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Global Labor and the ILO (1947-1973)
A Post-Cold War Perspective1
Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva
The aim of my research is to look at labor as one of the most contentious issues of the Cold
War period in order to better understand how “Cold War” has functioned as both a discourse
and in practice and so as to underscore the divergences as well as the convergences between
both economic and social models. For that matter, I use international organizations as fields
(and not objects) of research, primarily the ILO2 but also the United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe.3
This work is based on three assumptions and/or choices that shape the way I am looking at my
topic and which I first wish to clarify.
Firstly, regarding the definition of or approach to labor, I will roughly follow the mental
framework to which “my actors” and in particular the ILO actors were beholden. Since the
late 1930s (following the death of Albert Thomas in 1932 and the entry of the US into the
ILO in 1934) there has been a shift in the perception and definition of labor as a field of
action. In the 1920s, labor and workers had to be mainly protected. Protective conventions
(like the eight-hour workday) or social insurance were priorities of the organization. Starting
in the 1930s, labor had to be organized – productivity, planning, and manpower-management
training became the main issues. Following this, and unlike what I have done in my previous
work on the GDR or on the German social state, the work experience will not be at the center
of my investigation; rather, I will focus on the discourse on labor. Thus the main actors of my
presentation will not be the workers but the officials and experts, possibly trade unionists and
politicians, who discussed labor issues.
Secondly, the classic Cold War historiography focuses on the opposition between and
incompatibility of both systems. I have no intention of glossing over the struggles and
oppositions between both economic and social systems, but I shall be putting them in a “postCold War perspective.”4 I want to study how this opposition has been constructed. I also want
1
This text has been written and discussed during my stay at the Re :work in Berlin between January and July
2011.
2
The literature on the ILO is growing very quickly. For a complete bibliography, see the last edited volumes:
Jasmien van Daele, Magali Rodriguez Garcia, Geert van Goethem, Marcel van der Linden (eds.), ILO Histories :
Essays on the International Labor Organization and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century
(Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Isabelle Lespinet-Moret, Vincent Viet (eds.)
(Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011); Sandrine Kott,
Joëlle Droux (eds.), Globalizing Social Rights : The ILO and Beyond (London: Palgrave, 2012), forthcoming.
3
The literature on the ECE is still scarce. See Gunnar Myrdal, “Twenty Years of the United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe,” International Organization 22, no. 3 (Summer) 617-628; and David Wightman, “EastWest Cooperation and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe,” International Organization 11,
no. 1 (1957) 1-12. Vaclav Kostelecky, The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe: the beginning of a
history, Gothenburg, Graphic Systems, 1989. There are a number of people now working on ECE material – see
in particular the ongoing research of Vincent Lagendijk.
4
Sari Autio-Sarasmo, Katalin Mikossy (eds.), Reassessing Cold War Europe (Routledge, 2010).
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to bring to light another side of the story and decipher the circulation of knowledge and also
learn how the hidden convergence between both systems related to labor questions. Most of
the authors who adopt a post-Cold War narrative focus on political, cultural and technological
exchange and tend to emphasize a one-way circulation. They stress the exportation of values,
ideas and goods from the West to the East and (“from a winners point of view”?) disclose a
kind of hidden Westernization of the East much before the final demise of the socialist bloc.
The historiography of human rights is paradigmatic for that.5 What I discovered is that in the
field of labor exchanges things were less unilateral. At least up to the early 1970s, socialist
solutions and models did pose a challenge and even served as inspiration for some Western
European technocrats (and we should not forget the huge impact on powerful communist
parties like those of France or Italy).
But what I have also discovered in working on IO material is that in order to really understand
these circulations we must bring developing Third-World countries into the picture. These
countries played a crucial role in the circulation and cross-pollination of both models – and
for that, IO are excellent observatories.
Thirdly, as previously stated, I will use International Organizations as fields of research and
not as objects. This means that I will not address the realist/functionalist debate, which
focuses on the role international organizations were able to play as international actors.6 I am
using the IO material as international (or transnational) open social spaces where ideas and
know-how practices are exchanged, where dominant paradigms are received, constructed and
exported from and to national scenes. I use them as observation sites from which I can
identify and follow actors and study what I call mechanisms of internationalization or
globalization. But in order to do so I chose to “enter” into the IO in a special way. I have a
general (although not a permanent) distrust toward the formal trappings of IO and have
purposely avoided those large conferences and meetings (and their printed material) that are
used by national representatives as nationalistic soapboxes and places where power blocs take
shape.
I have been looking in particular at the archival documents (mainly correspondence and
reports) produced by officials and experts in the secretariats (of the ECE) as well as in the
ILO office. This allows me to identify and trace certain actors who act as links between the
national and the international spheres, between West and East.
What I wish to present here is the first results of this research based on archival research that I
have done in the ILO and ECE archives in Geneva, in the Stasi and SAPMO archives in
Berlin, and which I wish to complete with research in the Bundesarchiv and in the archives of
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
5
Daniel Charles Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of
Communism (Princeton University Press, 2001).
6
See my paper : Sandrine Kott, “Les organisations internationales terrains d’étude de la globalisation: Jalons
pour une approche socio-historique,” in Critique international, 52, (2011), p.11-16. and “International
Organizations. A Field of Research for a Global History” in Zeithistorische Forschungen. Studies in
Contemporary History, 3, 2011, p.445-453.
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I wish to proceed in three steps.
1) Firstly, I will study how the Cold War was constructed around the labor issue and how
the ILO was a space where oppositions between two conceptions of labor were
constructed and discussed.
2) Secondly, I will show how convergences emerged from these debates and the role that
certain actors and countries played in the emergence of these convergences.
3) Thirdly, I will study the circulation of know-how and expertise between West and East
as well as East and South, shifting the analytical framework from Cold War to
developmental issues.
1. Labor as a Cold War Issue
The ILO is an ideal observatory for looking at how the question of labor became a major Cold
War issue.
The ILO as a Cold War Actor
The ILO itself can be seen as an early Cold War institution.7 In 1919 it was explicitly founded
as a counter-model to revolutionary Russia so as to promote reformist solutions to social
questions.8 Its tripartite structure encompassed government, employer and worker
representatives and was embedded in this conception of social reform inherited from the latenineteenth century and was clearly at odds with the planned state-economy model promoted
by the Soviet regime. In return, the Soviet communists showed a marked hostility to the
organization even when the USSR became a member of the ILO in 1934 after having joined
the League of Nations for security purposes.9 But at that time Eastern European actors and in
particular Polish and above all Czech actors were strongly involved in the organization.
Edvard Benes, Minister of Foreign Affairs and then the second president of Czechoslovakia,
was a member of the Paris commission which discussed the organization’s future between
January and March 1919. He also participated in the ILO conferences during the Second
World War.
In the first phase of the Cold War (1947-1970) the ILO was led by the American civil servant
David Morse.10 Ever since the mid-1930s its survival rested heavily on the support of the
Western world and in particular on the US, which tended to use it as a platform from which
they could internationalize the New Deal.11 Meanwhile, during this period of “US
7
See Harold Karan Jacobson, Th USSR
h UN Ec
c
S c Ac
(Notre Dame, Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1963); and Harold Karan Jacobson, “Labor, the UN and the Cold War,”
International Organization 11, no. 1 (1957) 55-67.
8
James T. Shotwell, “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” in Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 166, “The International Labor Organization,”
1933, March, 18-25.
9
Jacobson, op cit.
10
On Morse, see Daniel Maul, “The Morse Years: The ILO 1948-1970,” in J. van Daele, M. Rodriguez-Garcia,
Geert van Goethem, M. van der Linden (eds.), ILO Histories. Essays on the International Labour Organization
and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) 365-400.
11
Geert Van Goethem, “Phelan’s War: The International Labour Organization in Limbo (1941-1948),” in ILO
Histories, 314-340; on the international US model, see also David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission:
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hegemony,”12 almost all Eastern Bloc countries (except the GDR) were13 or became (1954 for
the USSR)14 members. Poland and Czechoslovakia were undoubtedly the most involved, but
the whole bloc was diplomatically present through their delegates at the International Labor
Conference and in the governing body – those countries which did not possess delegates in
the governing body regularly sent observers.
Th “Th
F
”
Labor issues were discussed in a highly controversial manner not only within the ILO but also
in other international arenas such as the Economic and social council of the United Nations
(ECOSOC).
The way that conferences are still organized in the IO tends to intensify or even showcase the
oppositions, representatives often stressing their fundamental ideological differences by
grandstanding and getting on their soapboxes for Cold War discourses.15
A strategy of “depoliticizing” or “de-ideologizing” the debates around labor was consciously
employed by Gunnar Myrdal in the ECE – he restricted those participating in the debates to
the real experts and shunned all publicity. This was a model for the ILO when organizing the
Second European Conference in 1974.
During this period the basic opposition was structured around the liberal (communists would
say formal) conception of “freedom” versus realized freedom through equality.
In the 1950s it usually crystallized around three main issues: those which were referred to in
the literature as human right issues16 but what I call the “three freedoms” – a takeoff on
Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of 1941.
First Issue. Employers representation in the framework of tripartism raised the question of
free versus state enterprise and a free versus a command economy. Western employers’
representatives tried to exclude the socialist employers from the organization by arguing that
they were not “true employers” but rather government delegates, this being in contradiction to
Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2010).
12
Robert Cox, “Labor and Hegemony,” in International Organization 31, no. 3 (1977) 385.
13
Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia. But the Czech and Polish delegates were
the only ones to regularly attend the international labor conference. Between 1945 and 1951 Poland was the only
Eastern Bloc country to have a seat in the governing body.
14
After 1954 all Eastern Bloc countries were represented each year at the conference. Romania entered the ILO
in 1956. The USSR was member of the governing body from 1955 onward. Between 1957 and 1960 there was
also a Czech delegation, replaced by a Romanian one between 1960 and 1963 and a Polish one between 1963
and 1966, an Hungarian one between 1966 and 1969, and a Czech and Romanian one between 1969 and 1972.
At least three socialist counties were sending governmental observers to the governing body during this period.
This documents the diplomatic involvement of Eastern Bloc countries n the ILO at that time.
15
See the International Labour Conference (ILC) proceedings edited each year by the ILO, which very well
document the front lines between both blocs on various issues.
16
On the use of human rights rhetoric by US actors in the Cold War context, see several contributions in StefanLudwig Hoffman, Moralpolitik : Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Wallstein,
2010).
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the founding principle of tripartism in the ILO.17 The employer’s representatives from the
socialist countries were banned from active participation in industrial committees up to 1959.
Second Issue. In 1947 the question of forced labor was reopened by the American Federation
of Labor in a session of the UN Social and Economic Council to denounce the labor camps in
the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc. A first joint committee (ECOSOC-ILO) was set up
in 1951 to study thousands of accusations against several countries, mostly European and
socialist, for practicing “forced or corrective labor as a means of political coercion or
punishment and which [was] also on such a scale as to constitute an important element in the
economy of a given country.” In this first phase, forced or free labor was exclusively
approached from the side of its legal definition and in reference to state control.18
Third Issue. Voting in 1948, the Convention 8719 addressed the question of freedom of
association. The convention stressed that “public authorities shall refrain from any
interference which would restrict this right or impede the lawful exercise thereof.” (Article 32) But it did not mention the various other pressures which could prevent the workers from
organizing.
In all three issues the ILO conventions and discussions tended to consider public authorities
and the state as the main or even sole threat to freedom. This prevailing conception of
freedom was not left unchallenged.
In this respect it is interesting to compare both answers of the US and the Czech governments
to a question sent in 1956 by ILO officials in preparing a series of monographs on TU.
The answer of the US government was the following:
“In the US the basic tenet is that within the framework of a free society there shall be quality
of opportunity and representation to all citizens as individuals and as members of groups or
associations. Employers and workers are free to organize their own associations to conduct
their internal affairs and to advance their interests. There is no governmental intervention in
these affairs.”20
The Czech government gave the following answer
“The relationship between the TU, the state and the government’s economic agencies is one
of mutual cooperation. The TU organization does not stand in isolation from the management
of their enterprises but, on the contrary, actively participates in the solution of the problems
17
For a short account, see Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (New York, NY:
Octagon Books, 1971) 290-311; and Victor-Yves Ghebali, The International Labour Organization: A Case
Study on the Evolution of U.N. Specialised Ggencies (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989) 164-175.
18
On forced labor, see Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (New York, NY:
Octagon Books, 1971) 270-283; and Daniel Maul, Menschenrechte, Sozialpolitik Und Dekolonisation: Die
Internationale Arbeitsorganisation (IAO) 1940-1970 (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 35-53.
See Sandrine Kott,“Arbeit ein transnationales Objekt: Die Frage der Zwangsarbeit im ‘Jahrzehnt der
Menschenrechte’,” in Unterwegs in Europa: Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte
(Campus, 2008), 301-323; Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Forced Labor, ILO-UN, Geneva, 1953; and the
1956 Report VI (2) prepared by the International Labour Office for the 39th Session of the Conference Résumé
de la discussion in Labour International Conference, 39me session, Geneva, 1956, Appendix IX, Geneva, ILO,
1956, 721-727.
19
See the text of the convention http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/english/convdisp1.htm, and for the discussion
surrounding this convention, see Alcock, p.67-81.
20
International Labor Office Archives (ILOA) FEWO 8-61; United States response, US government, 20
September 1955.
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and tasks of the enterprise concerned in accomplishing its fundamental objective – namely,
improvement of the living standard of the working population.”21
Shifting Fronts
But Eastern Bloc actors were not alone in their redefinition of freedom in terms of laborrelated issues
1) A commission was established to investigate cases of infringement of TU rights and
Western trade unions used this commission not only to assert their rights vis-à-vis their
employers but, for example, vis-à-vis the closed-shop practices of several trade unions in the
USA.22 Employers’ practices in Spain and Greece had been scrutinized closely at the
beginning of the 1970s. Even if the Convention 87 and the representations of trade union
rights which it conveyed had undoubtedly a huge impact on the socialist bloc : in the
Solidarnosc23 case but not exclusively24, it could also be used as a basis to question other
ways of limiting trade union rights.
2) As for the forced-labor discussion, the intervention of several actors from the Anti-Slavery
League or the Workers Defense League – in the view of communist-minded trade unions –
would open up the definition of forced labor. The opening did indeed come from both a
combined anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspective condemning colonial forced labor,
peonage and other forms of “capitalist exploitation.”25 The convention adopted in 1957 (105)
first recommended the abolition of forced labor:
a) as a means of political coercion or education or as a punishment for holding or expressing
political views or views ideologically opposed to the established political, social or economic
system.
But, after very controversial discussions, this too was added:
(b) as a method of mobilizing and using labor for purposes of economic development;
(c) as a means of labor discipline;
(d) as a punishment for having participated in strikes;
(e) as a means of racial, social, national or religious discrimination.
The definition of forced labor had been reopened26 and in the end the Convention 105 aimed
at condemning Soviet labor camps has being primarily directed against colonial rule.27
3) In my view, the tripartite question opened up the most interesting of all the discussions. To
settle the question of employer representatives from the Eastern Bloc, the general director set
up a committee led by Sir McNair. The report of the McNair Committee was discussed in the
21
ILOA FEWO 8-17, 6 January 1956. Response of the Czech government.
See several cases of the imitation of TU rights in the art of the employers coming from Belgium, Greece, FRG,
USA in the 1950s in ILOA TUR-1.
23
Idesbald Goddeeris, “The limits of Lobbying: ILO and Solidarnosc,” in Jasmien van Daele, et al. (eds.), ILO
Histories, op. cit., 423-443.
24
See on that the reaction of the Stasi MfSA HA XVIII Ka/100 (CD, Spur 2).
22
25
On the multifaceted definition of forced labor, see Torn Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Free and
Unfree Labor: The Debate Continues (New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997); and the special issue of Journal of
Modern European History – Europe, Slave Trade and Colonial Forced Labour, vol. 7 (2009) 1.
26
See http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/english/convdisp1.htm for the text of the convention.
27
See the FLC series in ILOA.
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39th International Labor Conference in 1956 and stated the growing importance of a mixed
economy and the need to distinguish between private ownership and “employers” defined as
persons who hold leading positions in production.28 The conclusions of the report were
rejected by the employers’ representative, but the vast majority of workers representatives and
government delegates voted for it. Meanwhile the whole issue allowed for the launching of an
important discussion on the role of the state in advanced capitalist as well as in developing
countries. This was summarized by the Indian government delegate as follows29:
“In past controversy, many of us tended to assume that the countries of the world could be
divided into two groups: those whose workers' and employers' organizations were
independent and free from the control of their governments and those where they were not.
[But] there are grades of shading, and variable and ponderable, and less ponderable, degrees
of control . . . [That to which] I would like to draw your attention today is the development of
a new class of management . . . representatives from the relevant categories in such
organizations should be enabled to play their part in the ILO.”30
This “new class of management” on both sides of the Iron Curtain could learn how to share
their knowledge.
2. Common Ground
Common Issues
Although acting in divergent economies, economists, experts and managers could indeed
share common priorities. Three of them were:
1) Manpower training along with adjustment to technological change seems to have been one
vital common issue. This led to cooperation within and through the ILO and the ECE in
various ways. The Czech authorities sent teams to the ILO as early as the 1950s and were able
to become part of manpower-training programs with West European managers by 1956. But
the main impulse came in the early 1960s from the economic reforms that were enacted all
over the Eastern Bloc and which aimed to introduce more flexibility into the planned
economy. Eastern European governments turned to the Office and applied for manpowertraining programs. The Polish authorities obtained a manpower-training center for managers
in Warsaw as early as 1965,31 and Romania shortly followed their example.32 In 1968-1970,
high-level Czech economic managers were sent to the international training center established
in Turin in 196433 and participated in several training sessions on computing and decisionmaking. The ECE-specialized committees offered an important framework for these meetings
28
Report of the Committee on Freedom of Employers' and Workers' Organizations, GB 131, session, 6-10
March 1956. See also the discussion in the conference ILC, tenth and eleventh sessions, 1956, 133-161.
29
On the role played by Indian actors in the East-West exchanges on economic thoughts look at Engerman,
David C. « The Anti-Politics of Inequality: Reflections on a Special Issue ». Journal of Global History 6, no. 1
(2011): 143-151, here p.147.
30
International Labor Conference Proceedings 1956, tenth session, 133.
31
ILOAZ/1/10/1/1 correspondence 1966-1969.
32
ILOA Z3 52 /1 (J2).
33
ILOA TAP 0-17 Cz 1965.
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between Eastern and Western European managers34 and at the beginning of the 1970 the
General Secretariat for East-West cooperation in Vienna organized several meetings in which
common problems like the use of natural resources, energy and transport systems were
discussed.35
2) These types of meetings were based on a common “productivist” belief which shaped the
organization of labor. Already in the interwar period US engineers had been sent to the USSR,
where they promoted Fordist methods.36 In both blocs piecework wage, extreme division of
labor, technical innovation on the shop floor was the top priority of the management. As early
as 1952 the ILO Trade unionist Jan Shuil described the situation as follows: “The efforts
directed at increasing productivity in both the Western and Eastern countries are essentially
alike but the similarity of effort is completely obscured by the disparity of language; mainly
for political reasons . . . I have often wondered if the subject did not lend itself to a general
study or an article in The International Labor Review that would bring out the similarity of
efforts and even of methods, the reasons why certain measures are taken in certain countries
and the fact that most measures find their counterpart under one term or another in most other
countries . . . it may contribute to the soothing of many minds.”37 These studies were launched
in 195238 based on the widely shared assumption that an increase in productivity was the
prerequisite for increasing the wealth of all39.
3) A third common issue was planning, an important one among European civil servants and
economists since the First World War. In this respect the ILO was a space for discussions in
particular in the 1930s (and not just as a response to the world crisis)40 and during the Second
World War.41 Even if the conception of planning varied greatly between West and East, there
was still a common belief among most European economists and civil servants (less so in the
USA since the end of the First World War) that the economy should be planned. In 1961,
Gunnar Myrdal42, the Swedish economist and director of the ECE between 1947 and 1957,
stated that the expression “planned economy” was a tautology since an economy was in fact
all about planning.43 The question of a “national planned economy” was among the most
34
See the Archives of the United Nations in Geneva (UNOGA), Myrdal Files, ARR 14/1360 26.
For the very positive point of view of the Stasi on that issue, see MFSA HA XVIII 21508 and HA XVIII 19658.
35
See ILOA Jenks Papers, Mission I. Tchéco, 14 March 1968.
36
See the classic book on the subject, Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and
Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Several Soviet historians
(among them Stephen Kotkin and Yves Cohen) have stressed this once more.
37
ILOA Z 11/1/2, Activities in the Field of Productivity, 1952-1956.
38
ILOA Z 11/1/2 ILO.
39
On this productivity belief see and its political implications the seminal article of Maier, Charles S. « The
Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II ».
International Organization 31, no. 4 (October 1, 1977): 607-633. But unlike him I do not see the origin of this
belief in the 40s and the internal US policy.
40
See Thomas Cayet, “Le planning comme organisation du travail,” in Lespinet-Moret, Viet (dir),
op. cit., 79-89.
41
ILO ILOA PWR 1/1000.
On Myrdal see Puntigliano, Andrés Rivarola, et Ȍrjan Appelqvist. « Prebisch and Myrdal: Development
Economics in the Core and on the Periphery ». Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (2011): 29-52.
43
See the excellent book of Gunnar Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1960); here p. 3.
42
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important topics discussed during the meetings organized in Vienna by the European
Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences, which had started
work at the end of the 1960s and gathered scholars from Eastern and Western Europe. The
first meeting held in Paris, with economists from various European countries, was devoted to
planning.44
Further research on all these topics have to be done along these lines but what I want to
discuss here is the role played by certain actors and situations in opening spaces for
discussion.
C
Ex
c
Ac
C
Many factors could be pointed out and in particular the role played by mostly French
communist (and “compagnons de route) in various spaces in linking Western and Eastern
scholars and experts. Here I wish to highlight two dimensions.
1) I was surprised to discover the real and symbolic role that the concentration camp of
Mathausen (where “Incorrigible Political Enemies” of the Third Reich were imprisoned)
played in creating links between Eastern and Western actors. When Morse met the Czech
president Antonin Novotny in Prague in 1959 during a long mission he made to Eastern
Europe, Novotny greeted him warmly and opened the interview by saying that they had in all
probability met before in Mathausen. Morse was indeed commanding an American unit which
liberated the concentration camp of Mathausen where Novotny was imprisoned.45 I found the
same allusion to Mathausen as a link in the Stasi-archives. A delegate from France at the ECE
and manager of the large enterprise Creusot-Loire was considered “reliable” because as a
French resistance fighter he had been deported to Mathausen.46 Of course these actors did not
really meet in Mathausen and they did not even share the same experience of the camp but the
reference to the camp stands for the legacy of antifascism, as a common political value which
could help overcoming distrust and opposition.
2)The collaboration and dialogue between both blocs is not understandable without putting it
in a longue durée perspective. The relationship between Eastern and Western European
countries is embodied in several actors who had already played an important intermediary role
between the two “Europes” during the interwar period. For the Czech and the Polish cases I
have been able to follow some of these intermediaries between their national administration
and the ILO before and after the war. These people accompanied David Morse during his
mission to Eastern Europe in 1948 and 1959.47 In Poland he was accompanied by Jan Rosner,
who had been a key figure in the relationship between Poland and the ILO since the 1930s.
He was secretary of the Polish delegation at the international conference between 1930 and
1933 and became an official in 1933. Between 1946 and 1950 he was the ILO correspondent
44
UNOG GX 10.
ILOA Z 3/64/2, Director-General’s Mission to Austria and Eastern Europe, March-April 1958
46
MfSA HA XVIII 19658.
47
ILOA Z 3/1/7 Records of official visits by the director general, 1948-1961, Z 3/64/2, Director-General’s
Mission to Austria and Eastern Europe, March-April 1958.
45
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in Warsaw. After his “resignation” he was hired on short-term contracts and sent on technical
missions to various countries.48
In the Czech case this continuity was bound up with the role played by the Czech experts in
the field of social insurance, the main field of expertise of the ILO in the interwar period. It
was also embodied in the person of Anton Zelenka, chief of the social insurance section of the
ILO in the 1950s.
Zelenka was born in Prague in 1903 and trained in the same city in the 1920s. He occupied
leading positions in the central administration for social insurance of the first Czech Republic.
He then joined the ILO, where he worked in close cooperation with two other main Czech
actors in the field of social insurance in the 1930s and 1940s – Oswald Stein (director of the
social insurance section between 1937 and 1943)49 and Emil Schönbaum, who was a very
successful expert of the ILO and helped to shape social insurance systems in many Latin
American countries.50
Zelenka was the Czech governmental representative of the 28th International Labor
Conference in 1946. In the 1950s he was hired as an Austrian citizen; nevertheless he
maintained close contacts with his Czech colleagues and was very influential in pushing an
ILO seminar on social insurance in Prague in 1959. In fact, during the 1950s Czechoslovakia
remained a major point of reference in the field of social insurance. The International Social
Security Association (ISSA), which from the beginning was closely linked to the ILO and
received guests in the ILO building in Geneva, also met in Prague in 1959 and was
successively headed by two Czech exiles in this period – Leo Wildman and later Vladimir
Rys, both maintaining close contacts to their home country.
Given this long-lasting expertise (and not solely ideological proximities as it is often asserted)
it is hardly astonishing that the Czech government repeatedly asked to send field experts on
social insurance to developing countries like Morocco and Burma.51
But as we will discuss later, this also had to do with the special position of Czechoslovakia as
a showcase nation of the Eastern Bloc.
Most Eastern European countries had benefited from technical assistance from the West
before the war, in a time when the split between two “Europes” counter posed a developed
Western Europe (or A Europe) and a backward Eastern Europe (or B Europe).52
3. Beyond the Cold War: The Development Issue?
Two Europes
As a matter of fact, in requesting assistance, Eastern European authorities were perfectly in
line with the practice which had predominated in the interwar period when Eastern European
countries benefited from knowledge and know-how produced in the West.53
48
ILOA P 2765, P 14/11/41.
ILOA P1289.
50
ILOA P3926.
51
ILOA P 1/25.
52
The distinction between Europe A and B is made by Francis Delaisi, Les deux Europes (Paris, 1929) and taken
up by Albert Thomas in a speech he held in Sofia in 1930. ILOA CAT 1-30-1.
49
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After the Second World War one can distinguish two phases:
1) Immediately after the war, it was the Polish authorities, above all, who were sending
pressing demands for assistance and reconstruction. During the Morse mission to Poland in
1948, Polish officials pressed him to help them rebuild their country. They denied the very
notion of Cold War but stated bitterly that with the dissolution of United Nation Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)54 and launching of the Marshall Plan, Germany
would again become a threat to Polish citizens and world peace.55
2) After five years during which the involvement of Eastern European countries had
experienced a lull, in the second half of the 1950s Eastern European officials (in particular in
the Balkans) turned again to IO for help, stressing that their countries should be eligible for
technical assistance programs. They complained that the Expanded Program of Technical
Assistance (EPTA) set up by the UN was exclusively directed at “less developed” countries.
For example, Romanian officials requested assistance to develop their tourist industry in the
1960s, and Polish authorities applied for fellowship programs. They thus managed to send
about twenty people with various professional backgrounds to Western Europe between 1957
and 1961 through the special ILO technical assistance program (the EPTA was much more
difficult to access). Most of them received fellowships to study rehabilitation programs and
institutions for the disabled in various Western European countries. Not surprisingly Jan
Rosner, by then minister for social welfare, was the key person in organizing this fellowship
program. After his mission the grant holder had to send a report to the ILO. These reports are
very good documents because they help us to understand the three different lenses through
which Polish fellows they were looking at “capitalist” realities: the communist, the national,
and the expert one. They tended to emphasize the proximity in inspiration between both
experiences but stressed the relative “backwardness” of Eastern European countries.56
Interestingly, with the help of the ILO-EPTA program, the Poles then organized a seminar on
the vocational rehabilitation of the disabled in Afro-Asian countries.57 This offers a good
example of how the circulation of know-how in the sphere of labor between West and East
transformed itself in a circulation between East and South.
Between East and South
The Poles were not the first Eastern Bloc country to organize such a seminar with the help of
the ILO – that honor when to the Czechs.
53
See Johan Schot, Vincent Lagendijk, “Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe
on Motorways and Electricity Networks,” in Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008), 196-217; and K.
Steffen Kohlrausch, S. Wiederkehr (eds.), Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe (Deutsches Historisches
Institut: Warsaw, 23, Osnabrück, Fiber, 2010). Ausgabe 01-02/10; and the sepcial issue of Comparativ, 1-2
(2010), Verflochtene Geschichten: Ostmitteleuropa.
54
For UNRAA’s implication in Poland, see Jessica Reinisch, “ ‘ We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation’:
UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3
(1 July 2008) 451 -476.
55
ILOA Morse Mission in Poland, ILO A Z 3/64/2.
56
ILOA OTA 50-1.
57
ILOA TAP 14-119.
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Beginning in 1956, Evzen Erban, the Czech Minister of Social Security, expressed the wish of
his country to organize a training seminar on social security with support of the EPTA. This
seminar finally took place in 1959 after a rather cumbersome procedure which clearly
revealed that the technical assistance program was not meant to promote Eastern European
models. When David Morse launched the technical assistance program within the
organization, he clearly presented it as a kind of American Marshall Plan for the world.58
In return, the first declaration of the Eastern representatives (the Polish Altman) in the
governing body was strongly critical of the program, explaining that it was a way to expand
the Western capitalist model in the field of labor.
Nevertheless, already in the early 1950s and increasingly after Stalin’s death, socialist
countries (even the Soviets) used the ILO and other international organizations to promote the
socialist labor movement and the socialist model of development.59 In this regard that
Czechoslovakia, which was the most developed Eastern European country and had a very
solid tradition of international cooperation, served as a showcase state for the Eastern Bloc.60
The first seminar held in Prague in 1959 on social security – a field in which Czech actors
could show a long-lasting expertise – seems to have been a success. But it was above all a
way to promote a state-organized system of social security.61
Other Eastern European countries also offered expertise in specialized fields.
The Bulgarians organized a seminar on cooperatives (a Bulgarian tradition) in 1964 in Sofia.62
The Soviets and Hungarians organized a seminar on vocational training in 1963.63
These undertakings were apparently well received in developing countries not just because it
was a way to escape Western domination but also because at that time the socialist countries
could provide them with a successful model of rapid and successful industrialization under the
umbrella of the state. In a lot of countries this was especially appealing to elites for whom the
state was central, because it was what they controlled.64
Conclusion
1) We have seen how labor was primarly a public Cold War topic but also how Eastern and
Western actors could converge in sharing the same modern view.
58
See the DG Report 1951, 100-102, and the preliminary discussions in GB, 1949, 109, in particular pp. 61-63;
also see ILOA Z 11/10/3.
59
See Alvin Z Rubinstein, The Soviets in International Organizations: Changing Policy Toward Developing
Countries, 1953-1963 (Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 1964).
60
See Justine Faure,
c
Tch c
c
-1968
(Paris: Tallandier, 2004) 364-385.
61
ILOA SI 2-0-17, Social security Cz 1943_1960 et TAP 14 1957.
62
ILOA TAP 14 104.
63
ILOA TAP 14-83.
64
See Constantin Katsakioris, “Soviet Lessons for Arab Modernization: Soviet Educational Aid towards Arab
Countries after 1956,” in Journal of Modern European History, vol. 8 (2010) 1, 85-103. On the socialist
countries’ policies toward the developing countries, see Christopher Clapham, “The Collapse of Socialist
Development in the Third World,” in Third World Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, Rethinking Socialism (1992), 13-25
and more recently David C. Engerman, ‘The second world’s third world’, Kritika, 12, 1, 2011, pp. 183–211 and
Tobias Rupprecht, ‘Die Sowjetunion und die Welt im Kalten Krieg: neue Forschungsperspektiven auf eine
vermeintlich hermetisch abgeschottete Gesellschaft’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 59, 3, 2010, pp.
381–99. Unfortunately all these contributions are concentrating solely on the Soviet case.
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2)Approaching the Cold War through labor-related questions offers a good insight into how
the Cold War discourse helped to obscure more long-lasting and structural issues. It shows in
particular that the development issue was still central in the after war period and was not only
dividing the world between South and North but also Europe between West and East.
3) Finally, this approach, which emphasized convergence and also reveals the role of certain
key actors, is also crucial for understanding the rapid European integration of Eastern
European countries into the European Community.
13