Over the last past years, scholars have considered the 1970s as a critical moment in the development of transnational activism and the 'breakthrough' of human rights. 1 They have highlighted the expansion of large-scale international campaigns on behalf of human rights in the postcolonial world, and their connections with the mobilization on behalf of human rights and dissidents in the Eastern Bloc, which started to grow at the same time. 2 Even more, some authors have brought these North-South and East-West campaigns together under the umbrella of one budding global civil society, picking up on Akira Iriye's book on the 'global community' that international organizations and institutions had created after WW II. 3 Although human rights campaigns had already been developing over the previous decades, the singularity of the 1970s -or the long 1960s, as Sarah Snyder phrased it -has been located not only in the expansion of these campaigns in size and resonance, but also in the ways in which they forged links across the borders of the Iron Curtain and, more specifically, witnessed an entanglement between campaigns developing over the 'Third World' and those developing over human rights in the 'Second World'. The decade saw campaigns by Amnesty International, simultaneously denouncing human rights violations in the 'three worlds' of the Cold War globe, but also an entangled protest against dictatorships and violence in Eastern Europe and the Third World, as exemplified by the widespread comparisons between the Warsaw Pact invasion in Prague and the American war in Vietnam in the summer of 1968 or the responses to repression in the Soviet Union, racial discrimination in Southern Africa, war in Biafra, authoritarianism in South Korea, and coups in Greece and Chile. 4 These cross-references have nurtured the idea that, especially in the 1970s, there emerged a common 'anti-totalitarian' identity 5 between campaigns on behalf of the Global South and those developed on behalf of human rights in Eastern Europe, which expanded over the 1980s and, ultimately, signaled the end of the Cold War. 6
The implosion of Communism between 1989 and 1991 in Central- and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the following socio-economic transitions had a strong impact on Western European social movements. The international trade union movement and trade unions in Belgium and the Netherlands were galvanized to support the changing labour landscape in CEE, which witnessed the emergence of new independent unions and the reform of the former communist organizations. This article explores the so far little-studied history of Christian trade union engagement in post-communist Europe. Focusing on the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) and its Belgian and Dutch members, it reveals how Christian trade unions tried to recruit independent trade unions in the East by presenting themselves as a ‘third way’ between communism and capitalism and by emphasizing the global dimensions of their movement. The WCL ultimately failed to play a decisive role in Eastern Europe because of internal disagreements, financial struggles and competition with the International Confederation of Trade Unions.
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