Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South

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Cover illustration: Ingrid Miethe, Praza da Libertade,
Nampula (Mozambique) March 2015, wall painting.

ISSN 2195-5158

ISBN 978-3-631-82483-2 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83435-0 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83436-7 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83437-4 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/b17544

© Peter Lang GmbH

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About the editors

The Editors
Ingrid Miethe, is Full Professor for education at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany.
Jane Weiß is a research assistant and project supervisor in the Department of History of Education at the Institute of Education Studies at Humboldt University Berlin.

About the book

Ingrid Miethe / Jane Weiss (eds.)

Socialist Educational Cooperation
and the Global South

During the struggles for independence in the global south, education became an important motor of emancipation. The postcolonial countries put the development of a democratic and de-racialized educational system on the agenda of urgent problems to be solved. In the course of this development, many cooperative education projects were undertaken between established socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba, and African countries, Southern and Northern Asian countries, countries of the Middle East, and Latin American countries.

Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South brings together a variety of topics, perspectives, and research approaches in this heterogeneous field, integrating for the first time a very broad interdisciplinary discourse and offering new insights into this important component of socialist globalization.

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Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South

IFounding and Transforming Institutions and Ideas

Ingrid Miethe

The Worldwide Dissemination of Workers’ Faculties and the Character of Educational Cooperation among the Socialist States

Andreas Tietze

Copying, Innovating and Spreading: The GDR and Transnational Policy Borrowing in the Field of Polytechnic Education

Berthold Unfried

Education as a Paradigm and as a Part of Institutionalized “International Solidarity” of the German Democratic Republic

Paige Newhouse

State Security: A Form of Knowledge Exchange between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the German Democratic Republic

IIEducational Institutions of International Cooperation

Dayana Murguia

Socialist Education and International Cooperation: An Introduction to the School Program on the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba

Susanne Timm

The Collaboration between the Namibian SWAPO and the East German Socialist Party as Case for Non-Touching Educational Concepts

Jane Weiss

On an Attempt to Shape the New Mozambican: The “School of Friendship” in Staßfurt (GDR)

IIIStudying Abroad

Barbora Buzássyová

Repositioning of Czechoslovak Educational Strategies to the “Least Developed Countries”: The Rise and Decline of University of 17th November

Riikkamari Muhonen

Moscow-Based Peoples’ Friendship University as a Case of Soviet Cooperation with the Developing World: Changes and Continuities

Svetlana Boltovska

Dreams and Everyday Life of African Students in the Country of Victorious Socialism –- Education for Sub-Saharan Africans in the Soviet Union

Manfred Heinemann

Isolation, Self-Satisfaction and the Replacement of Marxism Leninism by the Chuch’e Movement in North Korea’s Educational System through the Lens of GDR Cultural Diplomacy

IVGeneral Considerations – Outlook and Comments

Tom G. Griffiths

Education under and for Socialism: What Hope Progress?

Marcelo Caruso

Brain Drain or the Specifics of a Socialist Globalization

About the Authors

Socialist Educational Cooperation and the
Global South

Education has been seen by both colonial powers and liberation movements in the colonized countries as an essential foundation for these countries’ future. As colonial powers, France and Britain strove as early as 1940, and increasingly after 1945, to expand their educational efforts, mainly by founding schools in the colonized countries, not least in order to “re-establish imperial legitimacy.”¹ For the anticolonial liberation movements and, later, the young African states, education was a vehicle of emancipation and a prerequisite for the development of independent nation-states. Anticolonial liberation movements developed educational concepts during their struggles for independence, and immediately conducted literacy campaigns and/or founded schools in liberated zones.²

The Conference of African States on the Development of Education in Africa, held in May 1961 in Addis Ababa, was the first primarily intra-African forum on education issues. Participants included 39 African states in addition to the former colonial powers. The conference underscored the importance of education for economic and social development: “The Conference has emphasized the urgent need for planning educational expansion as a part of overall national plans for social and economic development. It has agreed on basic plans for educational development in Africa and has assessed the probable costs of the development plans, both short-range and long-term.”³ It was also stated at the conference, however, that the African countries “know that to achieve their goals they will need foreign aid increasingly for this decade and in decreasing amounts for the second decade. The African States will welcome the necessary ←7 | 8→international assistance.”⁴ More specifically, the conference demanded increased spending by the UNESCO states as well as the ECA⁵ states for the development of educational systems in the African countries.

The educational efforts of the African independence movements and the aid of the international community must always be considered in the context of the Cold War, since the young nation-states were often instrumentalized by the superpowers as they tried to expand their respective spheres of influence. Examples begin with the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and also include the war in Afghanistan, in which the superpowers were directly involved, as well as “proxy wars” such as those in Congo, Angola and Mozambique.⁶ The Cold War was also fought on an ideological level: in large part, it was a “battle of ideas,”⁷ that is, “a conflict between two apparently incompatible ideologies with competing concepts of social development.”⁸ It is no surprise that education was an important battlefield in this conflict, as ideologies were expected to be communicated and spread through education. It is clear that neither side was simply interested in teaching urgently needed specialist skills: both were anxious to teach their respective values and concepts of society at the same time – democracy on the Western side and Marxism-Leninism on the Eastern side.⁹

The resulting development can be characterized in a sense as a race to conquer minds. Both the Western and the Eastern¹⁰ camps provided extensive funds, ←8 | 9→both to develop local educational systems and to offer students scholarships in the Western or Eastern countries. In the course of these developments, many of the African countries, as well as countries in southern and southeastern Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, sought contacts to and support from established socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany. A great number of bilateral cooperation projects were initiated between countries of the Global South and established socialist states, especially in the field of education. Educational cooperation among socialist countries as discussed in this volume is, therefore, always understood as embedded in the global Cold War context.¹¹ With this anthology, we would like to contribute to a less monolithic perspective on that period of world history, which has increasingly appeared in the historical discourse and literature in recent years.¹²

Furthermore, transnational and/or postcolonial studies on decolonization processes often dismiss the role of the Eastern bloc or treat it as secondary, that is, only in relation to the efforts of the “West.” East Germany’s Africa policy, for example, has been discussed in the context of global decolonization history and in the postcolonial perspective as a “scene of the East–West German rivalry of systems.”¹³ Yet this dimension, while certainly significant, reduces the variety of exchange processes and neglects global entanglements in history, establishing ←9 | 10→the “East as the defining other of freedom and progress in the West.”¹⁴ In addition, the countries of the Global South appear in this perspective only as reactive forces with no initiative and agency of their own.

This narrow perspective on Cold War complexities must be overcome in order to integrate the Eastern European and state socialist experiences and the experiences of countries of the Global South. This can be done in part by bringing marginalized stories and narratives to the center. At the same time, to overcome the Western European bias, historiography must challenge the dominant perspective and paradigm of a bipolar confrontation of two blocs. Such an approach may let the Eastern bloc appear less monolithic and more diverse than usual, and allow the countries of the Global South to appear in the global context less as instruments and more as actors.

Besides the often-missing perspectives just described, the issue of education generally has remained rather in the shadows in the context of decolonization, although it was widely perceived by contemporaries as one of the strongest forces of emancipation in liberation struggles in the countries of the Global South. The neglect of education in scholarly literature seems even more remarkable in view of declarations by postcolonial polities that establishing a non-racist, democratic system of education was one of the most significant challenges confronting them. This is an important research topic inasmuch as educational issues were central, and Arnason, for example, demonstrates that, in the case of the Soviet model and its dissemination, the development of cultural factors took a different path from that of economic or political developments.¹⁵ Thus the study of educational issues can also lead to new theories on the effects of educational ideas and educational cooperation in the context of the Cold War, and can reveal that the countries of the Global South were not a monolithic bloc in regard to educational issues, and did not simply align themselves with one side or the other and then stoically adopt its educational ideals. In fact, it has been shown both for African countries such as Tanzania,¹⁶ Guinea Bissau¹⁷ and ←10 | 11→Mozambique,¹⁸ and for Vietnam and Cuba¹⁹ that, in spite of a basic orientation toward the socialist system, postcolonial countries implemented their own educational notions and concepts. In addition to global influences – such as those of socialist European countries – the postcolonial educational systems of the Global South always absorbed local traditions too.

The specifics of the education transfers²⁰ involved, in which socialist countries may be both lenders and borrowers, have not been systematically researched up to now. Moreover, the exchange relations between the Eastern European states especially and the countries of the Global South in Africa, Asia and Latin America have received little attention in the formulation of theories. The very heterogeneity of relations between the socialist states and countries with varying ideological orientations is in itself a significant contribution to the complexity of the socialist globalization process, and one which has only begun to be explored.

The countries of the Global South not only actively sought education transfers from socialist Eastern Europe, but also adapted the transferred institutions to local situations, sometimes making great changes, as they implemented them. These South-specific developments became in turn the object of education transfer to other countries of the South with similar problems. In the context of global socialist education exchange, these special South-South transfers – those between Cuba and Angola²¹ or between Cuba and Nicaragua,²² for example – are also a part of the fabric of relations between the Eastern European socialist states and the Global South. Equally important are the feedback effects of transfers in the respective lender countries themselves (such as knowledge transfers, the circulation and modification of educational practices, etc.) and the opportunity offered by this research context to gain new perspectives on the educational systems of the respective lenders. After all, international educational cooperation ←11 | 12→was a space of self-reassurance, and hence of nation-building, for the established socialist countries.²³

Hence the division of participants into lenders and borrowers in this context is not rigid; the process always involves a mesh of interwoven relations and mechanisms, and little is known up to now about those relations and interactions. Nonetheless, an interdisciplinary research field has developed in which various individual aspects of educational cooperation between the European socialist countries and the socialist Global South are explicitly examined. Such research has focused on certain points.

One focus of research has been the educational institutions created explicitly for children and adolescents from the Global South – primarily boarding schools and children’s homes – mainly in the European socialist countries. Thus, we have publications on the “School of Friendship” founded for Mozambican children and youth in Stassfurt, East Germany,²⁴ on the home for Namibian refugee children in Bellin, East Germany,²⁵ and on North Korean orphans in East Germany.²⁶ Universities too were founded in the socialist countries with the explicit goal of educating students from the Global South. There are studies on the Lumumba University of International Friendship in Moscow²⁷ and on its Czech counterpart, the University of 17th ←12 | 13→November.²⁸ Recently, the Isla de Juventud in Cuba, which offered schooling and vocational training to children and adolescents from the Global South, has also been an object of study.²⁹

A second focus of research, which overlaps with the first in regard to institutions, is on studies abroad – that is, the institutions, programs and conditions under which students from the Global South studied at colleges and universities in the socialist countries. Research has dealt, for example, with students from the Global South studying in East Germany³⁰ or in the Soviet ←13 | 14→Union.³¹