Introduction: Socialist Humanitarianism

Humanitarian action connected socialists across the world in the context of the Cold War. Socialist aid flowed through multilateral humanitarian organizations and the representatives of socialist states helped to develop the legal frameworks and practices that shaped the international humanitarian sector. Complex long-term medical assistance programmes that were coordinated by national elites in the Global South and the ‘Global Easts’ left a lasting mark upon the built environment and healthcare infrastructure. ¹ Humanitarianism also permeated domestic life within state socialist countries. Through solidarity initiatives, socialist citizens translated their vocal support for national liberation movements and oppressed peoples into tangible material and financial assistance. State socialist regimes called upon voluntary humanitarian organizations to supplement domestic healthcare services by organizing blood donations and providing at-home care services. Beyond state socialist contexts, giving and receiving aid created a complex ecosystem that connected grassroots leftist organizations across continents.

This special issue brings together a diverse range of perspectives to explore the meaning, purpose, and practices of socialist humanitarianism. It deliberately advances a broad definition of socialist humanitarianism as the circulation of aid delivered by individuals, organizations, or governments that identified with socialism. This expansive framing allows us to bring different scales of socialist humanitarianism into conversation, from complex state-led medical assistance programmes to grassroots initiatives that were developed by leftists in Latin America and Western Europe. In this short introduction, I will examine why the socialist world has been sidelined within international historiographies on humanitarianism and argue that placing it at the centre can offer new ways of understanding the evolution of humanitarian ideas and practices across the second half of the twentieth century.

Despite the ubiquity of socialist donors and aid networks, socialist states and actors are chronically underrepresented in historiographies of international humanitarianism. The reasons for this are complex and arguably rooted in the development of the international humanitarian sector in the first half of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the First World War and the 1917 revolutions that dissolved the Russian Empire, Western relief agencies’ efforts to address widespread displacement, disease, famine, and malnutrition across Eastern Europe and the Near East were often implemented with the dual goals of alleviating suffering and preventing the spread of Bolshevism. ² Relief operations deployed in certain regions of the nascent Soviet Union were often critiqued within donor societies for fuelling the development of Bolshevism and supporting the political enemies of the West. ³ Anti-Bolshevik impulses also deeply shaped the international Red Cross movement's response to the intensification of civil war violence across Europe in the early 1920s. ⁴ After the end of the Second World War, the anti-communist thrust of international humanitarian relief efforts accelerated as the wartime coalition of the Allies splintered. Thereafter, Western-led relief and reconstruction assistance to address wartime displacement and destruction were explicitly implemented as a response to the perceived geopolitical and civilizational threats posed by communism. ⁵

Historical and contemporary understandings of humanitarianism are also heavily influenced by the experiences of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) headquartered in the West, including the Red Cross and the United Nations. ⁶ Narrow understandings of what humanitarianism is have resulted in the sidelining of ‘humanitarian action not borne of the Northern-dominated and highly institutionalized international regime’, which has meant that relief practices originating in either the Global South or the socialist world have not been fully incorporated into the global history of humanitarianism. ⁷ Instead, global histories have tended to take Western perspectives and practices as normative and focus on ‘watershed moments’ that carried enormous significance within North America and Western Europe, but that were less formative elsewhere. In the West, the Biafran War caused an international outpouring of humanitarian activism and sentiment, reshaped the humanitarian sector, and was a key moment of enormous governmental and non-governmental mobilization. ⁸ This conflict may have been the catalyst for the West's ‘NGO moment’ during which NGOs became experts in aid provision and desirable partners in the implementation of international political programmes, but the same cannot be said for the socialist world. ⁹ Different flashpoints emerge if we look from the vantage point of the ‘Global Easts’. The Korean War (1950–53) was a formative moment for the globalization of socialist humanitarianism. Aid and medical teams from across Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia were dispatched to North Korea, and thousands of Korean child refugees were housed across socialist Eastern Europe. ¹⁰ Decolonization in Africa and the Vietnam War were also important turning points, both for state socialist regimes seeking to showcase themselves as humanitarian donors and for widespread societal humanitarian mobilization. The collapse of socialism in Europe also generated a powerful ‘NGO moment’. Transnational humanitarian aid flowed to formerly state socialist countries and a plethora of informal organizations sprang up to address humanitarian crises, often in collaboration with international organizations and foreign donors. ¹¹

Definitions of humanitarianism have largely been framed around the fundamental principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence, which has also resulted in the exclusion of the socialist world. Innovative scholarship has examined how these theoretically apolitical principles have been (and continue to be) mobilized by NGOs and humanitarian agencies originating in the Global North to perpetuate colonial hierarchies in the Global South. ¹² However, as Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Julia Pacitto aptly observe, both ‘a strict adherence to the Northern institutional model and the countervailing post-colonial critique of the Northern system’ have rendered other forms of humanitarianism less visible or framed them as deviations from the ‘norm’. ¹³ Actors and governments across the socialist world rejected the principle of neutrality and emphasized the inseparability of humanitarianism and politics, particularly anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. ¹⁴ The same rejection of the neutrality of relief was practiced by prospective recipients of humanitarian aid in the context of the Cold War. In the wake of disaster, certain socialist governments (for example, China and the Soviet Union) refused to accept foreign aid in order to prevent reputational damage domestically and internationally. ¹⁵ The fundamental principle of independence was also largely meaningless in socialist states because organizations who sought to deliver aid required, at the very least, some level of endorsement from the government in order to operate.

Socialist states were also keen to present their humanitarian activities as distinctive from those that originated in the capitalist West. In the context of decolonization, governments in state socialist Europe framed their aid to the Global South as the antithesis of Western philanthropy: an ‘extension of the struggle against fascism and capitalist imperialism’ and a longer-term solution to underdevelopment and dependency. ¹⁶ In communist China, humanitarian action required an entirely different vocabulary because the concept of humanitarianism was so strongly associated with European and US imperialism. ¹⁷ In this special issue, Dongxin Zou explores how Chinese doctors practiced a distinctive form of Maoist humanitarianism in Algeria, wherein they rejected privilege and professional hierarchies and collapsed the boundaries between medical expertise and political consciousness. On the other side of the world in Cuba, humanitarianism has long been framed around the idea of ‘health(care) as political praxis’ and built upon non-hierarchical visions of solidarity that are undergirded by ‘cooperation without political conditionality or material self-interest’. ¹⁸ Since the 1960s, sending Cuban medical brigades overseas has been conceptualized as the antithesis of charitable giving and a method for addressing ‘deeper structures of inequity found within healthcare provision on a global scale’. ¹⁹ Therefore, vocabularies of humanitarian action differed significantly in the socialist world, even if the actual practices of humanitarianism shared common features across geopolitical divides.

Despite its underrepresentation in scholarship, the socialist world was an epicentre of transnational humanitarian intervention and mobilization in the twentieth century. As donors, state socialist states were important links in the global networks of humanitarian aid that flowed from the ‘Second’ to ‘Third’ worlds. Socialist states also received aid and even became centres of international humanitarian intervention in moments of crisis, be it in Tito's Yugoslavia, Ceaușescu's Romania, Mengistu's Ethiopia, or Gorbachev's Soviet Union. ²⁰ Beyond acting as donors and recipients, socialist states also helped to shape the international humanitarian sector more broadly. After the end of the Second World War, socialist states made major contributions to the development of international humanitarian law, particularly the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions in the 1970s. ²¹ Experts from Central and Eastern Europe were instrumental in ensuring the gradual codification of healthcare as a human right in international law throughout the 1940s–1970s. ²² In the 1970s, non-aligned and socialist countries helped reshape international humanitarian law to include the protection of guerrilla fighters in liberation wars, as well as reform the relationship between national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the central bodies of the movement in Geneva. ²³ Socialist states were also enthusiastic participants in high profile international humanitarian programmes that were delivered within the framework of multilateral organizations headquartered in the capitalist West, including the League of Red Cross Societies, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Health Organization. ²⁴

Across the twentieth century, humanitarianism provided socialist regimes with a form of legitimization and a method for projecting alternative geopolitical visions on the global stage. In the 1920s, the recognition of the Bolshevik-controlled Russian Red Cross by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Soviet Union's engagement with international relief agencies lent legitimacy to the fledgling Soviet regime at home and abroad and served to counter negative representations of the new government in the West. ²⁵ In the 1960s, engagement in humanitarian activities provided national independence movements in the decolonizing world with a method for building legitimacy and mobilizing international support. ²⁶ During the Cold War, the practice of socialist humanitarianism served to foster imaginaries of a new world order. By providing coordinated and long-term healthcare assistance to the newly-established states that emerged from collapsing European empires, socialist regimes exported their healthcare models to post-colonial contexts, claimed authority within the field of global health, and developed a ‘socialist commonwealth ideal that expanded beyond Europe’. ²⁷ As Čarna Brković's work on the Yugoslav Red Cross aptly shows, humanitarian initiatives were a form of ‘socialist worldmaking’ that constructed ‘an imaginary of worldwide relations distinct from globalisation and colonialism’. ²⁸

Socialist humanitarianism was a powerful form of diplomacy that was exercised from both above and below. Visibly supporting national liberation movements through the delivery of aid allowed state socialist regimes to showcase their commitment to anti-imperialism and sharpen the distinction between the West and the East on the global stage. ²⁹ Outside the framework of state socialist regimes, humanitarian aid was an important manifestation of socialist internationalism during periods of conflict. During the Spanish Civil War and Vietnam War, trade unions, leftist political parties, and activists across Europe, North America, and Asia sent material, medical, and financial aid to Republican Spain and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. ³⁰ For citizens in state socialist countries, the act of giving aid – be it money, resources, or blood – was a tangible expression of solidarity with oppressed people and a way to live out the ideals of socialist internationalism. ³¹

Beyond the international context, focusing on humanitarianism also offers insight into the numerous ways in which citizens opted in to the task of building socialism, as well as the complex ways in which international politics shaped the social and cultural history of state socialist societies. The ‘home front’ of socialist internationalism was a kaleidoscope of activist solidarity initiatives that were simultaneously coordinated by above and from below. ³² These initiatives were dynamic spaces that spawned ‘the seeds of both resistance and legitimation’ and where state ideologies were both rigidly enforced and subverted. ³³ Dora Tot's article in this special issue takes readers to the home front of Yugoslav socialist internationalism, where ritualized and state-controlled acts of solidarity provided opportunities for citizens to contribute to the government's humanitarian engagements with national liberation movements and become ‘active participants in socialist worldmaking’. Within state socialist societies, humanitarianism was not only about delivering aid overseas and was also geared towards supplementing domestic healthcare provision through voluntary labour. ³⁴ Maren Hachmeister's article explores how the Czechoslovak and Polish Red Cross societies served the healthcare system by organizing blood donations. While these socialist Red Cross societies were subordinate to the state, the governments of both countries depended heavily on the voluntary labour of their members to ensure that hospitals and clinics had an adequate supply of blood. Hachmeister shows that through this relationship of dependence, the Red Cross societies in Czechoslovakia and Poland both stabilized and challenged socialist rule in their respective countries.

Placing the socialist world at the centre of the history of humanitarianism also highlights networks of aid distribution that complicate the traditional trajectories of Global North-Global South transfer. Rather than flowing from the West to the ‘rest’, medical expertise, technical assistance, and relief supplies circulated from East-South, East-East, South-East, and South-South throughout the twentieth century. Focusing on Cuba's enormous contributions to the delivery of medical aid globally allows us to not only ‘disrupt the imperial gaze of humanitarianism’, but also to disrupt hierarchies within the socialist world itself. ³⁵ Cuba sent far greater numbers of doctors, nurses, and teachers on overseas missions than European state socialist regimes, including the self-proclaimed leader of the socialist bloc – the USSR. ³⁶ Aid also circulated horizontally within and across the socialist world. Mozambique was a hub of both infra-African aid and socialist humanitarianism after independence, as aid and medical personnel arrived from Tanzania, Guinea, Cuba, China, and North Korea, as well as from Western leftist networks. ³⁷ In the aftermath of the 1988 Armenian earthquake, numerous socialist states that had previously received Soviet aid sent relief supplies to the USSR, including Yugoslavia, Hungary, Vietnam, Romania, North Korea, China, and Mongolia. ³⁸ Aid also circulated bidirectionally across geopolitical divides and shared experiences motivated socialist citizens to donate to their ‘fraternal’ neighbours. ³⁹ In this special issue, Sebastian Fonseca's article helps us to reconsider the direction of aid flows through its focus on a transnational grassroots network: the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES). Against the backdrop of anti-communist terror across Latin America, ALAMES's humanitarianism was a form of epistemic survival for practitioners of social medicine as the group protected persecuted physicians, created institutional safe havens, and disseminated scholarship across borders. As Fonseca argues, the work of ALAMES offers a new perspective on socialist humanitarianism, one that moves beyond the framework of the state and international NGOs to explore grassroots South–South connections.

Humanitarianism also provides a lens for exploring exchange, tensions, and fragmentation within the socialist world itself. The delivery of humanitarian aid from East to South was inflected by intra-socialist hierarchies, as well as a perpetual struggle for resources and influence. Competition and collaboration were core elements of state efforts to export socialist healthcare in the era of decolonization and medical professionals from state socialist countries often worked alongside one another during overseas medical missions. ⁴⁰ As Bogdan Iacob shows in this special issue, Romanian officials closely studied the aid programmes of other state socialist governments in order to formulate their own assistance programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, Dongxin Zou's article demonstrates how Chinese doctors in Algeria embraced Maoist humanitarianism as a distinctive offering, which meant rejecting the privileges and remuneration that their counterparts from European socialist countries received and opting to work in remote rural areas. These choices set them apart from the Romanian and Soviet medical missions that are explored in Bogdan Iacob's and my own contribution, which largely focused on enhancing urban healthcare provision in recipient societies, despite the governments of Romania and the USSR publicly espousing the benefits of their medical systems in improving health outcomes for rural populations.

The socialist world also provides a new lens for examining the relationship between donors and recipients of humanitarian aid. Within state socialist Europe, the relationship between socialist donors and recipients was sometimes shaped by a sense of sameness: shared experiences of poverty and scarcity, as well as a perceived sense of mutual dependency. ⁴¹ Beyond the European continent, aid flowing from East to South was built upon a foundation of anticolonial solidarity, but the donor–recipient relationship sometimes replicated colonial dynamics. This paradox was central to European socialist humanitarianism, wherein a sincere commitment to anti-racism and anti-imperialism sat uncomfortably alongside racialized thinking and practice. ⁴² Interactions between medical teams from state socialist Eastern Europe and their counterparts in the postcolonial world were often ‘underpinned by the cultural revival of fantasies of Western imperial power’ and discussions of socialist aid drew divisions between the ‘modernity’ of the donor and ‘backwardness’ of the recipient. ⁴³ The rhetoric and imagery used to mobilize citizens of state socialist contexts to support people across the decolonizing world were also sometimes inflected by imagined civilizational hierarchies. ⁴⁴ Recipient societies also projected their own racial hierarchies onto foreign physicians. ⁴⁵ In this special issue, Bogdan Iacob explores how ideas about race shaped the donor–recipient relationship between Romanian physicians and the populations that they served in Sub-Saharan Africa. These interactions produced ‘socialist whiteness’: a racial optic premised on ideas about developmental hierarchies, European civilizational superiority, the modernizing potential of socialism, and the pathologization of postcolonial populations as underdeveloped. My own article also examines how civilizational hierarchies permeated Soviet humanitarianism. Not only did publications on Soviet medical missions present local populations as ‘backwards’, but seconded Soviet specialists tended to be recruited from the more ‘developed’ republics of Russia and Ukraine, rather than from the republics of the Caucasus or Central Asia.

Histories of humanitarianism have tended to privilege the perspectives of donors at the expense of recipient governments and societies. Recently, however, a developing body of scholarship has emerged that explores how countries within the Non-Aligned Movement and the socialist world engaged flexibly with an array of state and non-state donors across geopolitical divides. ⁴⁶ Two articles in this special issue make important interventions in this regard. First, Alila Brossard Antonielli examines how aid was received in Angola and Mozambique during the Cold War and then remembered in the decades thereafter. In her focus on recipients, Antonielli illuminates how independence movements and other affiliated organizations navigated the complexities of the Cold War aid landscape and leveraged personal connections to secure both medical aid and international recognition. Second, Sebastian Fonseca's exploration of the activities of the Latin American transnational collective ALAMES demonstrates how the boundary between the donor and the recipient could be blurred and even dissolved. Persecuted social medicine practitioners within the network simultaneously received and gave aid to their colleagues in their efforts to resist the leftist ‘epistemicide’ that was enacted as part of Operation Condor in the Southern Cone.

As the scholarship on socialist humanitarianism and this special issue demonstrate, looking from the vantage points of the socialist world offers new ways of considering the modern history of humanitarianism. Closely examining practices and discourses from socialist contexts and actors across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America expands our understanding of humanitarianism beyond the definitions that have been advanced by Northern-dominated multilateral organizations throughout the twentieth century. New geographies of humanitarianism also emerge that upend traditional assumptions about unidirectional Global North–Global South transfer. Decentring humanitarian action that originated in the capitalist West allows us to nuance the chronology of the international humanitarian sector and propose alternative timelines and watershed moments that shaped its development. Taken together, the articles that follow invite readers to consider the socialist world as an important site of humanitarian mobilization and intervention in the twentieth century.