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The Finnish viewpoint - Teemu Periho

The turn of the 90's was an active period of internatinalization for the students of contemporary history in
Helsinki. The Cold War was coming to an end and borders were opening, but before the Erasmus exhange
program was implemented students had to find other ways to go abroad. The contemporary history
students had been visiting Petrozadovsk in the late 80s, but now they started to gaze towards Europe.

In Hungary local history students were planning to establish an international organisation that would
allow open and free dialogue between the universities of Eastern and Western Europe. From their
initiative students from all over Europe gathered in Budapest in October 1989 to set up the organisation.
Finns got in eagerly, as in everything that had got something to do with internationalisation. The project
resulted in the International Students of History Association, or more familiarly ISHA, which was formally
established on 11 May 1990.

In my presentation i will cover the process of establishing ISHA in the context of the end of the Cold War.
I will talk about the aspects of isolation and integration in the context of ISHA: how did the integration of
European students of history develop, how was it planned and executed? What were the final results and
in which ways did the students integrate to Europe? I will argue that despite the good intentions, ISHA as
an organisation wasn't wery well organised, and although on individual level it had an huge impact on
people's experiences it didn't have that big of an impact on greater scale. It was a story of individuals who
wanted to get rid of isolation.

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