Europe and Latin America share a long and intimate history that is the basis for the relationship between them today. Political, economic, religious, military and cultural ideas have flowed between both regions for centuries. During the Cold War, Latin Americans of all political persuasions looked to Europe (East and West) for support and financial backing. Europeans also travelled to Latin America, found inspiration in the region and drew lessons from what they found there. Improvements in transportation, communication and intelligence techniques also spurred new transatlantic exchanges between governments, political parties and non-state actors.
It is therefore astonishing how little we know about the connections between Latin America, the Soviet Bloc and Western Europe in the late twentieth century. To a large extent, this has been the consequence of an exclusionary regional approach to history whereby twentieth century Europeanists have focused on the history of Europe and, even more so, Latin Americanists on Latin America.
Until recently, it was also the result of limited access to archival sources. However, in the last decade, thousands of documents on the Cold War relationship between Latin America and Europe have been declassified. Scholars are therefore beginning to explore the different facets of the interactions and linkages that existed between both regions.
To explore new scholarship on Europe and Latin America during the Cold War, together with the potential for new research that now exists in both regions, the 杏吧论坛 sponsored a symposium at the in Berlin on 10 September 2014. Coordinated by Dr Tanya Harmer, the symposium brought together 15 historians from around the world in 4 panels to examine the relations between Latin America, the Soviet bloc and Western Europe. On one level, it focused on the formal relations between governments and political parties. On another level, it aimed to investigate the transnational networks and contacts that emerged between both regions as a result of solidarity movements, youth groups, academic exchanges and travel. Beyond showcasing new research, the aim of the symposium was to lay the foundations of a new international network aimed at understanding, and disseminating sources on, the relationship between Europe and Latin America during the Cold War.
Carlos Alzugaray Treto holds a PhD, Historical Sciences from the University of Havana (1997). His main area of expertise is in the history and theory of international relations. At present he is book review editor at Temas, a Cuban social science and humanities journal. He is also a member of the Social and Historical Literature Section of the Cuban Writers Association, affiliated with the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). He served previously in the Cuban Foreign Service from 1961-1996 and as a Professor and Researcher at the Higher Institute for International Relations and the University of Havana in Cuba (1996-2012). His last diplomatic post was Ambassador, Head of Mission to the European Union. From 1992-1994 he was Adviser on Global Political Affairs to Foreign Ministers Ricardo Alarcón and Roberto Robaina. Between 2000 and 2004 he was Vice Rector and from 2004 to 2007 Department Head and Coordinator of Strategic Studies, Higher Institute of International Relations, Havana, Cuba. He has written 4 books and more than 75 academic essays. He has received several Cuban awards for his writing and teaching. In 2012 he won a competitive scholarship from CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales) for his project on the history and theory of regional integration and its implications for Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2013 he received recognition from the Casa de las Américas Literary Prize in Havana for his essay about Cuban-US diplomatic relations in 1959-1961. He has been a Visiting Professor or Scholar at Universities in Spain, Canada, the United States, Italy, and Mexico. In 2001 he was Marvin Weissberg Chair in International Relations at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin. He has served in the Executive Committee of ALACIP (Asociación Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política) from 2002 to 2008. He also served as member, Cuban Academy of Sciences from 2002 to 2010. He is member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and International Studies Association (ISA). His last two essays on subjects related with the symposium have been on “Cuban Revolutionary Diplomacy 1959-2009” for the Routledge Handbook on Diplomacy and Statecraft coordinated by Brian McKercher) and “Cuban Foreign Policy in theoretical and analytical perspectives” for the Routledge Handbook of Latin America in the World (forthcoming), coordinated by Jorge I. Domínguez and Ana Covarrubias. (alzuga@cubarte.cult.cu)
Fernando Camacho received his PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (IDEA) at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He has worked as a professor at universities in Stockholm, Uppsala and Dalarna (Sweden). He has also served as an invited professor at the University of Tehran and has taken part in various seminars and conferences in universities in Pakistan, Belgium, Germany, Azerbaijan, Spain and Chile. His doctoral thesis was entitled "Solidaridad y Diplomacia. Las relations entre Chile y Suecia durante tres experiencias revolutionaries 1964-1977." He is also the author of the book Suecia pro Chile. Una history visual del exilio y la solidaridad, 1970-1990 (2009). (camacho_f@yahoo.se)
Tanya Harmer is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the regional, inter-American dynamics of the struggle and its links to broader developments in the Third World. Her most recent research has focused on the international history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73), Brazilian Cold War interventions in the Southern Cone of Latin America, US relations with the Chilean dictatorship and the influence of the Cuban revolution in Latin America after 1959. She is currently writing a biography of Beatriz Allende and Latin America’s 1960s revolutionary generation. Her future project is to write a global history of the Cold War in Latin America (t.harmer@lse.ac.uk)
James G. Hershberg is Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University; former director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and now editor of the CWIHP book series; and author of Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Washington, DC and Stanford, CA: Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press, 2012) and James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993), as well as numerous articles on cold war and nuclear history. He is currently working on a book on Cuba, Brazil, and the Cold War. (jhershb@gwu.edu)
Albert Manke is senior researcher and lecturer of Iberian and Latin American History at the Institute for Iberian and Latin American History of the University of Cologne. Since August 2013 he is one of the two directors of the University of Cologne Forum "Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Perspectives from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe" within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative. Albert Manke studied History, Spanish Philology and Philosophy in Cologne and Paris. His PhD thesis dealt with the defense of the Cuban revolution by the National Revolutionary Militias, 1959-1961 (to be published). For that project he conducted extended archival and field research (oral history) in Cuba, the USA, Spain, and other countries. Currently he is working on a postdoc research project concerned with Chinese migration to Latin America from colonial times to the republican era, focusing especially on transpacific transculturation, agency and ethnic identity building. (amanke@uni-koeln.de)
James Mark is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is author of The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2010), and co-author of Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (OUP, 2013) and Che in Budapest. Global Revolution in the Eastern Bloc (in preparation). He is currently running a Leverhulme Trust-funded project ' (2014-2019). (j.a.mark@exeter.ac.uk)
Kaeten Mistry is lecturer in American History at the University of East Anglia, specialising in U.S. foreign relations, the international history of the cold war, and intelligence. Previously, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick and IRCHSS Fellow at University College Dublin. He studied at the University of Birmingham, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Padua, as well as holding visiting fellowships at NYU, Bologna, and Oxford. His first book, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. He has published articles in journals including Diplomatic History, Cold War History, Modern Italy, and Ricerche di Storia Politica, as well as guest editing a special issue of Intelligence and National Security. He is currently working on two projects, the first on dissenting voices to U.S. foreign relations in the twentieth century, the second, exploring the rise of transnational national security whistle-blowers since the 1970s. (k.mistry@uea.ac.uk)
Iwa Nawrocki is a doctoral candidate in History at Princeton University working on transnational Latin American history. Her dissertation analyses why a group of Brazilian liberation theologians sought out contacts with the socialist world in the final decade of the Cold War. She is particularlyinterested in the meaning of transnational Christian-Marxist dialogue for the liberation theology project and for the Latin American Left more broadly. She holds a M.A. in History from Princeton University and a Joint Honors B.A. in History and Philosophy from McGill University. (nawrocki@princeton.edu)
Raffaele Nocera is a Researcher and Professor of Latin American History at the Department of Human and Social Science at the Universidad de Napoles "L'Orientale". He holds a PhD and his research focus on Chilean political history, inter-American relations and Italian foreign policy in Latin America. His publications include, Stati Uniti e America Latina dal 1945 a oggi (Carocci, 2005), Chile y la guerra, 1933-1943 (LOM-DIBAM, 2006), Stati Uniti e America Latina dal 1823 a oggi (Carocci, 2009), with Claudio Rolle Crus (ed.), Settantatré. Cile e Italia, destini incrociati (Think Thanks, 2010), and with Angelo Trento, America Latina, un secolo di storia. Dalla rivoluzione messicana a oggi (Carocci, 2013). (raffaelenocera@gmail.com)
Carlo Patti is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Goiás, in Goiânia (Brazil), and earned his Ph.D. in History of International Relations at the University of Florence in 2012. As an international historian he has a deep interest in the history of the Brazilian foreign policy during and after the Cold War. Based on a multi-archive research and on oral history, his doctoral dissertation “Brazil in Global Nuclear Order” analyzes the Brazilian nuclear ambitions in the last sixty years and its repercussions on the international regime of nuclear non proliferation. Patti’s recent publications include analyses on the former Brazilian president Lula’s nuclear diplomacy and on the Brazilian nuclear history. He’s currently turning his doctoral dissertation into a book. He has been a visiting scholar at the Syracuse University (2010) and a post-doctoral fellow at Fundação Getulio Vargas (2012-2013), University of Brasilia (2013), and Catholic Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro (2013-2014). Between January and August 2014, he coordinated the Country Desks Unit at the BRICS Policy Center of Rio de Janeiro. (patti.carlo@gmail.com)
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney teaches Latin America history, global/comparative history and the history of gender at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, USA. She has researched citizen rights in Chile with focus on gender in her book titled, The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile (Pittsburgh University Press, 2009). She has also written about heath and rights, forced sterilisation, human rights violations in the Americas and transnational activism of women during the Cold War. Her research projects include a project about the history and politics of Chilean exile in Germany and a study about the Federación Democrática Internacional de Mujeres (FDIM). Currently, Pieper Mooney is working on a book about the life of the medical doctor Benjamín Viel and the politics of health in the Twentieth Century. (jpieper007@gmail.com)
Anita J. Prażmowka is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. Author of several books on Polish history and Polish foreign policy during the Second Worold War. Recently published Civil War in Poland, 1942-48. Her biography of Władysław Gomułka will be published by I.B. Tauris in 2015. Presently working on a project ‘Military supplies to fraternal capitalist countries during the Cold War. A case study of Poland’s support for Angola 1976-82. (a.j.prazmowska@lse.ac.uk)
Balint Tolmar is a PhD student at the Central European University in Budapest. He is currently researching labor flows between socialist Hungary and other members of the COMECON. (tolmar_balint@ceu-budapest.edu)
Olga Ulianova is the director of the American Studies Doctoral Programme at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) and a senior researcher at its centre for advanced studies: the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (IDEA). She obtained her PhD in History at Lomonsov Moscow State University and has received research grants from FODECYT, the Ford Foundation, CEPAL and CEP. Her principal areas of investigation include the Cold War in Latin America, the history of non-state actors in contemporary politics and the history of East European and Central Asian relations with Latin America. Olga Ulianova has published widely on a range of topics relating to these issues and is currently working on a multivolume edited collection of declassified documents related to the Soviet Union's role in Chile in the twentieth century. (olga.ulianova@usach.cl)
Michal Zourek (Poděbrady, 1985) holds a PhD in Ibero-American Studies from the Charles University in Prague. At present, he is a lecturer at the Institute of Technology and Business in České Budějovice. The field of his interest is modern history of Latin America. He researched in Chile (one-year stay) and Argentina (two-year stay). He is the author of the book Checoslovaquia y el Cono Sur 1945–1989. Relaciones políticas, económicas y culturales durante la Guerra Fría, which will be published at the end of 2014. The main objective of the work is to interpret unpublished Czech and foreign archives. In 2015 his work Dějiny Uruguaye, the first book about the history of Uruguay in Czech, will come out. (zourek@centrum.cz)