This book weaves together gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War era. We survey both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. These events, alliances, and actions are in dialogue and conflict with, among others, the third-way proposal of non-alignment and the rebellious energy of liberation movements. Our starting point was an online issue of Mezosfera magazine (“Refractions of Socialist Solidarity”), in dialogue with the film Two Meetings and a Funeral (dir: Mohaiemen, 2017). The Hungarian premiere of both the magazine and the film was at the Hungarian Metalworkers’ Union, correlating non-alignment with the trade union movement––two institutions with many inflection points in their complicated histories. Along with film screenings, a series of study groups looked at examples of cross-border solidarity work and the place of Eastern Europe within global histories. As we expanded the reading lists derived from the study group and magazine, a process of assemblage eventually metamorphosed into this anthology. The stories we found often proposed less sunny horizons––dark turns and missed connections came to the forefront. Nevertheless, through it all, many witnesses and participants of those events maintained optimism despite setbacks. Marking the end of a two-year research process, we present this anthology as a mid-journey pause and reflection: transnational solidarity is always worth celebrating and also, always, difficult to inhabit.

Our anthology title is a play on the first volume of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France: Society Must Be Defended. This homage signposts both the salutary impact of Foucault’s writings on dissident political work and the types of misrecognition, weak alliances, and failed prediction relevant to our concerns. We are thinking here of Foucault’s enthusiasm for Iranian revolutionary effervescence in 1978, which he saw as having no parallel or antecedent in Europe. This led to his accurate reading of religious spirit as an animating force of this revolution, while missing the realpolitik nature of a post-revolt state organized by a theocracy. Foucault was not alone in misreading the arc of 1979. Still, there was something particular about his reading that came from a dislocation from the familiarity of the European archives and his enthusiasm for the “limit-situation” of human self-actualization. Foucault welcomed the ambiguity in relations between vastly different Iranian revolutionary forces subsumed under the supra-cause of ousting the US-backed Pahlavi monarchy. By late 1978, Foucault’s enthusiastic writings about Iran had come under criticism by Iranian feminists, Islamic scholars, and French leftists. As the clergy triumphed in the post-revolutionary power struggle and public executions of dissidents began, a seemingly chastened Foucault lapsed into silence.

There are many examples of transnational misrecognition, errors in alliances, and failures to transform the mechanisms of state power after a successful revolution. These failures circulate several questions, including one that has animated our inquiry: Is every action capable of building solidarity, or can it become anti-solidarity when carried out with challenging allies, ambiguous manifestos, and accelerated timelines? During the editing of this volume, we have focused on how cross-border solidarity manifested in what we call “messy practice”––in the local specificity of varying contexts, alignments, and regions. This volume is a partial story of the dream of working beyond borders, inhabited by dramatic protagonists and triumphant moments, coming together (and apart) across many fissures, fault lines, and utopias.