Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World

Globalization has become synonymous with the seemingly unfettered spread of capitalist multinationals, but this focus on the West and western economies ignores the wide variety of globalizing projects that sprang up in the socialist world as a consequence of the end of the European empires. This collection is the first to explore alternative forms of globalization across the socialist world during the Cold War. Gathering the work of established and upcoming scholars of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, Alternative Globalizations addresses the new relationships and interconnections which emerged between a decolonizing world in the postwar period and an increasingly internationalist eastern bloc after the death of Stalin. In many cases, the legacies of these former globalizing impulses from the socialist world still exist today. Divided into four sections, the works gathered examine the economic, political, developmental, and cultural aspects of this exchange. In doing so, the authors break new ground in exploring this understudied history of globalization and provide a multifaceted study of an increasing postwar interconnectedness across a socialist world.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction / James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung Part I: Red Globalisation? 1. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Alternative Visions of a Global Economy 1950s-1980s / James Mark and Yakov Feygin 2. The Cold War in the Margins of Capital. The Soviet Union's Introduction to the Decolonized World, 1955-61 / Oscar Sanchez-Sibony 3. The Soviet Bloc and China's Global Opening-up Policy during the Last Years of Mao Zedong / Péter Vámos 4. From Socialist Assistance to National Self-Interest: Vietnamese Labor Migration into CMEA Countries / Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel Part II: A Socialist Age of Development? 5. "Socialist Development" and East Germany in the Arab Middle East / Massimiliano Trentin 6. Entangling Agrarian Modernities: The "Agrarian Question" through the Eyes of Soviet Africanists / Steffi Marung 7. Socialist Worldmaking. Architecture and Global Urbanization in the Cold War / Łukasz Stanek Part III: Cultural Encounters: Discovering Similarities, Defining Difference, Creating Identities 8. Writing the Soviet South into the History of the Cold War and Decolonization / Artemy M. Kalinovsky 9. Internationalizing the Thaw: Soviet Orientalists and the Contested Politics of Spiritual Solidarity in Asia 1954-1959 / Hanna Jansen 10. Soviet Anti-racism and Its Discontents: The Cold War Years / Maxim Matusevich 11. Southeast by Global South: The Balkans, UNESCO, and the Cold War / Bogdan C. Iacob Part IV: Global Encounter and Challenges to State Socialism 12. A Prehistory of Postcolonialism in Socialist Poland / Adam F. Kola 13. Competing Solidarities? Solidarność and the Global South during the 1980s / Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris 14. China is Not Far! Alternative Internationalism and the Tiananmen Square Massacre in East Germany's 1989 / Quinn Slobodian Glossary Index

About the Author :
James Mark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is author of The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe and author (with Robert Gildea and Anette Warring) of Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt. Artemy Kalinovsky is Senior Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is author of Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan and A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Steffi Marung is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Area Studies at the University of Leipzig. She is author of Die wandernde Grenze: Die EU, Polen und der Wandel politischer Räume, 1990–2010.

Review :
Alternative Globalizations is fully rewarding. That the contributions challenge frequently used categories, complicate binary narratives inherited from the Cold War, and show interconnections, where most of us would not assume them to have played a crucial role, is another highly appreciated trait. (Eurasian Geography and Economics) Gathering contributions which analyse the many shapes of socialist internationalism during the post-war period, the book proposes a renovated and multifaceted frame of globalization. . . . The ambitious objectives of the collection are fulfilled in so far as the global scenario of the entangled processes of Cold War and decolonization is described as a multilocal and multivocal context whose effects reverberate in the contemporary globalization. - Arianna Pasqualini (Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists) This edited volume is a significant contribution to knowledge that broadens our understanding of the global Cold War setting. It challenges both the dominant research paradigms and current hegemonic narratives about this period. The book can be taken as a starting point and its chapters as an inspiration and introduction to discovering and exploring the work of its authors more widely. Due to its broad implications, it does not only appeal to historians of the post-1945 world. Rather, it is equally interesting to scholars studying contemporary societies that once took part in socialist globalizing projects and postcolonial and postsocialist contexts across Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. - Jelena Đureinović (Studies of Transition States and Societies) New anthology publication Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World represents, in the best light, the strength of the current trend in world historiography, which is increasingly focused on global history. Such a view of history reveals completely new contexts and motivations of various participants in events. Not only the main players of the Cold War are taken into account, but also the interests and motivations of participants not only from Europe but also from other continents of the world. - ONDŘEJ BĚLÍČEK (A2larm) This volume edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-South interconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider history of "alternative globalizations." - Jun Fujisawa – Kobe University (Hungarian Historical Review)