The humanitarian and internationalist profile of the Nordics is well-documented and has recently attracted growing scholarly interest. A similar trend is evident in the study of smaller state socialist countries of the Soviet bloc, whose developmental activities in the Global South have increasingly become the focus of academic inquiry. These engagements have been interpreted in both moral and strategic terms: as expressions of socialist solidarity and internationalist duty, as well as pragmatic adaptations by small, export-oriented societies seeking relevance in a rapidly decolonizing world. In the Nordic context, close coordination between state and civil society has been viewed as a critical factor in shaping the scope and effectiveness of international engagement. However, post-colonial conflict situations present a more complex picture. In several cases, Nordic governments, faced with geopolitical sensitivities or domestic constraints, adopted a cautious stance, refrained from action, or sought to limit civil society involvement abroad. Nordic humanitarian engagement has also frequently sparked domestic debates about its goals, methods, and broader political consequences, raising important questions about the conditions necessary for effective coordination between state and civil society. In parallel, Czechoslovakia and other small socialist states faced competition from Western countries, including the Nordics, as they pursued similar strategies, such as technical assistance, educational exchanges, and infrastructure projects, under the banner of socialist solidarity in the Global South. At the same time, they had to navigate their own ideological, economic, and diplomatic constraints. Drawing on diverse empirical materials and historical case studies, ranging from Cold War diplomacy to Biafra and Palestine in the 1960s, the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa in the 1970s, and contemporary humanitarian cases, this panel brings together six papers exploring how the humanitarian and development engagements of European small states have been tested. The emerging public history of the humanitarian aspect of the global turn in the Nordics is critically attuned to the tensions between overarching international commitments and specific instances of (in)action. At the same time, the panel foregrounds comparisons with state socialist Czechoslovakia, thereby enriching our understanding of how different small European states navigated frictions in their relationships with the Global South during the Cold War.