The paper introduces the special issue ‘East–West cooperation in the automotive industry: Enterprises, mobility, production’ which includes four contributions on the development of socialist automotive industry and on the technological relations between Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War. The 1960s and 1970s intense relations between socialist governments and Western European automobile companies provide further evidence of the permeability of the Iron Curtain, the early entanglements between the two blocs and the lack of internal cohesion inside each of them. The papers stress the role of the enterprise, both socialist and capitalist, as a crucial agent in directing East–West flows of technology and knowledge. They invite to reconsider the classical vision of West–East transfer of technology and to go deeper in the study of the political uses of foreign technology and on the processes of reception, adaptation and transformation of Western technologies in Socialist Europe.

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This article deals with early efforts to facilitate steam navigation between Vienna and Constantinople along the Danube. In addition to analyzing the complex negotiation processes that enabled the first regulation project at the so-called Iron Gates, a narrow gorge situated at the Austrian-Ottoman border, it assesses ways in which the new shipping connection transformed the cultural and spatial perceptions of travelers. The article argues that even though the plan for making the Iron Gates navigable was set out on the drawing boards of engineers and in the cabinets in Pest and Vienna, local circumstances changed its practical implementation in a number of important ways. The success of this major engineering operation relied on close cooperation among hydrological experts, state representatives, and entrepreneurs, all of whom had different stakes in the project but still shared a common interest. Establishing a shipping connection to the Black Sea along the Danube was thus the result of an alignment of interests among Hungarian, Viennese, and local Ottoman authorities; a careful match between theoretical knowledge and practical engineering work; and, last but not least, the surmounting of a mental separation between “Orient” and “Occident.”

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