Mobility

This chapter explores the system of mobility that linked Eastern Europe to the Far East and Africa from the early 1950s through the late 1980s. It focuses on the university students from the newly decolonized countries, and later labour migrants (mainly from Cuba, Vietnam and Mozambique). It argues that—unlike liberal capitalist models that valorize individual migration—socialist states viewed mobility as a tool for economic and political state-building. Mobility was not conceived as an end in itself, but as a means of development, one in which the development of individuals (migrating and otherwise) was embedded in, and dependent on, the development of the state. It took a collective (not an individual) form, and was institutionally brokered. While most mobility occurred between the state-socialist ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, there were also several remarkable examples of mobilities entirely independent of the European core. Notably, while state-socialist countries put a premium on cultivating a continued sense of national belonging among the migrants, the encounters these migrations gave rise to also engendered a certain socialist transnationalism, or what Hüwelmeier called ‘socialist cosmopolitanism’. The forms and meaning of the migrations, however, changed over time. In the 1960s and 1970s, Eastern European elites saw their support for mobility from the decolonizing world as an embodiment of the region’s new global role and as part of their responsibility to encourage economic uplift elsewhere. By the 1980s, however, migrants became increasingly seen as economic units useful for the development of Eastern Europe within a global economy.