Historical scholarship on ballet and modern dance offers a unique perspective to consider pressing issues surrounding global mobility, value-formation, and citizenship in Europe today. Connected to this conference’s theme, papers on this panel explore the close relationship between global politics and global movement, defined as performance onstage, as a socio-cultural practice, as an ideological construct, and as a tool for political diplomacy and representation. Paper topics include: the role of dance in conversations about black identity among African intellectuals in post-World War II Paris; concepts of cultural inclusivity and political difference articulated by German modern dancers from 1900 to the 1960s; the Royal Ballet’s 1959 -60 tour to South Africa and the values of the postwar British state; diplomatic networks of teaching and performance by the Cuban Ballet in Europe and the Soviet Union after 1959. Questions this panel addresses include: how do dancers, who have historically comprised a mobile and migratory demographic, stage visions of national belonging, political virtue, social engagement (including forms of populism and elitism), and civic responsibility? How do bodies in performance form sites for colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance? For the exercise of state power and the influence of non-state actors? When does dance, as culture, succeed as a form of political diplomacy when standard methods of engagement, such as policies, talks, or negotiations, fail?