Discordant Lessons of Internationalism: Third World Students and Their Encounter with the Czechoslovak Milieu, 1961-1974
Abstract
Using recently released record groups in the National Archives, Prague, the author considers the history of the University of 17 November (Univerzita 17. listopadu), focusing on the lives of foreign students amongst the local inhabitants of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the 1960s and early 1970s. The University of 17 November operated in Prague and then in Bratislava from 1961 to 1974 as an educational institution for students from the ´Third World´, but also as training centre for Czechoslovak experts heading out to developing countries.
Its existence was also linked with Czechoslovak attempts to gain a foothold in Africa, motivated ideologically, politically, and economically. It was established with the expectation that graduates from the university would become emissaries of Czechoslovak interests in their home countries.
But this expectation, argues the author, was not quite met. Behind the comparatively frequent conflicts between the foreign students and their natives of Czechoslovakia the author sees mainly the prejudice and aversion of the closed local milieu, which were not overcome by either the official ínternationalist´propaganda or the inconsistent attempts to deal with incidents that arose.
Only after the Prague Spring of 1968, when the University of 17 November was publishing a magazine, Forum zahraničních studentů (Foreign Students´ Forum), were these problems reflected upon more openly. Nevertheless, according to the author, one cannot ignore the contribution that this institution made towards the flowering of a number of specialized academic fields in Czechoslovakia, including African studies, Latin American studies, ethnography, and translation studies, and to establishing userful-term contacts in the Third World. blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa