Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular: Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War by Kristin Roth-Ey

All historians must choose, as editor Kristin Roth-Ey explains in her introduction, whether to focus more on the forest or on the trees. The central argument of this edited volume—a must-read for any scholar working on Second–Third World relations during the Cold War—is that “the history of socialism ‘going global’ was . . . more particular than universal, more singular and original than planned” (p. 20). The populations of Third World countries “brought a wide range of ideas to the table, including different interpretations of socialism and the modern,” and “Second World people, too, had other reference points besides socialist ones” and “clashed not only with their Third World counterparts, but also among themselves” (p. 6). Roth-Ey and her coauthors posit that these dynamics would get lost in the macro-level analyses that dominate much of the burgeoning literature on East–South encounters. Instead, the contributors to the book narrow the scope...