Bargaining for humanitarian aid across the Iron Curtain: Western relief workers in Romania in the late 1970s

In the 1970s, two floods and an earthquake turned state socialist Romania into a recipient of significant international humanitarian aid. Western relief organisations came to Bucharest to negotiate the terms of their assistance. Drawing on material from German, Swiss and Romanian archives, this article argues that giving and receiving across the Iron Curtain were deeply embedded in the systemic competition of the Cold War. It shows that Western relief workers were able to convince Romanian authorities to make humanitarianism a valid form of East-West cooperation. However, such exchanges remained limited to a few flagship projects, separated from Romania's own recovery measures.