The dissolution of the so-called “Eastern Bloc” in 1989–1991 gave rise to a narrative of vindication of the west and its model of liberal democracy and global integration. The former state-socialist countries opened up to global trade and—at least initially—accepted the hegemony of an all-encompassing model of globalization led by western institutions and western agents. This view implies that the “Bloc” had formerly rejected this model of integration and globalization and defiantly opposed it until they could not keep up their resistance any longer. Such narratives that climaxed in the late 1990s have increasingly been questioned in the most recent research literature. The volume edited by James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung is in line with these recent research trends. The authors of the edited volume try to improve our understanding of the Cold War period by focusing on east-south relations as well as the engagement of actors from the state-socialist east in international organizations.
The book is structured in four parts. Part 1 copes mainly with the economy and is titled “Red Globalization?” While James Mark and Yakov Feygin focus on Soviet conceptualizations of the global economy in the post-Stalin years, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony zeroes in on the late 1950s and the first direct economic interactions between the Soviet Union and the decolonized countries. Péter Vámos scrutinizes the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the Global South in his contribution. He does so from the angle of the political elite of communist Hungary, thereby analyzing the methods employed by Soviet officials to keep their Hungarian allies firmly on the Soviet side. The last contribution to the first part of the edited volume is more “economical,” again by focusing on factor mobility within the framework of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), in this case labor migration from Vietnam. Alena Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel argue that labor migration from Vietnam to state-socialist Europe was marked by different phases from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. While at first being a scheme of technology transfer and training in its early stages, labor migration from Vietnam was increasingly shaped by the economic need for additional (unskilled) labor in eastern Europe. They argue that a comparison to the labor migration to western Europe can be fruitful, but only if the western model is not taken as the guiding example.
The second part deals with the notion of “Socialist Development” and encompasses three contributions on East German assistance to Syria (Massimiliano Trentin), Soviet Africanists and agricultural experts in Africa (Steffi Marung), and the export of architectural designs and concepts of urbanization from eastern Europe (Lukasz Stanek). All three authors emphasize the importance of formulating the right research questions and to avoid thinking primarily in terms of success and failure. Instead, it is analytically more fruitful to ask how concepts of modernity and development originating in eastern Europe have been reshaped encountering prospective partners in the Global South. Such an approach opens up the question how the contact with the Global South helped emissaries from the east to question their own assumptions and concepts. This heuristic openness could grant a greater level of autonomy and agency to actors from the Global South.
Part 3 focuses on cultural encounters between east and south. The first contribution of this section by Artemy Kalinovsky shows some similarities with Steffi Marung's chapter in the previous section. Both authors argue against a fixation on the respective capitols and power centers in east and south. In the case of the Soviet Union, both authors pay attention to Soviet Central Asia envisioned as a showcase for the Global South by Soviet elites. However, these presentations did not always play out as smoothly as planned. Furthermore, they granted a hitherto unknown level of agency and leverage to Central Asian representatives of state socialism. The other contributions to part three of the volume focus on the promotion of “cultural solidarity” with Asian countries by Soviet emissaries to UNESCO (Hanna Jansen), Soviet public campaigns against racism (Maxim Matusevych), and UNESCO as a stage to connect two different and hitherto isolated peripheries: southeastern Europe and the Global South (Bogdan Iacob).
“Global Encounter and Challenges to State Socialism”—the last part of the edited volume—differs from its predecessors chronologically, as the contributions mainly focus on the late 1980s. Adam Kola asks in his chapter why postcolonial literature did not resonate among the dissenting intelligentsia in late-socialist Poland despite enjoying a general degree of popularity in Polish society. Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris scrutinize the actual links between Solidarność in Poland and its connections with social and political movements in the Global South. The last chapter by Quinn Slobodian deals with the Tiananmen Square Massacre and its repercussions for East Germany.
The greatest challenge for an edited volume is to ensure a basic level of coherence among the different chapters and to find a common analytical framework that could prove stimulating for the broader community of researchers. The editors by and large tackled these hurdles very well. Scrutinizing Cold War east-south relations helps to show that the east was far from being isolated either by its own choice or by forces originating from outside the “Eastern Bloc.” It is fruitful to think of the post-war globalization drive, as the editors do, not as a western endeavor that was entirely rejected by the east till 1989, but as a project that evolved in a co-evolutionary way whereby actors from west, east, and south alike enjoyed (albeit differing) degrees of agency.
There are, however, some frictions in the edited volume that pinpoint the need for further scholarly debate. These can be illustrated by comparing the chapter by Mark/Feygin with the chapter written by Sanchez-Sibony. The former state the importance of Stalin's death for the “Eastern Bloc” to overcome his heritage of enforced autarky and to develop their own projects of “alternative globalizations,” or to participate in other projects originating in the institutional framework of the UN. Sanchez-Sibony gives the impression that the Soviets were primarily in a defensive position and often felt threatened by changes in the west that left them—in their understanding—with little to no agency of their own. Thus, the basic point of reference had been a world market clearly dominated by western actors. These differences between the two chapters point at two research questions that could profit from further debate: how important was Stalin's death for the foreign and socioeconomic policy of the Soviet Union? Did the western framework that drove post-war globalization really leave enough room for alternatives?
It is worth to think about the title “Alternative Globalizations” more closely. While alluring, the term has the potential to turn out to be a trap. The term alternative could suggest that by scrutinizing the post-war period carefully enough, scholars could excavate real alternatives for the present order and pinpoint crossroads in the past where humanity took the wrong turn. Understood in this way, the term “alternative globalizations” probably promises much more than it can deliver. The term is best employed and understood as a way to mark the contours of different “variations” of globalization. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that to speak of “the” western model of globalization is a simplification and—depending on the research context—can turn out to be an oversimplification.
The edited volume by James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung provides a lot of food for thought and is a stimulating read to encourage further debate. The different chapters are well researched and offer valuable insight into new research trends.
