The aim of this special issue is to study the Middle East and Eastern Europe (including south-eastern Europe) as one interwoven space and to use it as a laboratory to explore conceptual issues regarding modern (societal) transnational and (state) international history. In this introduction we wish to analyse and explain the changing relations between the various states of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with an eye also to Russia/the Soviet Union. We will highlight two patterns: similar ethno-religious-linguistically heterogeneous populations and shared peripherality vis-à-vis Western Europe. The question of interplays and overlaps between nation-states and empires and the geographic proximity of Eastern Europe and the Middle East cut across these two patterns, constituting a broader framework. Throughout, the reader will note three generic interlocking traits. Eastern Europe and the Middle East are not internally homogeneous and fixed, nor is their relationship, which indeed is irreducibly diverse in the political as well as in the economic, social and cultural fields. This diversity is reflected in the variety of contexts and actors who appear in the articles, including statesmen, merchants, activists, journalists, thinkers, architects, and bureaucrats.We have had the privilege to build on a firm scholarly bedrock as we conceptualised this special issue, and specifically on three broad debates whose geographies interlock. First, historians of both Eastern Europe and the Middle East have been advocating for these regions to be embedded in larger trans-regional, inter-imperial and global narratives. 1 This approach overlaps with recent studies of
