Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany

This article investigates tensions and dynamics in global socialism through a focus on Tanzanian students in East Germany between the late 1950s and 1990. Disciplinary techniques partially known from Tanzania and everyday strategies of survival explain why most students complied with official requirements, but did not necessarily agree with East German ideological tenets. Additionally, throughout the decades, mobility across the Iron Curtain remained an important strategy to further own interests. The article concludes that an analytical framework spanning several decades and paying attention to dynamics in the country of origin sheds new light on agency and mobility among ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘South’ during the Cold War.     

Shrinkage,Metropolization and Peripheralization in East Germany

Since around 2000, there has been extensive research on questions regarding shrinkage and urban renewal in Germany after a task force report revealed approximately 1.4 million vacant flats in East Germany. Since then, most towns and cities have been labelled “shrinking cities” there. While from a planning perspective urban decline and also shrinking cities are widely studied phenomena throughout the industrialized world and a substantial literature exists on the phenomenon in Germany, the impact of political debates and normative considerations is under-researched. This paper highlights the role of political–normative ideas of metropolization and societal relations within this complex core–periphery process, elaborating on the concept of peripheralization and calling for further research.     

Regional Innovation Support Systems: Recent Trends in Germany and East Asia

Since the beginning of the 1990s, one can observe a clear shift in the aims of regional policy in industrialized countries from reducing regional inequalities to developing endogenous small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and innovation in regions through regional innovation support systems. Innovation support systems are defined as a group of actively cooperating organizations that support the innovativeness of SMEs. An innovation support system consists of all agencies found in three support stages, namely the provision of general information, technological advice and joint R&D projects, between firms (of which technology-following SMEs are the main group), higher education institutes (HEIs) and public research establishments (PREs). Agencies found in these stages try to help to solve innovation problems mainly of technology-following SMEs by either giving them advice themselves or by referring them to other agencies in a further stage of support. The agencies can be mainly supra-nationally, nationally or regionally initiated. This paper aims at comparing these regional innovation support systems in Germany and East Asia, that is Japan and South Korea, both concerning the instruments used, their impact on regional economic development, their level of organizational embeddedness in regions and the ability of regions to coordinate innovation support policies. The main conclusions of the paper are that there are similarities between the regional innovation support systems found in the countries when it comes to policy instruments, but that the countries differ concerning their level of regional embeddedness and the abilities of regions to coordinate innovation support policies. The paper also tentatively concludes that in countries where regions have the ability to coordinate policies into integrative innovation support systems, the impact on regional economic development tend to be larger than in countries where these abilities are lacking, that is where dirigiste and grassroots support systems prevail. One important explanation for the different coordinating abilities lies in the different political-administrative systems found in the studied countries (centralized in South Korea versus federal in Germany). Other factors explaining differences are: a time lag of development policies between countries, differences between the history of supporting SMEs in regions, supra-national support frameworks, the commitment of the political leaders in regions, collective trust and the size of countries.