behind for liberal democracies and free markets. In the ensuing decades, two shipyards that were once the pride of their cities – in Gdynia, Poland, and Pula, Croatia – went bankrupt, unable to withstand global competition.

Through an interdisciplinary study of these two shipyards, In the Storms of Transformation brings together a team of researchers to re-evaluate the shift from state socialism to market capitalism and offer a new periodization. With perspectives from social anthropology, sociology, and business history, the book argues that this transformation began with the oil crisis of the early 1970s and ended with EU accession – in 2004 in Poland and in 2013 in Croatia – highlighting the EU competition laws and global competition that pushed the shipyards into bankruptcy and diminishing the role of the revolutions of 1989.

In the Storms of Transformation bridges local labour history with global market forces, going beyond prevalent narratives of loss and nostalgia or successful neoliberal change to offer a novel and nuanced reading of post-communist transformation and its contradictions.

Through a case study of two remarkable shipyards, In the Storms of Transformation offers a new perspective on the shift from socialism to market capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe.

Author Details:

Ulf Brunnbauer is the academic director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies and holds the Chair of Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg.

Philipp Ther is a professor of Central European history and founder of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

Piotr Filipkowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Andrew Hodges is a book editor and literary translator at The Narrative Craft.

Stefano Petrungaro is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Peter Wegenschimmel is the head of archives at the University of Kassel.

Discussant:

Veronika Pehe is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (ICH)

In cooperation with:

IOS Regensburg, Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (UR)