Global Labor and the ILO ( ) A Post-Cold War Perspective 1

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1 Global Labor and the ILO ( ) A Post-Cold War Perspective 1 Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva The aim of my research is to look at labor as one of the most contentious issues of the Cold War period in order to better understand how Cold War has functioned as both a discourse and in practice and so as to underscore the divergences as well as the convergences between both economic and social models. For that matter, I use international organizations as fields (and not objects) of research, primarily the ILO 2 but also the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. 3 This work is based on three assumptions and/or choices that shape the way I am looking at my topic and which I first wish to clarify. Firstly, regarding the definition of or approach to labor, I will roughly follow the mental framework to which my actors and in particular the ILO actors were beholden. Since the late 1930s (following the death of Albert Thomas in 1932 and the entry of the US into the ILO in 1934) there has been a shift in the perception and definition of labor as a field of action. In the 1920s, labor and workers had to be mainly protected. Protective conventions (like the eight-hour workday) or social insurance were priorities of the organization. Starting in the 1930s, labor had to be organized productivity, planning, and manpower-management training became the main issues. Following this, and unlike what I have done in my previous work on the GDR or on the German social state, the work experience will not be at the center of my investigation; rather, I will focus on the discourse on labor. Thus the main actors of my presentation will not be the workers but the officials and experts, possibly trade unionists and politicians, who discussed labor issues. Secondly, the classic Cold War historiography focuses on the opposition between and incompatibility of both systems. I have no intention of glossing over the struggles and oppositions between both economic and social systems, but I shall be putting them in a post- Cold War perspective. 4 I want to study how this opposition has been constructed. I also want 1 This text has been written and discussed during my stay at the Re :work in Berlin between January and July The literature on the ILO is growing very quickly. For a complete bibliography, see the last edited volumes: Jasmien van Daele, Magali Rodriguez Garcia, Geert van Goethem, Marcel van der Linden (eds.), ILO Histories : Essays on the International Labor Organization and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century (Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Isabelle Lespinet-Moret, Vincent Viet (eds.) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011); Sandrine Kott, Joëlle Droux (eds.), Globalizing Social Rights : The ILO and Beyond (London: Palgrave, 2012), forthcoming. 3 The literature on the ECE is still scarce. See Gunnar Myrdal, Twenty Years of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, International Organization 22, no. 3 (Summer) ; and David Wightman, East- West Cooperation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, International Organization 11, no. 1 (1957) Vaclav Kostelecky, The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe: the beginning of a history, Gothenburg, Graphic Systems, There are a number of people now working on ECE material see in particular the ongoing research of Vincent Lagendijk. 4 Sari Autio-Sarasmo, Katalin Mikossy (eds.), Reassessing Cold War Europe (Routledge, 2010). 1

2 to bring to light another side of the story and decipher the circulation of knowledge and also learn how the hidden convergence between both systems related to labor questions. Most of the authors who adopt a post-cold War narrative focus on political, cultural and technological exchange and tend to emphasize a one-way circulation. They stress the exportation of values, ideas and goods from the West to the East and ( from a winners point of view?) disclose a kind of hidden Westernization of the East much before the final demise of the socialist bloc. The historiography of human rights is paradigmatic for that. 5 What I discovered is that in the field of labor exchanges things were less unilateral. At least up to the early 1970s, socialist solutions and models did pose a challenge and even served as inspiration for some Western European technocrats (and we should not forget the huge impact on powerful communist parties like those of France or Italy). But what I have also discovered in working on IO material is that in order to really understand these circulations we must bring developing Third-World countries into the picture. These countries played a crucial role in the circulation and cross-pollination of both models and for that, IO are excellent observatories. Thirdly, as previously stated, I will use International Organizations as fields of research and not as objects. This means that I will not address the realist/functionalist debate, which focuses on the role international organizations were able to play as international actors. 6 I am using the IO material as international (or transnational) open social spaces where ideas and know-how practices are exchanged, where dominant paradigms are received, constructed and exported from and to national scenes. I use them as observation sites from which I can identify and follow actors and study what I call mechanisms of internationalization or globalization. But in order to do so I chose to enter into the IO in a special way. I have a general (although not a permanent) distrust toward the formal trappings of IO and have purposely avoided those large conferences and meetings (and their printed material) that are used by national representatives as nationalistic soapboxes and places where power blocs take shape. I have been looking in particular at the archival documents (mainly correspondence and reports) produced by officials and experts in the secretariats (of the ECE) as well as in the ILO office. This allows me to identify and trace certain actors who act as links between the national and the international spheres, between West and East. What I wish to present here is the first results of this research based on archival research that I have done in the ILO and ECE archives in Geneva, in the Stasi and SAPMO archives in Berlin, and which I wish to complete with research in the Bundesarchiv and in the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. 5 Daniel Charles Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton University Press, 2001). 6 See my paper : Sandrine Kott, Les organisations internationales terrains d étude de la globalisation: Jalons pour une approche socio-historique, in Critique international, 52, (2011), p and International Organizations. A Field of Research for a Global History in Zeithistorische Forschungen. Studies in Contemporary History, 3, 2011, p

3 I wish to proceed in three steps. 1) Firstly, I will study how the Cold War was constructed around the labor issue and how the ILO was a space where oppositions between two conceptions of labor were constructed and discussed. 2) Secondly, I will show how convergences emerged from these debates and the role that certain actors and countries played in the emergence of these convergences. 3) Thirdly, I will study the circulation of know-how and expertise between West and East as well as East and South, shifting the analytical framework from Cold War to developmental issues. 1. Labor as a Cold War Issue The ILO is an ideal observatory for looking at how the question of labor became a major Cold War issue. The ILO as a Cold War Actor The ILO itself can be seen as an early Cold War institution. 7 In 1919 it was explicitly founded as a counter-model to revolutionary Russia so as to promote reformist solutions to social questions. 8 Its tripartite structure encompassed government, employer and worker representatives and was embedded in this conception of social reform inherited from the latenineteenth century and was clearly at odds with the planned state-economy model promoted by the Soviet regime. In return, the Soviet communists showed a marked hostility to the organization even when the USSR became a member of the ILO in 1934 after having joined the League of Nations for security purposes. 9 But at that time Eastern European actors and in particular Polish and above all Czech actors were strongly involved in the organization. Edvard Benes, Minister of Foreign Affairs and then the second president of Czechoslovakia, was a member of the Paris commission which discussed the organization s future between January and March He also participated in the ILO conferences during the Second World War. In the first phase of the Cold War ( ) the ILO was led by the American civil servant David Morse. 10 Ever since the mid-1930s its survival rested heavily on the support of the Western world and in particular on the US, which tended to use it as a platform from which they could internationalize the New Deal. 11 Meanwhile, during this period of US 7 See Harold Karan Jacobson, Th USSR h UN Ec c S c Ac (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963); and Harold Karan Jacobson, Labor, the UN and the Cold War, International Organization 11, no. 1 (1957) James T. Shotwell, The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 166, The International Labor Organization, 1933, March, Jacobson, op cit. 10 On Morse, see Daniel Maul, The Morse Years: The ILO , in J. van Daele, M. Rodriguez-Garcia, Geert van Goethem, M. van der Linden (eds.), ILO Histories. Essays on the International Labour Organization and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) Geert Van Goethem, Phelan s War: The International Labour Organization in Limbo ( ), in ILO Histories, ; on the international US model, see also David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: 3

4 hegemony, 12 almost all Eastern Bloc countries (except the GDR) were 13 or became (1954 for the USSR) 14 members. Poland and Czechoslovakia were undoubtedly the most involved, but the whole bloc was diplomatically present through their delegates at the International Labor Conference and in the governing body those countries which did not possess delegates in the governing body regularly sent observers. Th Th F Labor issues were discussed in a highly controversial manner not only within the ILO but also in other international arenas such as the Economic and social council of the United Nations (ECOSOC). The way that conferences are still organized in the IO tends to intensify or even showcase the oppositions, representatives often stressing their fundamental ideological differences by grandstanding and getting on their soapboxes for Cold War discourses. 15 A strategy of depoliticizing or de-ideologizing the debates around labor was consciously employed by Gunnar Myrdal in the ECE he restricted those participating in the debates to the real experts and shunned all publicity. This was a model for the ILO when organizing the Second European Conference in During this period the basic opposition was structured around the liberal (communists would say formal) conception of freedom versus realized freedom through equality. In the 1950s it usually crystallized around three main issues: those which were referred to in the literature as human right issues 16 but what I call the three freedoms a takeoff on Roosevelt s Four Freedoms speech of First Issue. Employers representation in the framework of tripartism raised the question of free versus state enterprise and a free versus a command economy. Western employers representatives tried to exclude the socialist employers from the organization by arguing that they were not true employers but rather government delegates, this being in contradiction to Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12 Robert Cox, Labor and Hegemony, in International Organization 31, no. 3 (1977) Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia. But the Czech and Polish delegates were the only ones to regularly attend the international labor conference. Between 1945 and 1951 Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to have a seat in the governing body. 14 After 1954 all Eastern Bloc countries were represented each year at the conference. Romania entered the ILO in The USSR was member of the governing body from 1955 onward. Between 1957 and 1960 there was also a Czech delegation, replaced by a Romanian one between 1960 and 1963 and a Polish one between 1963 and 1966, an Hungarian one between 1966 and 1969, and a Czech and Romanian one between 1969 and At least three socialist counties were sending governmental observers to the governing body during this period. This documents the diplomatic involvement of Eastern Bloc countries n the ILO at that time. 15 See the International Labour Conference (ILC) proceedings edited each year by the ILO, which very well document the front lines between both blocs on various issues. 16 On the use of human rights rhetoric by US actors in the Cold War context, see several contributions in Stefan- Ludwig Hoffman, Moralpolitik : Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2010). 4

5 the founding principle of tripartism in the ILO. 17 The employer s representatives from the socialist countries were banned from active participation in industrial committees up to Second Issue. In 1947 the question of forced labor was reopened by the American Federation of Labor in a session of the UN Social and Economic Council to denounce the labor camps in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc. A first joint committee (ECOSOC-ILO) was set up in 1951 to study thousands of accusations against several countries, mostly European and socialist, for practicing forced or corrective labor as a means of political coercion or punishment and which [was] also on such a scale as to constitute an important element in the economy of a given country. In this first phase, forced or free labor was exclusively approached from the side of its legal definition and in reference to state control. 18 Third Issue. Voting in 1948, the Convention addressed the question of freedom of association. The convention stressed that public authorities shall refrain from any interference which would restrict this right or impede the lawful exercise thereof. (Article 3-2) But it did not mention the various other pressures which could prevent the workers from organizing. In all three issues the ILO conventions and discussions tended to consider public authorities and the state as the main or even sole threat to freedom. This prevailing conception of freedom was not left unchallenged. In this respect it is interesting to compare both answers of the US and the Czech governments to a question sent in 1956 by ILO officials in preparing a series of monographs on TU. The answer of the US government was the following: In the US the basic tenet is that within the framework of a free society there shall be quality of opportunity and representation to all citizens as individuals and as members of groups or associations. Employers and workers are free to organize their own associations to conduct their internal affairs and to advance their interests. There is no governmental intervention in these affairs. 20 The Czech government gave the following answer The relationship between the TU, the state and the government s economic agencies is one of mutual cooperation. The TU organization does not stand in isolation from the management of their enterprises but, on the contrary, actively participates in the solution of the problems 17 For a short account, see Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (New York, NY: Octagon Books, 1971) ; and Victor-Yves Ghebali, The International Labour Organization: A Case Study on the Evolution of U.N. Specialised Ggencies (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989) On forced labor, see Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (New York, NY: Octagon Books, 1971) ; and Daniel Maul, Menschenrechte, Sozialpolitik Und Dekolonisation: Die Internationale Arbeitsorganisation (IAO) (Essen: Klartext, 2007), See Sandrine Kott, Arbeit ein transnationales Objekt: Die Frage der Zwangsarbeit im Jahrzehnt der Menschenrechte, in Unterwegs in Europa: Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte (Campus, 2008), ; Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Forced Labor, ILO-UN, Geneva, 1953; and the 1956 Report VI (2) prepared by the International Labour Office for the 39th Session of the Conference Résumé de la discussion in Labour International Conference, 39me session, Geneva, 1956, Appendix IX, Geneva, ILO, 1956, See the text of the convention and for the discussion surrounding this convention, see Alcock, p International Labor Office Archives (ILOA) FEWO 8-61; United States response, US government, 20 September

6 and tasks of the enterprise concerned in accomplishing its fundamental objective namely, improvement of the living standard of the working population. 21 Shifting Fronts But Eastern Bloc actors were not alone in their redefinition of freedom in terms of laborrelated issues 1) A commission was established to investigate cases of infringement of TU rights and Western trade unions used this commission not only to assert their rights vis-à-vis their employers but, for example, vis-à-vis the closed-shop practices of several trade unions in the USA. 22 Employers practices in Spain and Greece had been scrutinized closely at the beginning of the 1970s. Even if the Convention 87 and the representations of trade union rights which it conveyed had undoubtedly a huge impact on the socialist bloc : in the Solidarnosc 23 case but not exclusively 24, it could also be used as a basis to question other ways of limiting trade union rights. 2) As for the forced-labor discussion, the intervention of several actors from the Anti-Slavery League or the Workers Defense League in the view of communist-minded trade unions would open up the definition of forced labor. The opening did indeed come from both a combined anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspective condemning colonial forced labor, peonage and other forms of capitalist exploitation. 25 The convention adopted in 1957 (105) first recommended the abolition of forced labor: a) as a means of political coercion or education or as a punishment for holding or expressing political views or views ideologically opposed to the established political, social or economic system. But, after very controversial discussions, this too was added: (b) as a method of mobilizing and using labor for purposes of economic development; (c) as a means of labor discipline; (d) as a punishment for having participated in strikes; (e) as a means of racial, social, national or religious discrimination. The definition of forced labor had been reopened 26 and in the end the Convention 105 aimed at condemning Soviet labor camps has being primarily directed against colonial rule. 27 3) In my view, the tripartite question opened up the most interesting of all the discussions. To settle the question of employer representatives from the Eastern Bloc, the general director set up a committee led by Sir McNair. The report of the McNair Committee was discussed in the 21 ILOA FEWO 8-17, 6 January Response of the Czech government. 22 See several cases of the imitation of TU rights in the art of the employers coming from Belgium, Greece, FRG, USA in the 1950s in ILOA TUR Idesbald Goddeeris, The limits of Lobbying: ILO and Solidarnosc, in Jasmien van Daele, et al. (eds.), ILO Histories, op. cit., See on that the reaction of the Stasi MfSA HA XVIII Ka/100 (CD, Spur 2). 25 On the multifaceted definition of forced labor, see Torn Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Free and Unfree Labor: The Debate Continues (New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997); and the special issue of Journal of Modern European History Europe, Slave Trade and Colonial Forced Labour, vol. 7 (2009) See for the text of the convention. 27 See the FLC series in ILOA. 6

7 39th International Labor Conference in 1956 and stated the growing importance of a mixed economy and the need to distinguish between private ownership and employers defined as persons who hold leading positions in production. 28 The conclusions of the report were rejected by the employers representative, but the vast majority of workers representatives and government delegates voted for it. Meanwhile the whole issue allowed for the launching of an important discussion on the role of the state in advanced capitalist as well as in developing countries. This was summarized by the Indian government delegate as follows 29 : In past controversy, many of us tended to assume that the countries of the world could be divided into two groups: those whose workers' and employers' organizations were independent and free from the control of their governments and those where they were not. [But] there are grades of shading, and variable and ponderable, and less ponderable, degrees of control... [That to which] I would like to draw your attention today is the development of a new class of management... representatives from the relevant categories in such organizations should be enabled to play their part in the ILO. 30 This new class of management on both sides of the Iron Curtain could learn how to share their knowledge. 2. Common Ground Common Issues Although acting in divergent economies, economists, experts and managers could indeed share common priorities. Three of them were: 1) Manpower training along with adjustment to technological change seems to have been one vital common issue. This led to cooperation within and through the ILO and the ECE in various ways. The Czech authorities sent teams to the ILO as early as the 1950s and were able to become part of manpower-training programs with West European managers by But the main impulse came in the early 1960s from the economic reforms that were enacted all over the Eastern Bloc and which aimed to introduce more flexibility into the planned economy. Eastern European governments turned to the Office and applied for manpowertraining programs. The Polish authorities obtained a manpower-training center for managers in Warsaw as early as 1965, 31 and Romania shortly followed their example. 32 In , high-level Czech economic managers were sent to the international training center established in Turin in and participated in several training sessions on computing and decisionmaking. The ECE-specialized committees offered an important framework for these meetings 28 Report of the Committee on Freedom of Employers' and Workers' Organizations, GB 131, session, 6-10 March See also the discussion in the conference ILC, tenth and eleventh sessions, 1956, On the role played by Indian actors in the East-West exchanges on economic thoughts look at Engerman, David C. «The Anti-Politics of Inequality: Reflections on a Special Issue». Journal of Global History 6, n o. 1 (2011): , here p International Labor Conference Proceedings 1956, tenth session, ILOAZ/1/10/1/1 correspondence ILOA Z3 52 /1 (J2). 33 ILOA TAP 0-17 Cz

8 between Eastern and Western European managers 34 and at the beginning of the 1970 the General Secretariat for East-West cooperation in Vienna organized several meetings in which common problems like the use of natural resources, energy and transport systems were discussed. 35 2) These types of meetings were based on a common productivist belief which shaped the organization of labor. Already in the interwar period US engineers had been sent to the USSR, where they promoted Fordist methods. 36 In both blocs piecework wage, extreme division of labor, technical innovation on the shop floor was the top priority of the management. As early as 1952 the ILO Trade unionist Jan Shuil described the situation as follows: The efforts directed at increasing productivity in both the Western and Eastern countries are essentially alike but the similarity of effort is completely obscured by the disparity of language; mainly for political reasons... I have often wondered if the subject did not lend itself to a general study or an article in The International Labor Review that would bring out the similarity of efforts and even of methods, the reasons why certain measures are taken in certain countries and the fact that most measures find their counterpart under one term or another in most other countries... it may contribute to the soothing of many minds. 37 These studies were launched in based on the widely shared assumption that an increase in productivity was the prerequisite for increasing the wealth of all 39. 3) A third common issue was planning, an important one among European civil servants and economists since the First World War. In this respect the ILO was a space for discussions in particular in the 1930s (and not just as a response to the world crisis) 40 and during the Second World War. 41 Even if the conception of planning varied greatly between West and East, there was still a common belief among most European economists and civil servants (less so in the USA since the end of the First World War) that the economy should be planned. In 1961, Gunnar Myrdal 42, the Swedish economist and director of the ECE between 1947 and 1957, stated that the expression planned economy was a tautology since an economy was in fact all about planning. 43 The question of a national planned economy was among the most 34 See the Archives of the United Nations in Geneva (UNOGA), Myrdal Files, ARR 14/ For the very positive point of view of the Stasi on that issue, see MFSA HA XVIII and HA XVIII See ILOA Jenks Papers, Mission I. Tchéco, 14 March See the classic book on the subject, Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Several Soviet historians (among them Stephen Kotkin and Yves Cohen) have stressed this once more. 37 ILOA Z 11/1/2, Activities in the Field of Productivity, ILOA Z 11/1/2 ILO. 39 On this productivity belief see and its political implications the seminal article of Maier, Charles S. «The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II». International Organization 31, n o. 4 (October 1, 1977): But unlike him I do not see the origin of this belief in the 40s and the internal US policy. 40 See Thomas Cayet, Le planning comme organisation du travail, in Lespinet-Moret, Viet (dir), op. cit., ILO ILOA PWR 1/ On Myrdal see Puntigliano, Andrés Rivarola, et Ȍrjan Appelqvist. «Prebisch and Myrdal: Development Economics in the Core and on the Periphery». Journal of Global History 6, n o. 1 (2011): See the excellent book of Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960); here p. 3. 8

9 important topics discussed during the meetings organized in Vienna by the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences, which had started work at the end of the 1960s and gathered scholars from Eastern and Western Europe. The first meeting held in Paris, with economists from various European countries, was devoted to planning. 44 Further research on all these topics have to be done along these lines but what I want to discuss here is the role played by certain actors and situations in opening spaces for discussion. C Ex c Ac C Many factors could be pointed out and in particular the role played by mostly French communist (and compagnons de route) in various spaces in linking Western and Eastern scholars and experts. Here I wish to highlight two dimensions. 1) I was surprised to discover the real and symbolic role that the concentration camp of Mathausen (where Incorrigible Political Enemies of the Third Reich were imprisoned) played in creating links between Eastern and Western actors. When Morse met the Czech president Antonin Novotny in Prague in 1959 during a long mission he made to Eastern Europe, Novotny greeted him warmly and opened the interview by saying that they had in all probability met before in Mathausen. Morse was indeed commanding an American unit which liberated the concentration camp of Mathausen where Novotny was imprisoned. 45 I found the same allusion to Mathausen as a link in the Stasi-archives. A delegate from France at the ECE and manager of the large enterprise Creusot-Loire was considered reliable because as a French resistance fighter he had been deported to Mathausen. 46 Of course these actors did not really meet in Mathausen and they did not even share the same experience of the camp but the reference to the camp stands for the legacy of antifascism, as a common political value which could help overcoming distrust and opposition. 2)The collaboration and dialogue between both blocs is not understandable without putting it in a longue durée perspective. The relationship between Eastern and Western European countries is embodied in several actors who had already played an important intermediary role between the two Europes during the interwar period. For the Czech and the Polish cases I have been able to follow some of these intermediaries between their national administration and the ILO before and after the war. These people accompanied David Morse during his mission to Eastern Europe in 1948 and In Poland he was accompanied by Jan Rosner, who had been a key figure in the relationship between Poland and the ILO since the 1930s. He was secretary of the Polish delegation at the international conference between 1930 and 1933 and became an official in Between 1946 and 1950 he was the ILO correspondent 44 UNOG GX ILOA Z 3/64/2, Director-General s Mission to Austria and Eastern Europe, March-April MfSA HA XVIII ILOA Z 3/1/7 Records of official visits by the director general, , Z 3/64/2, Director-General s Mission to Austria and Eastern Europe, March-April

10 in Warsaw. After his resignation he was hired on short-term contracts and sent on technical missions to various countries. 48 In the Czech case this continuity was bound up with the role played by the Czech experts in the field of social insurance, the main field of expertise of the ILO in the interwar period. It was also embodied in the person of Anton Zelenka, chief of the social insurance section of the ILO in the 1950s. Zelenka was born in Prague in 1903 and trained in the same city in the 1920s. He occupied leading positions in the central administration for social insurance of the first Czech Republic. He then joined the ILO, where he worked in close cooperation with two other main Czech actors in the field of social insurance in the 1930s and 1940s Oswald Stein (director of the social insurance section between 1937 and 1943) 49 and Emil Schönbaum, who was a very successful expert of the ILO and helped to shape social insurance systems in many Latin American countries. 50 Zelenka was the Czech governmental representative of the 28 th International Labor Conference in In the 1950s he was hired as an Austrian citizen; nevertheless he maintained close contacts with his Czech colleagues and was very influential in pushing an ILO seminar on social insurance in Prague in In fact, during the 1950s Czechoslovakia remained a major point of reference in the field of social insurance. The International Social Security Association (ISSA), which from the beginning was closely linked to the ILO and received guests in the ILO building in Geneva, also met in Prague in 1959 and was successively headed by two Czech exiles in this period Leo Wildman and later Vladimir Rys, both maintaining close contacts to their home country. Given this long-lasting expertise (and not solely ideological proximities as it is often asserted) it is hardly astonishing that the Czech government repeatedly asked to send field experts on social insurance to developing countries like Morocco and Burma. 51 But as we will discuss later, this also had to do with the special position of Czechoslovakia as a showcase nation of the Eastern Bloc. Most Eastern European countries had benefited from technical assistance from the West before the war, in a time when the split between two Europes counter posed a developed Western Europe (or A Europe) and a backward Eastern Europe (or B Europe) Beyond the Cold War: The Development Issue? Two Europes As a matter of fact, in requesting assistance, Eastern European authorities were perfectly in line with the practice which had predominated in the interwar period when Eastern European countries benefited from knowledge and know-how produced in the West ILOA P 2765, P 14/11/ ILOA P ILOA P ILOA P 1/ The distinction between Europe A and B is made by Francis Delaisi, Les deux Europes (Paris, 1929) and taken up by Albert Thomas in a speech he held in Sofia in ILOA CAT

11 After the Second World War one can distinguish two phases: 1) Immediately after the war, it was the Polish authorities, above all, who were sending pressing demands for assistance and reconstruction. During the Morse mission to Poland in 1948, Polish officials pressed him to help them rebuild their country. They denied the very notion of Cold War but stated bitterly that with the dissolution of United Nation Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) 54 and launching of the Marshall Plan, Germany would again become a threat to Polish citizens and world peace. 55 2) After five years during which the involvement of Eastern European countries had experienced a lull, in the second half of the 1950s Eastern European officials (in particular in the Balkans) turned again to IO for help, stressing that their countries should be eligible for technical assistance programs. They complained that the Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA) set up by the UN was exclusively directed at less developed countries. For example, Romanian officials requested assistance to develop their tourist industry in the 1960s, and Polish authorities applied for fellowship programs. They thus managed to send about twenty people with various professional backgrounds to Western Europe between 1957 and 1961 through the special ILO technical assistance program (the EPTA was much more difficult to access). Most of them received fellowships to study rehabilitation programs and institutions for the disabled in various Western European countries. Not surprisingly Jan Rosner, by then minister for social welfare, was the key person in organizing this fellowship program. After his mission the grant holder had to send a report to the ILO. These reports are very good documents because they help us to understand the three different lenses through which Polish fellows they were looking at capitalist realities: the communist, the national, and the expert one. They tended to emphasize the proximity in inspiration between both experiences but stressed the relative backwardness of Eastern European countries. 56 Interestingly, with the help of the ILO-EPTA program, the Poles then organized a seminar on the vocational rehabilitation of the disabled in Afro-Asian countries. 57 This offers a good example of how the circulation of know-how in the sphere of labor between West and East transformed itself in a circulation between East and South. Between East and South The Poles were not the first Eastern Bloc country to organize such a seminar with the help of the ILO that honor when to the Czechs. 53 See Johan Schot, Vincent Lagendijk, Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks, in Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008), ; and K. Steffen Kohlrausch, S. Wiederkehr (eds.), Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe (Deutsches Historisches Institut: Warsaw, 23, Osnabrück, Fiber, 2010). Ausgabe 01-02/10; and the sepcial issue of Comparativ, 1-2 (2010), Verflochtene Geschichten: Ostmitteleuropa. 54 For UNRAA s implication in Poland, see Jessica Reinisch, We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation : UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland, Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (1 July 2008) ILOA Morse Mission in Poland, ILO A Z 3/64/2. 56 ILOA OTA ILOA TAP

12 Beginning in 1956, Evzen Erban, the Czech Minister of Social Security, expressed the wish of his country to organize a training seminar on social security with support of the EPTA. This seminar finally took place in 1959 after a rather cumbersome procedure which clearly revealed that the technical assistance program was not meant to promote Eastern European models. When David Morse launched the technical assistance program within the organization, he clearly presented it as a kind of American Marshall Plan for the world. 58 In return, the first declaration of the Eastern representatives (the Polish Altman) in the governing body was strongly critical of the program, explaining that it was a way to expand the Western capitalist model in the field of labor. Nevertheless, already in the early 1950s and increasingly after Stalin s death, socialist countries (even the Soviets) used the ILO and other international organizations to promote the socialist labor movement and the socialist model of development. 59 In this regard that Czechoslovakia, which was the most developed Eastern European country and had a very solid tradition of international cooperation, served as a showcase state for the Eastern Bloc. 60 The first seminar held in Prague in 1959 on social security a field in which Czech actors could show a long-lasting expertise seems to have been a success. But it was above all a way to promote a state-organized system of social security. 61 Other Eastern European countries also offered expertise in specialized fields. The Bulgarians organized a seminar on cooperatives (a Bulgarian tradition) in 1964 in Sofia. 62 The Soviets and Hungarians organized a seminar on vocational training in These undertakings were apparently well received in developing countries not just because it was a way to escape Western domination but also because at that time the socialist countries could provide them with a successful model of rapid and successful industrialization under the umbrella of the state. In a lot of countries this was especially appealing to elites for whom the state was central, because it was what they controlled. 64 Conclusion 1) We have seen how labor was primarly a public Cold War topic but also how Eastern and Western actors could converge in sharing the same modern view. 58 See the DG Report 1951, , and the preliminary discussions in GB, 1949, 109, in particular pp ; also see ILOA Z 11/10/3. 59 See Alvin Z Rubinstein, The Soviets in International Organizations: Changing Policy Toward Developing Countries, (Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 1964). 60 See Justine Faure, c Tch c c (Paris: Tallandier, 2004) ILOA SI , Social security Cz 1943_1960 et TAP ILOA TAP ILOA TAP See Constantin Katsakioris, Soviet Lessons for Arab Modernization: Soviet Educational Aid towards Arab Countries after 1956, in Journal of Modern European History, vol. 8 (2010) 1, On the socialist countries policies toward the developing countries, see Christopher Clapham, The Collapse of Socialist Development in the Third World, in Third World Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, Rethinking Socialism (1992), and more recently David C. Engerman, The second world s third world, Kritika, 12, 1, 2011, pp and Tobias Rupprecht, Die Sowjetunion und die Welt im Kalten Krieg: neue Forschungsperspektiven auf eine vermeintlich hermetisch abgeschottete Gesellschaft, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 59, 3, 2010, pp Unfortunately all these contributions are concentrating solely on the Soviet case. 12

13 2)Approaching the Cold War through labor-related questions offers a good insight into how the Cold War discourse helped to obscure more long-lasting and structural issues. It shows in particular that the development issue was still central in the after war period and was not only dividing the world between South and North but also Europe between West and East. 3) Finally, this approach, which emphasized convergence and also reveals the role of certain key actors, is also crucial for understanding the rapid European integration of Eastern European countries into the European Community. 13