When we talk about globalization, we often mean the extension of capitalist hegemony over the world since the end of the Cold War. But after World War II the socialist bloc practiced alternative models of worldwide collaboration — ones supposedly based on the principles of solidarity, international cooperation, anti-imperialism, and scientific-technological revolution. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the economic organization founded by the Soviet Union and its satellites in 1949, abandoned the Stalinist policy of autarkic national economies and aimed at inter-socialist economic collaboration. In the wake of decolonization in the Global South, these ambitions were extended toward the newly independent countries in Africa and Asia.

This is the story architectural and urban historian Łukasz Stanek tells in his new book Architecture in Global Socialism. He recounts this history from the perspective of the cooperation between architects, planners, and construction companies from Eastern Europe and the Global South. In particular, he focuses on five cities in Ghana, Nigeria, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, shaped by the collaboration between the “Second” and the “Third” worlds. Against the backdrop of the urbanization processes in Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City, he shows both sides’ interest in cooperation, the dynamics of their collaborative efforts, and their political and economic goals.

He also shows how personal contacts between architects, planners, managers, and engineers from Southern, Eastern, and Western countries impacted urbanization processes in Eastern Europe after the end of socialism. 

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The involvement of Eastern European countries in the “Third World” is often interpreted as an extension of the Cold War beyond Europe, to other continents. But your book shows how these newly decolonized countries didn’t just jump into new dependency relations with the socialist world. Rather, they chose carefully between partners from the West and East, as they looked for the most favorable offer. How did they make this choice?

LS: The answer to this question differs from country to country. Some countries in the Global South were closely linked to the Soviet Union. This pertains in particular to Mongolia, Vietnam, and Cuba, which were member states of the Comecon. But in my book, I chose to focus on countries which were nonaligned and were neither Soviet satellites nor Marxist-Leninist regimes. This is true even of Ghana under the socialist government of Kwame Nkrumah, let alone Nigeria, Iraq, the Gulf states, and, indeed, the majority of countries in the Global South during the Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, their governments carefully negotiated their position within and across Cold War divides.

The motivations of these countries to collaborate with socialist Eastern Europe were diverse and changing. Nkrumah’s government embarked on a socialist path of development, and the Soviet Union and its satellite countries sent architects, planners, and engineers to assist Ghana. They facilitated industrial modernization, collectivization of agriculture, and an egalitarian distribution of welfare, but also a fundamental restructuring of times and spaces of everyday life beyond the racialized colonial city. These exchanges shaped the urban landscapes of Ghana, including housing, schools, health care and cultural facilities, administrative buildings, and industry.

By contrast, Nigeria’s elites were generally hostile toward socialism. They invited Eastern European architects and construction companies because of other reasons: in order to offset the dominance of Western countries, to develop the Nigerian construction industry, to stimulate competition on their market, and to alleviate the shortages of labor power in state administration, professional services, and higher education. Similar motivations can be seen in Iraq, at least since the late 1970s, and in the Gulf states. This is a key dynamic that the book describes: the ways in which Eastern Europeans, West Africans, and Middle Easterners exploited differences between state socialism as an economic system and the emerging “globalization” of design and construction services, increasingly dominated by the West.

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