The International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) held its first sym­posium in Paris in the turbulent year of 1968. At the time, the globe was divided into three worlds, which competed with each other in practically every field: the arms race, sports, culture, media attention, political influence, economic growth, science, and, at last but not least, technology. Historians of technology were not fond of this segmentation and confrontation. They believed that technology was universal and dependent on transnational cooperation. In order to express their willingness to collaborate over political boundaries, they founded ICOHTEC and started to build up an organization that aimed to promote understanding, cooperation, and recognition between scholars. To prove that they could do something tangible in the lines of their objective, they began to hold frequent symposia in different countries in both the West and East.

The image of an organization working for “peaceful co-existence” was the representation ICOHTEC wanted to construct for itself. At the time, governments in the East and West, the United Nations, and various other international organizations also tended to regard the history of technology as an important field for cooperation over boundaries. This paper aims to examine how ICOHTEC succeeded in achieving its goal.

The collapse of the Berlin wall, the USSR, and the Warsaw Pact meant the final end of the Cold War. Political barriers for international cooperation seemed to disappear. This also meant a turning point in the history of ICOHTEC, which was built out of the concept of the divided globe. The position of the national societies as the representatives of their countries soon lost significance within ICOHTEC, while individuals and informal research groups gained more importance. In the early 1990s this indicated the turn from internationalism to transnationalism in ICOHTEC, which had to update its image and take on a new orientation. The latter part of the paper deals with the measures ICOHTEC carried out to make its transnational turn and to take fresh directions forward.

The series of ICOHTEC’s 40 symposia can be examined as a survival story of cooperating and networking among scholars who have attempted to adapt to the changing constellations of world politics and to find their ways to promote goals that they have considered valuable and significant for their discipline and peoples of the globe.