Orchestrating Solidarity. Third World Agency, Transnational Networks and the Belgian Mobilization for Vietnam and Latin America (1960s-1980s)

Central in this research is the question of how some distant political issues and movements in countries of the Third World became the subject of mobilization in Western Europe during the Cold War. Indeed, broad sectors of Western European societies appeared to be genuinely moved by the turmoil that happened in the Southern hemisphere. The period of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s witnessed the rise of a plethora of social movements that claimed common cause with political movements in the Third World and gave shape to a special connectivity between the First and Third World. This connectivity was dubbed "solidarity", and seemed to have developed itself on a scale like never achieved before or since. The issue of the Vietnam War, for instance, mobilized in the 1960s and early 1970s hundreds of thousands of people into action in their societies, witnessing the rise of massive street demonstrations and thousands of committees spread across big cities and smaller towns in Western Europe. When a military coup by general Augusto Pinochet toppled democracy in Chile on September 11, 1973, a domestic political crisis "jumped" across the Andes and the Atlantic to provoke an explosion of indignation and activism in Western Europe, where solidarity committees staged public protests against the Pinochet dictatorship and organized relief for the thousands of Chileans seeking refuge in Western Europe. Around the same time, a groundswell of public opprobrium against Apartheid in Southern Africa started to swell worldwide, and developed into what its historiographers have celebrated as one of the most globalized social movements of the Cold War. Even against the backdrop of an economic crisis and growing East-West tension in the following years, solidarity with the Third World remained powerful, as demonstrated by the mobilization for Nicaragua in the 1980s. The emergence of social movements in Western Europe professing the grand word of "solidarity" with the Third World has for a long time received attention from historians and social scientists as well as from former activists who have extensively written about the topic. The question which they had largely in the back of their mind was why Third World issues provoked reaction among Western European activists, whereas they have largely equivocated on the more fundamental question of how. In their attempt to come to terms with the question of why activists mobilized for issues beyond their own countries with seemingly little at stake for them, and why some issues became hot and others not, accounts have usually looked for answers within the minds of the activists and the societies they lived in, without giving much not to say any attention to their interaction with Third World actors and the input of the latter. Firmly centered on the agency of Western European activists, traditional conceptions of solidarity have left little room for an active part of Third World actors. Leading interpretations have converged on a consensus, a foundational narrative, considering Third World solidarity movements simply as a matter of ideals, ideologies and imaginations on the account of activists in the "First World", notably the "New Left", who shaped for themselves the outlook and nature of their activism. The quintessence of solidarity, then, has been located in a "mental connectivity"' with the Third World emerging in the minds of radical Western activists, whereby Third World actors only appear as passive objects of the imagination or, at best, as secondary figures, voiceless and separated by mental and geographical distance. By means of an impressive amount of to date neglected sources, this study has challenged traditional interpretations and has made explicit the purposive role and impact of Third World political movements in the development of the campaigns which emerged in support of them at the scene of Western European societies, and, more specifically, in Belgium. Analyzing four important cases of Third World activism, namely the mobilization for Vietnam, Brazil, Chile and Nicaragua in the period of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and adopting a transnational perspective which draws on an original cross-fertilization of the literature on transnational social movements and the research on Third World diplomacy, this doctoral dissertation has argued that Third World political movements have played an active part in the emergence, functioning and transnational identity of overseas social movements for their causes. These Third World actors were not, as averred by traditional accounts, passive recipients of support, but they have on the contrary actively created networks with overseas groups in Western Europe and established direct connections and relationships with the latter in their quest for international support, money and power. What appeared to be on the one side "solidarity", was on the other "diplomacy". In all the solidarity movements analyzed in this research, the line between solidarity and diplomacy was a thin and fuzzy one: embassies, diplomats, and politicians have all been present as chief protagonists in solidarity movements, more than mainstream studies may reveal. In addition to considering the move of political movements in the Third World toward Western Europe, this research has also made explicit how their agency deeply affected the ways in which overseas solidarity movements developed and organized themselves. One of the key arguments made by this research is that we cannot understand where and how transnational activism developed, even at the very local level, without taking into account the material connections with Third World actors and the input of the latter proceeding via these networks. We have demonstrated that actors and organizations which were far from "new" and "young" in the 1960s and the following decades have played a pivotal role, both as privileged partners for Third World political movements and as a central axis for the mobilization at the level of Belgian society. The grand orchestrators behind the mobilization against the Vietnam War and the Brazilian and Chilean dictatorships were, typically, not the students of "1968", as claimed by mainstream literature, but their university professors, people belonging to slightly older generations, or members of organizations like political parties, trade unions, or, notably in the case of Brazil, Catholic church groups. The privileged access to information and relationshipswith Third World actors of a relatively small number of leading activists is key to understanding the structure, configuration and features of the mobilization in Belgian society. Furthermore, Third World agency was a driving force behind the emergence of transnational networks which interlinked activists across borders of states and were the basis on which cross-border diffusion and similarities as well as a Europeanization and globalization of activism emerged. With these path-breaking conclusions, this research project has painted a new picture of the roots of contemporary NGOs for development cooperation and human rights, the history of the Cold War and 1968 movements in Belgium, and the North-South relations in a globalizing world.

Jaar van publicatie:2013

Toegankelijkheid:Closed