Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime Human Rights in History Series

This book examines competition and collaboration among Western powers, the socialist bloc, and the Third World for control over humanitarian aid programs during the Cold War. Young-sun Hong's analysis reevaluates the established parameters of German history. On the one hand, global humanitarian efforts functioned as an arena for a three-way political power struggle. On the other, they gave rise to transnational spaces that allowed for multidimensional social and cultural encounters. Hong paints an unexpected view of the global humanitarian regime: Algerian insurgents flown to East Germany for medical care, barefoot Chinese doctors in Tanzania, and West and East German doctors working together in the Congo. She also provides a rich analysis of the experiences of African trainees and Asian nurses in the two Germanys. This book brings an urgently needed historical perspective to contemporary debates on global governance, which largely concern humanitarianism, global health, south-north relationships, and global migration.

Introduction; Part I. Race, Security, and Cold War Humanitarianism: 1. Bipolar (dis)order; Part II. The Global Humanitarian Regime at Arms: 2. Through a glass darkly; 3. Mission impossible; 4. Back to the future in Indochina; 5. 'Solidarity is might!'; Part III. Global Health, Development, and Labor Migration: 6. Know your body and build socialism; 7. The time machine 'development'; 8. Far away, so close; 9. Things fall apart; Conclusion.

Young-sun Hong is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of Welfare, Modernity and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (1998). She has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harvard Center for European Studies, and New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies. She has also received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, the Max-Planck Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Social Science Research Council. Hong has contributed to debates on modernity and transnationalism at the H-German Forum on Transnationalism (2006) and the German History Forum on Asia, Germany and the Transnational Turn (2010). In 2008, she organized a session on Asian-German studies at the German Studies Association meeting. Currently, she serves on the editorial board of Social History.