The Ford Foundation behind the Iron Curtain: Making Dissidents or Educating Party Intellectuals?

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

Abstract

In 1956 the Ford Foundation signed a contract with Poland over a fellowship program that would, within roughly a decade, bring more than 300 social scientists, humanities scholars, and artists as well as smaller numbers of journalists and professionals to Western universities for one-year study and research visits. A year later, a similar agreement was reached with Yugoslavia, and in 1963 with Hungary. The Ford Foundation’s objectives, closely coordinated with the State Department, aimed at increasing the likelihood of these intellectuals to become spokespersons for a democratic development of a Western type and thus critics of state socialism. The Communist governments obviously had different aims in mind, i.e. to train their intellectuals in the state-of-the-art of social thought and techniques that were to be used in the service of the socialist polities. Both things happened and the crucial political struggle between the two sides emerged over the relative weight of each of these opposite effects. In this paper, I analyze how both sides observed and assessed the impact of Western fellowships on the intellectuals and how they tried to draw most out of the program for their own needs. In effect, this political struggle has been, above all, a struggle over the selection procedures of the candidates. Using archival material from the Ford Foundation and East European archives as well as interviews with former fellows, I discuss some of the mechanisms that made some fellows more dissident and others better educated intellectuals.

Author

• Matthias Duller, Central European U (Hungary)