Globalizing Nicaragua? An Entangled History of Sandinista Solidarity Campaigns in Western Europe....

Globalizing Nicaragua?

An Entangled History of Sandinista Solidarity Movements in Western Europe

Kim Christiaens

Third World solidarity movements have been, typically, associated with the left protest cultures of the 1960s, which turned to versions of Marxism in the decolonizing world out of disenchantment with the status quo they found on both sides of the Iron Curtain.1 This narrative, tilted heavily toward the period and actors surrounding “1968,” has largely overlooked the European social movements that claimed common cause with revolu-tions in the Third World duringthe late 1970s and 1980s. To date, the latter period has mainly been understood in terms of a decline of the left, Neo- Liberalism, the Second Cold War, and the rise of human rights in the wake of the Helsinki process. It has been argued that these elements, and notably the juggernaut

of human rights, engendered a shift from the “radical internationalism of the sixties” to a depoliticized activism that embraced liberal principles of democracy, peace, and human rights in the 1980s.2 Nevertheless, simultaneously with the growth of peace and human rights activism, a plethora of groups continued to espouse the causeof various national liberation movements in the Third World.

Revolution in Central America, a region that became one of the hotbeds of the Second Cold War,was an issue that drew a groundswell of solidarity from European citizens during the late1970s and 1980s.3 For many decades, Central America had been considered to be a backyard of the US and the realm of so-called “banana-republics.” Yet, the success of the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which succeeded in over-throwing the violent Somoza regime and bring the Marxist Sandinista

——————

1 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, 2012); Christoph Kalter, “A Shared Space of Imagination, Communication, and Action: Perspectives on the History of the Third World,” in Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett, eds., The Third World in the Global 1960s (New York, Oxford, 2013), 23-38.

2 Max Elbaum, “What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?,” Radical History Review 82 (2002): 37-64.

3 Roger Peace, A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign (Amherst, Boston, 2012).

156 K I M C H R I S T I A E N S

National Liberation Front (FSLN) into power, changed the fortunes of the region. It propelled the small Central American nation into a cause célèbre for thousands of activists worldwide.4 All over Western Europe, hundreds of solidarity committees and NGOs stepped into action to support the Sandinista regime, which faced both enormous domestic troubles as well as the effortsof the Reagan administration tocombat communism in Central America by aiding contra-revolutionary forces and isolating the country.5 In addition to Nicaragua’s struggle for self-determination, the escalating violence in El Salvador and Guatemala also stirred many European con-temporaries, shocked by the assassination ofthe progressive Salvadoran archbishop Romero in 1980 and the murder of dozens of European missionaries, development workers, and internacionalistas.6

To date, this Western European engagement with Central Americahas been the subject of only a fairly limited number of case studies on campaigns in specific countries.7 We know relatively little about the Euro-pean solidarity movements for Central America, notably incomparison with the overwhelming number of studies on campaigns for other Third World causes. Furthermore, mostof the relevant literature is suffering from a narrow focus that fails to put campaigns forCentral America in a diachronically or synchronically comparative perspective with other solidarity movements. Indeed, accounts have equivocated on entangle-ments with other solidarity movements and international causes. Admittedly, the opinion that campaigns over Central America were a corollary of ideas and experiences accumulated during earlier campaigns of international solidarity with countries like Cuba, Vietnam and Chile has often been uttered in literature and public memory.8 Yet, this claimhas not been delved into with any substantial empirically informed research.

——————

4 Héctor Perla, “Heirs of Sandino: TheNicaraguan Revolution and the U.S.-Nicaragua Solidarity Movement,” Latin American Perspectives 36 (2009): 80.

5 Edward A. Lynch, The Cold War's LastBattlefield: Reagan, the Soviets, and Central America (New York, 2011).

6 Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia, 1995).

7 Erika Harzer and Willi Volks, eds., Aufbruch nach Nicaragua: Deutsch-deutsche Solidarität im Systemwettstreit (Berlin, 2008);Otker Bujard and Ulrich Wirper, Die Revolution ist ein Buch und ein freier Mensch: Die politischen Plakate des befreiten Nicaragua 1979-1990 und der internationalen Solidaritätsbewegung (Cologne, 2007).

8 Max Elbaum, “What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968?,” Radical History Review 82 (2002): 37-64; Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne, 1986).

G L O B A L I Z I N G N I C A R A G U A ? 157

Likewise, the position of the solidarity campaigns for Central America toward other international causes at stake in the 1980s has so far remained largely unexamined. For instance,the relationship of campaigns forCentral America with the simultaneously burgeoning peace movement and human rights campaigns in support of dissidents in Eastern Europe has to date only been superficially analyzed. Strikingly, it is also unclear to what extent the national struggles in the different Central American nations gave way to just one common solidarity movement.9 Undoubtedly, the crisis in Cen-tral America had important regional and transnational dimensions. National borders wereblurred by refugees, military operations, and politi-cal alliances, for instance between the Sandinista liberation front and rebels in El Salvador and Guatemala.10 On the other hand, national differences were as obvious as similarities, notably since revolution was pursued by different “national” liberation movements, of which only the

Sandinista liberation front was successful in assuming power.

This chapter aims to fill these gaps and connect the Western European mobilization for CentralAmerica with the broader history of international solidarity movements. It will do so by focusing on the ways in which soli-darity with Nicaragua, whichwas the most mobilizing Central American issue in Western Europe,related to previous and simultaneous campaigns for other international causes and countries in the South and East. This question is particularly interesting since the FSLN, just like many other anti-colonialist movements, was keen to present its national struggle against Somoza in universalist terms, as part of a worldwide struggle for national self-determination and revolution. As various studies have argued, this conflation of national liberation with the Marxist ideology of interna-tionalism was not merely a ploy. In addition to Cuban support, forinstance, exiles from various Latin American nations participated in the Sandinista revolution, whereas the Sandinista government allied itself with other liberation movements in Central America and elsewhere in the Third World, ranging from Palestine to South Africa.11 This chapter asks the question of to what degree the

scope of European solidarity movements

——————

9 Sharon Erickson Nepstad, “Creating Transnational Solidarity: The Use of Narrative in the U.S.-Central America Peace Movement,” Mobilization 6 (2001): 21-36.

10 Idean Salehyan, Rebels Without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca,2009), 126-144.

11 Pascale Bonnefoy, Claudio Pérez and Ángel Spotorno, Internacionalistas: Chilenos en la Revolución Popular Sandinista (Santiago, 2009).


with Nicaragua displayed a similar transnationalization. Did solidarity ex-ceed the borders of the Central Americannation, entangle with other causes, and therefore undergo aprocess of globalization? What was the impact of earlier traditions of international solidarity, and how did the mobilization for Nicaragua respond to the changing contextof the 1980s and the rise of campaigns for peace, human rights and Eastern Europe? Thischapter first looks at the birth of a transnational movement for Nica-ragua during the late 1970s, and the staminaof networks and ideas developedduring the European campaigns against Pinochet. The second part analyzes the role of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the attempts of Sandinista diplomats and activists to weldNicaragua to the peace movementand create a common Central America campaign. The third part continues by identifying East-West connections and revealing the contested nature of universalizing human rights discourses within solidarity campaigns for Nicaragua.

More than a palimpsest? Revolutionary humanitarianism and the origins of European solidarity with Nicaragua

Though the 1959 Cuban revolution may well have received significant attention from Western intellectuals, thefoundation of the FSLN by a group of Marxist rebels two years later, and the group’s violent confronta-tion with theUS-backed Somoza dictatorship over the following years drew little interest among the European public until the late 1970s. All this contrasted not only with the international impact of the repression in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s,12 but also with the efforts by European-based humanrights NGOs to publicize information on state terror in Nicaragua. From the early 1970s, NGOs such as Amnesty International or the International Federation for Human Rights organized several on site missions to Nicaragua and monitored in detail the repression to which the Somoza regime subjected its opposition.13 Even if these

campaigns flaunted this repression in typical human rights language as “genocide,”

——————

12 Kim Christiaens, Idesbald Goddeerisand Magaly Rodríguez García, eds., European Solidarity with Chile, 1970s-1980s (Bernet al., 2014).

13 “Corrupción y violaciones a los derechos humanos en Nicaragua,” Nueva Sociedad 29 (1977): 148-150.


and despite lobbying at the levelof international organizations, they failed to make the civil warin Nicaragua a mobilizing issue in Western Europe. This only changed beginning in early 1978. The murder of the moderate opposition leader Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and the escalating confronta-tion between the FSLN and the Somoza regime propelled Nicaragua not only into the international headlines, but alsointo the subject of increased social mobilization in Western Europe in which political solidarity with the FSLN blended with human rights.

From the late 1970s, solidarity committees started to mobilize for material and political support for the FSLN through a broad range of activities, including press conferences with Sandinista representatives, the publication of bulletins, and public rallies.14 In France in late 1977, medical doctors and exiles founded a national committee with local chapters allover the country, while the Wuppertal-based Information Office Nicaragua developed a

network that encompassed sectionsat several university campuses inWest Germany.15 In 1978, emergencyrelief campaigns for the thousands of Nicaraguan refugees that were on the move or flocked to misery in neighboring Central American countries mobilized a broad array of social-democratic and Christian trade unions, solidarity committees, and human rights and development NGOs. These groups, through public fundraising and governmental subsidies, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid.16 TheBasel-based anti-capitalist cooperative Longo Maï coordinatedthe delivery of material aid for Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica.17 Nicaragua also made its entry onto the political scene: In December 1978, the British Labour Party issued a resolution professing solidarity with the struggle of the FSLN, and tied itin with campaigns of the Socialist International, whose leadership gave Sandinista representatives an interna-tionalforum.18

——————

14 This chapter uses the private archives of the European Secretariat of the European Nicaragua committees (ESENC), kept by Hans Langenberg and Klaas Wellingain Utrecht; Overview of the committees, 1978, ESENC.

15 Kim Christiaens, “Between Diplomacy andSolidarity: Western European Support Networks for Sandinista Nicaragua,” European Review of History / Revue Européenne d'Histoire, 21 (2014): 617-634.

16 Alexander Stoff, “Die sandinistische Revolution in Nicaragua im Spiegel der entwicklungspolitischen Presse in Österreich: Eine Diskursanalyse,” M.A. diss., Vienna University, 2007, 14.

17 Basler Zeitung, October 14, 1978.

18 14th Post-War Congress of the SocialistInternational, Vancouver, November 3-5, 1978, Barbara Castle Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 192.


This crescendo of interest and the variety of actors involved reflected the broadening natureof the opposition in Nicaragua.There, the FSLN succeeded in forming an anti-Somoza opposition with moderate socialand Christian democratic parties, trade unions, and church and human rights groups,whose institutional ties with overseas counterparts helped todraw attention in Western Europe to the struggle. What ultimately did the most to spurthe European mobilization in support of the FSLN was the blend between humanitarianism and political solidarity that emerged from the late 1970s onward. Traditional narratives have so far oversimplified the nature of solidarity with Nicaragua by reducing it to a kind of “palimpsest” of activism developed by radical leftist groups in support of other armed revolutionary movements in the Third World during the two previous decades.19 Obviously, somethingcan be said for such a view of continuity. At a time of disenchantment with what were called “unfinished” revolu-

tions in the Third World (and in Southern Europe), the Sandinistas came to be seen by radical leftist groupings as a living confirmation of revolution and a symbol of Third World anti-imperialism that challenged not only US hegemony, but was also, by contrast to Cuba or Vietnam, not overtly asso-ciated with Soviet support.20 Also in theiruniversalizing discourses, radical leftist activists integrated Nicaragua in their tradition of anti-imperialist Third Worldism and its “world historical view” that stressed the global connections of localrevolutions.21 Just as Vietnam had been “everywhere” to radicals in the 1960s, so too were representations of Nicaragua univer-salized, the particularities of the FSLN stripped off, and its struggle connected to anti-imperialist causes at home and abroad.22 Trotskyite groups connected Nicaragua to the simultaneouslygrowing protests against the US-backed Shah regime in Iran in order to diagnose a world-wide decline of American power.23 In a similar universalizing effort, exiles and students from other Latin American countries, who played key roles in the foundation of the earliest committees, connected the issue of the

——————

19 Jean-François Vitrac, “La vision française de la révolution sandiniste au Nicaragua,”

Bulletin de l'Institut Pierre Renouvin, 17 (2003): 161-174; Hanspeter Kriesi et al., New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Minneapolis, 1998), 58.

20 Gérard Chaliand, Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde: Guérillas et socialismes (Paris, 1976). 21 George N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: AGlobal Analysis of 1968

(Cambridge, Mass., 1987)

22 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass., London, 2003), 171-182.

23 Internationale Solidariteit, “Nicaragua – Iran,” 1978, Amsab-ISG (Ghent), AF 001203.


FSLN to their own national struggles and solidarity movements. In addition to participating in the armed struggle in Nicaragua, Chilean exiles of the revolutionary MIR were, in many countries, among the first to launch solidarity committees in support of the FSLN, whose struggle against Somoza appeared to be far more successful than their own againstPinochet.24

Even if the shadow of the radicalism of 1968 was present, the Nicara-gua solidarity movements included a broad variety of actors beyond the radical left and were set in their own decade. Campaigns witnessed a remarkable combination of political solidarity and humanitarianism, which stressed the atrocities of the conflict, human suffering, the popular support for the FSLN,and its pursuit of democracy. In the UK, activism in sup-port of the FSLN took root in a Central America Human Rights Committee, set up by Chilean and Salvadoran exiles who followed the example of an earlier committee for

Chile. Committees worked togetherwith NGOs like Oxfam and Amnesty International to provide, in cooper-ation with the organizing FSLN committee in Costa Rica, medical and humanitarian help forthe thousands of refugees in Central America. When the Dutch photographer Koen Wessing published an acclaimed photo-graphical account of his stay in Nicaragua in 1978 to accompany humani-tarian relief campaigns, it revealed a story of armed rebellion set against a background of human suffering, injustice, and misery, rather than of heroic resistance.25 The Socialist International defended its support for the struggle of the FSLN against a “fascist regime” by drawing analogies withthe European resistance against Nazism, in which democracy, liberation, and human rights onlyemerged after a necessarily violent struggle.26

The complex ambiguity between armed struggle and humanitarianism cannot be seen apart from the efforts of the FSLN itself, which played a majorrole in the emergence, organization, and conceptions of solidarity. The rise of solidarity movements coincided with organizing efforts of FSLN exiles and members, who started to actively promote the cause of the FSLN from 1977 onward as part

of international campaigns to isolate

——————

24 The National Nicaragua Coordination in France, September 1979, ESENC. 25 Koen Wessing, Nicaragua ’78 (Amsterdam, 1978).

26 “Democracia – Violencia – Socialism: Entrevista a Bernt Carlsson,” Nueva Sociedad43 (1979): 109.


the Somoza regime.27 The activity of Nicaraguan exiles, whose number remained relatively small even after an increase following the failed uprising of September 1978, wasnot only important in terms of the ex-panding networks and opportunities for action they brought in their wake, but alsoin changing the European representation of the FSLN. The1970s were indeed harsh times for Latin American revolutionaries that aimed to find European support for theirarmed struggle against dictatorships. Not only becausethe struggle of the FSLN and other revolutionary groups was often associated with the specter of contemporary terrorism by extremist organizations (PLO, RAF,…),28 but also because most of the “Latin America watchers” were holding principles of non-violence, peace and human rights.

When FSLN exiles and representatives turned to Western Europe to enlist support, they tried to find

ways to accommodate their armedrebellion in Nicaragua with human rights and humanitarian concerns. For example, the guerrillero Enrique Schmidt Cuadraurged the European-wide networkof solidarity committees to form a broad movement that wentbeyond the fragmented radical left and reached out to governments, trade unions and mainstream political parties.29

This was despite the fact that he had been involved in armed struggle in Nicaragua before becoming the main European FSLNrepresentative in 1977, and would meet a violent death in the Contra-War some years later. Likewise, the iconic liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal, who travelled the globe as an international advocate of the FSLN after being forced into exile in 1977, revealed in his publishedmemoirs how he made Nicaragua aversatile symbol that aimed to fit the sensibilities of the European audiences, at one occasion speaking a language ofarmed liberation, and at the other one of human revolution and human rights.30

The way in which the FSLN triedto promote its image was strongly in-spired by the language and networks of the solidarity campaigns sparked bythe 1973 Chilean coup. When

Enrique Schmidt and other leading FSLN

——————

27 Héctor Perla, “The FSLN and International Solidarity,” in David Close, Salvador Martí i Puig and Shelley A. McConnell, eds., The Sandinistas and Nicaragua Since 1979 (Boulder,2012), 269-286.

28 Discussion about support to the FSLN, s.d. (1979), Archives of the Socialist International, IISH, 762.

29 Hans Hübner et al., eds., Enrique Presente. Enrique Schmidt Cuadra: Ein Nicaraguaner zwischen Köln und Managua(Cologne, 2004).

30 Ernesto Cardenal, La Révolution Perdue: Mémoires (Paris, 2008), 51 and 119.


members started to launch solidarity campaigns, they explicitly referred to the Chilean example, which had mobilized a broad variety of actors and blended solidarity with human rights.31 Next to analogies drawn between Somoza and Pinochet or “concentration camps” in Nicaragua and in Chile,32 Nicaraguan exiles also capitalized on the cultural fascination with Latin America that Chilean artists (Nueva Canción) and a variety of Latin American intellectuals in exile had stimulated. Many of the earliest solidar-ity committees emerged around centers for Latin American culture, as was the casewith the Dutch Nicaragua Committee in Utrecht or the Infor-mation Office Nicaragua in Wuppertal, which propagated the political poetry by Ernesto Cardenal or the music of artists such as Enrique Mejía Godoy.

All in all, however, European solidarity with the Sandinista struggle was relatively limited prior to 1979. By late 1978, the FSLN was supported by a European-wide network of about seventy

committees. Together, these groups accounted for thousands ofactivists, but their resonance still paled in comparison with the earlier mobilization for Chile.33 The efforts of leading FSLN representatives to organize local committees in what was called a “European solidarity movement” (with coordinated actions and regular meetings) were often sidelined due to the committees’ internal factionalism. Furthermore, many committees were more interested in the idea of armed struggle than of human rights. Reports of the European meetings of the Nicaragua committees all complained about the difficultiesin attracting public interest in their cause.34 Armed struggle, which was the effective route followed by the FSLN in Nicaragua, overshadowed in many committees the focus on human rights. The tension between both inter-pretations provoked for example a split in the British Central America Human Rights Committee, where Latin American supporters of the FSLN eventuallywithdrew to form their own “solidarity” committee.35

——————

31 Interview by the author with Klaas Wellinga and Hans Langenberg, Louvain,

November 24, 2010.

32 Comité de solidarité avec le peuple du Nicaragua, Nicaragua vers la libération (Paris, 1978), 53.

33 Letter from Klaas Wellinga and Hermann Schulz, 1979, no. 2, ESENC.

34 Report of the Madrid conference of European Committees, October 1978, ESENC. 35 Central America Human Rights Committee,1979, ESENC.


Central America as a second Vietnam

European interest in Nicaragua dramatically expanded after theSandi-nista victory in July 1979. Against the backdrop of dictatorships and un-successfulresistance in many other Latin American countries, and the cruelties under the Somoza regime, the Nicaraguan revolution appeared as a symbolof change to a broad array of European groups interested in the Third World. The new government’s policy of non-alignment, its ambi-tious plansfor a new society with large-scale literacy and health campaigns, and the charisma of the young Sandinista leaders, were all factors that contributed to the great amountof sympathy. This concern came from quarters ranging from progressive Christians and human rights and justice NGOs, to the traditional political formations of the left. Nicaragua became associated with peace, democracy and reconstruction, instead of armed struggle. Seemingly

unaware of the bloodshed of theprevious years, Christian tradeunions saw in Nicaragua a “peaceful” transition that might inspire other parts of Latin America. When delegates of the Socialist Inter-nationalvisited Nicaragua in 1979, theywere keen to “Europeanize” the situation by drawing parallels with the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe.36

Supporting Nicaragua was for many activists a confirmation of a Western European self-consciousness and independence vis-à-vis the US and Cold War bipolarity. New committees piggybacked on contacts with Nicaragua, which expanded due to various European tours of FSLN diplomats in search of support, the travels of activists and journalists to this new Mecca of the revolution, and the start of many on-site projects coordinated by European NGOs.37

At the request of the FSLN, thecommittees tried to professionalize their campaignsand orga-nized themselves in coordinating structures at the national and Western European level, brought together by a secretariat in Utrecht and regular meetings between their representatives and Sandinista diplomats.38 Despite these efforts, the committees turned out to be flies on the wheel when it came to staging large campaigns for the

reconstruction of the country.39 In contrast, more professionalized NGOs (co-financed with governmental

——————

36 Le Monde du Travail, August 13, 1978, 3.

37 Structure of the Dutch Committee, 1981, DNC, 17.

38 Conference European Nicaragua Committees in Herdecke, September 18-30, 1979, ESENC.

39 Nicaragua Today, No. 3 [1981], 3.


subsidies), worked with impressive budgets to aid the small ruined country, and opened new opportunities for developmentcooperation.

For their part, many locally organized Nicaragua committees increasingly expanded their attention toward the escalating struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala.40 This shift was spurred by a number of catalytic events, such as the assassinationof the Salvadoran archbishop Romero in 1980, and the violence by the right-wing governments of El Salvador and Guatemala againstopposition and guerrilla movements that resulted in the murders of thousands of citizens and several European missionariesand development workers. Committees for El Salvador and Guatemala, many of which were founded by exiles and missionaries in the 1970s, gainednew energy due to the activity ofexternal offices of the Salvadoran liberation front in Europe, dispersing information and aid projects, and the return of missionaries.41 Even if since their birth in the late 1970s

campaigns for Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala had sharedmany characteristics in ideology and constituency and catered mainly for the same public, they had formed rather distinct identities and were marked by specific networks with a particular focus on their respective countries. In the early 1980s, however, a growing common identity emerged between these movements, of which many united efforts in what were called “Central America committees.” These committees shared their expertise, information, and networks, and framed their respective causes asa common “Central American” struggle.42

Indeed, all over Western Europe, many Nicaragua committees joined their counterparts working on El Salvador and Guatemala in common campaigns for Central America. The specificities of the nationalstruggles in Central America wereblurred by a perceived common struggle against American intervention, notably when the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1981 inaugurated a period of intensified US support for the counterrevo-lution by the Contrasin Nicaragua and the struggle of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan regimes against armed liberation movements. A key frame that stimulated the idea of a common struggle against American

——————

40 Kim Christiaens, “Orchestrating Solidarity: Third World Agency, Transnational Networks, & the Belgian Mobilization for Vietnam and Latin America, 1960s-1980s,” Ph.D. diss., LeuvenUniversity, 2013, 293-4.

41 Correos de Centroamericana. Berichte aus Nicaragua, El Salvador und Guatemala, no. 18, October 22, 1982, 16.

42 Peace, A Call to Conscience, 79.


interventionism was the representation of Central America as “a second Vietnam.”43 Indeed, activists were keen to compare their campaigns to the iconic anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, and profusely drew parallels between both struggles, portraying for instance the Salvadoran dictator Duarte as another South Vietnamese leaderNguyen Van Thieu and pro-testing against a “Vietnamization” of Central America.44 Action repertoires developed in support of the Vietnamese revolutionaries, such as the collection of bicycles for medical transport,were now staged in support of the FSLN struggling against theContras.45 It was with the aspiration to create a movementcomparable in size and impact to the massive mobili-zation against the Vietnam War that in1981 the Central America committees (along with a variety of peace and Third World groups) launched so-called “anti-intervention fronts” in their respective countries. These fronts sought to denounce American

involvement and a “Vietnamization” in Central America.46 This anti- intervention campaign not only makes an interesting case for assessing the ideas that drove atten-tion to Central America among Western European activists, but also for assessing the input of the FSLNin these ideas.

Indeed, the representation of the Central American cause as asingle common struggle against American intervention that exceeded the national borders of Nicaragua and evoked the Vietnam War cannot be understood apart from the efforts of the Sandinista government. Sandinista posters,discourses, and publications regularly framed the situation in Central America with references to the Vietnam War. The most important example is the anti-intervention campaign for Central America, which was staged by European activists but originated with an international conference orga-nized by the FSLN in Managua inJanuary 1981. In response to the hardening US policy, the Sandinista government gathered under the slogan “El Salvador Vencerá” about 150 representatives hailing from more than forty countries and supportive organizations abroad.47 FSLN diplomats

requested solidarity committeesbroaden their scope to the plight of other

——————

43 Lynch, The Cold War's Last Battlefield, 192.

44 De Groene Amsterdammer, January 28, 1981, 12.

45 Bicycles for Nicaragua, BG D49/528,IISH.

46 Sixth European Conference in Geneva, November 6-9, 1981, DNC, 18.

47 La DireccionNacional en el Primer Encuentro Internacional de Solidaridad con Nicaragua. “El Salvador vencera!”(Managua, 1981).


Central American countries and notably to the cause of El Salvador.48 Solidarity with Nicaragua was linked to the examples of the anti-Franco and anti-Pinochet struggle, but it was notably the Vietnamese example that became the benchmarkfor the anti-intervention campaign that developed all over Western Europe and other continents over the next months.49

The reference to the struggle of the South Vietnamese national liberation movement against the US in the 1960s turned out to be particularly useful, for it cultivated a subtle ambiguity between the necessity of active re-sistance against American involvement and combative solidarity on one hand, and the aspiration of “peace” on the other. Indeed, just as the South Vietnamese NLF had cultivated in its international propaganda a subtle blend between armed struggle and its profile as a “peace-loving force,” so too did the FSLN and the anti-intervention campaign that developed for Central America weld international solidarity to the goal of peace.50

Similar to the efforts of Vietnamese diplomacy to connect its cause to the burgeoning European peace and disarmament campaigns of the 1960s, the FSLN aimed at reaching out to the tremendous mobilization for peaceand against missiles, which sweptWestern Europe in the wake of theNATO double-track decision.51 Thisambition was evident in the ways in which the anti-intervention campaigns, organized by the Western Euro-pean Nicaragua committees at the level of their respective countries, tried to connect the issue of Central America with the broader peace movement. One of the most important anti-intervention campaigns was, for instance, the “peace tour” that made stops in Western European countries in thespring of 1982. Over several weeks, a bus with Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan diplomats, and the Nicaraguan music group Pancasán, toured across dozens of cities all over Western Europe accompanied by thousands of activists who attended concerts “For Peace.”52 In the next years, solidarity committees participated in the mass-scale peace demon-

——————

48 First International Meeting of Solidarity with Nicaragua, 1981, DNC, 72; El Día, January 27, 1981; Omali Yeshitela, “The First Conference in Solidarity with Nicaragua,” The Black Scholar 12 (1981): 25-36.

49 Tomás Borge, Los primeros pasos: La Revolución Popular Sandinista (Mexico, Madrid, 1993), 156-166.

50 Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War

(Ithaca, London, 1999), 19-26.

51 European Nicaragua Meeting in Geneva, October 1981, DNC, 72; Anti-Intervention Front Central America, October 1981, DNC, 72.

52 Anti-Intervention Campaign, April 28, 1982, DNC, 18.


strations against missiles. In the UK, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, which extended collaboration with El Salvador, Guatemala, and other Latin America solidarity activists, reached out to the Campaign against Nuclear Disarmament, staging public demonstrations with one of the figureheads of opposition against the Thatcher government, Labour leader Michael Foot.53 In Belgium, activists sold Nicaraguan bananas during anti-missile demonstrations, while progressive Christian groups departed in 1984, following theexample of their American counterparts, as “Witnesses forPeace” to Central America.54 Atthe same time, Sandinista leaders framed their visits to European state leaders and governments as “peace visits.”55 The cooperation withthe broader peace movement was,however, not without tension. As I will argue in the next section, the political character and interests of the solidarity committees clashed on a number of occasions with more moderate tendencies who

were partaking in the mo-bilization against missiles, and the anticommunist criticismof the Soviet Union and human rights violations in Eastern Europe, which the latter infused in these peace campaigns.

The universality of humanrights versus the particularity of Nicaragua

The 1980s were marked by the further breakthrough of human rights on the agenda of social movements, in the wake of the Helsinki Accords and the rise of dissent in Eastern Europe. Several accounts have argued that, since the late 1970s, theplight of the “Second World” replaced the Third World as themain focus for New Left activists who became disen-chanted with Third World versions of Marxism and turned to Eastern European struggles for democracy and human rights against Soviet communism.56 Obviously, there is some truth to these claims. Most cited

——————

53 Activity Report British NSC, April 1981, DNC, 72.

54 Bart Latré, Strijd & Inkeer: De kerk-en maatschappijkritische beweging in Vlaanderen, 1958-1990

(Louvain, 2011), 381-382.

55 Barricada Internacional, July 19, 1982, 2.

56 Robert Gildea, James Mark and Niek Pas, “European Radicals and the ‘ThirdWorld’: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958-1973,” Cultural and Social History 8 (2011): 449-472; JamesMark and Anna von der Goltz, “Encounters,” in Robert Gildea,

G L O B A L I Z I N G N I C A R A G U A ?

169

examples are the trajectory of the iconic studentleader Rudi Dutschke, who turned from a troubadour of armed struggle in Vietnam into an advo-cate of Czechoslovakian Charta 77, or the French 1968 intellectuals who supported the Polish trade union Solidarność.57 Most of the international causes resonating among Western European audiences in the 1980s witnessed a growing emphasis on human rights. Whereas the campaigns for Solidarność were from their inception keen to celebrate the plight of Poland as a human rights cause, older struggles against injustice and dicta-torships in the Third World, such as the anti-apartheid and anti-Pinochet movements, increasingly replaced Marxist revolution and international solidarity with non-violent resistance and human rights.58 Accordingly, a universalizing “human rights language” forged a common identity between solidarity movements with the Third World and support for dissidents in the Eastern bloc.59 A textbook example of this intersection is the common identity that emerged between international campaigns for Solidarność and thosein support of Chilean trade union opposition against Pinochet.60 In the 1980s, solidarity campaigns for Chile and Poland intertwined regularly both with each other and with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. This happened not only in terms of ideas, but also of constituency. To a certain degree, such East-West

connections were also present in the solidarity campaigns for Nicaragua. They were ideologically drawn by the writings of intellectuals like the German writer Günter Grass, who, upon visiting Nicaragua, equated the struggle of the Sandinistas against American intervention with Solidarność’s cause.61 In a similar vein, Trotskyite groups

——————

James Mark and Anette Warring, eds., Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford, 2013), 155-160.

57 Kim Christiaens, Idesbald Goddeeris and Wouter Goedertier,“Inspirées par le Sud? Les mobilisations transnationales Est-Ouest pendant la guerre froide,” Vingtième Siècle, Revue d'Histoire 109(2011): 155-168.

58 Idesbald Goddeeris, ed., Solidarity with Solidarity: Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980-1982 (Lanham, 2010).

59 Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge, 2011), 134.

60 Kim Christiaens, “The Difficult Quest for Chilean Allies: International Labor Solidarity Campaigns for Chile in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Christiaens, Goddeeris and Rodríguez García, eds., European Solidarity with Chile, 97-129.

61 Günter Grass, “Im Hinterhof: Bericht über eine Reise nach Nicaragua,” Die Zeit, October 1, 1982, 45.


welded solidarity with Nicaragua to support for the Afghan resistance.62 Bracketingtogether Third World self-determination and dissent in Eastern Europe and reflecting ideas about an alternative world beyond the Cold War, these discourses can be considered as an actualization of the Third Worldism of the 1960s. The comparisons between the American bombings over Hanoi and Soviet troops in Prague in 1968 were, then, analogous to those between the Sandinistas and Solidarność fifteen years later.

Yet, a more thorough analysis reveals distance between these East-West and North-South solidarity movements, and the contested nature of human rights. Indeed, both the Polishopposition as well as the Sandinistas fiercely rebuffed the parallels drawn between their causes by Western intellectuals à la Grass.63 The Nicaraguan comandante Bayardo Arce scoffed at connections drawn by social-democratic politicians between the plight

of Nicaragua and Poland at the level of the Socialist International, which was an important meeting place for both supporters of the Sandinistas and dissenters in Eastern Europe.64 Both the Polish and Afghan crises were anathema to the FSLN, as it maintained good relations with Warsaw and Moscow.65 An analysis of the European support groups for Nicaragua and Solidarność in the 1980s reveals a similar tension rather than a common identity. Whereas campaigns for the Polish trade union, supported by Cold Warriors and the Sandinista regime’s most vocal opponents (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) as well as domestic opposition, were strongly driven by anticommunism, anti-Americanismwas one of the main threads that united activists from different leftist quarters behind the FSLN. By contrast, criticism of the Soviet Union was far less vocal in soli-darity movements for Nicaragua than what could be supposed from tradi-tional accounts of Third World solidarity activism. These accounts have argued that these movements were mainly run by New Left activists who were openly critical of both the US and theSoviet Union.66 Even if it is true that there was little

enthusiasm for Eastern Europeanstate socialism

——————

62 Rød Ungdom, Uten frihet - ingen fred (Copenhagen, 1985), Amsab-ISG (Ghent),AF 008593.

63 “Istnieją granice siły: Rozmowa Przeglądu Politycznego z Günterem Grassem,” Przegląd Polityczny 3 (1984): 3-15.

64 Fernando Pedrosa, “Políticas informales y redes transnacionales: Los socialdemócratas europeos en los procesos de democratización de la tercera ola en América Latina,”

Anuario de la Escuela de Historia Virtual 2 (2011): 52-53.

65 Mieczysław F. Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1984-1986 (Warsaw, 2005), 141. 66 Kalter, “A Shared Space,” 30.


among Western European Nicaragua campaigners, many of them were averse to explicit critique of the Soviet Union. Campaigns were mostly silent about the developments in Eastern Europe, and lashed out against the overwhelming media attention thatanti-Soviet dissidents received.67

The coordinating structure that united the Western European Nicaragua committees stopped at the border of the Iron Curtain, and if activists met with EasternEuropean counterparts during world conferences or other eventsorganized by the FSLN in Nicaragua, the latter were most likely to be official delegationsinstead of dissidents. This distance with Eastern Europe was rooted in several factors, such as the dominance of anti-Americanism and the concern to keep North-South relations and cam-paigns for Third World countries separated from the burden of the bipo-larity of the Cold War and East-West tensions. Critique of Reagan, neo-Liberalism, and Atlanticist policies of Europe’s governments was, for the larger part of the Nicaragua campaigners, difficult to blend with support for dissent

in Eastern Europe.68 Critically, this also stemmed from the concerns of the Sandinista government itself, as it publiclyadvertised sup-port from and friendship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in domestic and international propaganda, andin doing so prevented its WesternEuropean supporters’ need to criticize the latter.69

Nevertheless, campaigns for Nicaragua remained sensitive to the appeal of human rights. The international resonance of the FSLN from 1977 and the efforts tolaunch international solidarity campaigns were spurred by the shift in US foreign policy following the ascension of Jimmy Carter, and attempts of the Sandinistas at home and in exile to connect to this change in international politics.70 As made clear above, the earliest solidarity move-ments often combined a focus on armed struggle with attempts to embracea more humanitarian frame. After 1979, the FSLN linked its domestic

——————

67 Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris,“The East versus the South: Belgian Solidarity Movements with Poland and Nicaragua during the Early 1980s,” in Robert Brier, ed., Entangled Protest:

Transnational Approaches to the History ofDissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Osnabrück, 2014), 173-98.

68 Robert Brier, “Poland's Solidarity as aContested Symbol of the Cold War: Transatlantic Debates After the Polish Crisis,” in Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrode, eds.,

European Integration and the Transatlantic Community in the 1980s (New York, 2013), 83-105. 69 See for instance: Barricada Internacional. International Weekly of the Sandinista National

Liberation Front, No. 24, July 5, 1982, 8; Ibid., No. 18, May 1982, 1.

70 Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St Paul MN, 2006), 84-85.


reforms to a concern with humanrights, but it saw itself increasingly con-fronted with domestic and international opposition that were keen to dothe same to attack the Nicaraguan government.71 The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and Christian-inspired World Con-federation of Labor pursued several human and trade union rights cam-paigns to denounce Sandinista repression of their affiliates at the level of European governments and UN bodies.72 This criticism often condensed in a universalizing and, at the time, potent anti -totalitarian discourse that sawthe Sandinista uniformed military leaders as a “red dictatorship” of the same orderof general Jaruzelski’s in Poland. It equated both the former and the latter with fascist dictatorships in Chile and other countries of the Southern Cone in order to showcase that both communism and fascism were not opposites but twins of totalitarianism incompatible with democracy.73 To counter such accusations, the Sandinista government

initiated a campaign to denounce American intervention in Nicaragua at the level of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunalin 1984.74 This tribunal was founded in 1979 by an international assortment of intellectuals who sought to promote an alternative interpretation of human rights.Rooted in a cri-tique of Western interpretations of human rights focusing on the individual and states, this tribunal advocated the doctrineof “peoples’ rights,” which held that people were the real subjects of history and rights.75 This example shows not only that human rights werea deeply contested issue76, butalso reveals the stamina of campaigns and ideas of the 1960s and 1970s into the 1980s.Indeed, the doctrines of peoples’ rights had been developed during campaigns by the Italian socialist senator and lawyer Lelio Basso and his entourage in the framework of the Russell Tribunal on Latin America, which, since its foundation in 1971-3, had gathered the most famous intel-lectuals to condemn oppression in various Latin American countries like Chile and Brazil. They did this after theexample of the Russell Tribunalon

——————

Borge, Los primeros pasos, 62-63.

ICFTU, IISH, no. 1482-1490; WCL, Kadoc, no. 347.

Robert Czarkowski, De Polonia a Nicaragua (San José, 1984); Brier, “Poland’s Solidarity,” 99-100.

Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, Permanent Peoples' Tribunal on Nicaragua: October 1984, Brussels (s.l., 1984).

Linda Bimbi and Gianni Tognoni, Speranzee inquietudini di ieri e di oggi: I trent’anni della Dichiarazione Universale del Diritto dei Popoli (Rome, 2008).

Ed McCaughan, “Human Rights and Peoples' Rights: An Introduction,” Social Justice 16 (1989): 1-7.


American war crimes in Vietnam inthe 1960s.77 When the Sandinista government participated in a campaign against American intervention in Nicaragua at the level of this tribunal, it tied in once again with ideas and campaigns developed during previous campaigns and for other countries in the South. The Sandinista government invited delegations for on-site visits and sent representatives, including Ernesto Cardenal, to testify before the jury in Brussels during the session in October 1984, attended by about 1,000 observers.78 The involvementof icons of the anti-apartheid struggle, campaigns against Pinochet, and Palestine solidarity helped, together with the support of high-profile intellectuals (such as Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Eduardo Galeano), to garner publicity in international publications and media in Nicaragua, Western Europe, and the US.79

Yet, rather than universalizing the cause of Sandinista Nicaragua, the FSLN and activists

shifted toward a representation of Nicaragua that stressed the “otherness” of the country. All this became visible in the “peoples’ diplomacy” that the FSLN pursued in its relations with Western Europe. The development of people-to-people ties had been an important ingredient of the foreign policy of countries like Cuba and North Vietnam as early as the 1960s, and was intended to gain access to Western societies beyond the traditional diplomatic avenues, for instance through travel, culture, and the establishment offriendship associations.80 Notablyfrom 1984, the Sandinista government increased its efforts toward developing this kind of people-to-people diplomacy aimed at Western Europe. They did this under the influence of the dramatic domestic situation due to the Contra War, growing opposition, and economic crisis.81

An intermediary role was played by the network of Nicaragua committees, which reached their zenith in number and activity from 1984.82 Thousands of volunteers left their societies for several weeks to participate in international work

——————

77 Kim Christiaens, “Why Brazil? The Belgian Mobilization Against Repression inBrazil and its Significance for Third

World Solidarity Activism in the 1970s andBeyond,”

Journal of Belgian History 43 (2013): 108-147.

78 François Houtart to Maurice Barth, May 7, 1984, Oxfam Belgium, Brussels.

79 Brussels session on Nicaragua, 1984, Oxfam-Belgium, Brussels; De Standaard, October 7, 1984; Barricada Internacional, August 15, 1983; Barricada Internacional, October 11, 1984.

80 Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig, “Buena Vista Solidarity and the Axis of Aid: Cuban and Venezuelan Public Diplomacy,” The ANNALS of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science 616 (2008): 223-225.

81 Perla, “Heirs of Sandino,” 87-88.

82 Tenth European conference of Nicaragua committees, November 23-25, 1984, DNC, 18.


brigades to Nicaragua.83 These travels, which aimed at making participants “little ambassadors” (in the words of the FSLN), were organized by the committees in cooperation with the Comité Nicaragüense deSolidaridad con los Pueblos (CNSP), an institution responsible for the coordination of overseas solidarity groups.84 As European activists traveled to Nicaragua and learned about thenation, its population, culture, and folklore, they increasingly perceived the country not so much as an extension of their own Europeanstruggles, but as a colorful contrast with the dullness of their Western societies. Diplomacy also brought Nicaragua to Western Europe: solidarity committees organizedtours and festivals with Nicara-guan artists that spreadword about the country and its culture to the broader public. Whereas it were mostly Western pop artists that had taken the floor during fund-raisings and solidarity campaigns for Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the FSLN sent from the mid-

1980s a growing number of Nicaraguan artists to Western Europe, where they staged performances and solidarity concerts that appealed more to the emotions and senses than topolitical doctrines, and stressed the particularity of Nicaraguan culture.85 The fusion of solidarity, culture, and diplomacy was embodied by figures such as Ernesto Cardenal or Francisco de Asís Fernández, a poet and writer who was, as the president of CNSP, one of the central intermediaries between the Sandinista government and the European soli-darity committees. This cultural diplomacy went hand in hand with cam-paigns for political and material support for the country, such as the international campaign “Nicaragua must survive,” whichwas launched by vice-president Sergio Ramírez during his 1985 visit to Western Europe.86

All in all, the focus on the otherness of the country contributed to a representationof Nicaragua that lost much of its potential for internationalcontextualization. In the second part of the 1980s, indeed, solidarity with Nicaragua turned out to be increasingly difficult to attach to other interna-tional issues and topical evolutions

at stake in Europe and other parts of the world. In the wakeof attempts to settle the Contra War with peace negotiations, and the failure of rebels to seize power in Guatemala and El Salvador, the connection between the Nicaraguan revolution and rebellion

——————

83 Peace, A Call to Conscience, 157.

84 Hazel Smith, “Revolutionary Diplomacy Sandinista Style: Lessons and Limits,” Race & Class 33 (1991): 69.

85 Nicaragua Today. Bulletin of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign , no. 10 [1983], 8. 86Report of the European Coordination, February 1, 1986, DNC, 18.

G L O B A L I Z I N G N I C A R A G U A ?

175

in other Central American nations dwindled, whereas the non-violent and gradual transition todemocracy in countries such as Brazil and Chile sharply contrasted with the armed revolution thathad paved the way for the coming to power of the FSLN in 1979. The only important cause in the South that entangled occasionally with Nicaragua solidarity in the second part of the 1980s was the anti-apartheid struggle. “Boycott South Africa, not Nicaragua” was one of the slogans of the “Nicaragua must survive” campaign, while British committees brought up Nicaragua in reference to with the 1986 March of Freedom against apartheid in London by drawing analogies between US support for the Somoza and the apartheid regime.87 Yet, anti-apartheid remained a far larger and more appealing issue than Nicaragua, whereas attention to South Africa among Nicaragua activists was often very transitory or unstable. Also in Sandinista propaganda, little attention was devoted to anti-apartheid throughout the 1980s, with the exception of some occasional festivities such as the foun-dation of a Nicaraguan Anti-Apartheid Committee in 1987.88 The dwindled international relevance of Nicaragua for Western European activists con-tributed, together with other broader evolutions, to a gradual decline of the solidarity movements, even before the elections of 1990 marked the end of the Sandinista regime.

Conclusions

Recent accounts of the European solidarity movements on behalf of the Third World have been likely to depict the movements as part of an expanding global civil society that was well under way before the end of the Cold War, and as stimuli in a process of globalization of social move-ments.89 The fascination of European audiences with a faraway country such as Nicaragua indeed reflects the ways in which social movements broadened their horizon beyond what happened in their own societies, and

——————

87 Nicaragua Today, no. 23, 1986, 2-3.

88 Derechos Humanos en Nicaragua. Boletín de la Comisión Nacional de Promoción y Protección de los Derechos humanos, no. 3, July-August 1987, 15.

89 Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett, eds., The Third World In The Global 1960s

(New York, Oxford, 2013); Hakan Thörn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (Basingstoke, 2006).


discerned the global dimensionsof local and national strugglesat home and abroad. Foreign issues were not only domesticated by activists, these issues were also represented and celebrated as causes whose relevance transcended local, national, and regional boundaries. The resonance of the cause of Nicaragua among a variety of groups in Western Europe stemmed not only from the cause’s potential to inspire activism at home or projects inNicaragua, but also from its ability to exceed national confines and to connect to other international issues in the past and present. As was the case with many other issuesin the Third World, such as thestruggle against apartheid and the Vietnam War, solidarity with Nicaragua was not only a subject of a global community of concern, but was also represented as a cause with a global significance and reach. Importantly, and this is a point which has received scant attention to date, this transnational identity hinged on more than just the sheer geographical diffusion of

solidarity campaigns, the ambition of activists to present themselves as part of aglobal public opinion, or common symbols and opposition against US involvement that blurred national boundaries. Critically, Nicaraguan agency also played a pivotal role in the construction of a transnational identity. Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinista government organizedvarious “world conferences” andinternational encounters in order to bring activists together in common campaigns and around common themes. Sandinista diplomacy was a key factor in the emergence of campaigns that linked the fate of Nicaragua with the plight inother Central American countries. Nicaraguan agency isalso important for understanding the continuity ofmodels of international solidarity practiced in previous cam-paigns, most notably for countries like Chile and Vietnam. When organiz-ing the first solidarity movements in WesternEurope, Nicaraguan exiles were indeed substantially influencedby the example of solidarity with Chile, whereas Sandinista diplomacy contributed, next to biographical continuities of activists, to the resonance of the iconic anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s in the solidarity movements of the 1980s and the efforts of

activists to reach out to the broader peace movement.

Yet, there are important limitations that call for a measure of skepticism toward the tendency to represent solidarity with Nicaragua as a globalized movement. First, in the case of the Western European solidarity movements, a process of Europeanization seemed often far more im-portant than a process of globalization. Indeed, Western European activ-ists above all centered their efforts on Europeanizing solidarity in terms of


organization and ideas. Their efforts to create a “European” movement that engendered cross border cooperation between locally working activists hinged on their belief in a specific role for Western Europe in challenging the bipolarity of theCold War and challenging the US, a belief that also underpinned Sandinista diplomacy’s particularfocus on Western Europe as a pivotal region for its foreign policy. Second, this chapter has not only revealed connections, but also tensions with other solidarity movements and the elective affinities characterizing campaigns for Nicaragua. Most notably, it has widened the distance between campaigns for Nicaragua and thoseon behalf of Eastern Europe. Where some recent studies have bracketed these East-West and North-South movements together, this chapter has argued that theylived in a tense and often antagonistic relationship. Connections established by some Western European activists were overshadowed by far more important ideological differences, Cold War tensions, and, last but not least, the interests of the Sandinista

government, which did not want tohave its relation with the SovietUnion and Eastern Europe jeopardized.90 Not only was there a gulf with the causes of EasternEuropean dissidents, but also with causes in other parts of theThird World. This hinged not necessarily on differences in ideology, such as was the case regarding the Christian-democratic opposition that took the lead in Chile in the 1980s. Also, national interests and strategic competition with other countries over access to political and material support from Western European governmentsand NGOs played their roles. Fromthe mid -1980s, these elements stimulated the Sandinista government to foster an understanding of solidarity whichstressed the otherness and uniqueness of the country among European audiences, and led to a “Nicaraguanization” rather than aglobalization of solidarity that ran counter to universalizing human rights discourses.

——————

90 Lynch, The Cold War's Last Battlefield.

Globalizing Nicaragua? An Entangled History of Sandinista Solidarity Campaigns in Western Europe....

Documents

Transcript of Globalizing Nicaragua? An Entangled History of Sandinista Solidarity Campaigns in Western Europe....