Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 1 (2021): 184–187

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Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World.
Edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 352 pp.
Recently, a small yet growing number of researchers have been working
on the transnational history of the socialist countries during the Cold War.
Their studies make clear that the socialist countries after the 1950s were
far from isolated or autarkic and that these countries developed varioustransnational connections with the Global South and other parts of theglobe. However, while they shed light on various concrete cases of theseinterconnections, it is often not easy to situate these findings in a larger
picture of postwar globalization. The present volume edited by James Mark,Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution
to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-Southinterconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider
history of “alternative globalizations.”
The book consists of an introduction and fourteen essays on political,economic, and cultural aspects of the Soviet and Eastern European connections
with the Global South. Many contributors do not adopt the simplistic viewof the Cold War as a mere binary confrontation between the two camps andinstead depict the story of the East-South entanglements in connection withthe activities of the Western counterparts. Furthermore, they often do notregard these relations as a one-sided transfer of socialist modernity fromthe developed East to the Global South and point out various unintendedor surprising impacts on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The
introductory essay by the three editors deserves particular attention, since
it integrates the essays of the volume and situates the interactions between
the Eastern and Southern peripheries in a broader process of postwar
globalization.
The first essay, by Mark and Yakov Feygin, offers a well-written overview
on the rise and fall of the alternative, anti-imperialist visions of global economy
presented at the fora of the United Nations by the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s. As Mark and Feygin show, while thesocialist countries initially advocated these visions, their adherence to economic
bilateralism, the halfway commitment to them, and the accumulating debts tothe West fundamentally weakened such visions. The provocative yet stimulating
essay by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony also focuses on Soviet economic relations
http://www.hunghist.org

DOI 10.38145/2021.4.184

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Hungarian Historical Review

with the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s, but from different standpoint.
According to Sanchez-Sibony, none of the visions of an alternative modernity
were the main motive behind the Soviet economic entanglements with theGlobal South. Rather, these entanglements were motivated by the desire toincrease economic exchange with the outer world in the margins of capitalist
globalization. While these two articles differ widely from each other on therole of socialist modernity, they are, in fact, mutually complementary and areof special value in that they both further a rethinking of the processes andcharacteristics of postwar economic globalization.
On a more concrete topic of the interconnections, Alena K. Alamgir andChristina Schwenkel explore Vietnamese labor migration into Eastern Europe.
The Vietnamese labor program was initially designed as a means to help Vietnam,
but as the economic crisis and labor shortage in Eastern Europe deepened, it
became a source of a cheap workforce in the receiving countries. Massimiliano
Trentin also examines the attitudes of non-Soviet actors by investigating East
German policy in the Middle East. He points out that because of its rivalry
with West Germany and its own economic interests, East Germany sometimes
behaved autonomously in the region.
As to the cultural relations with the Global South, Łukasz Stanek
investigates the interactions between Eastern Europe, West and North Africa,
and the Middle East in the field of architecture. To deal with their “weak”
bargaining positions, Eastern European actors in West Africa and the Middle
East behaved flexibly, which made them highly instrumental for local elites inthese areas. Marung examines Soviet Africanists’ activities concerning African
agricultural problems. The failure of the Soviet agricultural model in Africa
urged these scholars to rethink Soviet agricultural policy at home. The impactof transnational relations on the domestic politics of the socialist countries wasalso examined by Kalinovsky. He analyzes the interrelations between the Soviet
policies in its own South and in the Global South, and he concludes that theSoviet attempt to instrumentalize the regions of Central Asia and Caucasia asa showcase for development in the Global South backfired. In fact, it revealed
the weaknesses of the model and encouraged resistance against the regime
in these Soviet republics. Maxim Matusevich focuses on the strained relations
between the Soviet authorities and the African students at Soviet universities.
Whereas the Soviet authorities wished to educate African students aboutsocialist modernization, in practice, these students often emerged as educatorsof their fellow Soviet students. These interesting case studies make clear that185

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socialist entanglements with the South were not a simple diffusion of a certain
model, but the developed socialist countries were also influenced and reshapedby the South.
At the same time, it should be noted that the transnational approaches by
the socialist countries, like every other such endeavor, had its limits. In the caseof socialist globalization, the actors from the East often did not show greatinterest in thinking and acting within a global framework, preferring insteadto maximize their own interests. For example, Bogdan C. Iacob presents
an interesting case of Balkan scholars’ encounters with the Global South inUNESCO. Using the UNESCO project as a platform for their cause, thesescholars emphasized the shared experience of Western European colonialism
in the Balkan region and the Global South. But since their aim was Eurocentricrather than transregional, they lost momentum in the global arena. Such limits
were also present in the transnational relations cultivated by the oppositional
movements in Eastern Europe. Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris
examine transregional collaboration between the Polish Solidarność and theoppositional movements in the Global South and conclude that the engagementof Solidarność abroad remained limited in scope, as its reserved attitude toward
the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa suggests. Adam F. Kola approaches
the limitedness of the Eastern European intellectuals’ internationalism from adifferent perspective. He examines the reason why Polish intellectuals in thelate socialist period avoided postcolonial discourse in emphasizing the “Sovietcolonization” of Poland.
While these essays analyze the Soviet and Eastern European entanglementswith the decolonizing countries, the essay on Sino-Soviet competition over theGlobal South by Péter Vámos broadens the scope by introducing the Chinese
factor to the discussion. In response to the Chinese attempt to forge a worldwide
anti-Soviet coalition, the Soviets coordinated the policies of bloc countries
vis-à-vis China in an attempt to isolate it globally. Hanna Jansen examines theintellectual thaw under Khrushchev and the activities of Soviet Orientalists inthe context of Sino-Soviet disputes. Quinn Slobodian focuses on East German
grassroots internationalism, which emerged as a result of the Tiananmen Squaremassacre of 1989.
The book thus covers geographically and thematically wide-ranging topics
of global interconnections that emerged after decolonization in the 1950s. The
introductory essay provides a good reference point to position these cases within
a wider framework of postwar globalization. On the whole, the book enhances

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our knowledge of the socialist postwar global entanglements with the GlobalSouth, and it will be of use and interest to readers who are curious to know more
about the subtle, as yet lesser-known aspects of globalization.
Jun Fujisawa
Kobe University
junfujisawa@phoenix.kobe-u.ac.jp

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