Home Front

After 1989, as ‘Third Worldism’ rapidly withered, anti-colonial solidarity began to be characterized as cynical propaganda or a set of practices imposed from above that had elicited only grudging, ritualized responses from unimpressed populations. This chapter argues against this restrictive history. Most in Eastern Europe did not experience an anti-colonial world through physical encounter. Rather, it was mediated through many forms of socialist-era culture, ranging from travel writing to television to folk and pop culture fascination with Third World revolutionary heroes. Such culture was certainly exploited to legitimize socialist regimes: this was particularly important given the disillusionment with Stalinism. However, its appeal went well beyond the machinations of the state, precisely because it drew on longer-term traditions of anti-colonial feeling and organization that had long extended far beyond any Communist movement. It was partly for this reason that anti-colonial solidarity could be politically disruptive: it provided exemplars and languages of critique that could be turned against domestic authoritarianism, the seeming abandonment of revolution by consumerist Eastern European regimes, or indeed against the ‘imperialism’ of the Soviet Union itself. Lastly, this chapter traces the emptying out of cultures of solidarity with the decline of mass politics and the distancing of Eastern European societies from the Third World. Although dissident movements drew on analogies with slavery or apartheid to make sense of their own oppression, this was no longer informed by an internationalist solidarity culture, which was less and less capable of generating grass-roots activism.