Introduction to Everyday Internationalism: Socialist–South Connections and Mass Culture during the Cold War

Abstract This Special Issue brings together scholars working in a variety of contexts to explore the concepts of solidarity and socialist internationalism as a mass phenomenon. While recent scholarship has begun to document linkages between the socialist and (post)colonial world during the Cold War, most of this work has eschewed a focus on the mass, social experience of internationalism, instead emphasizing the transformative role played by small groups of mobile elites. But if the direct experience of socialist internationalism was limited to a privileged few, how then was it experienced by the majority, for whom actual travel outside of their state was a distant possibility? This issue explores how socialist internationalism and its attendant practices of solidarity functioned within and between socialist societies. Where it does take border-transcending groups as its subject, it explores the socio-historical, everyday implications of this transnational story. For much of the Cold War, state and party-led practices of internationalism were a central component of everyday life, but little is known about these practices as they manifested on the ground. To shed light on this, this Special Issue explores how depictions of solidarity manifested in mass culture; how everyday practices emerged out of socialist internationalism and anti-imperialism; and how institutions that sought to bridge gaps between societies through solidarity emerged and then transformed or disappeared after 1989.