Non-socialist Countries Research Articles

Tourism through the Iron Curtain. Travelling from West to East Germany

ABSTRACT In the early 1970s, East Germany opened its borders to visitors from West Germany and West Berlin. Soon after, East German authorities recorded several million entries from non-socialist countries each year. This article examines the intentions and obstacles to establishing a successful tourism business across the inner-German border. The author shows that the regime’s attempts to develop the GDR into an attractive travel destination were shaped by (I) poor starting conditions, which could not be overcome for financial reasons; (II) bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a mistrust of its own people as well as of West Germans; (III) inefficient structures, which could not be corrected for political reasons; (IV) the constant desire to impress West Germany; and (V) the need for foreign currency. However, while other socialist states gave priority to economic considerations, in the GDR political hopes, aspirations or concerns were uppermost in the mind of policymakers when it came to tourism from the Federal Republic. The article therefore argues that travelling from West to East Germany must be understood as ‘Cold War tourism,’ as the conflict greatly informed the conditions and experience of travel.

Socialism, Heritage and Internationalism after 1945. The Second World and Beyond.

ABSTRACT The international histories of cultural heritage protection have been commonly focussed on the Eurocentric trajectories of heritage evolution in the twentieth century and trace the Western roots of cultural globalisation in the field of conservation and preservation of monuments. The current theme section offers the first examination of the contribution of socialist states, institutions and experts to the evolution of heritage concepts and policies in the postwar world. In what ways have socialist countries approached the conservation, handling and exhibition of cultural heritage differently to nonsocialist countries? How have tangible and intangible heritages been mobilised in support of socialist political agendas? What role did actors from socialist states play in the development of international heritage protection policies that proliferated in the wake of the Second World War? And to what extent did the Soviet Union and the wider Second World of the Cold War export and shape the development of socialist approaches to heritage in Third World? The collected articles in this themed section not only demonstrate the similarity of heritage policy formation in the so-called First and Second worlds but show the role that socialist states played in world geographies of cultural heritage.

Surrogate Infrastructure: The Noncommercial Circulation of Chinese Films in the Early Cold War

Abstract Recent scholarship elucidates the extent to which Chinese literary and film culture during the high socialist period (1949–1976) was engaged with the world. This article builds upon the literature by examining how Chinese films were distributed and exhibited in this period in nonsocialist countries. With Australia as my case study, I argue that China exported films to nonsocialist countries mainly noncommercially, that is, not for profit but for propaganda and diplomacy. Once there, Chinese films were disseminated and shown with the help of a variety of local communist, leftist, or otherwise People's Republic of China (PRC)—friendly individuals and organizations. The films, therefore, circulated in the world not just through the formal alliances among brother nations of the socialist bloc, but also because of what I term a “surrogate infrastructure” that bound various peoples and communities on the left at both the local and global levels. By consulting Chinese government documents as well as Australian newspapers, I demonstrate that, despite the language barrier, a didactic film art, and a Cold War geopolitical context that impeded the global flow of Chinese films, the noncommercial route nevertheless limned an alternative mapping of the 1950s.

Institutions, Extreme Weather, and Urbanization in the Greater Mekong Region

Climate change threatens many developing countries with more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Researchers, however, have not comprehensively examined how extreme weather influences urbanization and sustainable development. Based on the spatial estimates of precipitation, tropical cyclones, and temperature for the period of 2000 to 2010, we establish an eleven-year climatological record and calculate anomalies at the county and district level in the Greater Mekong Region (GMR). Combining this with urbanization data from the World Bank, we relate weather patterns to growth rates in urban population and urban land use and find that the above-average rainfall in the wet season along with more frequent cold waves and tropical cyclones tend to retard urban development. In contrast, crop failures caused by increasingly severe droughts during the dry season and heat waves accelerate rural–urban migration and the agglomeration of urban poverty. By identifying institutionally varying effects, we further find that nonsocialist countries have additional sensitivity to most weather extremes than more centralized socialist countries, which have stronger ability to mobilize resources for disaster management and relief. Our study contributes to the understanding of effects of weather shocks on socioeconomic outcomes in societies rapidly integrating with the global economy.

Karl Leonhard hat „kein Interesse!“ – Hintergründe über das Rodewischer Symposium aus neu aufgetauchten Quellen

In 2013 at the Rodewisch Clinic for Psychiatry, four folders were found that contain original documents from the office of former head of the clinic Rolf Walther. These original sources provide new insights into the organisational background of the International Symposium on Psychiatric Rehabilitation of 1963, as a result of which the groundbreaking Rodewisch Propositions were framed. The documents founds reveal that, apart from the persons already identified, Halle/Saale - based hygienist Karlheinz Renker was deeply involved in the preparation of this event. They also show that for ideological reasons the GDR Ministry of Health restricted the number of participants from non-socialist countries, in particular Western Germany, to be admitted. Finally, the sources suggest that a volume compiling all talks given at the symposium as one publication and as such making its content and resolutions known to a wider public failed, among other reasons, due to the fact that Karl Leonhard, then head of the GDR Association for Psychiatry and Neurology, was "not interested" in it.

‘A medium of revolutionary propaganda’: the state and tourism policy in the Romanian People's Republic, 1947–1965

This paper contributes to recent analysis of tourism within socialist states by examining tourism policy in the Romanian People's Republic, 1947–1965. It considers the development of tourism policy that was intended to support the broader political project of building socialism. Romania initially adopted the Soviet model of purposeful and collective outdoor recreation. It promoted domestic tourism to enhance the health of the working population and generate pride in the achievements of socialism. Romania also followed the Soviet Union in ‘opening’ to international tourism in the mid-1950s. However, after increasing tension with the Soviet Union Romania pursued a more independent course of socialist development from the late 1950s. This was reflected in tourism policy, particularly the vigorous encouragement of international tourism following the model of neighbouring Yugoslavia. This was a means to generate the foreign currency needed for an independent industrialisation programme and also enabled Romania to project its increasingly independent stance to foreign visitors (from both socialist and non-socialist countries). However, while tourism was an important part of state policy, many of the ways that the People's Republic used tourism mirrored existing practices in capitalist states and there was limited success in developing a distinctly socialist form of tourism.

L’efficacité, l’égalité, l’équité et la répartition personnelle des revenus

The analysis of the impact of economic policy and of the process of growth on personal income distribution is getting greater priority in the literature. Such an analysis cannot usefully be pursued in the light of efficiency considerations alone; it must also take equality and equity into account. Equity is defined here as a characterization of a state of affairs in terms of three parameters: (1) the choice of a distributive norm, (2) the specification of what is to be distributed, and (3) a measure of the degree of inequality that exists. A general "equity function" (E) is defined, whose particular form reflects the chosen distributive norm, and whose two arguments are the sum total to be distributed and a measure of the inequality that characterizes the distribution of that sum. Then, a number of critera of distributive justice are compared, and the criteria based on the relative and absolute income gaps are found to be the most useful. This suggests the formulation of an "equity index" (e) which is sensitive to both growth, relative inequality and absolute inequality. Unsurprisingly, empirical estimates show that the "equity index" has risen in socialist countries and fallen in non-socialist countries as a group. The "equity index" is also estimated for a number of individual countries, but the results are difficult to interpret without an in depth analysis of the circumstances of each country.

International film circuits and global imaginaries in the People's Republic of China, 1949–57

This article analyses patterns of film export from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to socialist and non-socialist countries during the period from 1949 to 1957. By focusing on the types of films and the countries in which they are exhibited, the article argues for a multilateral and comparative approach to understanding the filmic geographies created, and the ways in which this international film exhibition and its dant filmic geographies participated in Maoist articulations of socialism and modernization as national and global projects. The focus on the first eight years of the PRC and the global circulation of PRC films during this time further encourages a reassessment of scholarship on world cinema that tends to locate socialist cinema and the films of Maoist China outside of global aesthetics, politics and cultural exhibition and production.

The Soviet Impact On Economic Development in Non-Socialist Countries, 1947-1991

The Soviet Impact On Economic Development in Non-Socialist Countries, 1947-1991

The End of Nomadism?: Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia (review)

Reviewed by: The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia Thomas Barfield Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath. The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. vi, 355 pp. Hardcover $64.95, ISBN 0-8223-2107-6. Paperback $21.95, ISBN 0-8223-2140-8. The grasslands of Inner Asia constitute the eastern part of the Eurasian steppe. For more than 2,500 years they have been the home of societies with a distinctive culture based on horse-riding nomadic pastoralism. Historically, the Inner Asian steppes and deserts constituted a hard frontier for China. The region remained culturally distinct and politically independent for most of its history. The nomads formed their own supra-tribal political organizations that that fought the Han, Tang, and Ming dynasties to a standstill, extorting lucrative trade and tributary benefits in return for their cooperation. The high point of the region's political power came under the Mongol empire, when nomads from this region conquered most of Eurasia in the thirteenth century. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, the steppe peoples of Inner Asia gradually lost their political autonomy to the expanding empires of Qing China and Czarist Russia. After the Qing dynasty collapsed, the northern part of Mongolia broke away to become independent for a short time only to find itself incorporated as a satellite of the new Soviet Union. Northern Xinjiang and southern Mongolia remained part of China. The collectivist socialist policies implemented by the Soviet Union and Mongolia beginning in the 1930s and in the People's Republic of China after 1949 transformed the region by totally reorganizing the economy and creating a new social order. However, the course of this transformation varied considerably depending on the duration of socialist control, its effectiveness, and the degree to which it was compatible with pastoralism. The End of Nomadism? examines the economic, ecological, and social impact of these policies on Inner Asian pastoralists and how they have coped with the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's decollectivization. The study is based on data drawn from the Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia Project, a research effort carried out between 1991 and 1995 under the direction of the book's authors. This international anthropological project examined twelve different pastoral communities in three countries (China, Russia, and Mongolia) and produced a set of individual studies that were unparalleled in their scope, detail, and common focus. Drawing on this research, the book reviews the current state of Inner Asian pastoral societies and their prospects for the future. Humphrey and Sneath argue that Inner Asia is best treated as a single unit because the people there inhabit a relatively uniform steppe region in which they practice some form of pastoralism and because they share a common Mongol [End Page 142] Buddhist heritage (with the exception of some Turkic groups in the west). At the same time they demonstrate that the economic and political differences in each country (and sometimes within a country) have had strikingly different impacts on the environment and the effectiveness of pastoralism as an economic base for people in the region today. Their book is unique in its range of comparisons and its emphasis on Inner Asia as a region worthy of study in its own right and not just as a peripheral part of China or Russia. Nomadic pastoralism as historically practiced in Inner Asia was targeted for destruction under socialism. Central planners considered it a low-technology, low-output system of production that was inferior to any sort of agriculture. They were particularly offended by the thought of people moving around seasonally and living in yurts with no fixed addresses, which they regarded as the height of primitiveness. It should be noted that this prejudice was widely shared by governments in nonsocialist countries with populations of pastoralists, but here planners had the capacity to do something about it directly. They settled the nomads into fixed communities organized around collectives. Resistance to collectivization was less here than in Central Asia where people often killed their animals rather than give them to the state, perhaps because so much...

Democratic politics and the fall of the military regime in Bangladesh

The main objective of this article is to explain the rise of democracy and the demise of the authoritarian military regime in Bangladesh. In this process the various subaltern social groups played a major role, though their political aspirations remain unrealized in the new government. On the basis of subaltern participation in the antimilitary agitation, the article argues for a separate political space for the subaltern categories that occupy a dialectical relationship with both the existing state structure and opposition political parties. This separate political space is, indeed, the core of democratic polity in Bangladesh.The fall of the military regime of General H. M. Ershad in 1990 ushered in a new phase in democratic politics in Bangladesh. Given the extent of mass participation in antiauthoritarian social agitation, Bangladesh proudly stands with countries like the Philippines, Haiti, and many other socialist and nonsocialist countries. At the same time, the downfall of the military regime of General Ershad paved the way for the democratically elected Khaleda Zia government and the totally new conception of democracy and participatory governance it introduced.

The Challenges Facing Vietnamese Communism

The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which established Southeast Asia's first of socialism in 1945, is facing unprecedented challenges to its monopoly of power. Unlike previous times, when the main threat was posed by foreign milit ary intervention, the threat today is mainly political and is being mounted by domestic forces which are directly questioning the legitimacy of one-party rule. Also, unlike previous times, the CPV can no longer count on support from the socialist community headed by the Soviet Union. The socialist community, as indeed the Soviet Union itself, no longer exists. Vietnam, in fact, is an economic ally backward, isolated outpost of socialism. The prime challenge facing Vietnam's Communist leaders is how to break out of their isolation, and guide Vietnam into the economic and political mainstream of Asia and the Pacific without triggering chaos and political instability and perhaps their own fall from power. Over the last five years Vietnam's leaders have shown themselves to be creative and flexible in dealing with the myriad of challenges facing them. In 1986 the CPV boldly adopted a reform package ? known as dot moi (or renovation). In essence, Vietnam moved to dismantle the system of bureaucratic centralism, cen tral planning and state subsidies, and to replace it with a multi-sectoral commodity economy. The previous two-sector economy (state and collective) was expanded to include state capitalist, private capitalist and individual ownership of the means of production. Vietnam also adopted a relatively liberal foreign investment code and threw open its doors to non-socialist countries. In the short space of five years, the state and collective share of Gross Domestic Product has fallen to 40 per cent. The Soviet Union has been overtaken as Vietnam's largest trading partner, investor and aid donor by Japan, Taiwan, Sweden, France, Australia and West Germany. Perhaps Vietnam's greatest achievement has been to harness the productive energies of its peasant farmers. Vietnam no longer suffers from a chronic food shortage. In 1989-90 it achieved self-sufficiency and began exporting some of its rice surplus. Vietnam's attempts at political reform have not been so dramatic. In 1986, the CPV also committed itself to dot mot in the political sphere, or democratization. This took several forms. First and foremost, democratization entailed renovating the party itself. In 1987, a party purification campaign was launched. By the end of 1990, 127,800 members had been disciplined and another 78,200 were expelled. Second, attempts were made to revitalize the Vietnam Fatherland Front and its constituents, the mass organizations for trade unions, the peasantry, women, youth

Plenary paper 2: Why is the agriculture of advanced Western economies still organized by family farms? Will this continue to be so in the future?

The dominance and persistency of family farms in industrialized nonsocialist countries can only be explained by the theory that farm households organize agricultural and household production, and also very often off-farm employment, efficiently. The organizational unity of farms and households in agriculture has to be seen as a consequence of limited economies of size relative to the size of the family's labor capacity. Economies of size are increasing as well as labor capacity due to labor saving technological innovations. Smaller than technically optimal farm sizes are further to be explained by lower transaction costs of family farms vis-a-vis hired labor farms. Future changes of these determinants and their implications for family farming are discussed. Copyright 1991 by Oxford University Press.

Deregulation and Privatization in Germany

ABSTRACTPublic enterprises in the Federal Republic of Germany are about average for all nonsocialist countries and markets are more heavily regulated than in the United States. Compared to American deregulation and British privatization, there have been few developments in the Federal Republic. Why? In the last ten years new schools of thought have provided a stronger normative foundation for and a stronger positive explanation against deregulation and privatization in Germany in the near future. The German political debate on deregulation and privatization is characterized by three institutional peculiarities. Major steps to deregulate or privatize economic sectors require legislation, which is influenced by political parties. Trade unions exert a strong influence on the major parties and are opposed to privatization and deregulation. The European Community forces some deregulation upon the Federal Republic in order to liberalize service sectors.

Economic exchanges specific to the two German states

In the GDR’s most recent “Law on the Five Year Plan” for the years 1986 to 1990, an expansion of trade relations with non-socialist countries has been called for “on a foundation of parity and to reciprocal advantage (as) a contribution to the material basis for a policy of peace and international security.“] This directive presents a more balanced perspective than the second SED Party Program of 1976,* which foresaw “improvements in the profitability of foreign trade” for strengthening socialism “in economic competition with capitalism.” The relations of “cooperation” and “mutual advantage” were specified in the Program for members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and for developing nations, while “peaceful coexistence” was assured for countries with different social orders, without any stipulation of commercial reciprocity. Relations with the GDR’s most important Western trading partner, the Federal Republic of Germany, were significantly improved during the same period that the second Party Program was issued. At the recent 11th Party Congress of the SED, moreover, Erich Honecker reaffirmed that the “preservation of peace was and remains . the decisive question in relations”3 between the two Germanies. The Directive for the live-year plan, presented at the Congress by Politburo member Giinter Mittag, could thus emphasize the need to “further solidify the economic unassailability of the GDR” in foreign trade with capitalistic countries, citing an “inseparable relationship”

87:6394 The oil and gas resources of the nonsocialist countries of the world: Modelevskiy, M.S. and G.S. Gurevich, 1986. Int. Geol. Rev., 28(7):765–769

87:6394 The oil and gas resources of the nonsocialist countries of the world: Modelevskiy, M.S. and G.S. Gurevich, 1986. Int. Geol. Rev., 28(7):765–769

The Computation of World Income Distribution

There is a growing perception of the international economy as an interdependent system. The UN General Assembly's 1974-75 declaration on principles and programs for a change in the international economic order assumes that the welfare of peasants, workers, businessmen, civil servants, and political elites in less developed countries (LDCs) are linked to decisions made by economic policymakers in the industrialized nations. Many people in LDCs, especially elites, compare their material levels of living with those of rich countries. Accordingly, there is merit to examining global income distribution. Because scholars do not have a good technique for aggregating country income distributions into a world income distribution, they rarely analyze this distribution. This article presents a method of calculating global distribution, given a set of national distributions. As a sidelight to their work on purchasing-power parity, Kravis, Heston, and Summers calculate world (145 nonsocialist countries) income distribution, but by nations, not by households or individuals. They assume that each individual receives his GNP per capita. Table 1

The frontier of modern Western medicine in Nepal

Using the concepts frontier and interface the introduction and spreading of modern Western medicine in Nepal and its relations to other medical systems are described and analyzed. Medical systems do not prevail in the same degree in all places; we may call the geographic areas of concentration the core areas or center(s) of medical systems and the remaining areas their periphery. The frontier of a medical system is defined as that part of the periphery where the presence of the system is increasing. The place of the frontier, its width and the forms in which a medical system appears at its frontier are determined by both internal dynamics and contextual factors. In non-socialist countries like Nepal the dynamics of modern Western medicine are characterized by three tendencies: centralization, expansiveness and a commercial and capitalist character. Some important contextual factors which have been shaping the frontier in Nepal are: migration, including tourism, labor-migration and trade; the role of foreign aid and geographical conditions. The situation at the frontier has an important influence on the nature of the interface between modern Western medicine and other medical systems. In the article Faith-healing, Ayurvedic medicine, Homeopathy and Tibetan medicine are described briefly and the interface between them and modern Western medicine is looked into.

Changes in the World Distribution of Income between 1950 and 1977

Trends in the world distribution of income are much discussed and philosophised about. The issue of increasing economic inequality among nonsocialist countries in the post-war period is central to the debate about the International Economic Order. In I969 the Pearson Commission Report was already pointing to the 'widening gap between the developed and developing countries' as a 'central issue of our time', and was proposing the reduction of that gap as the main objective of international co-operation.' According to that report, GNP per capita had increased between I960 and I967 at annual rates of 2-5 % and 3-6 % in developing and developed countries respectively. Morawetz (I978) found that the gap between the two sets of countries rose from i 2 6 fold in I950 to I3-2 fold in I975. Other authors see a more complicated picture. Atkinson (I975), for instance, has argued that although the share of poor countries in world income probably declined between I950 and I970, that of the countries at the middle of the world distribution probably increased.2 What may be a mere assessment of relative growth performances among nonsocialist countries becomes a basic theoretical element in the radical stream of economic literature. For authors like Amin (I974), Emmanuel (I972), and Frank (I978), the capitalist mode of development necessarily leads to the rich countries of the 'centre' becoming richer and poor countries of the 'periphery' becoming poorer, in a degree depending on their involvement in international trade. For them, a widening gap between developed and developing countries is simply the statistical confirmation of an unavoidable consequence of the national and international capitalist system. In the latter perspective, the issue at stake is of such importance that the contrast between the abundance of theoretical literature and the lack of empirical work is striking. The few existing studies of changes in world distribution provide an inadequate picture. Intra-country income distributions are not taken into account, observation periods do not exceed I5 years (8 for Andic and Peacock (I96I) and for Beckerman and Bacon (I970), I5 for Kirman and Tomasini (I969)), socialist as well as some non-socialist countries are excluded, and national incomes are converted to U.S. dollars at official exchange rates.3 Finally, none of these studies covers the I970s, although several shocks which might have affected world distribution occurred during that decade. For the non-socialist countries to which they refer, the Andic/Peacock and Beckerman/Bacon studies found the Gini coefficient almost constant over

World raw material markets until the year 2000 – implications for Eastern Europe

Abstract This study examines a number of major aspects of the world market for minerals. Based on this it also discusses perspective possibilities and conditions of resource supplies for Eastern Europe from CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), as well as from non-CMEA sources. Continuing difficulties in resource imports from CMEA sources is projected. The cost advantages of these imports relative to non-socialist imports and to the development of domestic mining will, in general, substantially diminish, and in certain cases even discontinue. The study concludes that for several non-fuel minerals and energy sources a rise in the share of non-socialist countries in the imports of East European countries will become necessary in the period until 2000.