State socialist experts were at the center of Eastern Europe’s internationalization from the mid-1950s until 1989. They acted as intermediaries between their states and other national, regional, and international environments. The contributions integrate national milieus within broader frameworks mostly circumscribed by inter- and nongovernmental specialized organizations (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; International Theater Institute, or the un Commission on Population and Development). The issue is an innovative initiative to identify within four fields (economy, demography, theatre, and historical studies) state socialist experts’ contributions to international debates and institution building. We argue that these groups were fundamentally characterized by their transnational dynamism. The resultant forms of mobility and transfer resituate specific systems of knowledge production from Eastern Europe within the larger story of postwar globalization. The collection also includes an anthropological study about the internationalization trajectories of lower-ranked professionals and the resilience of their expertise ethics after 1989. Socialist experts’ mobilities can be circumscribed at the intersection of multiple phenomena that defined the postwar: national settings’ impact on inter- and supra-state interactions; Cold War politics; the tribulations of international organizations; and global trends determined by the accelerating interconnectedness of the world and decolonization. Our findings de-center established narratives about the Cold War and they show how representatives from the East participated in and sometimes determined the conditions of Europeanizing and globalizing trends in their respective fields within particular organizations.

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Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were significant actors in the dynamics and development of post-1945 regimes of global health. This chapter explores how expertise in disease eradication and basic health services that had been developed in interwar Eastern Europe—often with the assistance of the League of Nations—became part of new socialist health interventions on a global scale at the World Health Organization (WHO). The region’s predominantly rural character in the first decades of the twentieth century and socialism’s self-definition as the solution to backwardness helped establish their medical initiatives as models for overcoming disease and deprivation in the post-colonial world in Africa and Asia too. The export of such blueprints of modernity was achieved through involvement in WHO schemes (e.g. eradication programmes for malaria, smallpox, poliomyelitis), through humanitarian assistance, or in aid to national liberation movements. Such interventions were presented as humane alternatives to liberal medicine, but were challenged by Chinese and Cuban regimes. For them, European socialist medicine reproduced civilizational hierarchies , as became particularly apparent with the erosion of its commitment to rural medicine outside Europe. From the late 1970s, the profile of Eastern European medical internationalism changed: pharmaceutical multi-nationals from the region grew in the South and healthcare was increasingly commercialized, whilst states provided only limited support during major international health crises such as the successive famines in East Africa. By the late 1980s, Eastern Europeans forfeited their alternative medical modernity as they embraced Western-inspired privatization and abandoned their pioneering role in public healthcare in the developing world.

L’aide médicale apportée par les pays d’Europe de l’Est à la République populaire démocratique de Corée et à la République démocratique du Vietnam témoigne de leur volonté de se tailler un rôle mondial en exportant la “modernité socialiste” dans le cadre de la construction des États postcoloniaux. La contribution analyse les expériences parallèles des équipes médicales roumaines et tchécoslovaques dans les deux États d’Asie de l’Est pour souligner la nature paradoxale des soins de santé socialistes : un mélange d’internationalisme, d’autodétermination, d’adaptation aux milieux non européens et de récits quasi-coloniaux sur les pathologies locales.

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.