Health

Abstract

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.