A Hub of Anti-Colonialism: Prague's International Organizations in the Transnational Socialist Network and Global Cold War

Paris, 1996: Czech historian Karel Bartošek published his book titled Les Aveux des archives. Like many Czechoslovak intellectuals of his generation, Bartošek was a hard-liner communist in the 1950s, a reformist in the 1960s, and a dissident in the 1970s – finally ending up in exile in France after 1982. Referring to Artur London's famous testimony, which described the practice of Czechoslovak show trials, ¹ Bartošek focused on international dimensions of the Czechoslovak socialist regime, especially on the ties with the Parti communiste français. A part of the book is dedicated to international organizations and exile communities in ‘Praga Magica’ in the late 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by French historian Annie Kriegel, he used the phrase ‘Communist Geneva’, referring to Prague's role as a host of many international organizations. Bartošek stressed the political role of the Prague-based international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Cold War – he pictured them as tools of Soviet foreign policy and their officials as either obedient servants or useful idiots. ²

For years to come, Les Aveux des archives were the seminal reference in this field. Until recently, the history of Prague-based international organizations was interpreted only in the traditional Cold War framework, meaning that it served merely as a gear in the well-oiled Soviet propagandistic machine. ³ This article aims to introduce Prague as a centre of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thought and a host city to many Third World intellectuals, journalists and politicians. The international organizations that were based in Prague lie at the centre of my attention; together, along with other educational and media institutions, they formed a unique transnational space – partly interacting with the city of Prague, partly isolated from the physical environment. In addition, I look at this Prague-based space in a wider context, as an important centre of a large transnational network connecting international NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, individuals and state institutions mainly in socialist countries, but reaching all three worlds of the Cold War.

Prague's post-war cosmopolitan community is closely linked with the history of the Cold War. In the polarizing world, several exile communities settled in Czechoslovakia in the early years of the Cold War – the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese. ⁴ In the 1950s, the city became a destination for Western and Latin American socialist writers, poets, intellectuals and musicians. ⁵ Continuing decolonization then brought a new kind of foreigners to the Czechoslovak capital – students, workers, diplomats, military and security trainees, businessmen and journalists from the emerging ‘Third World’. ⁶

But the main reason why Bartošek semi-ironically labeled Prague as ‘Communist Geneva’ was the international organizations. Right after the Second World War in 1946, the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ) were founded in Prague. The IUS followed up on the interwar student internationals (International Student Confederation) and aimed to unite national student unions into one overarching organization. Similarly, the IOJ's roots went back to the interwar International Federation of Journalists and it had just as universalist a goal: it was meant to unite and represent the world's journalists of ‘democratic’ – meaning anti-fascist – conviction. Both the IUS and the IOJ were influenced by the emerging Cold War in the late 1940s when they gradually adopted Soviet positions on important international issues. This led to a split when most of the Western member organizations seceded and established their federations: the International Student Conference and the International Federation of Journalists, respectively. And the animosities at the height of the Cold War brought more organizations into Czechoslovakia. In 1951, Prague became the host of the World Peace Council, a socialist-oriented peace-promoting organization that stayed for three years before relocating to Vienna in 1954. Also in 1951, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) relocated to Vienna from Paris, where it resided since its establishment in 1945, and in 1956, it was pushed out again, this time to Prague. Similarly to previous cases, the West started running its own International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 1949, headquartered in Brussels. Even after its repulsion from France, however, the WFTU kept strong relations with the French communist trade unionist movement aligned with the PCF. The International Radio and Television Organization came to Prague already in 1950 from Brussels when the competing European Broadcasting Union was founded. And finally, in 1958, the Christian Peace Conference (CPC) and the World Marxist Review (WMR) were founded in Prague. The CPC was a platform trying to combine ecumenic Christianity with progressive socialism. ⁷ The WMR was an international Marxist theoretic journal, which was supposed to serve as a platform for the communist and worker parties to meet and discuss the ideological questions of Marxist thought. Having replaced the late Kominform, it united communist parties from the East, West and South.

Why was Prague chosen as the headquarters of so many international bodies? Initially, the IOJ and the IUS drew from the advantage of Czechoslovakia's capital in the post-war world: it was almost unharmed by the bombardments and other war damage, it profited from its position between the East and the West and could refer to its democratic traditions. It was even briefly considered to become the headquarters of the UN in 1945 (and Czechoslovakia's foreign minister Jan Masaryk for its Secretary General). ⁸ Equally important was the anti-fascist tradition – the 17^th of November, the day when the Nazis brutally closed Czech Universities in 1939, became International Student Day, and its legacy was guarded by the IUS, while the IOJ adopted the symbol of Julius Fučík, the world-famous Czech journalist, author of the Notes from the Gallows, and a communist martyr. ⁹ Later, when the Cold War intensified, other, more pragmatic reasons allegedly came into play. It was mentioned that Prague became the ‘Communist Geneva’ because of its position in the centre of Europe, which simplified the courier connection to Western countries. ¹⁰

The Cold War was an important factor that shaped Prague's international organizations, but it was not the only one. In this article, I focus on the connections with the countries of the ‘Global South’ or ‘Third World’. Anti-colonialism was a part of the genetic information of Prague-based international organizations, which attracted many Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to work in them, attend their congresses, and take part in their campaigns and events. Even though the East-West division was inscribed in the existence of these organizations and their pro-Soviet bias was apparent over the whole duration of the Cold War, the anti-colonial policy was not only a stick to beat the West with; in many aspects, it was a sincere attempt at national liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism. An interpretation that uses the framing of decolonization and development, which intersects with the Cold War, but is self-standing, is attempted here. This article focuses on the role of the Third World delegates, officials, guests and correspondents, on their formative factor in Prague's transnational space, and on the knowledge that was produced in this space by and about the Third World. I attempt to frame the relations between all these actors as a part of a heterogeneous polycentric network, which I call a transnational socialist network – with Prague as one of its important centres. In other words, using a variation to Eric Burton's term, it frames Prague as a hub of anti-colonialism in Europe divided by the Cold War. ¹¹

Studying the Prague-based secretariats, I draw from the recent scholarly focus on the role of international organizations in the Cold War. ¹² As shown by Akira Iriye, the new global order that emerged from the ruins of the Second World War was to a great extent defined by the ever-increasingly substantial role of international organizations. ¹³ As an important factor in the post-war world-system, international organizations also had an impact on the process of decolonization and vice versa. In an introduction to the fascinating special issue of the Journal of Global History concerning this relationship, Eva Maria Muschik proposes to distinguish three scholarly approaches, according to the functions that international organizations played in the process of decolonization: ‘(1) The most prevalent approach views international organizations as public forums for negotiating the meaning of decolonization more generally and the decolonization of specific places in particular. (2) Another approach examines international organizations as hubs for forging both anti-colonial and inter-imperial alliances. (3) A third presents international organizations and their employees as historical actors in their own right, who sought to respond to and shape the process of decolonization, rather than simply follow the lead of government representatives.’ ¹⁴ In the case of the Prague-based organizations, I would like to emphasize the second and third points – that they served as hubs (or one hub together) and as networks of actors with their agendas.

However, even though the scholarship on international organizations concerns trans-bloc exchange and the role of socialist experts, it still mostly focuses on West-based international organizations. The organizations both in the East and West were arguably important producers of competing internationalisms. The ‘alternative’ internationalism – produced in socialist countries and aimed mainly at the connection with the Third World – gained attention with the recent re-exploration of the East-South connections and writing Eastern Europe back into the global history of the Cold War. ¹⁵ Even in these works, however, the East-based international NGOs rarely come up as important co-producers of socialist internationalism. In this essay, I am trying to present them as significant hubs in the transnational socialist network.

In this article, the introduced organizations are labeled as ‘international non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs), as they were also referring to themselves. It is not a common term to describe East-based international bodies, as they are structurally different from the classical Western NGOs. It is true that in state socialist countries, the member organizations (national unions of students, trade unions) had tighter and subservient relations to the state and the ruling party. It is also true that these member organizations provided most of the finances for the international budgets, thus making the functioning of the ‘NGOs’ dependent on state socialist countries. Yet we still cannot label them as governmental organizations; the members from the West and South were often completely independent and pursued their own agenda. In some countries, the member organizations could be even illegal. Despite this hybrid character, I chose to call them international NGOs, as I believe it is a more fitting term than ‘intergovernmental organizations’, and many contemporary NGOs were and are dependent on state subsidies as well.

The article is based mainly on written sources – both published and unpublished. The National Archive of the Czech Republic managed to acquire archives of the International Union of Students and the International Organization of Journalists, even though incomplete and damaged, along with parts of archives of the World Peace Council and World Marxist Review. Even though unprocessed and fragmental, they are accessible to researchers. ¹⁶ The documentation of the World Marxist Review is kept in Moscow in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) but some parts of the collections are still classified. As a complimentary source of information, the article uses also oral interviews with the NGOs’ former officials. ¹⁷

The transnational space of socialist Prague – both real and imagined – was not constructed only as the Czechoslovak capital; it was co-produced by the Third World, its knowledge, and its people. Even though the foreigners lived partly in a bubble inside Prague, they still affected their environment and were affected by it, creating a hybrid ‘Third space’, as per Homi Bhabha. ¹⁸ The most suitable spatial framing I find to describe this ‘cosmopolitan Prague’ is a network– a network of its own as well as a part of a larger, global transnational socialist network. Manuel Castells described the advent of new information technologies and acceleration of the interconnections in the two last decades of the twentieth century as a process of forming of a ‘network society’. ¹⁹ If we go back to previous Cold War decades, we can characterize even the pre-network-society globalization as the emergence of various overlapping networks. But aside from globalization with its centres in the West, there was also an alternative one – a socialist one, as described by James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky and Steffi Marung. ²⁰ Such a process also produced alternative networks with their institutions and hierarchies. These overlapping networks are what I understand under the term transnational socialist network.

Each NGO formed its own network. They were spaces co-constructed by the actors in it – individuals and organizations, both non-state and state. Most of these actors were socialistically oriented, but not necessarily – it depended on the nature of their relations within the network. There were many actors of different backgrounds. The NGOs were polycentric and composed of member unions – in the case of the IUS, it was the national unions of students, in the case of the IOJ, it was the national journalist organizations, in the case of the World Marxist Review, it was the communist parties. Other bodies could have been associated without full membership. The relation of the member unions to their states varied – from state-controlled organizations in one-party states through independent NGOs to dissent illegal organizations. The members could bring their national discussions with them and engage in the common debate from diverse standpoints. The instrumentalization of the NGOs as autonomous actors has therefore its limits. ²¹

The international organizations in Prague were all concerned with their own professional, class, or sector agendas. But at the same time, they were interconnected with each other, creating something of a transnational bubble within Prague; the delegates from individual countries made small communities and friendships across the NGOs (the Soviets, Arabs, Latin Americans, etc.). This bubble was, of course, by no means hermetically sealed; it was composed of permeable, semi-closed networks of relations within and across the organizations and communities. And this network, as it was stated beforehand, was not confined by the city limits. Prague was not the only place that hosted the socialist-leaning international organizations; there was the Women's International Democratic Federation in East Berlin, ²² the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest, the World Peace Council, ²³ which moved from Prague to Vienna in 1954 and then to Helsinki in 1968, World Federation of Scientific Workers in London or the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Brussels. All these organizations called the ‘international democratic organizations’, formed a sort of transnational space. The organizations worked together and sent delegates to each other's congresses and conventions, and some of the delegates circulated between positions in different organizations. They gave each other their awards (each organization awarded its medals), referred to each other in their publications, and their representatives met at least once a year.

And these links did not go only from one organization to another. In a broader sense, we can interpret also the World Festivals of Youth and Students, ²⁴ World Peace Congresses with wide international attendance, and other events and conventions as a part of this network. Public intellectuals, recipients of the Lenin Prize, writers, and anti-colonial activists also engaged in these relations. There was student and worker mobility, as well as cultural and sports exchange, built on the basis of socialist internationalism. Another important hub was Moscow, of course, a traditional destination of students and communist pilgrims from all over the world. However, even though it hosted the Patrice Lumumba University, exile groups and solidarity committees, and even though it was the most important power centre of the socialist world, its role in the network was complemented by the nodes in other Central and Eastern European cities. And it was not exclusively socialist Europe that constructed this network – as we have seen, some organizations were seated and some events were held in neutral countries (Austria, Finland) or even NATO countries. ²⁵ Links also reached the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) to Cairo and other Third World projects (Bandung, Non-Aligned Movement, Tricontinental), or circles within the UN-affiliated organizations (UNESCO, UNICEF, UNCTAD). ²⁶

There have already been scholarly accounts to frame aspects of these entanglements. The concept of the Republic of Letters, originally designed to address the interconnectedness, unified language, and processes of the cultural production of the Enlightenment, has recently been picked up by Rossen Djagalov who used it to frame the space of cultural production and identity construction between the Second and the Third Worlds. ²⁷ Another spatial approach is Marcia Schenck's Black East, a variation of the Black Atlantic, designed to encapsulate the heterogeneous entanglements between the African and Eastern European socialisms and shared experiences of African expatriates in socialist countries. ²⁸ Djagalov and Schenck's approaches are methodologically very valuable; this article builds on them but puts the international organization in the centre of attention, which re-configures the spatiality. Yet another way to analyse the space was introduced by the research team Relations in the Ideoscape, headed by Birgit Schäbler. As a tool, this team used Arjun Appadurai's concept of Ideoscape as one of the currents – landscapes – of globalization. ²⁹ The project focused on ideological and cultural knowledge transfers between the Middle East and socialist Europe, finding forms and actors of the socialist ideoscape. While I acknowledge its usefulness, in this article, I move beyond the framing of the ideological landscape. The transnational socialist network that I propose encompasses its transnational nature, a variety of actors and both vertical and horizontal relations between them, and the spatiality of its centres and peripheries. ³⁰

The shape and language of the networks were also evolving over the decades. The peak of the Cold War in the early 1950s meant the Sovietization of the language and sharp competition with the ‘mirror organizations’ in the West. The era from the mid-1950s saw the coming of the Thaw and spiked attention given to the topics of decolonization and the Third World – and opened the possibilities of cooperation with the West. ³¹ In 1967, the student mirror organization was hit hard by an international scandal when it was discovered that they were funded by the CIA – and some of them were dissolved consequently, leaving the field for renewed universalist claims from the East. ³² The 1970s and 1980 have brought new rhetoric – one of human rights, converging Eastern and Western internationalisms. ³³ The whole interlinked space collapsed after 1989. For new democratic Czechoslovakia, the Prague-based NGOs were too interconnected with the communist dictatorships. But the collapse did not happen all at once – the NGOs were facing problems even before the ‘Velvet Revolution’, and some of their ideas had afterlives or were given a second chance under new circumstances in the post-1989 world.

The whole transnational socialist network was highly heterogeneous and cannot be seen as a space of unified ideology. Even the individual NGOs were composed of a variety of diverse actors. However, we can discern certain ideological and political traits that were to various extents shared among the international organizations. Most importantly for our argument, it was anti-colonialism, but there were other tropes as well – anti-fascism (a primary source of legitimacy), struggle for peace, disarmament and modernity. The language of the official production usually aligned with the Soviet stance. The East-Central European socialist countries did have a principal say in the main direction. They were main contributors to the budgets and often held executive positions – in the IUS and the IOJ, there was always a representative of Czechoslovakia occupying one of the two most important positions (President and Secretary General). The Treasury of the IUS was traditionally held by East Germans. The editor-in-chief of the WMR was always Soviet. But behind the curtains, there were rich discussions that showed that not all member organizations always agreed with everything and promoted their agendas. The disagreement with the official stance showed especially in the most controversial situations, such as the Soviet interventions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, when many members protested the NGO's official careful statements and which even caused secessions.

The anti-fascist commitment was the basic common ground of the post-war world. It was the glue that held the system of international organizations together. This was true for the UN-affiliated organizations as well as for those established in the future Western and Eastern Bloc. In the case of the Prague-based NGOs, as was mentioned, anti-fascism was in the genetic code of these organizations and the symbols that drew from the anti-fascist traditions (17^th of November, Julius Fučík) became the core of their mythologies. The anti-fascist paradigm called back to the interwar and war-time alliances of communist, socialist, anarchist and liberal forces, embodied in the common stance in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The Spanish question was still alive in the IUS and IOJ, the Spanish member organizations did not represent Francoist Spain but the Spanish Republic in exile. ³⁴ Anti-fascism was a flag behind which the delegates from both the East and West could rally. ³⁵

The anti-colonialism was another aspect of the ideology of the ‘democratic organizations’. There was not such a clear consensus on it as it was on anti-fascism from the beginning. But interestingly, the first post-war Prague-based NGOs (IUS and IOJ) adopted the language of anti-colonialism long before Khrushchev's turn toward the Third World in the mid-1950s. The anti-colonialism was a part of the concept of democracy as it was understood by the emerging transnational socialist network. Just as anti-fascism, it also calls back to the interwar period and the League against Imperialism. ³⁶ Anti-colonialism and relatedly, anti-racism, became legitimization tools; through promoting the rights of students or journalists all over the world, that is, even or especially in the colonial world, the NGOs could exercise their universalist claims. As early as 1947, the IUS established a special body that dealt with colonial matters – the Bureau of Students Fighting against Colonialism, having a specialized agenda, funding, issuing scholarships and publishing a bulletin Students against Colonialism. The Bureau not only focused on decolonization, but its members were also all from colonial or semi-colonial countries. ³⁷ Violent crises in Indochina, Indonesia and Madagascar in the late 1940s provoked heavy criticism of Western colonial regimes and sparked solidarity campaigns. ³⁸

Increasingly, the anti-colonial card was played for political purposes. In the IUS interpretation, it was the Western unions that were culpable for the split for defending controversial policies of their governments in the colonies and not the Eastern European delegations for abiding by the USSR in the Yugoslav or Czechoslovak crises. ³⁹ In the Korean War, the WFTU, IUS and IOJ (as well as other NGOs outside Prague) backed and disseminated the accusations of the use of ‘microbiological weapons’. ⁴⁰ Linking the topics of colonialism and racism also provided ammunition to target the United States. Criticism of racist realities in the USA was further legitimized by the presence of prominent anti-racist activists from the West, such as US African Americans W.E.B. Du Bois or Paul Robeson, at congresses in Prague. In his speech to the World Student Congress in 1950, Du Bois appreciated the representativeness of the event: ‘War is the result of evil conditions and their main cause. Peace is normal. Usually men do not kill each other. But men are induced to maim and murder because of some advantage which this offers. In our day it is great private profit of capitalism which causes world war, and it is the colonial system which causes the abnormal gains of capitalism. We can discuss this situation here today because the colonial peoples and what I may call the quasi-colonial people are represented.’ ⁴¹

Such talk, naturally, played into the USSR's hands. But that is not to say that the critique was only instrumental or without legitimate grounds. The NGOs were actively invoking people from the Third World to join and worked with them both in Prague and in the terrain. The IUS organized literacy campaigns, issued scholarships, promoted student rights and organized seminars about colonialism and its effects. ⁴² The WFTU focused on workers’ and trade unions’ rights in Latin America, South Africa, Iran and Saudi Arabia and pushed the UN to act. ⁴³ In 1957, it organized a Solidarity Week with the Algerian People and other solidarity campaigns (South Africa, Cuba, Vietnam, Cyprus, Iran and Jordan). ⁴⁴

The progressing decolonization and formation of student elites in the new countries also opened another round of competition between the Prague-based NGOs and their Western counterparts. Organizations from both the East and West exerted effort to incorporate as many member organizations from the Third World as possible to create an image that they were the global/universal organization. Both sides supported anti-colonial and national liberation struggles and courted the Third World by thematizing its problems. And they also started to organize their events in decolonized countries to emphasize their global dimensions. In the 1960s, the IUS Executive Committee met in Cairo, Jakarta and Algiers. ⁴⁵ The IOJ organized its meetings in Algiers, Baghdad, Santiago and Jakarta. ⁴⁶ The competition for the Third World sometimes meant problems with representation – to appear global, they had to make do with a union that was not dominant in their country. This fact was very much used as an argument by the Western mirror NGOs. ⁴⁷ But the representation argument cut both ways – as expressed by the Senegalese delegate to the IUS in 1954, who turned the problem against the colonial regimes: ‘If we have thousands of students in the world who are still not in a position to delegate national representatives, the blame must rest with those who refuse to grant the right of national representation to their subject national minorities.’ ⁴⁸

In any case, as the decolonization continued and the anti-colonial topics became more and more central in the transnational socialist network, the number of represented member organizations from the Third World rose and the balance within the NGOs shifted. Some Western student unions re-affiliated to Prague after 1967 and the CIA funding scandal. Established in 1958, the World Marxist Review (also known as Problems of Peace and Socialism) originally consisted of only twenty communist parties, mostly from Europe. ⁴⁹ But the number of represented parties and printed language editions rose steadily and in 1988, it was published in 41 languages and 70 versions in 48 countries, most of which were in the Global South. ⁵⁰ A similar effect was observed with the CPC: ‘One of the significant developments in the C.P.C. is its widening representation. There were fifty-six delegates present from Asia, and sixty from Latin America’, a participant described the 1978 All-Christian Peace Assembly gathered in Prague. ⁵¹

In the 1960s socialist internationalism peaked and Prague hosted more students and delegates from the Third World than ever. With the University of 17^th November ⁵² fully operational and the NGOs in their ‘golden age’, the city became a real ‘hub of anti-colonialism’. The city hosted – often with an NGO mediation – activists from Algeria, Angola, Portuguese Guinea, Indonesia and many other countries. The organizations developed their networks in the Third World where regional unions were being founded. The IOJ established relations with unions of Latin American, Chinese, Afro-Asian, or Arab journalists in the early 1960s. ⁵³ Despite some Soviet reservations, the WFTU vividly supported the meeting of Afro-Asian trade unions in Jakarta in October 1963 which adopted a stance against neo-colonialism. ⁵⁴ The CPC organized events with its regional filial organizations. In 1986, in the framework of the International Year of Peace declared by the UN, the CPC co-organized four continental conferences: one in Mumbai for Asia and Pacific, one in Dar es Salaam for Africa, another in Quito for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the last one in Hannover for Europe and North America. ⁵⁵ The IUS cultivated its relationship with the Latin American student union (OCLAE) and since 1972 also with the All-African Student Union (AASU). Together, the IUS and the regional unions co-organized many campaigns, such as the World Student Mobilization campaign on the 10^th anniversary of the student uprising in Soweto – 11 African states joined the campaign as well as many others from Europe, America and Asia. ⁵⁶

Even when decolonization was largely over and the enthusiasm somewhat faded away, the transnational socialist network promoted the topics of the Third World vigorously. The New International Economic Order, the initiative that emerged from the Non-Aligned Movement and the most significant challenge to the post-war global economic system, was also backed by the IOJ and other organizations, even though the ideas were not always aligned with the more reserved stances of the USSR. ⁵⁷ Fathi El Fadl from Sudan, General Secretary and one of the most important leaders of the IUS’ history, was a big proponent of the NIEO in the 1970s, as well as of global aims and scope of the IUS in general: ‘The present world order is marked by the imperialist and neo-colonialist domination and exploitation of the peoples of the developing countries and by an international division of labour which runs counter to the interests of the peoples of the developing countries and progressive mankind.’ ⁵⁸ The World Marxist Review organized an international symposium to discuss the NIEO; the partaking representatives of the world's communist parties were supportive, but the tone was much more cautious. The proceedings were then published in the journal's publishing house Peace and Socialism. ⁵⁹

Fathi El Fadl first came to Prague in late 1968, having been nominated for a position in the IUS executive committee by the Khartoum University Student Union. In 1971, he was elected the Secretary General and during his service until 1980, the number of represented unions in the IUS rose significantly. ⁶⁰ The representatives from the Third World member organizations certainly played a legitimization role in the international organizations – it was them who made the network global. But was the role only instrumental? Or did they have a real impact on the NGOs’ policies? Many of them went through several international organizations in the ‘transnational socialist network’ – especially those who could not return to their countries out of the threat of imprisonment or even execution. One such example is the Palestinian Mazen Husseini, who assumed the position of a Palestinian delegate in the IUS (and the editor-in-chief of the World Student News), then left for Helsinki to serve at the World Peace Council, and finally returned to Prague to be positioned in the IOJ.

The executive bodies of the World Marxist Review were dominated by representatives from European communist parties. The Third World delegates mostly accepted the hegemony of the socialist countries – the critique of the Soviet dominance in the journal came rather from the communist parties of the West (Japan, Italy, France). For the African and Arab communist parties, Soviet assistance was often a matter of survival – especially those working in illegality – and they adapted to the situation for pragmatic reasons. ⁶¹ But in the inner discussions, this ‘democratic deficit’ was also addressed, and with the increasing number of represented Third World, parties, these also wanted to have a say in the journal's agenda. There were voices that the journal had to cover global topics more rigorously and even those who said that Marxism should not be a criterion for membership. Michael Harmel, an influential South African communist who served as a delegate to the WMR, said at a plenary in 1971: ‘Different parts of Africa witness grave and deep changes, which are not sufficiently explained and scrutinized on the pages of our journal. (…) The journal should be international in the true sense of the word, but that must not be a cause for a whole continent, and particularly its most significant regions, to be excluded from the whole picture and analysis of the contemporary world. We deem it possible and necessary to receive a competent, deep, and up-to-date overview of the events in Africa, written by African Marxists, for publication in our journal’, said Harmel at the plenary meeting in 1971. ⁶² But the second-tier position of the African and Asian Marxists was never resolved; in fact, it was even institutionalized in 1988 when the journal got into financial problems and only the parties contributing to the budget (i.e. parties from socialist countries) effectively usurped the executive powers. ⁶³ The Latin Americans were better integrated into the global Marxist network already since the times of the Kominform and were represented in the editorial council from the start. ⁶⁴

The IUS was more inclusive. While the President was Czechoslovak, starting in 1960, there was an unspoken rule that the General Secretary came from a Third World country. The first one was Noori Abdel Razzaq Hussain from Iraq, followed by a fellow Iraqi Mehdi Al-Hafiz, then by Srinivasan Kunalan from India, Fathi El Fadl from Sudan and Georgios Michaelides from Cyprus (though a European country, also a post-colonial one). Their real impact probably varied; the function was influential, but it also depended on who occupied the other power centres – the Presidency, Treasury and the office of the Soviet delegate. ⁶⁵ But a general secretary could earn respect and autonomy; for example, Fathi El Fadl who held the position in the 1970s, is widely and unanimously remembered as a strong, charismatic figure and important policymaker ⁶⁶ . Under his leadership, the IUS was again getting closer to the universalist goal, as the number of national student unions with full or affiliated membership gradually increased, particularly in the Global South. ⁶⁷ With the fall of socialist regimes in Europe after 1989, the proportional influence of the Third World representatives grew even stronger; Franklin Gaston Santibañez from Chile became the President of the IUS, later replaced by Manish Tewari from India and Moeti Mpuru from South Africa became the Secretary General. ⁶⁸ The WFTU also had non-European leaders: Enrique Pastorino from Uruguay and Ibrahim Zakaria from Sudan served as general secretaries. Interestingly, the Western International Student Conference also adopted such an inclusive policy, having elected two Indian student leaders as the organization's heads in the 1960s, but the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions only had European presidents and general secretaries.

Within the NGOs Africans and Asians often managed the Third World-related agenda, even though not exclusively. There are also indications that the organizations deliberately delegated their Third World officials to represent them at international forums (such as the UN) in issues that involved colonialism, imperialism, or development. On the one hand, there is a possible interpretation that they were sent out on these missions because they came from post-colonial countries, worked on the topics in the NGOs, and thus were the most suitable experts. On the other hand, though, there is also a reason to suspect that the tasks were racialized on purpose – they could have been assigned to the missions to stress the anti-coloniality and globality of the sending NGO. ⁶⁹

Most recollections agree that Prague was a hospitable city, even though the delegates from the Third World admitted that they did not usually form friendships with the locals. That supports the claim that the NGOs were semi-isolated from the city around them; many delegates did not speak more than a few words in Czech, despite having spent years in Prague. ⁷⁰ Some of the delegates could also have a bad experience with the locals. The work environment naturally changed over the course of the Cold War. Not only the organizations themselves but also the city around them transformed substantially. Czechoslovakia as well as the idea of socialism itself evolved and affected the NGOs in Prague. First, the rupture in the communist movement caused problems; the Sino-Soviet split reflected in the transnational socialist network, too. Around the mid-1960s, the Chinese and Italians rebelled in the WFTU and shortly after that, the Cuban delegation and its radical supporters caused upheaval at the IUS congress in Ulaanbaatar, protesting against the organization's conformism. ⁷¹ The reform movement in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s sparked sympathies; according to some, the liberalizing atmosphere of Prague Spring affected the Soviet editors in the WMR so that they later became chief proponents of perestroika. ⁷² The reactions to the Soviet invasion were mixed; the WFTU officially condemned it. ⁷³ The IUS purposefully did not adopt any official stance so that everybody could save his or her face. ⁷⁴ Afghanistan was another blow that caused secessions, but largely by the ‘First World’ member organizations; the South often could not afford to be separated and stuck to the East even despite reservations.

The interconnections of the network with the materiality of Prague are also worth inspecting. Even though the beginnings were modest – the IUS started with only three rooms for all its activity, as per its first General Secretary Tom Madden ⁷⁵ – the NGOs soon built a prominent position within the city and the whole of Czechoslovakia. In the early 1970s, the IUS had a new headquarters constructed on a lucrative spot in the city centre by the river, and the seven-story building designed by a prominent Czechoslovak architect became one of the token buildings of Prague's modernist and brutalist architecture. ⁷⁶ The IOJ managed to acquire the headquarters in the same neighbourhood, Pařížská Boulevard. The World Marxist Review found home in a neo-Classicist palace that formerly hosted the university's Theological Faculty and Archbishop Seminary. In the late Cold War and with an intensifying tendency toward its end, the IUS and IOJ started using their contacts in the West and their particular legal position in the Czechoslovak system to develop economic activities to boost their budgets. The IUS ran a student hotel, using the profit for its activities, but also imported computers and other technology from the West and resold them to the Czechoslovak market. The IOJ started a similar business, trading computer software and interpreting technology, ending up running hotels and restaurants and owning or renting up to seventy properties in Prague – as the IOJ's President put it, the organization was ‘an island of capitalism in the sea of socialism’. ⁷⁷

The transnational socialist network took a heavy blow with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. The NGOs lost their main source of income, as the new, post-socialist governments did not want to subsidize what they saw as tools of communist propaganda. The Czechoslovak state started processes to seize their headquarters to make them move. With bank accounts running dry and political support gone, the organizations fell apart. The World Marxist Review dissolved already in the summer of 1990. Other organizations effectively ceased to exist in the late 1990s or diminished and eventually left Prague as mere shadows of their former glory. To a large extent, it was the delegates from the Third World who tried to keep the legacies of the NGOs alive. With the withdrawal of Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans assumed the highest positions in the secretariats of both IUS and IOJ. ⁷⁸ The network further weakened with the rising wave of neoliberalism. In some ways, it survived and reconfigured – but Prague was not a part of its history any longer.

The focus on the Third World problems in the Prague-based NGOs was undoubtedly caused (among other things) by the fact that the people from the Third World constituted a significant portion of their secretariats. The delegates, guests and students were shaping the network through their relations, their political activities, and perhaps most importantly, their contribution to the NGOs’ knowledge production. ⁷⁹

One form of transfer of knowledge was education and training. In this regard, the most prolific was the IUS, despite functioning mostly as a mediator. Having member organizations, associate members and other connections all over the world, the IUS facilitated scholarships that were issued by countries, parties or institutions. Many scholarship recipients were found for the Czechoslovak state which then placed the students at its universities. ⁸⁰ Similarly, the process was brokered for other East-Central European socialist countries, but also, for example, Finland. ⁸¹ Besides that, as almost all interviewed ex-officials of the IUS emphasize, the organization was the perfect place to learn politics; the student leaders could travel, negotiate, meet with top politicians and heads of state, and make compromises. In this regard, the IUS helped the representatives themselves develop their skills, contacts and careers. ⁸²

The IOJ built its network of schools, meant to train ‘democratic journalists’ from the Third World. The first of this kind, the International Institute of Journalism, was founded in 1963 in East Berlin, followed by schools in Budapest, Sofia, Havana and Prague. These schools were operated by national unions of journalists that hosted them but were a part of the IOJ network. Additional, more loosely connected schools, were founded in Bucharest, Baghdad, Lima and Pyongyang. ⁸³ According to the director of the Havanese school, all establishments worked closely together and shared experiences. ⁸⁴ The school Czechoslovakia was at first opened in Roztěž Castle before it was re-established in Prague in 1983, named after Julius Fučík. It offered six-month and two-month courses: ‘Primary attention will be given, besides topical theoretical knowledge, to practical training which will predominate in the syllabus.’ ⁸⁵ The school trained 117 journalists from 17 African, Asian and Latin American countries in four years since its establishment. ⁸⁶ And the impact of the school was spread; after graduation, the alumni continued to produce knowledge as journalists and their careers were affected by the training. An Iraqi female student who took part in the first course of the Prague School was expressing her wishes to give a lecture on propaganda in Baghdad, based on what she had learned in the course. A part of the training was the promotion of Czechoslovakia and socialism: ‘Apart from the theoretical lectures and the practicals in the news agency, radio and television, the participants in the opening course became acquainted with interesting aspects of life in Czechoslovakia: its industry, agriculture, social and health care and education.’ ⁸⁷ The IOJ cooperated also with other Prague-based international organizations, like when the WFTU facilitated courses at the IOJ school for the ANC representatives. ⁸⁸

Similarly, the WFTU also ran its training courses for Third World trade unionists. In cooperation with the communist trade union centres from Western countries (especially France) which worked as mediators, the WFTU established connections with local movements, such as the Union générale des travailleurs d’Afrique noire (UGTAN). In the Year of Africa, they co-organized a trade union school in Conakry for workers from Senegal, Morocco, Angola, Chad, Gabon, Mali and Guinea – and more were to come but could not out of financial or political reasons. A year later, African trade unionists were to be trained in Czechoslovakia. ⁸⁹ Besides Conakry, a similar institution was founded in Bamako, Mali, and a trade union college was established in Bernau in the GDR to host trade unionists from the Third World. ⁹⁰ The WFTU also cooperated with the local Czechoslovak organization (Revoluční odborové hnutí, ROH) – together they ran Antonín Zápotocký Trade Union School for Third World trainees. ⁹¹ The WFTU also organized short educational internships in Africa for its staff, so that they learn more about African realities and could in turn use the knowledge to train African trade unionists. As it was put by Immanuel Harisch: ‘Unionists from Guinea and Mali attended a special course at Bernau College, which was taught by East German staff who had previously gathered valuable experience at Conakry, the overall aim of which was that the African graduates of the special course would pass on their knowledge and skills upon their return to Africa’. ⁹²

Another way of producing knowledge was in the form of publications. The international organizations had their correspondents in the field in the whole world; they worked with their member organizations and then discussed the ideas at different levels within the organizations. Much of this knowledge was then made public through various channels – the knowledge was published in Europe but often it was authored by delegates or correspondents from the South, or it was aggregated information that had come from all around the world. Each of the organizations had its journal: the IUS had World Student News for general readership and specifically for Africans in cooperation with AASU, it published Africa Bulletin. For regional audiences, it also produced Arab Struggle and Asian Bulletin (later Asian and Pacific Bulletin). The IOJ published the magazine Democratic Journalist and the IOJ Newsletter, the WFTU had WFTU Bulletin, and of course, the World Marxist Review was organized around the journal of the same name. Delegates from the Third World served as editors or even chief editors of these journals: influencing or even supervising the knowledge production from the centre. Aside from the periodicals, all organizations produced books, leaflets and other educational materials. The WFTU was particularly prolific in this regard, exchanging books between the decolonized world and Europe, thus contributing both to the dissemination of socialist ideas and learning about the trade unions in the South. ⁹³ The African studies and other area studies were still in their infancy in the Eastern Bloc and its experts often relied on information from the South. The knowledge was thus flowing both to and from the Global South. ⁹⁴

Over the course of the Cold War, the Third World focus shifted from Algeria to Congo and Vietnam to Angola, and Mozambique to apartheid South Africa. The socialist world systematically criticized the racist realities in the USA – and the transnational network and the media it produced were a part of this pressure. As argued by Mary Dudziak, the fear that the negative image of racial discrimination in the USA might sweep newly independent African countries into the arms of the Soviet Union (especially after the Year of Africa) was one of the factors that made the civil rights movement succeed. ⁹⁵ The WMR explicitly focused on knowledge production – the journal organized conferences, roundtables and seminars all over the world and published its proceedings. And not only those focused on Marxist theory, but also on problems of national liberation, racism, development and scientific-technical revolution. ⁹⁶

Until recently, there was only one explanatory model for Prague-based international organizations – that of ‘Communist Geneva’. In this article, I have proposed a different take. With their global scope, I find it necessary not to view the NGOs only through the lenses of the Cold War, but also through those of decolonization. I have tried to sketch out the contours of the transnational socialist network which I find to be a good interpretative framework for the history of the East-based NGOs. In fact, I believe it could serve well even as a tool to explore the history of global socialism and reconstruct the intricate relations between socialists in the East, West and South.

As I argue, the Prague-based international organizations might have been semi-isolated from the city that surrounded it, but at the same time, they were highly connected in the international (transnational) milieu. The interconnected organizations indeed formed something of a ‘hub of decolonization’. They provided opportunities for people from different backgrounds to meet and interact. They gathered knowledge from their networks in the Global South and aggregated and re-produced it, and programmatically set up institutions and scholarship programmes. They organized literacy and other humanitarian campaigns. And they significantly contributed to the Cold War mobility, transferring people from the South to the North and vice versa and across the Iron Curtain. Not just the officials working at the NGOs’ secretariats, but also thousands of people who attended the plenary congresses or ad hoc conferences.

The networks that the NGOs formed or were a part of also helped with the formation of elites in the Global South. Mainly through the training and scholarship programmes, which were designed with this very purpose. But the NGOs developed their officials as well – even though life in Prague could have its peculiarities and the Third World representatives could sometimes be treated as second-tier, they also gained important experience in how to work in international organizations which helped them substantially in their careers; many alumni of the NGOs later landed in politics, diplomacy, in other international organizations or academia.

This is not to say that the ‘Communist Geneva’ thesis is completely unsubstantiated. To a certain extent, the NGOs did function as ‘front organizations’ and Eastern European communist parties did have a strong say in their direction. We also cannot discard the suspicion that Prague's international milieu provided recruitment opportunities to Czechoslovak secret services. But that being said, we also must acknowledge that it is not the only story there. And the one about the ‘hub of anti-colonialism’ deserves to be told just as much. This article is perhaps rather introductory to the field of Prague-based NGOs and their networks – further research is necessary. Hopefully, this article will contribute to it.