Asian Lessons in the Cold War Classroom: Trade Union Networks and the Multidirectional Pedagogies of the Cold War in Asia

Abstract

This paper invites us to move beyond an elite, “pedagogical” view of Third World diplomatic non-alignment, by examining trade unions as sites of “subaltern internationalism” in the early Cold War. Trade unions were targets of both communist and anticommunist pedagogical programs, spearheaded principally by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the rival International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), both of which competed to teach Asians how to be good trade unionists. But despite their ideological designs, I argue that these internationalist structures of the “Cold War classroom” facilitated, instead, unexpected encounters and fraternal connections that were experienced, and are best seen, at the level of the personal. After offering an overview of these Cold War macrostructures, the paper moves to the microhistorical scale to highlight one such set of personal networks that coalesced around a single “trade union expert.” George L-P Weaver was an African-American trade unionist whose pedagogical work took him to Okinawa and Singapore in the 1950s but whose dialogical encounters with Asian trade unionists had transformative effects on his ideological convictions afterward, challenging, in particular, his views on the role of the People’s Republic of China in the Cold War and of the “communism” of Chinese overseas communities in Singapore. In all, this paper suggests that trade unions offer us a rich site in which to recover individual dynamics that challenge and complicate, from below, the binary logics of the Cold War in Asia.