Liberal technical assistance or socialist material aid? The WHO crisis and the making of an alternative international health

Dora Vargha

Shortly after the World Health Organization was created, it faced a major crisis when half of Europe left the international agency. I argue that Cold War geopolitics is only partly to blame: underlying the dramatic exit of Eastern Europe was a fundamentally different understanding of international health. Socialist concepts and arguments were soon put to the test with the Korean war, bringing together most of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. This venture then laid foundations for further cooperation for the countries that found themselves outside of the new, liberal international order.

Prof. Dora Vargha is a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health and Cold War history. She is based jointly at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Exeter in the UK. She is the principal investigator of two projects, the ERC Starting Grant ‘Socialist Medicine’ and the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award ‘Connecting Three Worlds’, and co-investigator in the interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust Discovery Award project ‘After the End: Lived experiences and aftermaths of Diseases, Disasters and Drugs in Global Health’. She is currently co-editor of the new book series Epidemic Histories at Johns Hopkins University Press and co-editor of the Cambridge History of Medicine.