During the Cold War, the systemic competition between capitalism and state socialism led to the advancement of welfare states, east and west, north and south. “The very rivalry between the two camps stimulated debates…as the socialist countries’ representation of themselves as the champions of the weak forced the capitalist side to respond” (7). The advances in social policies, together with the higher standard of living and the attractions of consumerism in the advanced capitalist welfare states, in turn, forced the hands of the socialists. The result was a virtuous cycle of welfare state competition within the constraints of the Cold War.
Since the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91, the central role of competition with the Soviet Union in advancing social progress in the capitalist world has been forgotten. As Marina Cristina Galmarini points out in the introduction to Ambassadors of Social Progress, the historiography on blind activism has construed the United States as the avant garde of progress. In the now dominant narrative, the success of the US disability movement in lobbying Congress to pass the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been cast as the foundational moment, a “discovery that spread to West Germany…and the Scandinavian countries and subsequently to the rest of the world” (2).
Galmarini challenges this liberal triumphalism by recovering the history of socialist blind advocacy and its centrality in the history of global blind activism. “The socialist paradigm of blind (and more broadly, disability) advocacy,” she writes, “was for many people across the world a viable alternative to the models practiced in liberal democracies. This paradigm was based on the idea of blind people’s self-determination backed up by an interventionist state that rejected private charity and instead guaranteed employment and social services through legislation” (3). The socialist model was “a driver of transformation” as it encouraged “activists in the capitalist states to reform and refine their own ways” (3). By recovering this history, she hopes to push contemporary disability activists “to reflect more critically upon the role that the state should (or should not) play in resolving the inequalities caused by disability” (3).
Galmarini’s account is not a piece of nostalgic yearning for state socialism. “The goal of integration and equality for disabled people was never fully realized in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” she writes. “The socialist states failed to live up to all their expansive promises” (6). Socialist countries built institutions for sheltered employment and segregated education. Intended to prepare disabled bodies and minds for mainstream society, they in fact removed them from sight. Built on a promise of integration, their very existence ensured that desegregation in fact became “indefinitely delayed” (12). The relentless pursuit of “overcoming” in the socialist model prioritized a certain type of blind person—over-achievers, athletes, Stakhanovites. It rendered those who could not or would not participate in this heroic self-betterment invisible and marginalized. Moreover, “in a tragic combination of ableist and patriarchal beliefs,” she writes, “most blind women were also kept out of international activism and relegated to the shadows of their kitchens, where they appeared as exemplary blind housewives” (13–14).
Galmarini has no illusions of who or what the blind activists of state socialism were: not grassroots activists but “welfare officers, administrators, recruited professionals, and salaried functionaries” (1). Their main task was international diplomacy and transnational propaganda. That, however, did not prevent them from advocating for their constituencies at home. State functionaries, in particular blind functionaries, could be “activists in their own right.” “Service to the state in international politics could legitimize mass organizations’ lobbying functions” (8). Wearing two hats, the blind activists were both “functionaries officially representing their countries abroad and…members of an international network of advocates for blind people’s integration” (10).
The first four chapters recount the history of international blind activism, which Galmarini follows back to the interwar years. At first, internationalism did not emerge by linking together individual national movements. Rather, the movement was transnational to begin with. Institutions like the Marburg Institute for Blind Students trained students from all over Europe. Their personal connections formed the basis of activist networks, which were then reinforced by international conferences (Vienna 1929, New York 1931).
The young Soviet Union attempted to use the Vienna Conference to promote both its own Marxist understanding of disability as a result of capitalist exploitation, and to leverage it to create a revolutionary Blind International. By 1931, Stalin’s turn inwards undermined such attempts and the New York conference was largely dominated by advocates of charity by sighted patrons. Only a minority continued advocating for the emancipation of the blind from “tutelage and dependence on charity” and for knowledge drawn “from the actual and personal experience of the blind themselves” (37). The further development of blind internationalism was cut short by the chaos of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism, and eventually World War II.
Nevertheless, the radical proposal of blind activism promoted by the Soviet Union at the Vienna conference inspired curiosity abroad. The monthly publication of the All Russian Society of the Blind (VOS) had subscribers among both political friends and opponents across the continent. VOS also received many letters inquiring about its work—a sign that the Soviet approach was at the very least taken seriously. In turn, Soviet activists used their correspondence with international interlocutors to promote Soviet ways but also to collect information about best practice and new approaches developed elsewhere. The “double motivation” for international work thus underpinned the VOS’s work from the start. It would “become even more prominent in socialist blind unions’ activities after the Second World War” (43).
First, however, came a US advance with the 1949 formation of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind (WCWB). It reverted to the notion that blind advocacy was “a common, universal, and apolitical space for the sharing of experience, knowledge, and technology.” This was a movement for, rather than of, the blind, a US led and British supported project of “politically neutral” expertise which would prepare “blind people (like decolonized subjects) for self-rule” (48–49). And as far as its global aspirations were concerned, its European participants were made up of “Marshall Plan countries west of Russia” (52). Throughout the 1950s, the organization focused on western Europe and north America, with Brazil, Japan, Indian, and Mexico relegated to secondary status outside the “modern,” “advanced,” and “progressive” world (56). The “World Council” was in fact a “first world” council, an organization of the global north, where knowledge was produced. The rest of the world was to learn from it.
Meanwhile, the Soviets retreated into splendid isolation. In the 1940s, the VOS no longer participated in international debates. It was only after the death of Stalin that a socialist internationalism developed—a parallel structure in the socialist camp of linked national organizations. International sports competitions, invitations of “brotherly” organizations to national congresses and reciprocal programs to access each other’s health resorts all fostered trans-nationalism within the Soviet bloc. Interestingly, this new space was created in the first instance without the Soviet big brother: VOS came to the scene relatively late, but from 1956 onwards developed stronger and stronger links within socialist Europe and Asia. Delegations now travelled back and forth frequently, flanked by intensive epistolary exchanges. In these communications Galmarini again highlights the dual purpose of the activists: as state functionaries, their job was to promote Soviet superiority, but as activists they also identified “gaps in their own advocacy work and bring home new ideas to concretely improve it.” Socialist internationalism was thus driven by a “dynamic of extracting knowledge while boasting superiority” (84).
The two international blind movements of the Cold War—the US led WCWB and the Soviet bloc transnationalism—came together only in the 1960s, when the East German Union of the Blind and Low-Sighted (BSV) and the Soviet VOS finally became members of the World Council. Why and how this happened, and why it took so long, is recounted in Ch. 4, but the importance of this fusion of east and west for the larger narrative is that from then on the socialist “model of blind-led but state-supported disability advocacy” (96) became a touchstone for the international discussion. The new prominence and legitimacy of this model helped “diversifying debates over the best ways to improve blind people’s lives” (119).
Part two of the book (Chs. 5–7) then delves deeper into three case studies of the duality of external relations with internal activism by exploring the East German BSV, the Soviet-Russian VOS, and the European Regional Committee of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind (ERC). The latter served as a “catalyst in the growth of the international disability movement” because “it facilitated exposure to a wealth of diverse experiences, kept the horizons of disability politics open, and strengthened its members’ collective power as disability advocates” (174). The role of socialist models was crucial, either as inspiration or as something to argue with. It was only in the second half of the 1980s that models coming from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union lost legitimacy—to the detriment of the overall debate about how to best deal with the inequalities created by blindness and other disabilities.
