Europe Not Taken for Granted: The Ford Foundation’s Exchange Programs in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s

• In Event: The Imprints of Philanthropy: American Foundations in Eastern Europe during Communism

Abstract

Would exposing select East Europeans to the ideas and practices of the capitalist West – especially to the United States of America – affect East Europeans and, in turn, change the course of communism in Eastern Europe? This was the big question when the large and powerful Ford Foundation launched its first exchange program with a communist country: Poland, in 1957. After more than ten years of hostile Cold War, a softer approach to cultural warfare was attempted by both East and West in the late 1950s, in the so-called “Thaw.” The idea that exchanging people may have a positive effect on the relationship between East and West, was catching on (as it had also in the interwar years), and the Ford Foundation was the first American actor to venture into the area. The Polish program soon proved successful, and the Ford Foundation proceeded to run exchange programs also with Yugoslavia and Hungary. Carefully selected Poles, Yugoslavs and Hungarians (701 persons in total) spent periods of up to a year in the USA on Ford Foundation grants. This paper shows how conflicting beliefs and interests manifested themselves in the interaction between the Ford Foundation and the various actors in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and how this affected perceptions and attitudes in the cultural war across the East-West divide.

Author

• Ingeborg Stensrud, Norwegian U of Science and Technology (Norway)