Duty and Debt under the Ethos of Internationalism

Abstract

Following Christina Schwenkel’s call to attend to different temporalities in the study of the Vietnamese diaspora, I examine three historical representations of workers sent to Bulgaria between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s. These representations mediated Bulgarian-Vietnamese interstate relations: first, workers in relation to internationalist duty; second, workers in relation to financial debt; and finally, the workers as racialized, indebted subjects. My goal is twofold. Firstly, I turn my attention to the role and the figure of the Vietnamese worker under the ethos of actually existing socialism and navigate through the socialist rationalities that stood behind their arrival in Bulgaria. Second, I trace how representations of Vietnamese workers have changed from upholding the moral duty of socialist internationalism to becoming a labor force destined to repay Vietnam’s debt. This shift took place within a framework of changing power configurations that remodeled the extraction of surplus labor by relocating debt risks from the Vietnamese state to Vietnamese workers. I then trace the production of the indebted subject, which materialized in a historic type of racialization of the Vietnamese people, and which proved indispensable to Bulgaria’s transition to a market economy.

Paternalistic internationalism and (de)colonial practices of Cold War higher education exchange: Bulgaria's connections with Cuba and Angola

“…This model elaborated by Coronil kept coming to my mind while reading the OSA materials when it came to foreign trade between Bulgaria on the one side and Cuba and Angola on the other. Socialist solidarity and internationalism translated into low interest rates on loans and prices on machinery and labor (Apostolova, 2017). Clearly, such soft extractivism did not perform the same level of symbolic and physical violence and economic warfare as the extractivist capitalism suffered by the postcolonial world.…”

“…At the same time, socialist countries in the North also controlled the number of students they would receive from their Southern counterparts and which subjects they would train them in (Pugach, 2018, p. 15), which gave them more power over planning of knowledge and technology transfer than the countries sending their students to be trained abroad. And, although students and workers from developing countries were often exposed to "hygienising" and "civilizing" in Northern socialist societies (Apostolova, 2017;Ginelli, 2018;Pugach, 2018), they often had to face racist violence that state socialist countries turned a blind eye to (Hessler, 2006) or sometimes even institutionalized (Apostolova, 2017).…”

“…Such an asymmetric view of the relations and the lack of mutual knowledge interchange could of course partly be explained by the fact that Cuba and Angola were only recently decolonized countries, with little accumulated expertise. Yet, a larger and more problematic asymmetry has recently been explored in areas other than HE, for example, workers' exchange (Apostolova, 2017) and expert exchange in the field of urban planning and technology (Ginelli, 2018). To illustrate and discuss the findings that I consider most intriguing while looking for HE exchange, I now explore a few revealing excerpts which manifest patterns representative of the Bulgarian exchange with other countries as well.…”

“…To discuss my findings, in the article, I engage concepts such as decoloniality (Santos, 2013), cognitive justice (Visvanathan, 2006), extractivist capitalism (Gómez-Barris, 2017), paternalistic versus mutually beneficial internationalism (Alamgir, 2013;Apostolova, 2017), and post-colonial semiperipherality (Ginelli, 2018). I claim that although Eastern European state socialist regimes did not engage in extractivist capitalism, unlike their Western liberal counterparts, they still engaged in asymmetric practices of knowledge exchange during the Cold War.…”