Know your enemies rather than your friends. The asymmetry of Western and Eastern European Studies in American universities during the Cold War

This article proposes to analyze the asymmetry between the two Europe through the prism of American academic knowledge. This observation post has the particular interest of reversing the perspective: while East-Central Europe is regularly presented as the periphery of Europe, the study of the field of European Studies in the United States shows, on the contrary, how much the asymmetry was favorable to it, with Western Europe being neglected throughout the Cold War. In fact, Western European Studies’ position rapidly weakened from the 1940s onwards, thanks to two successive upheavals: the rise of Area Studies and the affirmation of the East-West confrontation. Research on the region also lacked the collective and voluntarist impetus that animated American specialists on Central-Eastern Europe during these decades.