Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War

Abstract

Second- and Third World entanglements are a booming field of research on post-1945 Eastern Europe. The past decade or so has witnessed a veritable profusion of case studies tracking the myriad ways in which economic, cultural and political bonds were forged between the socialist and postcolonial worlds. In his remarkably rich and original new study, Łukasz Stanek enlists architecture as a lens through which to illustrate the complexity of these interactions. The history of modern architecture, he argues, is a history ‘of resources circulating at various scales and with various speeds’ (p. 303). And it is precisely these circulations that stand at the centre of this work. Spanning Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, Architecture in Global Socialism reveals an exciting and vibrant world of interplays between Eastern European construction experts and the postcolonial states in which they undertook their work. Architecture, runs the key message of the book, was bound up in global systems of technical, cultural and economic exchange. It is subsequently revealed as both an arm of diplomacy and an agent of what Stanek helpfully terms ‘socialist worldmaking’. This yielded some interesting power dynamics. For Moscow, the decolonizing world presented rich opportunities to extend the hand of friendship and mobilize new allies against the old imperial Western powers. And from the perspective of many governments in the Global South, cooperation with the ‘Second World’ could help their countries integrate into new global networks. Indeed, it is a real strength of Stanek’s work that he is able to expose the multidirectional character of what on the surface may simply look like a Moscow-led effort to marshal an anti-imperial alliance between Eastern Europe and the decolonizing states. This is but one of many ways in which Architecture in Global Socialism is able to shatter some old Cold War assumptions.