Abstract
After World War II, the airplane served to dramatically shrink the world, enabling states to expand their diplomatic relations and trade with distant countries. This was especially true for a small landlocked country like Czechoslovakia. Under the motto, “Air is our sea,” Czechoslovak leaders sought to make their country a transportation center by turning Prague into an aviation hub. As one Czechoslovak diplomat put it in the early 1950s, Czechoslovakia was “a small state,” which could “feed its population only through extensive trade with other countries,” and that trade could only be conducted through the air.1 The Czechoslovak government understood that it needed its own civil aviation capabilities so it would not have to be dependent on foreign airlines to transport its goods and diplomatic delegations. Prague was therefore sympathetic when, during the late 1950s, newly independent African states similarly sought their own national airlines.
Keywords
- Civil Aviation
- African State
- International Civil Aviation Organization
- Federal Aviation Administration
- Soviet Bloc
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Notes
J. Kasparek (1952) “Negotiating the Czech-Soviet Aviation Agreement” American Slavic and East European Review 11 (3), p. 209.
D. Cumming (1962) “Aviation in Africa” African Affairs 61 (242), p. 30.
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D.R. Jones (1998) “The Rise and Fall of Aeroflot: Civil Aviation in the Soviet Union, 1920–1991,” in Robin Hingham, John T. Greenwood, and Van Hardesty (eds.) Russian Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century (Portland, OR: Frank Cass).
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Zeman, Czech Airlines 1923/2003, pp. 76–85 and H. Macdonald (1975) Aeroflot: Soviet Air Transport since 1923 (London: Putnam).
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P. Zidek and K. Sieber (2007) Československo a subsaharská Afrika v letech 1948–1989 [Czechoslovakia and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1948–1989] (Prague: Ústavmezinárodníchvztahů), p. 79 and Guttery, Encyclopedia of African Airlines, pp. 78–9.
P. Zidek (2002) “Vývoz zbrani z Československa do zemí třetího světa v letech 1948–1962” [Export of arms from Czechoslovakia to third world countries in the years 1948–1962] Historie a vojenství 3, pp. 560–1.
Guttery, Encyclopedia of African Airlines, pp. 78–9 and W. Attwood (1967) The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper & Row), p. 123.
G. Ginsburgs and R. M. Slusser (1981) A Calendar of Soviet Treaties 1958–1973 (Boston, MA: Brill), p. 137 and S. Mazov (2010) A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964 (Washington, DC and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press), p. 220.
S. Mazov (2007) “Soviet Aid to the Gizenga Government in the Former Belgian Congo (1960–61) as Reflected in Russian Archives,” Cold War History 7 (3), pp. 425–37.
Memorandum from Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Achilles to Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs George C. McGhee, May 10, 1962. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XXI, Africa (1996) (Washington, DC: US Department of State), pp. 315–18.
For a good account of the events of the Cuban missile crisis, see A. Fursenko and T. Naftali (1997) One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W.W. Norton).
R. Legvold (1970) Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 157. Also see W. Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks, p. 104.
Attwood, Reds and the Blacks, p. 109. For a discussion of Sékou Touré’s visit to the Kennedy White House see P. E. Muehlenbeck (2012) Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 67–9.
Nkrumah quoted by Mahoney in an interview with David Rooney. See D. Rooney (1988) Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 243.
R. D. Mahoney (1983) JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 181, 245.
P. M. Kaiser (1992) Journeying Far and Wide: A Political and Diplomatic Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Also see telegram from Ambassador Philip Kaiser (Dakar) to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, October 27, 1962. Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, Morocco, US Embassy, Rabat, Classified General Records, 1956–63, Box No. 13, Folder “US-Cuba, 1962–1964,” Record Group 84; Kaiser, Frontline Diplomacy; and Stephen Low, oral history interview, December 5, 1997, Frontline Diplomacy.
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© 2016 Philip Muehlenbeck
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Muehlenbeck, P. (2016). Czechoslovak Aviation Assistance to Africa (1960–68). In: Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945–1968. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56666-9_5
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