Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0009
Alena K. Alamgir
This chapter explores the system of mobility that linked Eastern Europe to the Far East and Africa from the early 1950s through the late 1980s. It focuses on the university students from the newly decolonized countries, and later labour migrants (mainly from Cuba, Vietnam and Mozambique). It argues that—unlike liberal capitalist models that valorize individual migration—socialist states viewed mobility as a tool for economic and political state-building. Mobility was not conceived as an end in itself, but as a means of development, one in which the development of individuals (migrating and otherwise) was embedded in, and dependent on, the development of the state. It took a collective (not an individual) form, and was institutionally brokered. While most mobility occurred between the state-socialist ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, there were also several remarkable examples of mobilities entirely independent of the European core. Notably, while state-socialist countries put a premium on cultivating a continued sense of national belonging among the migrants, the encounters these migrations gave rise to also engendered a certain socialist transnationalism, or what Hüwelmeier called ‘socialist cosmopolitanism’. The forms and meaning of the migrations, however, changed over time. In the 1960s and 1970s, Eastern European elites saw their support for mobility from the decolonizing world as an embodiment of the region’s new global role and as part of their responsibility to encourage economic uplift elsewhere. By the 1980s, however, migrants became increasingly seen as economic units useful for the development of Eastern Europe within a global economy.
{"title":"Mobility","authors":"Alena K. Alamgir","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the system of mobility that linked Eastern Europe to the Far East and Africa from the early 1950s through the late 1980s. It focuses on the university students from the newly decolonized countries, and later labour migrants (mainly from Cuba, Vietnam and Mozambique). It argues that—unlike liberal capitalist models that valorize individual migration—socialist states viewed mobility as a tool for economic and political state-building. Mobility was not conceived as an end in itself, but as a means of development, one in which the development of individuals (migrating and otherwise) was embedded in, and dependent on, the development of the state. It took a collective (not an individual) form, and was institutionally brokered. While most mobility occurred between the state-socialist ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, there were also several remarkable examples of mobilities entirely independent of the European core. Notably, while state-socialist countries put a premium on cultivating a continued sense of national belonging among the migrants, the encounters these migrations gave rise to also engendered a certain socialist transnationalism, or what Hüwelmeier called ‘socialist cosmopolitanism’. The forms and meaning of the migrations, however, changed over time. In the 1960s and 1970s, Eastern European elites saw their support for mobility from the decolonizing world as an embodiment of the region’s new global role and as part of their responsibility to encourage economic uplift elsewhere. By the 1980s, however, migrants became increasingly seen as economic units useful for the development of Eastern Europe within a global economy.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124708835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0008
Bogdan C. Iacob
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were significant actors in the dynamics and development of post-1945 regimes of global health. This chapter explores how expertise in disease eradication and basic health services that had been developed in interwar Eastern Europe—often with the assistance of the League of Nations—became part of new socialist health interventions on a global scale at the World Health Organization (WHO). The region’s predominantly rural character in the first decades of the twentieth century and socialism’s self-definition as the solution to backwardness helped establish their medical initiatives as models for overcoming disease and deprivation in the post-colonial world in Africa and Asia too. The export of such blueprints of modernity was achieved through involvement in WHO schemes (e.g. eradication programmes for malaria, smallpox, poliomyelitis), through humanitarian assistance, or in aid to national liberation movements. Such interventions were presented as humane alternatives to liberal medicine, but were challenged by Chinese and Cuban regimes. For them, European socialist medicine reproduced civilizational hierarchies , as became particularly apparent with the erosion of its commitment to rural medicine outside Europe. From the late 1970s, the profile of Eastern European medical internationalism changed: pharmaceutical multi-nationals from the region grew in the South and healthcare was increasingly commercialized, whilst states provided only limited support during major international health crises such as the successive famines in East Africa. By the late 1980s, Eastern Europeans forfeited their alternative medical modernity as they embraced Western-inspired privatization and abandoned their pioneering role in public healthcare in the developing world.
{"title":"Health","authors":"Bogdan C. Iacob","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were significant actors in the dynamics and development of post-1945 regimes of global health. This chapter explores how expertise in disease eradication and basic health services that had been developed in interwar Eastern Europe—often with the assistance of the League of Nations—became part of new socialist health interventions on a global scale at the World Health Organization (WHO). The region’s predominantly rural character in the first decades of the twentieth century and socialism’s self-definition as the solution to backwardness helped establish their medical initiatives as models for overcoming disease and deprivation in the post-colonial world in Africa and Asia too. The export of such blueprints of modernity was achieved through involvement in WHO schemes (e.g. eradication programmes for malaria, smallpox, poliomyelitis), through humanitarian assistance, or in aid to national liberation movements. Such interventions were presented as humane alternatives to liberal medicine, but were challenged by Chinese and Cuban regimes. For them, European socialist medicine reproduced civilizational hierarchies , as became particularly apparent with the erosion of its commitment to rural medicine outside Europe. From the late 1970s, the profile of Eastern European medical internationalism changed: pharmaceutical multi-nationals from the region grew in the South and healthcare was increasingly commercialized, whilst states provided only limited support during major international health crises such as the successive famines in East Africa. By the late 1980s, Eastern Europeans forfeited their alternative medical modernity as they embraced Western-inspired privatization and abandoned their pioneering role in public healthcare in the developing world.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114975191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0007
J. Mark
This chapter explores anti-colonial whiteness. It argues that postwar global decolonization offered a pathway to international status for Eastern Europeans and thus an escape from their historical subordination as lesser whites defined by their lack of imperial power. Adopting the postwar consensus that the world consisted of three races, Communists often presented themselves as the morally superior white Europeans. The racial problem had been solved at home, Communists argued, and their commitment to fighting continued discrimination wherever capitalist imperialism reproduced it placed them in the anti-racist avant-garde. This chapter brings together the contemporary voices of Eastern European politicians, activists and writers, alongside those of the Chinese, and Africans, to explore such declarations. Both friends and enemies were often critical. They argued that such claims were cynically used to hide the realities of domestic anti-Semitism, or were merely performative, a product of only superficially hidden European desires for power still expressed through white saviour fantasies based on imperial nostalgia. Nevertheless, as long as an anti-racism motivated in part by an imperially inspired longing for status could be hitched to a powerful and appealing anti-colonial world project, Communist Eastern Europe’s allies could discern its progressive potential. As soon as Third World alliances ceased to be perceived, from the late 1970s, as a route to global influence, commitments to forging a superior anti-colonial whiteness collapsed. More and more voices in Eastern Europe contended that a ‘multi-coloured socialist internationalism’ had degraded the region, the status of which would be recovered through a return to a culturally distinct, and racially bordered, white Christian Europe.
{"title":"Race","authors":"J. Mark","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores anti-colonial whiteness. It argues that postwar global decolonization offered a pathway to international status for Eastern Europeans and thus an escape from their historical subordination as lesser whites defined by their lack of imperial power. Adopting the postwar consensus that the world consisted of three races, Communists often presented themselves as the morally superior white Europeans. The racial problem had been solved at home, Communists argued, and their commitment to fighting continued discrimination wherever capitalist imperialism reproduced it placed them in the anti-racist avant-garde. This chapter brings together the contemporary voices of Eastern European politicians, activists and writers, alongside those of the Chinese, and Africans, to explore such declarations. Both friends and enemies were often critical. They argued that such claims were cynically used to hide the realities of domestic anti-Semitism, or were merely performative, a product of only superficially hidden European desires for power still expressed through white saviour fantasies based on imperial nostalgia. Nevertheless, as long as an anti-racism motivated in part by an imperially inspired longing for status could be hitched to a powerful and appealing anti-colonial world project, Communist Eastern Europe’s allies could discern its progressive potential. As soon as Third World alliances ceased to be perceived, from the late 1970s, as a route to global influence, commitments to forging a superior anti-colonial whiteness collapsed. More and more voices in Eastern Europe contended that a ‘multi-coloured socialist internationalism’ had degraded the region, the status of which would be recovered through a return to a culturally distinct, and racially bordered, white Christian Europe.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"8 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120989342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0004
P. Apor
Wars of liberation brought together the ‘Second World’ with Africa and Asia in the postwar period. This chapter traces how both sides recognized commonalities of purpose: how the memory of struggle of the Soviet Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans or even the nationalist Polish Home Army during the Second World War was integrated into a professed commitment to defend a hard-won anti-fascist and anti-imperialist world. Weapons were provided by Eastern Europeans as expressions of solidarity,and later as business opportunities; training camps for liberation movements were established across the region and beyond; its militaries took part in peace missions (e.g. following Vietnam), engaged in reconstruction efforts (e.g. Algeria) or resettled populations after other conflicts (e.g. Korea). Third World leaders sought to represent their own struggles as models to be supported by their Eastern European partners, whilst also identifying with the manner in which Europeans had overcome conflict on their own continent. Nevertheless, violence which had once been accepted as legitimate by a generation that had lived through the Second World War was more and more associated with the supposedly excessive demands of liberation movements, or with the threatening terrorism of Islamic groups. By the last decades of the Cold War, Eastern European Communist states were increasingly divided on these questions—whilst the Soviets and the GDR still saw revolutionary violence as acceptable in some circumstances, other elites preferred to propagate peace, solutions based in international law, and trade.
{"title":"War and Peace","authors":"P. Apor","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Wars of liberation brought together the ‘Second World’ with Africa and Asia in the postwar period. This chapter traces how both sides recognized commonalities of purpose: how the memory of struggle of the Soviet Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans or even the nationalist Polish Home Army during the Second World War was integrated into a professed commitment to defend a hard-won anti-fascist and anti-imperialist world. Weapons were provided by Eastern Europeans as expressions of solidarity,and later as business opportunities; training camps for liberation movements were established across the region and beyond; its militaries took part in peace missions (e.g. following Vietnam), engaged in reconstruction efforts (e.g. Algeria) or resettled populations after other conflicts (e.g. Korea). Third World leaders sought to represent their own struggles as models to be supported by their Eastern European partners, whilst also identifying with the manner in which Europeans had overcome conflict on their own continent. Nevertheless, violence which had once been accepted as legitimate by a generation that had lived through the Second World War was more and more associated with the supposedly excessive demands of liberation movements, or with the threatening terrorism of Islamic groups. By the last decades of the Cold War, Eastern European Communist states were increasingly divided on these questions—whilst the Soviets and the GDR still saw revolutionary violence as acceptable in some circumstances, other elites preferred to propagate peace, solutions based in international law, and trade.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128173371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0010
P. Apor, J. Mark
After 1989, as ‘Third Worldism’ rapidly withered, anti-colonial solidarity began to be characterized as cynical propaganda or a set of practices imposed from above that had elicited only grudging, ritualized responses from unimpressed populations. This chapter argues against this restrictive history. Most in Eastern Europe did not experience an anti-colonial world through physical encounter. Rather, it was mediated through many forms of socialist-era culture, ranging from travel writing to television to folk and pop culture fascination with Third World revolutionary heroes. Such culture was certainly exploited to legitimize socialist regimes: this was particularly important given the disillusionment with Stalinism. However, its appeal went well beyond the machinations of the state, precisely because it drew on longer-term traditions of anti-colonial feeling and organization that had long extended far beyond any Communist movement. It was partly for this reason that anti-colonial solidarity could be politically disruptive: it provided exemplars and languages of critique that could be turned against domestic authoritarianism, the seeming abandonment of revolution by consumerist Eastern European regimes, or indeed against the ‘imperialism’ of the Soviet Union itself. Lastly, this chapter traces the emptying out of cultures of solidarity with the decline of mass politics and the distancing of Eastern European societies from the Third World. Although dissident movements drew on analogies with slavery or apartheid to make sense of their own oppression, this was no longer informed by an internationalist solidarity culture, which was less and less capable of generating grass-roots activism.
{"title":"Home Front","authors":"P. Apor, J. Mark","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"After 1989, as ‘Third Worldism’ rapidly withered, anti-colonial solidarity began to be characterized as cynical propaganda or a set of practices imposed from above that had elicited only grudging, ritualized responses from unimpressed populations. This chapter argues against this restrictive history. Most in Eastern Europe did not experience an anti-colonial world through physical encounter. Rather, it was mediated through many forms of socialist-era culture, ranging from travel writing to television to folk and pop culture fascination with Third World revolutionary heroes. Such culture was certainly exploited to legitimize socialist regimes: this was particularly important given the disillusionment with Stalinism. However, its appeal went well beyond the machinations of the state, precisely because it drew on longer-term traditions of anti-colonial feeling and organization that had long extended far beyond any Communist movement. It was partly for this reason that anti-colonial solidarity could be politically disruptive: it provided exemplars and languages of critique that could be turned against domestic authoritarianism, the seeming abandonment of revolution by consumerist Eastern European regimes, or indeed against the ‘imperialism’ of the Soviet Union itself. Lastly, this chapter traces the emptying out of cultures of solidarity with the decline of mass politics and the distancing of Eastern European societies from the Third World. Although dissident movements drew on analogies with slavery or apartheid to make sense of their own oppression, this was no longer informed by an internationalist solidarity culture, which was less and less capable of generating grass-roots activism.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129037484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0006
Paul Betts
While the field of human rights has greatly expanded in recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Communist understanding of such rights, especially in an international setting. Rights issues were hotly debated themes in Eastern Europe from the very beginning, reflecting shifting ideals regarding the relationship between the socialist citizen and society. From the 1950s through the 1980s human rights became a surprising point of convergence for Eastern European and African representatives at the UN and elsewhere to build new associations beyond superpower antagonism. Different versions of human rights provided these regions with a newly minted language of socialist solidarity and cross-cultural understanding. International organizations served as key forums for exchanging ideas and building new alliances in the international community around rights advocacy. This chapter shows how representatives of recently decolonized states in Africa and Asia formed new coalitions that often included smaller Eastern European countries, fighting for the right to self-determination and against racial and religious discrimination in the 1960s, and then for gender rights in the 1970s. It then explores how the universalized idea of human rights fractured in the 1970s, in part due to the fading international appeal of common social and economic rights. Just as some outside Europe turned to the idea of e.g. African or Islamic rights, so European socialists’ rights work was increasingly focused on collective security in the European sphere, as their commitment to collective justice and anti-racist work at international institutions went into steep decline.
{"title":"Rights","authors":"Paul Betts","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"While the field of human rights has greatly expanded in recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Communist understanding of such rights, especially in an international setting. Rights issues were hotly debated themes in Eastern Europe from the very beginning, reflecting shifting ideals regarding the relationship between the socialist citizen and society. From the 1950s through the 1980s human rights became a surprising point of convergence for Eastern European and African representatives at the UN and elsewhere to build new associations beyond superpower antagonism. Different versions of human rights provided these regions with a newly minted language of socialist solidarity and cross-cultural understanding. International organizations served as key forums for exchanging ideas and building new alliances in the international community around rights advocacy. This chapter shows how representatives of recently decolonized states in Africa and Asia formed new coalitions that often included smaller Eastern European countries, fighting for the right to self-determination and against racial and religious discrimination in the 1960s, and then for gender rights in the 1970s. It then explores how the universalized idea of human rights fractured in the 1970s, in part due to the fading international appeal of common social and economic rights. Just as some outside Europe turned to the idea of e.g. African or Islamic rights, so European socialists’ rights work was increasingly focused on collective security in the European sphere, as their commitment to collective justice and anti-racist work at international institutions went into steep decline.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"199 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114749771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0002
J. Mark, Steffi Marung
This chapter situates Eastern Europe within a global history of empires and their demise, exploring the region’s status as both part of an imperial Europe and, at times, its defying anti-imperialist periphery. It examines how states that had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman, German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires navigated a world dominated by powerful, yet declining, Western European empires. The Soviet Union, influenced by a diverse range of anti-colonial activists, founded the Comintern, and became the first major state to provide support for anti-colonial struggles. By the 1930s, however, the Soviets had retreated, and in the wake of the Second World War reverted to great power politics. Smaller non-Communist Eastern European states fought to survive in an international environment in which their sovereignty was still in question. Some elites struggled to consolidate their fragile new polities in the white imperial world of the interwar period. Both identifying with the continent’s expansionism, and highlighting their experiences of living under empires within Europe, some of these same elites viewed themselves as ‘superior colonizers’ who could redeem an imperial project degraded by violence. Such a ‘civilizing mission’ would be brought not only to the ‘backward’ peripheries of their new states, but also to territories in Africa and Latin America, the acquisition of which would, they hoped, ensure their recognition as fully sovereign European polities. Yet with the growing threat of Nazi imperialism, others developed solidarities beyond Europe. Thus the empathetic affinities between Eastern Europe and the anti-imperial movements beyond Europe were established well before the institutionalization of socialist internationalism under postwar Communist regimes.
{"title":"Origins","authors":"J. Mark, Steffi Marung","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter situates Eastern Europe within a global history of empires and their demise, exploring the region’s status as both part of an imperial Europe and, at times, its defying anti-imperialist periphery. It examines how states that had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman, German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires navigated a world dominated by powerful, yet declining, Western European empires. The Soviet Union, influenced by a diverse range of anti-colonial activists, founded the Comintern, and became the first major state to provide support for anti-colonial struggles. By the 1930s, however, the Soviets had retreated, and in the wake of the Second World War reverted to great power politics. Smaller non-Communist Eastern European states fought to survive in an international environment in which their sovereignty was still in question. Some elites struggled to consolidate their fragile new polities in the white imperial world of the interwar period. Both identifying with the continent’s expansionism, and highlighting their experiences of living under empires within Europe, some of these same elites viewed themselves as ‘superior colonizers’ who could redeem an imperial project degraded by violence. Such a ‘civilizing mission’ would be brought not only to the ‘backward’ peripheries of their new states, but also to territories in Africa and Latin America, the acquisition of which would, they hoped, ensure their recognition as fully sovereign European polities. Yet with the growing threat of Nazi imperialism, others developed solidarities beyond Europe. Thus the empathetic affinities between Eastern Europe and the anti-imperial movements beyond Europe were established well before the institutionalization of socialist internationalism under postwar Communist regimes.","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114915073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-06DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0005
P. Betts, R. Vučetić
Cultural relations were decisive for making real these Second–Third World connections. Hot war and hard power of course continued to shape Eastern European–Third World encounters, but not exclusively so. Equally as significant were peace initiatives, soft power and cultural relations forged in the name of equality and exchange. In the case of the smaller Eastern European states, socialist fraternity with strangers abroad was identified as a means to escape political isolation (e.g. GDR, and Hungary after 1956); to gain Third World support with a view to protecting sovereignty and postwar European borders (e.g. Poland);, as well as to create distance from Moscow and Beijing in the name of distinctive national identities (e.g. non-aligned Yugoslavia and Romania). For cultural missionaries from the global South, these links with Eastern Europe advanced their broader understanding of nationalism, internationalism and socialism. In these cultural exchanges, anti-imperialism became the main ideological bridge between the Second and Third Worlds, serving as a Cold War socialist version of 1930s Popular Front activism. Cultural diplomacy, modernization, and even the defence of tradition became flashpoints in these exchanges. This chapter shows how the appeal of modernization paradigms lay in their combination of economic uplift with a respect for the recovery of national traditions and histories. Moreover, the defence of progressive tradition and religion, or the common appreciation of repurposed high European cultural forms, engendered far-flung socialist ‘imagined communities’ of mutual recognition that were pitted against the culturally destructive potential of western-led capitalist developmentalism. Such exchanges often brought these cultures together, but also sometimes heightened their differences..
{"title":"Culture","authors":"P. Betts, R. Vučetić","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848857.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Cultural relations were decisive for making real these Second–Third World connections. Hot war and hard power of course continued to shape Eastern European–Third World encounters, but not exclusively so. Equally as significant were peace initiatives, soft power and cultural relations forged in the name of equality and exchange. In the case of the smaller Eastern European states, socialist fraternity with strangers abroad was identified as a means to escape political isolation (e.g. GDR, and Hungary after 1956); to gain Third World support with a view to protecting sovereignty and postwar European borders (e.g. Poland);, as well as to create distance from Moscow and Beijing in the name of distinctive national identities (e.g. non-aligned Yugoslavia and Romania). For cultural missionaries from the global South, these links with Eastern Europe advanced their broader understanding of nationalism, internationalism and socialism. In these cultural exchanges, anti-imperialism became the main ideological bridge between the Second and Third Worlds, serving as a Cold War socialist version of 1930s Popular Front activism. Cultural diplomacy, modernization, and even the defence of tradition became flashpoints in these exchanges. This chapter shows how the appeal of modernization paradigms lay in their combination of economic uplift with a respect for the recovery of national traditions and histories. Moreover, the defence of progressive tradition and religion, or the common appreciation of repurposed high European cultural forms, engendered far-flung socialist ‘imagined communities’ of mutual recognition that were pitted against the culturally destructive potential of western-led capitalist developmentalism. Such exchanges often brought these cultures together, but also sometimes heightened their differences..","PeriodicalId":332850,"journal":{"name":"Socialism Goes Global","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131535238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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