Signal strength excellent in West Germany: Radio Tirana, European Maoist internationalism and its disintegration in the global seventies

Abstract

ABSTRACT That the European protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s were marked by transnational connections, mobilities and interactions is now widely accepted. This article takes two West German Maoist parties and their multi-layered transnational connections as a vantage point from which to explore the role that Albania and its Cold War broadcaster, Radio Tirana, played in establishing transnational Maoism as a global language of protest able to accommodate a wide variety of political causes in the aftermath of decolonization. Looking at transnationalism in different modes – understood here as different conceptual spaces – reveals that Maoist transnationalism was highly uneven. The article argues that the global Cold War both created the conditions under which China and Albania could become the centre of global Maoism and undermined the ideological coherence of Maoism. As the Sino-Albanian alliance began to unravel, Maoism as a global space of belonging also became increasingly fractured, although the effects of disintegration were again uneven: broadcasting and the circulation of Maoist knowledge continued – even expanded – while Maoism as a plausible politics in the Global North increasingly faded into the background.