Spaces of Interaction between the Socialist Camp and the Global South: Knowledge Production, Trade, and Scientific-Technical Cooperation in the Cold War Era

Overview

In recent debates on the Cold War era, transnational and global history highlight the significance of relations between the Soviet bloc and the Global South. They challenge Cold War perspectives that take “Moscow’s” hegemony and centralized control by national communist parties for granted. “Socialist globalization” has come to be seen as an integral part of the global post-war economic expansion. Contributing to these debates, this conference will focus on concrete spaces of economic East-South interactions: transnational hubs, institutions, and infrastructures. These spaces, to a certain extent, emerged and functioned beyond – or at the margins of – national control and opened up pathways into “the world”. Taking these spaces as a starting point the conference will ask for the actors, their interests, and power relations inside the East-South interactions. How were these spaces created and to what extent did they become relevant platforms of competition and of negotiation of differing interests? To what extent did the interactions between the socialist camp and the Global South replicate, or blur, the seemingly dominant spatial order of the global Cold War between the “Iron Curtain” and the North-South divide? We would like to discuss how different scales such as the local, the national, the bloc, and the global were intertwined in (the making of) these spaces. Emphasizing the spatial dimension will help to re-read the global Cold War order and post-war globalization processes.

Programme

Thursday, 26 October

1:00 pm–1:30 pm   Welcome & Introductory Remarks

1:30 pm–2:45 pm   Keynote & Short Discussion

Johanna Bockman (George Mason U, New York, USA): Financial globalization as a socialist, decolonial project: UNCTAD, NIEO, and non-aligned banking

2:45 pm–3:00 pm   Coffee Break

3:00 pm–4:45 pm   Panel I.  Knowledge Production

Introduction & Chair: Bence Kocsev (Leipzig U, Germany)
Eric Burton (U Vienna, Austria): Diverging visions in post-revolutionary spaces. East German advisers and revolution from above in Zanzibar (1964-1970)
Monika Motylinska (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany): The COMECON and knowledge production in the fields of architecture, town planning and design
Chris Saunders & Thorsten Kern (U Cape Town, South Africa): A Space of Interaction:  the GDR and Namibia in the Cold War
Comment: James Mark (U Exeter, UK)

4:45 pm–4:00 pm   Coffee Break

5:00 pm–6:30 pm   Roundtable

Negotiating a New International Economic Order (NIEO) – perspectives from behind the scenes

Chair: Bence Kocsev (Leipzig U, Germany)
Mihály Simai (Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, former Director of World Institute for Development Economics Research)
Ervin László (External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, President of the Club of Budapest, Hungary)
James Mark (U Exeter, UK) (t.b.c.)

7:00 pm               Conference Dinner

Friday, 27 October

Panel II.  Scientific-Technical Cooperation/Development Policy

Introduction & Chair: Anne-Kristin Hartmetz (Leipzig U, Germany)

9:00 am–10:30 am Section A

Jun Fujisawa (Kobe U, Japan): A united front against the Seven Sisters? The Soviet-East European support for the Iraqi oil industry and the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (1967-1979)
Max Trecker (Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, Germany): The grapes of cooperation: Bulgarian and East German plans to build a Syrian cement industry from scratch
Comment: Frank Hadler (Leipzig U, Germany)

10:30 am–10:45 am Coffee Break

10:45 am–12:30 pm Section B

Marcia C. Schenck (Princeton U, USA & Humboldt U, Berlin, Germany): Working the factory and the dance floor: Angolan and Mozambican worker-trainees in East Germany (1979-90)
Nana Osei-Opare (U California, Los Angeles, USA): Breaking paradigms through communist science: Ghana and Soviet relations (1957-1966)
Bogdan Iacob – Iolande Vasile (New Europe College, Munich, Germany): Elective affinities under duress: limits of Romania-Mozambique bilateralism (1976-1984)
Comment: Stefan Troebst (Leipzig U, Germany)

12:30 pm–1:30 pm Lunch

Panel III: Trade and Trade Infrastructures

Introduction & Chair: Jan Zofka (Leipzig U, Germany)

1:30 pm–3:00 pm   Section A

Anne Dietrich (Leipzig U, Germany): Bartering within and outside the COMECON: The GDR’s import of Cuban fruits and Ethiopian coffee
Simon Yin (Hefei U of Technology, China): China-Soviet rubber cooperation (1950-1953)
Comment: Uwe Müller (Leipzig U, Germany)

3:00 pm–3:15 pm   Coffee Break

3:15 pm–4:45 pm   Section B

Yury Skubko (Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia): National interests above ideology: Soviet diamond deals with South African De Beers cartel during the Cold War
Victor Petrov (European U Institute, Florence, Italy): The Rose and the Lotus: Bulgarian electronic entanglements in India (1967-1990)
Comment: Steffi Marung (Leipzig U, Germany)

4:45 pm–5:15 pm Closing Remarks/ Closing Discussion