Authors

Jiří Janáč¹;  ¹ Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Aca, Czechia

Discussion

The title of our paper comes from the name of the self-published memoirs of a Czechoslovak expert, who started his international career in the 1960s and spent the following three decades working on water development projects not only in various corners of the Global South, but also in the UNO headquarters in New York. Reflecting on his career, he examined also his relations with various employers and regimes he served : the socialist state, international organizations, local institutions and the international expert community. To whom did his loyalty belong? Who did he serve, when and how? However, the answer he offers undoubtedly conceals more than it reveals. Following technocratic ideology, he argues he is not to be blamed for anything – he was just an expert working for the ideal of progress and universal greater good. Nonetheless, the available literature and archival materials clearly show that Czechoslovak state-socialist authorities saw participation in UNO/UNECE primarily as an opportunity to obtain data and information on technological developments in the West.

The situation is further complicated by the lack of credible sources, typical of the period of authoritarian state socialism. Contemporary sources do not reflect the actual views of the authors. The retrospective view is then influenced by the post-socialist consensus on the Cold War period. Indeed, the aforementioned memoirs already in the title demonstrate the author’s effort to deal with the feeling of complicity in building of socialism/communism in the homeland and abroad.

This contradiction between the perspective of the individual and the institutional actor will be our focus in the proposed paper. Using the examples of Czechoslovak techno-experts working with / or at/ the UNO/UNECE organizations between mid-1950s and 1990, we will try to examine the limits of technocratic attitude and service to the nation/socialism. Schot and Lagendijk coined the notion of technocratic internationalism, an expert ideology that allowed them to harmonize apparent conflict between national interests and universal "greater good". Is it possible to apply such an approach in the study of the role of techno-experts in national intelligence collection management during the Cold War?