Preliminary Programme

This paper uses participant interviews and analyzes archival and other data to examine the impact of the revolutionary movements of the Global South on Yugoslav student activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Yugoslav youth regularly engaged with topics such as the war in Vietnam and the politics of the Caribbean, Middle East, and Africa sometimes through officially sponsored “friendship clubs” and conferences, and in less official capacities, such as unapproved anti-war demonstrations. Officially approved conferences and meetings provided Yugoslavs with an opportunity to directly interact with representatives of these foreign movements and to make concrete contributions via blood plasma drives and fundraisers. However, for the Yugoslav youth of the 1960s and ‘70s, the most passionate form of engagement with the Global South can be seen in examples such as Sarajevan students carrying Che Guevara’s portrait during a 1968 demonstration against Yugoslav officials, or from students vandalizing the Belgian Embassy during a march protesting Congolese President Patrice Lumumba’s death in 1961. The Global South’s greatest impact on Yugoslav student activism was, therefore, in providing inspiration and symbolism for their own protest movements, and in providing reasons for students to launch their own anti-war and anti-imperialist protests when official responses seemed insufficient. Unofficial engagement with foreign revolutionary movements was less direct than that provided by official forums, but it allowed Yugoslav students to imagine that their own protest movements were part of a wider movement opposed to authoritarianism and imperialism everywhere. (Show less)

Two years after her return from Guinea, in 1960, Czechoslovak Radio foreign correspondent V?ra Š?oví?ková mused that listeners from the country’s biggest cities down to its smallest villages were “constantly inviting me to talk about it.” Š?oví?ková concluded that “people here like Guinea; they already know a lot about it, and they want to know more still.” The reporter thus characterized Czechs and Slovaks as eager recipients of information about Africa’s newly-independent states, and herself as an expert in a position to disseminate such knowledge.

This paper examines the ways in which journalists with experience abroad (such as Š?oví?ková) represented Czechoslovak foreign policy, and insisted upon their expert status to influence foreign policy in an allegedly totalitarian, allegedly puppet, state. Following James Mark and Péter Apor, I focus on individuals who embodied the ideals of “socialism going global,” tracing such Central European engagement with the Third World back through the Stalinist period, and acknowledging the interwar Czechoslovak and Habsburg logics that inflected foreign reporters’ work. I analyze in particular the scripts, fan-mail, and memoirs of Czechoslovak Radio’s Africa correspondent V?ra Š?oví?ková, and the case of foreign reporter turned foreign minister, Ji?í Dienstbier, to consider how reporters conceived of radio’s potential to reshape Czechs’ and Slovaks’ understandings of foreign people and places. How did journalists position themselves towards a Czechoslovak public, a Czechoslovak state, and a world beyond Czechoslovakia’s borders? And how might their output transform our understanding of socialist media and the Czechoslovak listeners it served in the 1950s and the 1960s? (Show less)

This paper contributes to recent scholarship on the relationship between the “second world” and “third world” by exploring Romania’s (primarily discursive) engagement with the Vietnam War. In Romania the Vietnam War served as a platform for critiquing American imperialism as newspaper reports documented the barbarous acts of American forces on the Vietnamese people and environment, including rape, torture, and the use of herbicides. Meanwhile Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese People’s Army were hailed as freedom fighters. The purpose of these articles was to elicit sympathy for and solidarity with the Vietnamese people in their struggle for national liberation and to highlight the beneficence and superiority of socialism. Mobilized by the state as a tool to promote socialist and nationalist principles, the Vietnam War was also an important component of the everyday imaginary: Romanians of various ages and occupational backgrounds wrote to the party leadership, sharing their views on the war, and, in some cases, even requesting permission to fight alongside their “socialist brethren” in Vietnam. This paper thus demonstrates that the Romanian state and its citizenry could find common cause around certain issues, emphasizing the salience--at least in the 1960s--of national roads to communism. (Show less)