Suchergebnisse

This article revisits the Eastern Bloc's educational assistance provided to North Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. It highlights the political and economic premises, interests and policies at play, and investigates the role of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. It examines the creation of schools in North Africa and the Middle East and the training of students in the socialist countries. The article argues for the centrality of education in the international policy of the Eastern Bloc, further demonstrating its importance in the political economy of the relations with the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

A major ally of the Marxist-inspired liberation movements, which fought against Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, the Soviet Union provided them with not only military, but also civil aid in the form of scholarships. This paper focuses on the training of students from Portuguese Africa in the USSR. While it provides data and analyzes the importance and the complexities of educational assistance in the context of anti-colonial revolutions, it also sheds light on the tensions and serious conflicts that cast a shadow over the relationships between students and leaders. Students who created opposition groups and were accused of plotting against the leaders, criticizing the USSR, or trying to postpone their return to the motherland were repatriated and punished. Others managed to migrate and pursued their opposition from the West. Confronted with these phenomena, the party leaders grew disillusioned and reduced the number of students studying in the Soviet Union.

This working paper is intended as an overview of the Soviet Union's and Eastern Europe's aid to and cooperation with Africa in the field of higher and professional-technical education during the Cold War. For a long time, both this and other important chapters of the Eastern bloc's relations with Africa and more broadly with the Third World had been either neglected or completely dismissed. In post-Cold War scholarship, the prevalent notion was that the Soviet-style political and economic model "was responsible for many grievous economic ills in the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century" and that it "shattered all possibilities of democratic rule, prosperity, and social stability". The overall contribution of the Eastern bloc in the development of the Third World was considered as either negative or insignificant. Even a radical political economist like Andre Gunder Frank could affirm in 1989 that "much Third Worldist socialist rhetoric is just that, and no more", and add that "the East has supported superstructural change in the South with words and sometimes arms".

Soviet Lessons for Arab Modernization: Soviet Educational Aid to Arab Countries after 1956 This paper examines the Soviet-Arab cooperation in the domain of higher education and particularly the education of Arab students in the USSR. It argues that educational cooperation took shape on the ground of shared beliefs about the role of the state in the process of economic development and modernization. Soviet educational aid constituted a major vehicle for the transfer and implementation of Soviet ideas about modernization. It played a significant role in the development of Arab countries and marked the Soviet-Arab partnership.