Historians and political scientists have long traced the introduction of a reflection on the gendered impact of European public policies back to the mid-1970s. This was linked in particular to the attempt to reduce inequalities between men and women at work, and to the adoption of European legislation in this area, based on directives designed to ensure the application of Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome. This legal approach provides little explanation of the reasons, actors and modalities for putting gender issues on the agenda of the European Economic Communities (EEC). Based mostly on the archives of women's associations linked to the European Movement, and secondarily on the holdings of several European institutions (Commission, Parliament, Council, Economic and Social Committee), this article offers an original top-down and bottom-up analysis of the process of gendering EEC policies between 1957 and 1974. It contributes to the analysis of the economisation of the EEC social policies and shows that, for women Europeanist activists of the 1960s, gender equality could not be reduced to the issue of wages. Gendering European policies neither represented a linear process of framing of social policies under the economic goals of the EEC, nor was it an insignificant tool in the affirmation of the European institutions vis-à-vis the Member States. Eventually, studying the agency of women's associations in the inclusion of gender in EEC labour policies allows the article to shed new light on the citizen impulses in the European integration process, from the 1960s onwards.

Cold War historiography has long assumed an interruption of most pan-European, West-East economic relations between 1945 and 1989, before the circulation paradigm imposed the idea of a porosity of the 'iron curtain'. This article offers a double displacement in the analysis of pan-European economic connections during the Cold War. It first highlights the legacy, up to the late 1950s, of pan-European economic debates about socialist economics that have been developed in the interwar period within the communist parties' network in Europe. Second, it shows how these networks created opportunities in the people's democracies for challenging the implementation of the Soviet economic model. A clear Cold War divide in the field of economic ideas was delayed, at least until the beginning of the 1960s. A pan-European discussion about the limits of the equation between central planning and socialist economics, developed in capitalist interwar Germany, lived on.

In the 1980s, the USSR was a multiscalar political entity, both a single state and a Cold War superpower. The interaction between these two spaces of projection (national and transnational) called into play the capacity of Soviet institutions - state and partisan - to configure the doctrine of socialist internationalism. This doctrine, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, functions as a double system of constraint: it binds the USSR to a particular discourse, which in turn gives it power over the members of the socialist bloc who receive it. Perestroika's reform of the USSR's economic governance must therefore be seen in terms of its impact on the people's democracies, as well as the feedback effect that this bloc-wide evolution of the economic principles of socialism had on the USSR. This article looks at how the organization for multilateral economic cooperation of the socialist states, the CMEA, became an agent of a transnational production of economic reform of socialism in the 1980s, which partly escaped the USSR, while politically and economically influencing the latter's room for maneuver in its own reforms. The impossible decorrelation between the rational principles of Soviet governance on the scale of the USSR and the socialist governmentality of the world-economy, built up since 1949 on the scale of the Eastern bloc, sheds light on the transnational dimension of the Soviet reforms of the 1980s, whose local implementation cannot be separated from an understanding of how they were debated on an international scale.