Socialism Goes Global is an ambitious “collaboratively written book” based on a “four-year ten-person research project” that attempts to provide a “broad history of the relationship between eastern Europe and the extra-European world in the age of decolonization” (4). Despite the challenge of weaving a narrative from the varied encounters across Eurasia and the Global South into a coherent whole across multiple authorial perspectives, approaches, and styles, coordinators James Mark and Paul Betts focus the diverse specializations of the book's co-authors to consolidate the recent flurry of scholarship on Second World interactions with the Global South, drawing comparisons and conclusions across the region's many languages and national contexts.
Socialism Goes Global makes two significant interventions. First, it restores the “forgotten history” in which the relationship between the Second World and the Third World was at the core of the twentieth century world (5). The book's wide scope allows it to make the case for eastern Europe as the source of an alternative globalization movement that flourished through much of the twentieth century before it faded and eventually vanished from memory in 1989, when the undercurrents of Eurocentrism, always lurking beneath the surface under communism, replaced the narrative of solidarity with one of white postcolonial victimhood. This argument is made convincingly over the book's chapters, which show that Second World solidarity was an important attempt to forge a different kind of relationship with non-European countries despite the persistence of Eurocentrism.
The second major intervention, less explicit than the first but perhaps more pointed for specialists of the region, is how the book portrays the relationship between eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Mark, Betts, and other included authors argue that the states of eastern Europe (especially Yugoslavia) often led the way in engagement with the Global South, with the Soviet Union following reluctantly behind. Even scholars of eastern Europe, by now accustomed to emphasizing the differences between national contexts in the eastern bloc, may be surprised at the inversion of the usual hierarchy of initiative in connections with the Global South, subordinating the Soviet Union to its ostensible “satellites”.
The authors build these arguments over nine chapters organized thematically, a format that offers theoretical coherence at the expense of repeating the narrative arc in which communist solidarity with the Third World is constructed, then abandoned over the course of the mid-twentieth century. After the introduction and a useful chapter on the interwar era origins of the Second World's outlook on the Global South, chapters on “Development,” “Race,” and the “Home Front” (domestic perspectives on the Third World) make compelling cases for the Second World as an alternative model in many ways more relatable to the Third World than that of the First World, while interrogating the tensions and contradictions between the rhetoric of solidarity and lingering Eurocentrism. Despite taking the Second World solidarity seriously, James Mark also confronts east European racism, demonstrating in a compelling chapter on “Race” that east Europeans thought “in terms of their position in a global racial order” and believed that “their commitment to an anti-colonial internationalism had rendered them the better kind of white” (221). Chapters on “War and Peace,” “Culture,” and “Rights” also contribute to the book's argument and themes, bringing together a wide array of existing and new studies to familiar topics in Second World-Third World relations, while chapters on “Health” and “Mobility” (focusing especially on guest students) introduce less canonical but significant topics, presenting useful new theoretical paradigms for each. While some chapters are more central to the book's core arguments than others, Mark and Betts do a remarkable job holding the narrative, tone, and style together, ensuring that Socialism Goes Global reads like a book rather than an edited collection of chapters.
Even so, addressing so expansive a topic in both the USSR and the many states of eastern Europe in a single volume is a daunting task. The breadth of the book's topic lends itself to taking the vantage point of the various state/Party apparatuses of the region, which spend much of the book in the spotlight. However, the authors rightfully avoid interpreting the relationships between the Second and Third Worlds through the “state versus society” lens, and address the Communist Parties of the region, their opponents, and the many voices within and between them. Attempting to cover so much ground leads to inevitable sacrifices. Perhaps the greatest comes at the expense of the Soviet Union, which, despite having its own Eurasian empire and superpower status, is presented as just another country in the bloc. While de-centering the Soviet Union is consistent with the book's argument that eastern Europe often took the lead in relations with the Global South, scholars expecting a Soviet-centric account (as the order of terms in the subtitle seems to suggest) will be surprised and perhaps disappointed, although the core arguments and some interesting details and references will likely interest Russianists. The states of eastern Europe are well represented across the bloc, including primary and secondary sources from the relevant national languages.
The lack of theoretical engagement with recent work in Postcolonial Studies is arguably a missed opportunity, albeit understandable for a work already stretched across many fields and boundaries. The omission of a conclusion is more disappointing, particularly since the book ends on a downward turn, in an epilogue on the region's transformation from an attempt at solidarity with the Global South to coopting postcolonialism by the far Right. While this assessment merits consideration, taken as a whole, the book offers more than a declension narrative; rather, it serves as a reminder of an alternative meta-geography of eastern Europe not just as the periphery of western Europe, but at the crux of the global challenges and possibilities of the twentieth century: a significant, if understated, contribution from an important book that nearly lives up to its ambitious agenda.
