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Introduction to Everyday Internationalism: Socialist–South Connections and Mass Culture during the Cold War

Part of: Special Issue: Everyday Internationalism: Socialist-South Connections and Mass Culture during the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2024

George Bodie Open the ORCID record for George Bodie [Opens in a new window]
George Bodie*
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
*
E-mail: G.Bodie@gold.ac.uk
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Abstract

This Special Issue brings together scholars working in a variety of contexts to explore the concepts of solidarity and socialist internationalism as a mass phenomenon. While recent scholarship has begun to document linkages between the socialist and (post)colonial world during the Cold War, most of this work has eschewed a focus on the mass, social experience of internationalism, instead emphasizing the transformative role played by small groups of mobile elites. But if the direct experience of socialist internationalism was limited to a privileged few, how then was it experienced by the majority, for whom actual travel outside of their state was a distant possibility? This issue explores how socialist internationalism and its attendant practices of solidarity functioned within and between socialist societies. Where it does take border-transcending groups as its subject, it explores the socio-historical, everyday implications of this transnational story. For much of the Cold War, state and party-led practices of internationalism were a central component of everyday life, but little is known about these practices as they manifested on the ground. To shed light on this, this Special Issue explores how depictions of solidarity manifested in mass culture; how everyday practices emerged out of socialist internationalism and anti-imperialism; and how institutions that sought to bridge gaps between societies through solidarity emerged and then transformed or disappeared after 1989.

Type
Introduction
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 69 , Special Issue S32: Everyday Internationalism: Socialist-South Connections and Mass Culture during the Cold War , April 2024 , pp. 1 - 12
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

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References

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2 Christiaens, Kim, “‘Communists Are No Beasts’: European Solidarity Campaigns on Behalf of Democracy and Human Rights in Greece and East–West Détente in the 1960s and Early 1970s”, Contemporary European History, 26:4 (2017), p. 622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 For another early example, see Rupprecht, Tobias, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See, for example, Telepneva, Natalia and Muehlenbeck, Philip (eds), Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London, 2018)Google Scholar.

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13 Mark, James, Kalinovsky, Artemy, and Marung, Steffi (eds), Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Bloomington, IN, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burrell, Kathy and Hörschelmann, Kathrin (eds), Mobilities in Socialist and Post-Socialist States: Societies on the Move (London, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Celia Donert, “Women's Rights and Global Socialism: Gendering Socialist Internationalism during the Cold War”, International Review of Social History, 67:SI30 (2022), pp. 1–22.

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17 Péter Apor and James Mark, “Home Front”, in Mark and Betts (eds), Socialism Goes Global, pp. 318–358, 318.

18 On this, see Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ, 2019)Google Scholar.

19 In the East German case, Slobodian writes, “icons, and contributions rather than personal experience remained the means of engaging with the global South and activists of color”. Quinn Slobodian, “Socialist Chromatism: Race, Racism and the Racial Rainbow in East Germany”, in Quinn Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York, 2015), pp. 23–43, 32.

20 On this, see Niall Ferguson et al. (eds), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2011).

21 Gilburd, Eleonory, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2018), p. 39Google Scholar.

22 Harper, Tim, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Christiaens, “‘Communists Are No Beasts’”, p. 644.