During the Cold War, philanthropic organizations such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as state institutions (including West German ones), carried out and financed programs of academic mobility for East Europeans. Experiences and knowledge gained through these exchanges shaped the history of the region. This complicated story of people and institutions, despite some academic work, remains untold.
With such a diagnosis serving as a starting point, three researchers – STEPHAN RINDLISBACHER (Frankfurt an der Oder), ANDRZEJ TURKOWSKI (Warsaw) and BOGDAN ZAWADEWICZ (Munich) – organized an academic workshop to address at least some problems related to the topic. The workshop, financed by the German-Polish Scientific Foundation (DPWS) as well as the Robert B. Zajonc Institute For Social Studies (University of Warsaw) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies (European University Viadrina), was held on November 8, 2019 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city on the German-Polish border, itself an important point of exchange. It gathered participants of different disciplines and regional backgrounds (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, China). Many of the workshop participants already undertook or are currently undertaking projects based on empirical research in the field, some were able to present modes of interpretation of the data, some shared their reflections on the general outlook of the project.
The first panel, “The State of the Art. Approaches to Academic Mobility Programs” was chaired by Andrzej Turkowski. The first speaker was MATTHIAS DULLER (Graz) who presented his research on academic mobility programs organized by the Ford Foundation. The turning point of the East European story, according to Duller, was 1956, when the Ford Foundation turned away from overtly anti-Communist message and focused on the Eastern Bloc. American policy makers – rightly so – understood the Eastern Bloc as decidedly different from the Soviet Union in goals and outlooks. To foster intellectual pluralism within the Bloc, the Ford Foundation supported academics of revisionist Marxist outlooks, a decision hard to reconcile with the capitalist liberal-democratic consensus in the US.
Duller stressed the local differences of the cases he selected: Poland, Yugoslavia and Hungary. There was distinctness in the rationale for engaging in academic exchange (genuine reform efforts, a need for applicable knowledge in technical and natural sciences, engineering or management) and the screening and selection process. It also produced different outcomes: Polish social sciences became more Western-oriented, Yugoslavia developed its original blend of market socialism, and Hungarian scientists remained loyal to the party-state.
LIN YI-TANG (Geneva), the second speaker, shared her experiences of working within the framework of a major research project at the University of Geneva called “Rockefeller Fellows as Heralds of Globalization. The Circulation of Elites, Knowledge and Practices of Modernization (1920s-1970s).” Starting from 1914 until the 1970s, the Rockefeller Foundation financed 16,000 scholarships for people from 88 countries, who received funding for one- or two-year stays at US universities. The main goal of the Geneva academic project is to create a database of these people which includes their background, education prior to receiving the fellowship, information about their stay in the US and further careers. The data then will be interpreted to address concrete questions on how the fellowship experiences were translated into action on the ground.
TOMASZ ZARYCKI (Warsaw) opened his presentation with suggestions on interpreting and understanding the data stemming from academic mobility research. Zarycki, co-author of a pioneer work on political science in Eastern Europe, jumped right into the most difficult and controversial research questions, concerning the agenda of Western donors and the activities of the beneficiaries in countries of origin. According to Zarycki, the researcher needs to find a way between conspiracy theories, claiming that through exchange programs malevolent actors in the West created loyal executors of their will in the region, and idealistic visions of academic interactions, in which scientific activities and investments made in this area are without any practical implications. He also showed how in a peripheral country the external funding schemes divided local academic and public spheres. Zarycki asked whether Western foundations were financing only one particular side of the conflict, and who in the West was interested in such exchanges and why.
The second panel was chaired by Stephan Rindlisbacher. UNA BLAGOJEVIĆ (Budapest) talked about her PhD project on the history of the Praxis intellectual movement in Yugoslavia. In her presentation, Blagojevic focused on the international engagement of Yugoslav intellectuals on the example of the Korčula Summer School. The summer school held between 1963 and 1974 on a picturesque Dalmatian island (in today’s Croatia) was a place of contact between members of the philosophical Praxis school and foreign academics. It hosted prominent intellectuals such as Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, Richard J. Bernstein and Norman Birnbaum. The school, apart from being funded by the Yugoslav state, was co-financed by the Fulbright Commission, the Ford Foundation and the West German Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Una Blagojević showed how Yugoslav intellectuals (most prominently Ivan Kuvačić) promoted the school, invited guests, and how they negotiated with the state administration in order to get funding. Her conclusion was that international academic cooperation and the existence of intellectual alternatives did not automatically produce political liberalism, as the Yugoslav history of the 1990s showed.
In the next presentation, ZOLTÁN GINELLI (independent researcher) focused on the global circulation of knowledge from a world-system and post-colonial perspective. As a case study he has chosen the Central Place Theory created by the German geographer Walter Christaller. This theory which originated in pre-WWII Germany and served as a tool of German Nazi colonialism in the East, was later appropriated by US and West German planners who after 1945 spread it globally. Curiously, however, Christaller’s ideas were, independently from the US, developed behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in Poland. Besides explaining the patterns of knowledge circulation, Ginelli also reflected how in the context of the Cold War and through academic mobility, scientific geographic knowledge was transformed into spatial planning techniques, applicable in many parts of the world.
The last presenter was MILICA POPOVIĆ (Paris/Ljubljana) who shared her insights into Yugoslavia’s role in the world of academic exchange during the Cold War. She claimed that the “in-between” place occupied by the federation in global politics remains underappreciated. Milica Popović gave a complex overview of the existing literature and research on academic mobility from and to Yugoslavia. A factor of particular importance was the special relations to the decolonized countries of the Global South which supported the ideas of the Non-Aligned Movement. It seems that this cooperation overshadowed academic contacts with the Eastern Bloc. Milica claimed that the academic exchange needs to be analyzed from the perspective of soft power, elites, education, economy (especially in regards to foreign investments and access to markets before and after capitalism) and cultural hegemony.
The organizers of the conference planned and provided ample time for discussions and comments on the delivered papers. The discussion produced many interesting outcomes. One of them was the postulate for a more thorough study of the internal politics within the philanthropic foundations and diplomacy, especially on the personal level. In these sectors, (former) diplomats, intelligence officers and business, acting in executive posts, influenced politicians and lawmakers. A more intimate understanding of these institutions could also help to go beyond identifying major events (1956, 1968) as policy factors.
One of the main threads during the discussion was the level of individual experiences of those who took part in the exchange programs. On concrete empirical examples, workshop participants discussed changes in attitudes and outlooks, which very often did not replicate a trajectory “from socialism to liberalism”. To understand the experiences of the foreign scholars one might turn to oral history interviews, consult existing personal collections, other ego documents and texts.
As it was observed, an academic scholarship abroad could speed up one’s career which otherwise might be blocked by local structures. It helped gather financial capital. Due to favorable exchange rates, even small savings made in Western currencies were significant in the East. For some, a scholarship in the 1960s or 1970s United States or West Germany was a personal adventure which changed their life. But it did not have to look like that. Some countries limited personal freedom of their citizens abroad, expected them to regularly report to the embassy and subjected them or their families to blackmail.
Another important thread was the longer history of academic cooperation. Some programs, like the one developed by the Rockefeller Foundation, started already before WWII. At East European academic centers any institutional or personal experiences abroad, personal contacts with decision-makers or professors were priceless. Pre-existing connections and high cultural capital (intellectual competences, foreign languages) was key to engage in academic exchange.
As already observed, the organizers managed not to overload the schedule and provided space and time for plenary discussions and informal talks. The organizers and participants closed the proceedings with plans for future cooperation along the lines of the topics and problems of the November workshop. To summarize, staying true to the workshop’s main message, the flawlessly organized event created a space of exchange of disciplines and regional focuses and opened new possibilities to the research in this fascinating field.
Conference overview:
Panel I: The State of the Art. Approaches to Academic Mobility Programs
Chair: Andrzej Turkowski
Matthias Duller (Graz): Hopes and Realities of East-West Scholar Exchange Programs During the Cold War
Lin Yi-Tang (Geneva): The Rockefeller Foundation Fellows. In-between Database and Archival Sources, 1910s-1970s
Tomasz Zarycki (Warsaw): The Patterns of the Cold War Academic Exchanges and the Changing Structures of the Polish Field of Power
Panel II: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges in Researching Academic Mobility
Chair: Stephan Rindlisbacher
Una Blagojević (Budapest): Opening to the West: Yugoslav Intellectuals and their Internationalism
Zoltán Ginelli (Budapest): Geographies of Scientific Knowledge and Expert Mobilities in World-Systemic, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Contexts
Milica Popović (Paris, Ljubljana): Yugoslav Mobility. An Untold Story