Experts in "Development" and "Socialist Aid"

Since half a century, the sending of experts shall enhance development in societies which seem in need of such an intervention from outside in order to remedy their under-development. Both competing world systems had developed their own concepts of "development" and corresponding practices of "development aid" claiming universal validity. This project aims to compare the development sector of both competing systems in the last phase of the Cold War on the level of the experts, consultants, and specialists sent to recipient countries in the frame of "technical assistance". "Technical assistance" respectively (later) "technical cooperation", or "scientific- technical cooperation" and "cultural-scientific cooperation" in the terminology of the GDR are all based on the underlying rationale that a lack of knowledge hems development. Accordingly, a knowledge transfer should eliminate such under-development, and hence experts are principally dispatched to the country in order to transfer knowledge. This transfer encompasses not only technical know-how but also those attitudes, practices, and behaviours that will lead to a sensible application of newly acquired know-how. On a larger scale, the integration in one of the competing world-systems was at stake. Development experts, consultants, and advisors are defined as the group of knowledge workers who professionally impart their application-specific knowledge in the field of development aid or in GDR-terminology in "socialist aid" respectively. Core of the project is a comparison between development experts of the two German states. Levels of comparison shall be opened by leading questions: What types of experts were employed? Which tasks were they assigned to? Which aims and objectives did they pursue? Which lifestyles did these "itinerant" people West and East adopt in the countries of assignment? What was the range of officially prescribed and tolerated behaviours and everyday practices? Which attitudes, and practices vis-à-vis development did they have in common across system boundaries? Did they face similar problems in terms of transfer, and inter-cultural communication? Which cultural transfers occurred in daily life? Which role played the task to "develop" other people for the experts` own personal "development"? The comparative approach of this project will highlight in which fields and how experts in the field operated transfers and how this process influenced them on their part. The idea is to compare the transfer of attitudes and practices on the ground. Special attention shall be given to the development experts` role in the dissemination of knowledge, attitudes, cultural practices, and lifestyles. This project focuses on the development sectors of the two Germanies in countries in Africa and Latin America from the 1970s to the end of the socialist world system in 1990.

The project focussed on the interactions and exchanges between the two German states and African and Latin American actors in a development perspective from the beginning of the 1970s to the collapse of the socialist world system, thus dealing with the final phase of the global competition between the political systems of "West" and "East" when the aim of diplomatic recognition of one of the two German states no longer took center stage in their development policy. The focus of the project was on people mobilized and put in interaction by their activities in the development sector. We looked at development workers as a group of professionals on the move who had to come to terms with situations of massive difference not only in words but also in their everyday professional and private lives. Case studies were realized for Ethiopia and Tanzania as countries with accelerated development policies in a transformative perspective. To these, Cuba was added as an example for an extra-European member of the "Council for Mutual Economic Assistance" (CMEA) closely linked to the GDR. The research was based on archival material from German, Tanzanian, Ethiopian and some Cuban archives as well as on interviews with personal actors. Some main results of research: Special attention was given to the encounter and interaction between European development workers and their counterparts, those African and Latin American representatives of the development cooperation with whom they should partner and whom they should advise, instruct, and train. This cooperation was a delicate issue in both systems of development. The interactions were examined in a comparative perspective. Due to the abundance of the GDR's archival material, the comparison is slightly asymmetric. From files of disciplinary cases, we are better informed about the problems of GDR cooperants with cooperation projects than about those of their FRG colleagues. What is noteworthy is the small proportion of, narrowly defined, "political" transgressions that were subject to proceedings, and the great importance attached to their counterparts. In cases of doubt, the GDR citizens were sanctioned instead of their African counterparts. While the lives of West German development workers were much less regulated than those of East German ones, we are less informed about their misconduct from the viewpoint of the organizations sending them. Nonetheless, they had similar problems with the "locals": the material inequality that called for difficult decisions on how to behave without the guiding principle of a universally accepted standard; manifestations of difference which were irritating but in principle to be respected; the uncertainty of balancing what were supposed to be mutual norms of a common project and how much space needed to be given to culturally grounded differences; differing perceptions of work discipline; emotional challenges in an unfamiliar environment that might lead them to respond by isolating themselves within their native milieu. Through "mutually beneficial" economic relations, the GDR tried to make its politically chosen partner countries important economic partners, above all by bartering raw materials and labour for machinery and advisory services, levels of exchange intended to complement the provision of political "solidarity". At least since the first half of the 1980s, it became clear that this intention could not be translated into reality, thereby reducing the importance of these relations which was also reflected in the decreasing number of personnel sent. States that were officially "on the socialist development path", but had always maintained most of their economic external relations with the non- socialist world, now turned to the "West" and its network of multilateral economic organizations. The socialist world system was unable to develop its own world market, for the competition from the capitalist world market proved overwhelming. In an overall perspective, the outcomes of this project relativize the longer-term significance of development-political engagement by the two German states. The promising prospects of the mid-1970s that the socialist offensive would succeed proceeding from the three continents, thereby shifting the balance of power in favour of the socialist world system, were not realized. Nor did the "Third World" achieve the social importance in the FRG that it appeared it might for some time after the 1968 movement. In both systems of development, the 1970s were the high point for the exchange of personnel. In the 1980s, the number of posted people declined. For both German states, the exchange of personnel generated by the commitment to development policy was one track in which internationalization or "globalization" took place. Nonetheless, not all of those sent out returned as "internationalists", their lifeworlds having provided a substrate for such an orientation. Many lived their lives as East and West Germans (or Cubans) after their return, without having been permanently influenced by their work in Africa.