Nonaligned Movement:
Introduction

An introduction to the Nonaligned Movement, its history, and its meaning for Yugoslavia, as well as reasons for a growing interest in it. Part 1 of 7.

With Paul Stubbs.

Listen: “Nonaligned Movement: An Introduction” (Episode #106)

Remembering Yugoslavia PLUS

An extended, ad-free version of “Nonaligned Movement: An Introduction” (Episode #106).

Transcript: “Nonaligned Movement: An Introduction” (Episode #106)

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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. 

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[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your chairman Peter Korchnak.

Socialist Yugoslavia as a country, as a regime, as an identity rested on several pillars. You’ve on the show about some of the internal pillars: Tito, the People’s Liberation War, brotherhood and unity, self-management. The second Yugoslavia was created during World War II under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and the memory of that period served to cement and cultivate the Communist Party’s power and legitimacy. In addition to socialism, the ideology of brotherhood and unity served to maintain peace among the constituent nations and cohesion in the multiethnic federal country. Self-management was the means Yugoslavia pursued as its independent path to socialism.

Yugoslavia’s external posture and foreign policy was as unique as its internal workings. Yugoslavia was a founder and the leading force in the Nonaligned Movement, a non-bloc bloc of countries refusing to join either Cold War power bloc. 

Nonalignment was Yugoslavia’s external pillar and in a way a pre-condition for some of the internal one. It was so important (and so absent on this show) I’ll dedicate the next six episodes to it. 

Today’s episode will serve as an introduction, and in the course of the series I’ll tackle the various aspects of nonalignment: Yugoslavia’s political relations with the Third World or the Global South; Yugoslavia’s support for liberation and decolonization movements around the world; the economic aspects of nonalignment; nonalignment in the sphere of culture; and finally the legacy and the present and future of nonalignment.

Each episode comes with an ad-free, extended version, featuring extra interview footage, stories, analysis, music, and quotes by Tito and other Yugoslavs. As all past bonus material, these bonus extras are available exclusively to HERO members of Yugoblok. To get access and listen at Yugoblok or in your podcast listening app, go to Yugoblok.com/Join to sign up to be a HERO today. That’s yugoblok.com slash join.

So, let’s get nonaligned. We’ll first go meta and look at the growing interest in nonalignment and its legacy. We’ll then run through the history of the Nonaligned Movement. And we’ll close out with some thoughts on Tito’s role in the Nonaligned Movement and the impact of nonalignment within Yugoslavia. In addition to extra quotes and music, the extended episode features the full story of the 1961 summit of nonaligned countries in Belgrade.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Nonalignment raises a number of questions, about the Cold War and great power bloc politics, about Yugoslavia and its global role, about the Third World or the Global South. But the question that drives this very podcast is, “why?”

PAUL STUBBS: How come a small socialist country, clearly in Europe, even if on the periphery of Europe, should be able to galvanize and be in solidarity with anti colonial, decolonial movements in the global south? 

PETER KORCHNAK: Here to kick us off in our exploration of nonalignment is Paul Stubbs, a British sociologist living in Croatia for more than 30 years. He’s been studying the history and political economy of socialist Yugoslavia, particularly self-management, social welfare, and inequality. He is the editor of Socialist Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2023, which forms the basis of this Remembering Yugoslavia series on nonalignment.

Back when I started studying Yugoslavia, in grad school at the turn of the millennium, it was the wars of dissolution that stood at the center of attention (I myself dedicated my work to the dissolution itself). But over the past decade or so, there has been growing interest in nonalignment, both as such, globally, and from the Yugoslav perspective. So I first asked Stubbs for this context.

PAUL STUBBS: The intellectual answer is that, of course, there’s been a renewed interest in studying global socialisms. 

Part of that is about trying to decenter the Eurocentrism that actually, socialism is about the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. It was always much broader than that, of course, Cuba, China. But why not look at African socialism, socialisms in Latin America, and socialisms around the decolonial project. So that’s one element. 

And I think the other element is that a lot of people have tried to begin to look at this link between the kind of post socialist and the post colonial. And of course, Yugoslavia has a particular position, I don’t want to use the word exceptional, it’s unusual. Many of the things that Yugoslavia was doing in Africa around architecture were also being done by other socialist countries from Eastern Europe. So it wasn’t a solo player, but that interest in the postsocialist and the post colonial fits in with this. 

PETER KORCHNAK: So for one, it’s about a search for alternatives to the current situation and within that, considering the legacy of nonalignment.

PAUL STUBBS: The Nonaligned Movement very much has lessons for today’s multilateral chaos. 

The first would be, the importance of the United Nations to be able to do what it was set out to do. And of course, the reasons it can’t do that is because it is bound by the superpowers, bound by those countries that have veto power in the Security Council. So the United Nations has very little power. The power that it has is ceded to more powerful nations with veto power. And even more importantly, I think perhaps, from the mid to late 1970s, the strategy of the United States and her allies was to shift power to the World Bank, to the IMF, to the World Trade Organization, to bypass the United Nations, because it models a kind of democratic public sphere, even if it’s a bourgeois public sphere. So that’s one. 

The second is, of course, the Nonaligned Movement’s deep commitment to disarmament. I started at a moment in time when the fear of nuclear annihilation, mutually assured destruction was incredibly strong, right? The Cuban missile crisis, lots of posturing, lots of new nuclear states in the world. So the idea of what they called absolute and complete disarmament. Not only because it would be a safer world, but because if you disarm, then you can spend money on more desirable things like health care and social welfare. 

And so that brings me on to the third element, which is, I think this model of a different economic order, right? The idea of the New International Economic Order, which would not have happened without the Nonaligned Movement, the G77, and UNCTAD. We’ve got rid of political colonialism, but we haven’t got rid of economic neo-colonialism. So the terms of trade of countries in the periphery never benefited them. They were they were exporting commodities at prices dictated by the West. The West was then making industrial products and selling those back to the Global South at inflated terms. And the power of multinational corporations were [sic] beginning to be seen as incredibly kind of problematic, right? 

PETER KORCHNAK: There’s also a generational element in the interest. I mean here we are now, a generation and a half removed from Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the wars that ensued. 

PAUL STUBBS: There’s now a group of historians who actually almost never lived through social Yugoslavia, a new generation of scholars who are actually interested in socialist Yugoslavia, because—and I’m quoting my good friend Igor Štiks here—it was probably the most successful socialist experiment of the 20th century. You can still see a kind of interesting and important kind of set of gains, not just in terms of human welfare, but in terms of models of what socialism should look like. And one of those was about the solidarity with the Global South and the decolonial project. 

So I think that renewed interest of people who either didn’t experience socialist Yugoslavia or only experience it as children, really a generation— a jumping of a generation away from the study of nationalism and war basically, I think.

PETER KORCHNAK: One aspect of globalization, and perhaps part of nonalignment’s legacy, is that it encourages to consider the world as a whole. 

PAUL STUBBS: The collapse of the Berlin Wall meant that actually the entire apparatus of scholarship in Eastern Europe became much more Eurocentric. So it’s about comparative studies with neighbors. And therefore that global perspective gets lost.

We’ve become incredibly narrow in the social sciences and humanities, and we need to get back to an idea of the whole world being relevant. 

[SOUNDBITE]

History of the Nonaligned Movement

PETER KORCHNAK: In most narratives the Nonaligned Movement was officially established in 1961, at its inaugural conference in Belgrade. But there were two earlier international events that pointed toward cooperation among countries that opposed colonization.

In 1927 in Brussels, Belgium, the Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism gathered representatives of the world’s anti-colonial groups and movements, from communists to social democrats to delegates from anticolonial/liberation movements and parties. The groups positioned itself as the other, real League of Nations that was opposed to the imperial powers.

In 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, the Asian-African Conference was a gathering of the heads of state and government of 29 Asian and African countries. It also elevated the status of Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, and Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sukarno, presidents of Egypt and Indonesia respectively, as the leaders in the efforts to resist colonialism. The conference itself did point to the possibility of anti-bloc politics and cooperation across the two continents. But it did not institutionalize any of this, let alone establish the Nonaligned Movement.

PAUL STUBBS: The Bandung process of Afro-Asian unity or solidarity never got beyond the first conference in Bandung in 1955, mainly because of disputes between India and China.

PETER KORCHNAK: The impetus for creating the Nonaligned Movement came not from the new and decolonizing countries of the Global South, but from Yugoslavia. 

Recall that this was the only country in Europe where its citizens liberated themselves from occupation largely on their own. Yugoslav Partisans were Europe’s most successful resistance force and they won the war (and executed a socialist revolution in the process) without almost any external military assistance.

Consequently, Yugoslavia came to see the postwar struggles of peoples against colonialism as an extension of the wartime fight against fascism (in socialist countries the revolution was an additional outgrowth).

The proximate cause for nonalignment was the break with the Soviet Union in 1948.

PAUL STUBBS: For three years after the end of the Second World War, socialist Yugoslavia, under Tito, was a relatively well behaved Soviet satellite state. But there was a feeling, particularly because the victory of the socialists in Yugoslavia during the war— there was a strong feeling that they did it on their own, that there wasn’t a great deal of help from the allies, including the Soviet Union. And therefore there was an idea of a different road that Yugoslav socialism might take. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslavia resisted Soviet dominance within the bloc and refused to follow its hegemonic dictates as to how it should develop socialism and conduct its foreign policy. 

PAUL STUBBS: It was clear that Stalin’s perspective was that Yugoslavia would be a kind of, just another colony.

PETER KORCHNAK: The Soviet Union under Stalin promoted the idea of socialism of one country. The Soviet Union was to be the one country that achieved socialism and other countries were to assist in the process, before the revolution could be exported elsewhere. Basically, there was only one path to socialism, the Soviet path, and socialist countries outside the Soviet Union mere satellites or, in a sense, colonies.

Having won the war on their own, the Yugoslavs not only refused, quote, an “unconditional subordination of small socialist countries to one large socialist country,” they believed that they—and other countries as well—should and could pursue their own path to socialism.

Things came to a head in June 1948 when the Cominform (the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties) expelled Yugoslavia for its failure to tow the line. “Nationalist deviation” they called it.

After the break with the Soviet Union in 1948, Yugoslavia stood isolated. It attempted to shore up relations with its neighbors and unsuccessfully attempted to create a Balkan Federation. It linked up with communist parties in Western Europe. And it achieved a degree of rapprochement with the United States and its NATO allies. Recognizing Yugoslavia’s strategic importance in checking the Soviet Union in the region, the US began providing Yugoslavia with loans in 1949 and beginning in 1950 also with grants and military assistance.

But as much as Yugoslavia cozied up to the West, it also believed that one, the division of the world into blocs along military and ideological lines was “the gravest peril to world peace” and that “it [was] impossible to expect that socialism can be propagated in the world by splitting it into blocs.” 

PAUL STUBBS: This was a period of time before neoliberalism, if you like, when there were lots of contingencies, there were lots of uncertainties, there were lots of different possibilities for a different kind of world. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Kicked out of the socialist Eastern Bloc and ideologically opposed to the capitalist West, Yugoslavia sought friends elsewhere. Eventually, it turned south.

In the years after the split, Tito focused on consolidating power at home and reorienting the Yugoslav economy. The Yugoslavs re-read Lenin, Marx, and Engels, and came up with self-management as the new basis for its socialist path. Self-management was the opposite of the Soviet-style centrally planned economy. Rather than the state commanding the means of production, it was the workers themselves who were collectively both the owners and managers in charge. And once in the hands of the workers, the state itself was to wither away. Socialism from below if you will. 

Though Tito made no foreign trips between 1948 and 1953, the year Stalin died and the Korean War ended, he racked up important wins in foreign policy. In late 1948, Yugoslavia established diplomatic relations and signed a trade deal with India. With American support, in 1950, both India and Yugoslavia were elected as rotating members of the UN Security Council. Yugoslavia also recognized Ho Chi Minh’s government fighting the French colonial rule. 

In the Korean War, Yugoslavia, preparing as it was for a possible Soviet invasion, sided with the US to oppose North Korea’s invasion of the South. But it also opposed the UN intervention. At the subsequent Fifth Session of the General Assembly in September 1950, Edvard Kardelj used current affairs to presage nonalignment.

Later that year, Kardelj reiterated the principles of active peaceful coexistence to the Yugoslav National Assembly. He reaffirmed Yugoslavia’s opposition to all forms of interference in the internal affairs of other states and called for a strengthening of the United Nations and for peaceful economic, political, and cultural relations among nations on the basis of equality. 

He also reaffirmed Yugoslavia’s support for providing “ international economic assistance to underdeveloped countries’’ and supporting “national-liberation, democratic, and progressive movements in all countries.” 

PAUL STUBBS: And it’s not clear, you know, where the light bulb moment came from, but bubbling up in the early 1950s was this idea that actually the newly decolonized and future decolonized countries, particularly in Africa and in Asia, could be the new allies. 

And they’re actually finding common ground, part of it in terms of a legacy of antifascism, part of it in terms of a distrust of the two superpowers. 

Tito doesn’t get on that well with Nehru, but they share a philosophy, but gets on extremely well with Nasser, and is very supportive around the Suez Canal crisis, supportive of Egypt in the United Nations, and so on and so forth. 

So that’s why Yugoslavia is looking for allies in the Global South.

PETER KORCHNAK: In 1954, Tito set sail. Literally. His vehicle: a Yugoslav Navy training ship converted into a presidential yacht. The name: Galeb, or Seagull. The nickname: Peace Ship. 

Tito’s tour of India, Burma, and the Suez Canal between December 1954 and February 1955 was his first trip outside Europe and the first by a non-Asian head of state to that part of the world. 

The meeting with India’s prime minister Nehru in New Delhi in December 1954 produced a joint statement noting both countries emerged, quote “as independent nations through powerful movements of national liberation” and that their common adherence to nonalignment was not synonymous with “neutrality” but rather, quote “an active, positive, and constructive policy seeking to lead to collective peace, on which alone collective security can rest.” This launched the term and concept of nonalignment into world politics. 

Throughout the entire trip, which provided a foundation for Yugoslavia’s global role in spite of Yugoslavia size and relative poverty, Tito called for cooperation among the countries outside the two bloc and asserted that peace, economic development, and international stability were inseparable. 

On the eve of the Bandung Conference, these ideas fell on receptive ears. Tito’s defence of self-determination and independence from power blocs resonated with countries emerging from colonial rule. 

In the ensuing decade, Tito became one of the most traveled world leaders, traveling on Galeb for weeks and even months at a time to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

Lower level officials and thousands of experts traveled through the Global South a lot as well. Conversely, Tito frequently hosted nonaligned leaders in Yugoslavia, at Brijuni islands. 

As a non-Asian or African country, Yugoslavia wasn’t invited to Bandung. But it benefited greatly from the failures of that conference to formalize cooperation among participating countries. Most importantly, Tito recognized what it and the participating countries had in common: an interest in maintaining independence and equality among nations. 

[SOUNDBITE]

The meeting in July 1956 at Brijuni between Tito, Nasser, and Nehru is considered to be the direct precursor to the establishment of the Nonaligned Movement. In fact within Yugoslavia, Brijuni became the foundation of the nonalignment narrative; Yugoslavia’s central role and leadership in nonalignment as expressed at Brijuni became part of the country’s constitutive myth. 

Again the declaration of the summit laid out the basic ideas of nonalignment. Quote, “Peace cannot be achieved by division, but by striving for collective security on a global scale, expanding the area of ​​freedom, and ending the domination of one country over another.” The trio called for a new international order, “equality…disarmament, (and) international economic and financial co-operation…in accordance with the basic principles laid down in the Charter of the United Nations.”

At the 15th session of the UN General Assembly, in September 1960, Tito gave a speech that basically laid out the rationale for the incipient Nonaligned Movement as well as its program. He bemoaned the Cold War division into blocs, several threats to peace, apartheid, and underdevelopment. He highlighted the growing number of member countries, as more and more peoples shed the colonial yoke in a historically necessary process of emancipation. And he called for disarmament, “peaceful and active co-existence,” “non-interference” in the affairs of others, the right of countries to choose their own social and economic systems, and making the principles of the United Nations’ Charter a reality. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: By the time the Belgrade conference took place in September 1961, nonaligned countries had several years of networking and cooperation under their collective belts. 

[SOUNDBITE]

The start of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August and Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons tests just one day before the conference, turned the global spotlight on Belgrade. Suddenly, expectations for the conference grew exponentially, as it became an event that would not only show an alternative to power bloc politics but also help defuse the immediate crises, ease tensions overall, and maintain world peace.

PAUL STUBBS: The absence of that Bandung process meant that there was this meeting in Belgrade in 1961 which people say was the start of the nonaligned movement. Yes, it was, but in another way, it wasn’t. Because Nehru, from India only came because he received guarantees that this will be a one-off event, it would not become a formal movement. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: On September 1st, 1961 leaders of 25 countries, three observers, and forty delegations of various decolonization and liberation movements gathered in Belgrade for the inaugural conference of the Nonaligned Movement. 

[SOUNDBITE]

A number of South American countries didn’t show as the US pressured them to stay home because of Cuba’s presence. 

The founding meeting of the Nonaligned Movement established the non-bloc bloc as an advocate for peace, international cooperation, and economic development. 

Whereas before the event, the organizers called it a “Conference of Uncommitted States”, the official name ended up being “Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non- Aligned Countries.”

The conference was also an opportunity to showcase the ability of socialist Yugoslavia to host a mass event of global significance. More than a thousand journalists, photographers, and TV and radio staffers covered the conference; about a third came from abroad.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: The park is still there, though some of the trees and plaques are damaged, and there have been some additions since the summit. 

The wide spectrum of countries managed to agree on a few things: opposition to colonialism, arms race, and military interventions, and support for expanding the role of the United Nations, particularly in economic development, and to ongoing liberation struggles, particularly in Algeria, Angola, Congo, and Palestine. The closing declaration maintained that decolonization was a prerequisite for peaceful coexistence. 

The participants also issued a separate “Statement on the Danger of War and an Appeal for Peace,” in which they called on the Soviet Union and the United States negotiate and resolve conflicts peacefully. 

The delegates also published a “Message to President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev” urging the two leaders to meet for negotiations, which they also personally delivered to the respective addressees (Nehru and Ghana’s Nkrumah went to Moscow, Sukarno and Keita, of Mali, went to D.C.).

Tito triumphed in Belgrade. His quote, “penchant for summitry” helped establish him as the leader of or at least the force behind the Nonaligned Movement and thus a world leader. This role helped strengthen Yugoslavia’s reputation as an independent socialist country. 

As for the conference itself, it also led to some reforms of the UN. 

PAUL STUBBS: They managed to meet again for three years later in Cairo in 1964—

PETER KORCHNAK: —where 47 countries attended—

PAUL STUBBS: —but then it stops. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The Central Intelligence Agency concluded that, quote, “the cohesion that market th initial phase of nonalignment and promised so much was short lived. By the time the second summit was held in Cairo in 1964, the earlier harmony and unity were gone [and] contradictory regional interests flared.” Additionally, detente and the end of colonial rule, quote “took much of the punch out of nonalignment. In the succeeding years, the movement waned and appeared to be on the verge of extinction.”

PAUL STUBBS: And really only the Yugoslav are trying to keep it going. 

PETER KORCHNAK: One reason was the invasion of Czechoslovakia, another was the continuation of conflicts in the Middle East and Indochina.

In the 1960s, the Nonaligned Movement was an ad hoc grouping and meetings of countries, rather than an institution.

The Yugoslavs faced serious headwinds throughout the 60s in their work to keep the Nonaligned Movement going. Nehru died, Sukarno was overthrown, and Egypt got defeated in the Six Day War. And—

PAUL STUBBS: In the late 60s, there are new leaders.  And Tito finds new collaborators in Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Indira Gandhi in India, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia. 

And the thing starts up again in earnest in 1970 and the deal is that they will not become a formal institution, but they will do much more to have continuities and to not just be a talking shop. So it becomes a movement less dominated actually, by the Yugoslavs. And the Yugoslavs get quite annoyed at times. They say the Algerians are taking it over and privatizing it, which is actually what the Yugoslavs have done in the 1960s essentially. 

But it becomes a much more interesting and complicated movement.

PETER KORCHNAK: The Nonaligned Movement convened again in 1970 in Lusaka, Zambia. Fifty-three countries and six liberation movements attended. At Lusaka these conferences became numbered—Lusaka was the third— and the position of chairman was introduced, as pressure grew toward institutionalization. By the way, the Yugoslav company Energoprojekt built the venue for the Lusaka summit.

PAUL STUBBS: When Richard Nixon came to Yugoslavia—

PETER KORCHNAK: —in 1970—

PAUL STUBBS: —Henry Kissinger praises the Nonaligned Movement and said, you’re, you know, you’re now a bigger bloc than the two other blocs. And then Tito says, We’re not a bloc. And everybody laughs. 

And of course, that was the trick, in a way, that was the important ambivalence, right? That was a strength of the Nonaligned Movement, that it was a non-bloc bloc, that it was absolutely a reserve army of potential votes in the United Nations that could stymie any ideas of either the United States or the Soviet Union in certain directions, right? So, so I think that’s an important element of this. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The CIA called the Lusaka summit, “The Swan Song of Yugoslav Predominance.” The Agency concluded that, “the fact that it is being held at all is a tribute to Tito’s prestige and to the ability of Belgrade’s foreign ministry to stimulate interest in a movement that two years ago was considered dead. If it were not for Tito, it is safe to say there would be no nonaligned summit in Zambia.” Finally, the CIA also noted that, quote, “because of the varying and often conflicting interests and views of the participants, the Lusaka summit may possibly be the last worldwide gathering of nonaligned countries.”

It wasn’t. Seventy-five countries attended the fourth summit in Algiers in 1973, 85 the fifth in Colombo in 1976, and 92 the sixth in Havana in 1979. 

Throughout the 1970s, the Nonaligned Movement was increasingly concerned with economic issues, focussing on “collective self-reliance” and removing obstacles to economic and social development. In one sense, the focus on economics was one way to reach broad consensus and avoid dealing with political differences among member countries. 

It was in the 1970s that the Nonaligned Movement became to be known as such and established as an independent actor within the international system. It became an intergovernmental organization, without a charter or secretariat, but  with some established rituals and common identity.

Yugoslavia had the most at stake and was the Movement’s driver, if sometimes a backseat one. It also strived to keep the Nonaligned Movement truly nonaligned. Consistently it worked through diplomacy to maintain its leadership within the movement and it reiterated its universal values to counter any attempts, particularly by Cuba, to take things in a more radical direction.

PAUL STUBBS: It knew that it shouldn’t be leading this movement, but it often was.

PETER KORCHNAK: At the same time—

PAUL STUBBS: This is almost one of those accidents of history. There’s nothing that would necessarily have predicted that socialist Yugoslavia would have played such an important galvanizing role in what was the most important regular set of meetings of a kind of non-bloc, a group of countries seeking very, very hard to break the hegemony of the two major superpower blocs, the United States in the West and the Soviet Union in the east. 

But my reading of it for, let’s say the Algerians, for Nairi [sp?] and for Kaunda, is that, why not have the Nonaligned Movement? This is another arena in which we can develop our discourses of all the things that we want which would be a new decolonial world order. So why not in the relatively informal setting of the Nonaligned Movement summits or meetings of foreign ministers, we can kind of use it as a kind of almost think tank, and then we can take these things to the United Nations, to the G77, to different fora. 

PETER KORCHNAK: G77 is a coalition of developing countries within the United Nations that aims to promote its members economic interests. Historically it opposed apartheid and supported disarmament. 

PAUL STUBBS: The Nonaligned Movement was a kind of incubator for ideas, I think. And that’s why it carried on, and that’s why certainly in the 70s, until until there was the meeting in Cuba, which basically made it more radical but less influential, the 70s was, for me, the golden age of the influence of the Nonaligned Movement. 

[SOUDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: After Tito died in 1980, nonalignment shifted from a global to a more regional focus, with bilateral agreements being increasingly prevalent, and from ideologically-driven policies to policies that were justified by pragmatic concerns, with an even greater focus on economic factors.

Throughout the 1980s, the Nonaligned Movement faced several pressures. The world had to deal with the oil crises, the Soviet Union had to manage its invasion of Afghanistan and the economic crisis internally and throughout the bloc, the United States stepped up its military funding, and so on. The movement itself was divided, with increasing numbers of members embroiled in interstate conflicts. 

Yugoslavia, too, was getting enmeshed in a debt-driven economic crisis. Moreover, since the 1950s, Slovenia and Croatia had contested the redistribution of resources through the central government’s policy of evening out the levels of economic development in the country. They complained about having to pay disproportionately into the kitty, while poor places like Bosnia and Kosovo were the recipients who tended to waste the assistance. In the same vein, the two republics questioned the wisdom of funding an alliance with the Third World.

Even so, the number of nonaligned countries continued to grow throughout the 80s.

Ninety-nine nations attended the New Delhi summit in 1983. Here’s India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi reiterating the principles and values of nonalignment at the New Delhi summit:

[SOUNDBITE] 

The 8th summit in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1986 was attended by 101 countries. The participants adopted economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime, which led a prominent anti-apartheid activist to call Harare “the capital city of the anti-colonial struggle” where “the apartheid system will meet its day of reckoning.” The Harare venue, too, was built by Energoprojekt.

To commemorate the meeting, the ensemble Real Sounds of Africa released the single “Non-Aligned Movement,” praising the then-president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, who was in the 1980s still hailed as an anti-colonial revolutionary, and not yet a dictator.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: The 9th summit, in 1989, was again held in Belgrade, at the Sava Center, with a record number of guest countries and organizations. 

Here’s a look at the summit from India: 

[SOUNDBITE]

All Yugoslav republics and provinces, except for Slovenia, provided gifts to Belgrade, including fountains, statues, and murals, many of which can still be found around the city. 

Between 1989 and 1992, it was Yugoslav officials who chaired the Movement, including future presidents of Slovenia, Janez Drnovšek, and Croatia, Stjepan Mesić.

In 1991, the year Yugoslavia disintegrated, the Nonaligned Movement had 103 members.

We’ll pick up the story of the Nonaligned Movement in the post-Yugoslav era in the final installment of this series. 

[SOUNDBITE]

Tito, Nonalignment, and Yugoslavia

PETER KORCHNAK: If self-management was Yugoslavia’s internal response to the split with Stalin, nonalignment was the external one.

Nonalignment was more than just about an opposition to the division of the world into blocs. The Nonaligned Movement wasn’t a third bloc alternative to the bipolar world, it wasn’t a bloc at all and it also wasn’t neutral. 

Nonalignment was the reflection, result, and extension of what Kardelj called, “the great world anti-imperialist revolution of peoples.” The peoples that constituted the majority of the world’s population by the way. Where the Yugoslavs fought Soviet imperialism, other countries that of their respective colonial powers. 

Philosophically, Yugoslavia believed in “its independence and its right to the free internal development of socialism without external interference.” 

Self-determination and emancipation of people’s was a core source and element of nonalignment; nonalignment was against all forms of oppression and subordination of peoples. 

Yugoslavia was ever fearful of a Soviet invasion, the fear that was justified decade after decade, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in nonaligned Afghanistan in 1979. From the outset, Yugoslavia explicitly opposed aggressive warfare and believed the division of the world into blocs made the world a more dangerous place. 

Correspondingly, Yugoslavia supported peaceful economic, political, and cultural cooperation and active coexistence among countries on an equal footing.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: In this sense, you could say that nonalignment was the foreign policy parallel and equivalent of the domestic brotherhood and unity.

Yugoslavia also materially supported liberation and freedom movements across the world, particularly in Algeria. This policy seemed to be in direct conflict with the peace narrative but it was an expression of nonalignment’s anti-colonial, pro-self-determination stance. Plus the more non-colonized, independent countries there were in the world, the bigger and better the Nonaligned Movement. More on this in the next episode in this series.

Finally, Yugoslavia promoted the United Nations and its Charter as the foundation and global guarantor of all this. Nonalignment was to usher a new era of equality among self-determined, sovereign nations that did not affiliate with any powers or power blocs and did not interfere in each other’s territories or internal affairs and that peacefully resolved their disputes on the basis of the UN Charter.

In brief, nonalignment was about independence, peace, cooperation, and United Nations. 

These principles were left largely intact throughout the Cold War.

What did nonalignment accomplish for Yugoslavia? What were its benefits?

First, nonalignment enabled Yugoslavia to end its isolation. It now had trusted friends in Asia and Africa, and to a lesser degree in Latin America, who it count on for votes at the United Nations. Many of them sought to purse socialism and Yugoslavia could serve as an example. Yugoslavia’s stance against colonialism and for self-determination and independence bought Yugoslavia a lot of credit in the Global South. 

Nonalignment also allowed Yugoslavia to not just assert itself on the international stage but play a bigger, more secure role. In other words, with nonalignment, Yugoslavia could do more with what it had; as the Slovak saying goes, where two side battle, a third one wins. Yugoslavia’s prestige in the Global South helped it both to increase its bargaining power with the East and to defend from it. 

PAUL STUBBS: Yugoslavia succeeded in what it was trying to do, which is have an influence and an impact far above its weight. 

For the Yugoslavs, the Nonaligned Movement was a guarantee that it would punch above its weight in international relations, that it would not be under threat from the superpowers, actually that it could also have new markets, which are not unimportant.

PETER KORCHNAK: Nonalignment, the CIA concluded, “gave Yugoslavia a source of pride and accomplishment no other policy could offer.”

A lot of it was Tito’s doing. According to one pundit, the Nonaligned Movement was Tito’s baby, another has called it Tito’s toy, and the CIA deemed it to be Tito’s “pet project.” 

In a more sober tone, political scientist Alvin Rubinstein in 1970 labeled Tito, “the chief architect of nonalignment. (…) Tito gave shape and impetus to nonalignment…he infused it with a dynamism and purposefulness that were lacking in other leaders, introduced an activism crucial to the transmutation of an idea into a political force, and brought forcefulness and positiveness of the revolutionary.” End quote.

The CIA noted Tito’s role in nonalignment in its report on the 3rd conference, in 1970 in Lusaka. “In the early 1950s President Tito helped give the movement meaning. He alone of the four original supporters of nonalignment has given the movement momentum. Tito’s personal diplomacy has been a key to the movement’s success.” And, “not only is [nonalignment] the vehicle by which Yugoslavia emerged from diplomatic isolation in the early fifties, it has enabled Tito to play an active and far greater role in international politics than he otherwise would have managed.” End quote.

In many cases, Tito was the first white world leader who treated his black and brown counterparts with respect as equals. Quoting a redacted source, the CIA noted that “”the Yugoslavs are the most appreciated whites in Africa—they are able, conscientious, and do not come as missionaries of a particular cause.”

Tito’s staunch independence and internationalist orientation helped make Yugoslavia a country that was respected and admired. To this day, Yugoslavia and Tito elicit positive responses across the Global South. It’s not just the infrastructure Yugoslav companies helped build that’s still in use across the Nonaligned World. 

You heard the story from historian Jože Pirjevec way back in Episode 24, “Tito and His Biographers.”

JOŽE PIRJEVEC: Tito was in the end of the 50s, during the 60s and the 70s, a very important person on the international level, especially because he was able to go in touch to people in Africa, to peoples in Asia, and also Latin America as equal. And this was something completely new. The white man was used to go to these countries as a missionary as, especially as a colonialist. Tito had another attitude, and therefore, he was so extremely successful.

Tito was an extremely colorful person. He had a great charisma, an enormous charisma. I’m going often to Germany or Austria, or, let’s say to other countries in Europe, and also in India, in Arab countries and so on, if I say I am from Slovenia, nobody knows in Asia or in Africa where Slovenia is. But I say I am from Yugoslavia, they say, “Tito.” They still remember Tito in some way, as a person who tried to overcome this terrible gap between [the] rich north and the poor south. And this is the message Tito has left, which is, in my opinion, still very important.

PETER KORCHNAK: We’ll talk about the linkages with the global south later on in this series. 

Tito personified Yugoslavia the same way Nehru personified India and Nasser Egypt. In personifying Yugoslavia, Tito also personified the refusal to bow down to anyone as well as a distinct form of socialism, a one-party, self-managing system with market features. 

PAUL STUBBS: That is the story that I’ve heard, and it’s happened to me. Where do you live? Croatia. Where that? Yugoslavia, it used to be part of Yugoslavia are, and that unlocks kind of memories and doors and so on. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Rubinstein recounted one Yugoslav official likening Tito’s contribution to the evolution of nonalignment to the contribution of yeast to the making of bread: it is the yeast that gives form and quality to bread; it is the yeast that makes the bread palatable and provides the energy for expansion and bursting out.

Yes, for some Tito was a beast, to others a yeast.

Most discussions of the impacts of nonalignment on Yugoslavia focus on external benefits, in terms of foreign policy. But nonalignment impacted Yugoslavia internally as well; all the internal pillars—brotherhood and unity, self-management—were impacted. And the external and internal were intertwined and mutually reinforcing. 

Nonalignment had some economic benefits, both in reducing Yugoslavia’s dependence on either bloc and in expanding markets for Yugoslav goods and know how. I’ll talk about political, economic, and cultural impacts of nonalignment within Yugoslavia later in the series. 

For now, let’s bring it back to the global legacy of nonalignment and, by extension, of Yugoslavia.

PAUL STUBBS: That message of peace, solidarity, and new forms of more equitable global economic relations are as relevant as ever, it seems to me.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening and nonaligning. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. 

And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and take part in a growing community of yugodiasporans and others and enjoy an extended version of this episode.  

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music courtesy of Sticky Keys. The song “Non-Aligned Movement” by Real Sounds of Africa used for educational purposes.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

Additional Sources

• Čavoški, Jovan. “Between Great Powers and Third World Neutralists: Yugoslavia and the Belgrade Conference of the Non- Aligned Movement, 1961.” In: Mišković, Nataša, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Nada Boškovska, eds. The Non- Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade. London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 184-206.
• “Weekly Summary Special Report. The Third Nonaligned Summit: The Swan Song of Yugoslav Predominance.” Central Intelligence Agency – Directorate of Intelligence, 4 September 1970
• Dinkel, Jürgen. The Non- Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927– 1992). Translated from German by Alex Skinner. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2019
• Kardelj, Edvard. Yugoslavia in International Relations and in the Nonaligned Movement. Belgrade: Socialist Thought and Practice, 1979
• Rubinstein, Alvin Z. Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970
• Stubbs, Paul. “Socialist Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned Movement: Decolonial Contradictions.” Postcolonial Politics, June 5, 2023
• Stubbs, Paul, ed. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023
• Videkanić, Bojana. Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985. Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.