This paper investigates some of the consequences of the changing conditions brought by globalisation to the art history of Eastern Europe by focussing on a striking paradox of the current situation: while artistic practices in the region regularly exceed the national frame and artists, curators and museums operate seamlessly in the post-national context, research into the art history of Eastern Europe is held back by the difficulty in surmounting narrow national perspectives. Whereas in the first post-communist decade, artists often dealt with the grand narratives of memory, trauma and collective identities of the socialist past,  in the more recent years of ‘post-transition’  the preoccupation with the politics of identity, be it national, gender or religious, has diversified into new concerns. The rise of a post-national sensibility within contemporary art can be seen, in Jürgen Harbermas’s terms, through the emergence of a ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ that goes ‘beyond the affective ties of nation, language, place and heritage.’ In contrast to the dynamic internationalism of, for example, many of the newly-established museums of contemporary art in the region, stuffy Institutes of Art History are still frequently dominated by the intellectual modes and professional habits of the old regime. Could there be more though to this ‘lag’ in the adaption of East European art history to the inexorable processes of globalisation than the persistence of the vested interests of the Old School, which appear to lie in the maintenance of local myths and camouflaging the legacy of the interference of politics in art history?