Organized within the framework of an ongoing research project on Cuba and the GDR in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance as a development organization1, this international workshop aimed to investigate the entanglements between education and migration in the context of decolonization and the Cold War, paying special attention to the socialist world. Applicants were invited to address migratory processes framed by the states, parties, national-liberation movements and non-governmental organizations and that aimed at the development of the individual, the society and the nation in socialist and post-colonial countries. Such transnational exchanges were a crucial component of socialist globalization and part of larger, global development efforts. The speakers mostly focused on processes and trajectories of educational temporary migration from and towards socialist countries, where education included “civilizing” concepts and political education, in addition to formalized education and training.
BERTHOLD UNFRIED (Wien) opened the workshop by analyzing the educational dimension of socialist developmentalism, which intended to educate both the society and the individual, to develop socialist personalities and to practice internationalism through solidarity missions to the Three Continents. He focused mainly on the missions of Cubans and East Germans to the Three Continents as a form of temporary migration that aimed at producing “all-sided education”, which was at the core of the socialist developmental system. “All-sided education” aimed at addressing civilizational issues, promoting work discipline and new progressive gender roles, and encompassed political education, as it tried to establish a common world-view through the language of Marxism-Leninism, however often without succeeding. Furthermore, the educational purposes of the solidarity missions to the Three Continents were directed both to the recipient pupils and to the socialist cooperants sent abroad (“education of the educators”), who were supposed to be educated in internationalism and underwent constant evaluation, as the case of Cubans in Angola shows. In the conclusion, Unfried highlighted the international rather than cosmopolitan side of the socialist world, pointing out the centrality of the notions of nation-state and nation-building within such educational programs, intended to forge internationalist as well as patriot socialist personalities.
The succeeding contribution extended the perspective on the interactions within the socialist world by focusing on intra-bloc exchanges in the economic field. Illustrated by a case from the Soviet-Cuban relationship related to the problem of socialist sugar exports in the 1970s, OSCAR SANCHEZ-SIBONY (Hong-Kong) showed how the socialist world depended on capitalist infrastructure and institutions. As a solution to the intra-socialist competition, the Cubans proposed the cartelization of sugar production and sales. The establishment of an international cartel, the Cubans believed, would allow exporting countries to set bottom prices and coordinate the distribution of markets among them. On the contrary, thinking that a cartel would have been difficult to establish and believing in free-market forces, the Soviets opposed the Cuban opinion. These negotiations between the two socialist states reveal a struggle for hard currency on which the socialist world depended. Only in the 1970s, the socialist bloc developed a financial system of debt-based exchange. However, the creation of debt, which “enhanced the Soviet ability to transact spatially and multilaterally”, was only allowed by the global infrastructure based on the US dollar. Rather than an alternative to the capitalist economic system, Sanchez-Sibony concluded by defining as subaltern the position of the socialist economy.
Contributing to the “decentralization” of the Cold War narrative, INGRID MIETHE (Gießen) stressed the heterogeneity and the autonomous paths of development of socialist educational systems, which had resulted from their national and regional specificities. Differently from the belief of a centrally imposed Soviet educational model, Miethe demonstrated that countries voluntarily adopted the model for its attractiveness rather than coercion and transformed it according to their needs. The appeal of the Soviet model, as she further explained, had resulted from its addressing specific regional contexts, which resembled those of other socialist and post-colonial countries. Though sharing Marxist-Leninist ideology and thus similar interpretations of development, these models developed independently from the Soviet Union to autonomously provide answers to local problems. Rather than reproducing the “Sovietization thesis”, Miethe concluded that we could speak of a “global socialist educational sphere” that characterized the desire to build a socialist state and intra-socialist exchanges and transfer processes.
CLAUDIA MARTÍNEZ HERNÁNDEZ (Wien) shed light on the role played by the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in framing the labor and educational migration of Cubans to socialist Europe. Her contribution highlighted the intensification of the state and party-led migratory programs after Cuba’s admission to the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and defined the PCC as an educator of Cuban students and workers abroad. Notwithstanding the differences between students’ and workers’ experiences, both groups of Cubans acted under the surveillance of the PCC and the Cuban self-governing structures abroad with the long-term purpose to contribute to the development of their country once back home. Acting as a paternalist caretaker, the PCC pursued a broad concept of education, which aimed at the development of the socialist “new man”– the so-called “all-sided education” mentioned also by Berthold Unfried. As Martínez Hernández pointed out, however, PCC’s rigid control often led to contradictory results. Moreover, reality showed that neither was it able to control Cuban students and workers in the way it wanted, nor did these two groups always act as expected.
ERIC BURTON (Innsbruck) discussed the role of the anti-colonial liberation movements as educational actors that opened diverse educational trajectories. However, as Burton showcased in the example from the biography of Amin Cajee, who had fled to Europe escaping from the African National Congress (ANC), such educational trajectories also led to unexpected results. Furthermore, analyzing educational journeys between post-colonial African countries and the communist world while focusing on the networks built by the South African ANC, the presentation highlighted the limited power in the attempts of the movements’ leaderships to exert control over their members during the training abroad. Finally, Burton emphasized the importance of African hubs as connecting points by showing that educational paths to socialist countries went through different African countries, for instance, Tanzania in the 1960s. Burton pointed out that these transit countries facilitated the establishment of links between the various national liberation movements and the socialist world.
YAROSLAV ZHURAVLOV (Kiev) disclosed the KGB surveillance of students from the Global South in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. To obtain information, the KGB relied on a network of informants among local students and teaching staff. The intelligence acquired by the KGB served the public authorities of the USSR republics to monitor students’ frame of mind. Accordingly, the KGB gathered two groups of information; one related to the peculiarities of their everyday lives, the other to their political lives and reactions to international political events. Such information revealed, for example, that the students complained about low-quality teaching or that they were not competitive in the domestic labor market with the gained knowledge. However, they were mostly satisfied with the living conditions and the granted scholarships, which often put them in a better material position than the locals. Significantly, Zhuravlov pointed out that KGB obliterated the incidents in which students from the Global South were involved, such as racially-based violence and on the other hand black-market activities, against which the local authorities refrained from taking action. Foreign students’ affairs were politically highly sensitive. The presentation concluded that the KGB paid significant attention to the students from abroad to ensure they would carry back home a positive image of the USSR.
Shifting the attention to educational migration to the West, IRINA NASTASĂ-MATEI (Bucharest) focused on the cultural and academic relationship between the Socialist Republic of Romania (SSR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the Cold War. Such relationships developed especially after 1965, in the context of Nicolae Ceausescu’s openness towards the West as well as his pragmatic attitude, as he was willing to benefit from the links with advanced countries. Funded through scholarships provided by the Romanian state and, more often, by German universities and institutions, from the mid-1960s, many Romanian students and researchers started to temporarily migrate to the FRG. However, as Nastasă-Matei pointed out, these academic exchanges encountered many limits due to the Romanian ideological rigorousness and its desire to control the access to study abroad. Romanian authorities, in fact, insisted on recommending scholarship recipients who were politically loyal while often not allowing awarded students, who usually made direct applications, to leave the country. Finally, the Romanian-German relations, together with the number of Romanians studying or doing research in the FRG, decreased dramatically after the Romanian authoritarian clampdown of the 1970s. Therefore, focusing on the temporary migration of students and researchers from a socialist country to the West, Nastasă-Matei highlighted the limitations and the failures of such exchanges, often due to the reluctance to educate students in countries belonging to the opposite Cold War bloc.
NEDŽAD KUČ (Wien) offered an overview of socialist Yugoslavia’s scholarship programs for students from the Global South. While the Yugoslav government granted scholarships on all educational levels to countries, liberation movements and “friendly" parties across the non-aligned network, Kuč’s research has focused on African students as they constituted the largest group of educational migrants in Yugoslavia. Alongside supporting the educational efforts of the post-colonial countries and movements, Kuč stressed that providing scholarships aimed to strengthen (future) bilateral relations in line with the non-aligned foreign policy. While the host authorities foresaw students taking the ambassador-like role by promoting Yugoslav political and economic interests upon return to their home countries, this scenario rarely took the desired trajectory. The presentation left the question of the success of the Yugoslav scholarship program open for further research.
Playing with spaces and scales, THUC LINH NGUYEN VU (Wien) moved the debate to a local level, bringing the case of the language school in Łódź, Poland, which from the 1950s hosted international students with the goal of facilitating their language and cultural integration and preparing them for their subsequent studies in Poland. As the only such institution in the Polish People’s Republic, the language school in Łódź was a hub for temporary migrants who were expected to become the future elite of postcolonial states. Nguyen Vu defined the school as “many spaces in one”, as an institution of socialist education and a holistic space of socialist socialization, and the student’s dorm as a “microcosm” of socialist internationalism. She explored the Polish-Vietnamese relation during the period of decolonization and the Cold War through the eyes of Vietnamese students in Łódź, highlighting the dual process of adaptation and integration to both global socialism and local Polish culture and society, the positive and culturally rich experiences of internationalist encounters, the problems of homesickness and uprootedness, and their sense of dual belonging and transnational identity. With her contribution, Nguyen Vu shed light on the history of a seemingly minor institution as a microhistory of global socialism and gave space to the grassroots perspectives of educational migrants, highlighting the human dimension of the Cold War exchanges.
The discussions held after each presentation and the final debate of the workshop raised questions regarding the specificities of the socialist educational systems and concepts related to socialist educational mobilities mediated by the institutions. Did the studied flows of educational migration constitute migratory “systems”? Can they be seen as part of a “Socialist world system” or a “Socialist system of education”? What was the contribution of those circulating people, which we study to the cohesion or, alternatively, the centrifugal forces of the socialist world? The debate incentivized further research by questioning the historical significance of these educational trajectories, such as what role the returnees had played in their country of origin and what had been the developmental effects of their education abroad. On the other hand, the workshop dedicated less attention to the labor aspects of migration and development. The institutions of party schools and their role in the education of party cadres would have merited attention. Overall, the workshop exceptionally well highlighted the main features of the socialist educational system and the migratory processes in play, emphasizing the variety of actors involved, the goals and the failures of the educational programs while showing how academic and cultural exchanges led to encounters and personal connections that united the socialist world probably more than economic exchanges.
Conference overview:
Opening lectures: Concepts and Paradigms
Chair: Claudia Martínez Hernández
Berthold Unfried (Wien): The educational paradigm of socialist developmentalism: all-sided development
Oscar Sanchez-Sibony (Hongkong): Constraints of socialist “globalization”, or “inter-nationalization”?
Panel I: Actors of Education
Chair: Berthold Molden
Ingrid Miethe (Gießen): Education in the Socialist world
Claudia Martínez Hernández (Wien): The Party as educator of the students and workers sent to Eastern Europe
Eric Burton (Innsbruck): Liberation movements as educational actors
Yaroslav Zhuravlov (Kiev): Students from the Global South in KGB reports of the 1960s-1980s
Panel II: Educational Migration
Chair: Claudia Martínez Hernández
Irina Nastasă-Matei (Bucharest): Academic migration from Romania to the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War
Nedžad Kuč (Wien): African students in Yugoslavia during the Cold War
Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (Wien): Between integration and transformation: the Language School in Łódź in the eyes of Vietnamese students
Note:
1https://socialist-entanglements.univie.ac.at/.