Culture

Cultural relations were decisive for making real these Second–Third World connections. Hot war and hard power of course continued to shape Eastern European–Third World encounters, but not exclusively so. Equally as significant were peace initiatives, soft power and cultural relations forged in the name of equality and exchange. In the case of the smaller Eastern European states, socialist fraternity with strangers abroad was identified as a means to escape political isolation (e.g. GDR, and Hungary after 1956); to gain Third World support with a view to protecting sovereignty and postwar European borders (e.g. Poland);, as well as to create distance from Moscow and Beijing in the name of distinctive national identities (e.g. non-aligned Yugoslavia and Romania). For cultural missionaries from the global South, these links with Eastern Europe advanced their broader understanding of nationalism, internationalism and socialism. In these cultural exchanges, anti-imperialism became the main ideological bridge between the Second and Third Worlds, serving as a Cold War socialist version of 1930s Popular Front activism. Cultural diplomacy, modernization, and even the defence of tradition became flashpoints in these exchanges. This chapter shows how the appeal of modernization paradigms lay in their combination of economic uplift with a respect for the recovery of national traditions and histories. Moreover, the defence of progressive tradition and religion, or the common appreciation of repurposed high European cultural forms, engendered far-flung socialist ‘imagined communities’ of mutual recognition that were pitted against the culturally destructive potential of western-led capitalist developmentalism. Such exchanges often brought these cultures together, but also sometimes heightened their differences..