Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime by Young-Sun Hong

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime by Young-Sun Hong Eric Allina Hong, Young-Sun – Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 427. Young-Sun Hong's book is a welcome contribution to global Cold War history, the sprawling field that explores the military, diplomatic, and development activities not only of the US and USSR, but of other states as well. Deeply researched and densely argued, the book examines Cold War Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, or West and East Germany) and its engagement with what was, at the time, known as the "Third World." In addition to central Europe, the action unfolds in Algeria, Cameroon, Congo, Egypt, Guinea, India, the Koreas, the Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam—parts of what David Engerman in Kritika (2011) so evocatively called the "second world's third world." Like much other work published since Odd Arne Westad's Global Cold War (2005), this book holds the conviction that the conflict cannot be understood as epiphenomenal to the Moscow-Washington rivalry. Rather, undertakings of the type Hong examines had an independent logic and momentum of their own, albeit one connected to the greater drama. She explores a wide range of German international activity that falls under the rubric of what she calls the "global humanitarian regime," encompassing medical aid, housing and infrastructure construction, public health, and medical education. These included East German efforts to help North Korea rebuild after the 1953 armistice, West German construction and operation of a South Korean hospital in postwar Pusan, and both Germany's medical missions to Algeria and Congo (among other destinations) in [End Page 432] the mid-1960s. The two countries pursued forward- and backward-looking goals, building relationships in the "global south" (as we now call it) to burnish an image tarnished by the legacy of National Socialism, simultaneously hoping to undercut the global standing of their fraternal rival. Hong's focus is on the 1950s and 1960s, when the Germanys were locked in combat for legitimacy in the international arena. Bonn refused to recognize East Germany (referring to it only as the Soviet Occupation Zone) and sought to impose a global isolation via what was known as the Halstein doctrine, under which West Germany threatened to sever diplomatic relations with any country that recognized East German sovereignty. The East Germans condemned the West as a redoubt for fascism and little more than an appendage of US imperial ambition. Closed in separate spheres—West Germany in the "empire of liberty," East Germany in the "empire of justice" (to use Westad's formulation)—both nonetheless had similar goals in reaching out to newly independent states emerging from colonial rule Hong makes clear how "notions of civilizational difference" (p. 13), ideas with genealogical roots in nineteenth-century imperialism, were rearticulated in what she calls "the three-world paradigm" (p. 15). This paradigm maintained the centrality of a "civilizational gradient" (p. 127), powered by the unequal distribution of financial and military capital, which ran downhill from north to south. One of the book's continuous threads is how what both German states presented as "racial or/civilizational difference" (p. 269) was little more than thinly disguised, and sometimes undisguised, racism. Held by both, it underlay a neocolonial project that envisioned some parts of the south "primarily as a source of labor power and raw materials needed to realize the creative visions of industrialized countries" (p. 307). Indeed, this meticulously documented argument is a major conceptual contribution to histories not only of Germany and the Cold War, but to development, international organizations, and of the postwar order at large. Yet if the Germanys' humanitarian efforts were far from disinterested, Hong also shows that the targets of German designs were more than objects of exploitation and pawns of Cold War rivalries. Both German states depended on their southern allies to achieve important policy and ideological goals, and their counterparts in Dar es Salaam, Hanoi, and Pyongyang knew it. They were aware of how the Germans depended on them—if in a fashion different to their own...