Nonaligned Movement: After Yugoslavia*

The post-Cold War / post-Yugoslav history of the Nonaligned Movement. Vestiges and legacy of nonalignment in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. The future of nonalignment and of explorations thereof.

With Rima Sabina Aouf, Agustín Cosovschi, Natalija Dimić Lompar, Ljiljana Kolešnik, Petra Matić, Goran Musić, Bojana Piškur, Ljubica Spaskovska, and Paul Stubbs. Featuring music by SZ (Creative Commons), Tolga Maktay (courtesy of Kosha Musika), Tetouze, and phrex (Creative Commons). Part 7 of 7.

Listen: “Nonaligned Movement: After Yugoslavia*” (Episode #112)

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Transcript: “Nonaligned Movement: After Yugoslavia*” (Episode #112)

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[SOUNDBITE]

[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and information hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to everyone. 

Help write this story. Visit Yugoblok.com to join today. 

[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.

Over the course of the past six episodes we’ve looked at various facets of nonalignment from the Yugoslav perspective. We overviewed the history of the movement; we looked at Yugoslavia’s support for liberation movements across the Third World; we tackled the economics of nonalignment, particularly as it was defined by self-management; we saw how Yugoslavia created a cultural network across the nonaligned world; and we considered the limits of nonalignment and Yugoslavia’s nonaligned policy. In all these respects we, for the most part, stopped at the end of the Cold War and Yugoslavia’s dissolution. 

So in this, the final episode in our series on nonalignment, we’re going to catch up to the present and discuss the post-Cold War and post-Yugoslav history of the Nonaligned Movement. In the process, we’ll trace the vestiges of nonalignment in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, and we’ll evaluate its legacy. And finally, we’ll peek into the future, of nonalignment and of explorations of nonalignment. 

This podcast too has a future, and I invite you to be a part of it. Remembering Yugoslavia is part of the Yugoblok family, and it is members who make it possible. 

As a Yugobloknik, not only will you contribute toward making the podcast and a whole lot more accessible to all who remember Yugoslavia, you get a bunch of extras for your trouble. Take this episode for example, in fact the entire series on nonalignment. As a member you can enjoy ad-free, extended versions, featuring extra analysis, stories, and music. To support the creation of this podcast and get access to Remembering Yugoslavia PLUS, go to Yugoblok.com/join and sign up to be a Yugoblok member now. 

[SOUNDBITE – “Yugoslav Space Program” by Sticky Keys]

The Nonaligned Movement from 1991 to Present

PETER KORCHNAK: The prevailing view of the Cold War is that the United States won. Socialism collapsed, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Warsaw Pact and COMECON became obsolete. The US remained the sole superpower standing, reigning alone throughout the 30-plus-year era that’s coming to an end.

Wrong. It was in fact the Nonaligned Movement that won the Cold War. Aligned neither with the West nor the East and in opposition to both superpowers and their conflict, the Nonaligned Movement kept standing after the Cold War ended. Where two fight, the third one wins, as the saying across Central Eastern Europe goes. 

I kid, of course, I kid. The end of the Cold War rendered the Nonaligned Movement obsolete. If the construction of the Berlin Wall took place on the backdrop of the first conference of the Nonaligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, the fall of the Wall in 1989 marked the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and of the Cold War on the backdrop of the 9th and Yugoslavia’s final summit of the Nonaligned Movement in Belgrade.

But even as its core purpose had been fulfilled, or rather disappeared, the organization persisted.

In the Global South in particular, there have recently been calls for the Nonaligned Movement to continue. To quote S. I. Keethaponcalan, a conflict resolution professor from Sri Lanka at Salisbury University, “the movement’s need to continue is justified on the grounds that some of the old issues have taken a new form and new issues that affect members of the [Nonaligned Movement] as a collective entity, have emerged.” But to meet these challenges, the movement has to be revamped, argues Keethaponcalan.

The war in Ukraine revived the ideas of nonalignment in some parts of the world, as many countries, including nonaligned giants like India or Indonesia, hesitated or even refused to align both with Russia and with the West. This was a fight they wanted to sit out.

In parallel, hopeful noises emerged about the return of nonalignment as a viable geopolitical strategy. 

“As Ukraine war deepens great-power divisions, a revitalized non-aligned movement could emerge,” ran a headline in The Conversation. “Unless governments are threatened directly, many appear content to espouse nonalignment – a policy of avoiding strong support for the West or for its principal rivals in Moscow and Beijing,” wrote John Ciorciari of the University of Michigan. “[Nonalignment’s] strategic appeal is arguably stronger now than it was during the Cold War because of greater global integration. Unlike the 1950s, most countries now have strong economic, political and, in some cases, military linkages to both East and West. Choosing sides could…be crippling economically.” End quote.

Similarly, in a blog post about BRICS, a grouping of now ten countries that started with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa,

Yugoslav-born economist Branko Milanović wrote that, “[N]ow when the contours of a new Cold War are apparent, the need for an organization grouping countries that do not want to be involved in it (and including, somewhat incongruously, and for historical reasons, countries that are in war or conflict with NATO and the West, namely Russia and China) had naturally re-emerged. [T]he fact that an increasing number of countries want to join BRICS cannot be ignored or taken lightly. BRICS’ refusing to participate in new global trade, proxy, or actual wars may make such wars less likely. And BRICS’ economic clout may help reduce some of the glaring economic imbalances between the rich, middle-income, and poor nations across the world.” End quote.

Early on in the Russian invasion of Ukraine no Latin American country supported the diplomatic and economic sanctions on Russia; Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, even declared neutrality in the conflict, calling for peace.

“Non-Alignment is Back in the Global South, Albeit in a Different Incarnation,” ran a headline at the Global Development Policy Center.

It is back in the form of so-called “active nonalignment,” which emerged in Chilean academic and foreign policy circles. 

Active nonalignment calls on governments to pursue their own national interest, refuse to align with any power, and seek their own opportunities. 

AGUSTÍN COSOVSCHI: This is an idea or a project that still lives in many places in Latin America, the idea of finding a proper position for Latin America in the world order, which is not completely determined by what the world powers say, and which responds and corresponds better to Latin America’s needs and resources and interests.

PETER KORCHNAK: Agustín Cosovschi is a historian from Buenos Aires at the École française in Athens. 

AGUSTÍN COSOVSCHI: And I think that Yugoslavia became a symbol for that, and it is still a symbol of nonalignment, a symbol of a third way. And the idea of the third way again is fundamental in many geographies of the Third World, meaning different things, yes, but always referring to this idea that one has to find one’s own perspective of modernization and integration into world politics, integration into the global economy. 

Then again, the current moment of Latin American politics, which is quite right-wing, quite conservative, is not very prone to that. And it’s not, it’s not very friendly or open to these discussions. I think that these discussions were much more interesting, let’s say, 10 years ago, when the wave of progressive governments was still a thing in Latin America.

Nowadays I’m not so sure. And I think that in the case of Ukraine or in the case of Gaza, these are just quite empty phrases.

Latin America doesn’t really know  where to stand in these conflicts. Then again, I’m not sure that anyone really knows. I mean, the whole world is completely lost. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Whether “active nonalignment” stems from countries like Chile or Brazil flexing their muscles or, as the Latin American Institute would have it, from “a conviction that Latin American interests are not tied to conflicts in the Global North” I cannot say.

What I do know is that there is an even stronger view that nonalignment both failed and is not coming back. 

“The ideology of nonalignment was dead long ago,” concluded C Raja Mohan of the East Asia Policy Institute in the Foreign Policy magazine in 2022. “And while it may not be entirely buried, it poses little threat to the West and does not offer much salvation to the East. [T]he developing world is not dying to reinvent the failed Nonaligned Movement. [F]ew leaders in the developing world today delude themselves with the idea of collective bargaining against the global north. They are much wiser now and more adept at pursuing individual national goals.” End quote.

Before the war in Ukraine, analyses of the current state of nonalignment mostly emerged around the Movement’s summits, which continued to take place every 3 to 5 years, most recently last year in Kampala, Uganda.

For example, in 2003, The Guardian introduced the Nonaligned Movement as the answer to the riddle, “What has 232 legs but cannot walk in a straight line in any direction, has trouble expressing any sort of definitive opinion, and is probably at death’s door?” John Aglionby called the Nonaligned Movement a relic of the Cold War, “struggling to find any role for itself.” “While you can take the movement out of its founding era, it is much harder to extricate the founding era sentiments out of the movement.” End quote. 

Similarly, “since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been a movement adrift,” wrote Stewart M. Patrick at the Council on Foreign Relations in a 2012 article titled “The Nonaligned Movement’s Crisis.” “[The Movement] faces increasing problems of coherence and cohesion. Agreement on basic principles like non-intervention and global economic justice is one thing, agreement on concrete plans of action and hard-hitting resolutions quite another. Accordingly, [Nonaligned Movement] summits tend to be glorified gabfests.” End quote.

In 2016, Kavita Suranha at the Vienna University of Economics and Business called the summit in Caracas, Venezuela, where only 10 heads of state showed up, “no good, rotten, terrible” and “dismal.” “[W]ith the end of the Cold War order and plenty of economic and geopolitical upheaval since,” she wrote, “member states have taken different paths, and most struggle to coalesce around clearly shared goals. In Venezuela, at least, those that bothered to show up mostly have one thing that unites them: Long-standing beefs with the United States.” End quote.

So basically, things have gotten worse for the Nonaligned Movement, and it less and less relevant. 

The thing is, the Nonaligned Movement was always a hodgepodge of states, many of which were downright terrible in one way or another. Today, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Sudan are all members. And as before, the principles of the respect for sovereignty and of non-interference continue to be used as an excuse for oppressive regimes to act out domestically. 

When The Atlantic set out to show, quote “How a Global Movement for Peace Became a Club for Tyrants,” it wasn’t saying anything new. The Nonaligned Movement never was a paragon of democracy.

Again, countries continue to pursue their own interests. Even during Yugoslavia’s existence, some nonaligned countries leaned toward the West, like those in Latin America, and some toward the east, like Angola or Ethiopia. Some even changed sides, like when India’s Nehru sided with the US, while his successor, Indira Gandhi, sided with the Soviet Union; likewise Egypt and Pakistan. They all did what they considered prudent at the time to meet their security challenges. 

Last April, in an article marking 70 years from the Conference of Afro-Asian Solidarity titled “How the global south forgot its own birthday” and subtitled, “A damp-squib Bandung anniversary shows a lack of solidarity,” The Economist pointed out the example of India, which is quote “quite preoccupied with its own rise; the word nonalignment is “banished from government foreign policy speeches” and replaced with “multi-alignment,” which suggests readiness to work with anyone as long as it fits its national interest. The Economist’s conclusion: while “a new multipolar world is an opportunity for change…individual countries, rather than collectives, may end up having the most clout.”

[SOUNDBITE – “Nonaligned (feat. Kwame Nkrumah)” by SZ]

PETER KORCHNAK: That was “Nonaligned” by SZ, featuring a sample of a speech by Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and then the President of Ghana, a nonaligned country, from 1957 until 1966. SZ is Snežana Žabić, a writer and musician in Chicago. She is also a Yugobloknik, that is a member of Yugoblok participating in our little social network of post-Yugoslav solidarity. Join her in our movement by becoming a member today! 

In an email, Žabić wrote that, “The lyrics to ‘Nonaligned’ intentionally throw the listener for a loop. Is it a song about the Cold War era and toxic romantic language is a metaphor or is it a song about a toxic romance and the Cold War references are metaphorical? I leave it up to the interpretation of the listener. But one thing is clear: Kwame Nkrumah and his Nonaligned Movement had the right idea: it’s time to disarm.” 

The links to listen and buy this and other music you’ll have heard on this show are at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.

The Legacy of the Nonaligned Movement

PETER KORCHNAK: In the introduction to the series, sociologist Paul Stubbs outlined three legacies of the Nonaligned Movement. 

PAUL STUBBS: The importance of the United Nations, disarmament, and the idea of the New International Economic Order. 

PETER KORCHNAK: How much of this is actually being put into action is of course another matter altogether. The UN is weak, nuclear sabre rattling is getting louder, and the NIEO never really gathered any serious steam to begin with.

[SOUNDBITE]

As our focus here is Yugoslavia, let’s take a look at the legacy of the Nonaligned Movement in that lost country.

NATALIJA DIMIĆ LOMPAR: Definitely nonalignment was one of the three pillars, or identity pillars, of socialist Yugoslavia. One was self management, the other one was brotherhood and unity, and the third one was nonalignment. Out of these three pillars of Yugoslavia identity, nonalignment was the most, if not the only successful one. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Natalija Dimić Lompar is a historian at the Institute of Recent History of Serbia. 

NATALIJA DIMIĆ LOMPAR: I would say that it was almost a wonder that a small, relatively small country, economically, geographically, also by population, relatively small country, achieved such international visibility and influence as was the case with socialist Yugoslavia, especially during the 60s and and 70s. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In 1989, the countries above and below Yugoslavia in terms of population were Algeria and Kenya, respectively. In terms of GDP, in 1990 Yugoslavia’s peers were Czechoslovakia, Denmark, South Africa, and Sweden.

NATALIJA DIMIĆ LOMPAR: Yugoslav leadership did manage to find a common language with the newly independent countries, with the developing world. 

Yugoslav leadership had this capacity, was able to see or to recognize what were the trends on a global level, in global foreign policy, and to find their own place in this divided world, in a very precarious situation, position, liminal position between between East and West. They did manage to find their own place in this global international order so and to influence it to some extent. It’s in itself a major achievement.

PETER KORCHNAK: Those who remember Yugoslavia positively highlight Yugoslavia’s international standing, rooted in its foreign policy of nonalignment, as one of the best things about that country. The respect Yugoslavia garnered all over the world and all that stemmed from it, including the red passport that allowed its citizens to travel visa free to almost every country, remains a major point of pride.

But of course, the stamps in the expired red passport are all fading away.

The Legacy of Nonalignment in Yugoslavia

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: —said the president of Serbia, Alexandar Vučić, in 2021, at the 60th Anniversary Commemorative Non-Aligned Meeting, in Belgrade, under a huge picture of Tito networking at the inaugural summit. The meeting was organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, and co-hosted with Azerbaijan, in commemoration of the founding Summit of the Nonaligned Movement. 105 countries and nine international organizations participated in some shape or form.

This was actually the second time Serbia hosted such a commemorative summit. In 2011, then-president Boris Tadić hosted a commemorative 50th anniversary summit, though only with foreign ministers’ participation. 

“Not dead yet. A ghostly relic marks its birth in a vanished country.” quipped The Economist. 

All former Yugoslav republics except Bosnia and Herzegovina attended. 

Slovenia unsuccessfully used the gathering to lobby for its candidacy for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council, and other countries similarly lobbied for their own interests. “Serbs and other former Yugoslavs used the anniversary to look for deals, especially in arms and construction,” concluded The Economist.

Most importantly, wrote Tim Judah, “the movement, which [is a ghostly survivor of the glory days and] seems to serve no particular purpose, has been useful to Serbia because it conveniently gathers together scores of countries which Serbia needs to lobby to stall recognitions of Kosovo, which declared independence from it in 2008.” End quote. 

And so Vučić repeated the commemorative summit again for the 60th anniversary with the same goal as well as a way to signal the country’s neutral stance, between the West, where it purportedly wants to join the European Union, and Russia, its longtime ally and quote unquote Slavic Orthodox brotherly nation. 

Meanwhile, Kosovo’s president retorted that Serbia was abusing the Nonaligned Movement to distort the truth about Kosovo. 

And, as before, wrote Balkan Insight, “Serbia Spie[d a] Chance to Sell Arms to [the] Fading Non-Aligned Movement.” End quote. To boot, a defense industry fair was taking place in Belgrade on the same dates as the commemorative summit.

Like Nonaligned Movement summits of old, it was good theater. Taking place in the throes of the pandemic, the summit condemned quote unquote the West’s vaccination nationalism, for example. 

But despite all the pageantry, “It turned out to be a pretty sad event,” Eric Gordy from University College London told Emerging Europe magazine. And ironic, given Russia was also in attendance, the year before it invaded Ukraine. In any case, Gordy continued, “it recalls a period when, for a number of reasons, Yugoslavia enjoyed a position of prestige and influence in the world well out of proportion to its size and importance. But Serbia is not Yugoslavia, and a regime that embodies fear cannot attain the prestige and influence that Yugoslavia had.” End quote.

The summit spoke to the fact that things with the Movement are somewhere in between a new life and death. Despite the warm words, it was all about the cold reality. Nonalignment is as political a tool as ever. 

Also in 2021, thanks to all this and other lobbying of nonaligned countries, the Serbian candidate also became the president of the 67th session of the UN General Assembly.

Meanwhile, somewhere in between the two commemorative summits, Serbia mimicked Yugoslavia’s policy and established a scholarship program for students from nonaligned countries. According to its website, 536 scholarship holders from 127 countries are actively studying in Serbia as part of the World in Serbia program. 

GORAN MUSIĆ: For a long time, nonalignment was forgotten in Serbia as well. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Goran Musić, a social historian of labor issues at the University of Vienna. 

GORAN MUSIĆ: For a big, big chunk of 1990s, early 2000s, nonalignment was kind of afterthought. It was a side alley, which did not bring anything. So Yugoslavia was seen to be focusing on these underdeveloped countries, on far away societies, whereas it could have used its closer neighboring Western European, more prosperous countries to develop its economic and cultural ties with instead.

I think a turning point was the controversy around the Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence and the struggle that Serbia went into international bodies to kind of counteract the recognition of Kosovo. 

It is in that moment that the Serbian diplomacy started rediscovering its old Yugoslav diplomatic connections, and started, reinvesting these old friendships with this very concrete idea in mind, to lobby for them not to recognize Kosovo as an independent state. So this renewed interest of Serbia in the Global South, in maybe BRICS countries today, is quite self serving.

PETER KORCHNAK: In fact, the tables have turned in the economic realm. 

GORAN MUSIĆ: Paradoxically now, it is not the Yugoslavia companies which go abroad, it is the foreign capital of many of these developing countries, which have developed quite a bit in the meantime and became players in the international capitalist system, which are nowadays investing into Serbia, constructing railroads, building factories with their own money. 

And there is absolutely no attempt to establish these connections in a kind of novel and experimental ways. These are well established corporate ways of foreign investment which are taking place in Serbia, with very clear ideas of extracting short-term profit or boosting one’s international agenda and Serbia is kind of playing along. So it definitely lacks the more ambitious and emancipatory aspects of nonalignment. It is a far cry from those years.

PETER KORCHNAK: The alternative economic networks created and cultivated in the Nonaligned Movement have indeed been revived in a way, except the money and influence flow in the opposite direction. 

The same is the case elsewhere, by the way. As University of Exeter historian Ljubica Spaskovska noted in the case of her native North Macedonia:

LJUBICA SPASKOVSKA: A lot of Macedonian construction companies that were once very prominently involved in Iraq are actually not in existence anymore. They went bankrupt, or they were reformed, privatized, etc. And I think perhaps the biggest paradox is knowing what these companies did in terms of capital infrastructure, building of ports, of highways, irrigation infrastructure, military facilities, is that nowadays, especially in Macedonia, it’s Chinese companies or foreign companies that have to be invited to build sections of highways or even roads, just because there are no there is no longer domestic expertise, there is no domestic labor force that is actually capable of right of finalizing these large infrastructure projects. So I think that’s a very interesting or tragic inversion that, 50 years ago, building the highways and ports of the Global South, but nowadays, yeah, having to rely on foreign companies to do it in the former Yugoslavia.

PETER KORCHNAK: None of Yugoslavia’s successor countries joined the Nonaligned Movement as members. They have either attended summits as observers or guests or not at all. Today, Serbia along with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro maintain observer status with the Nonaligned Movement.

“It makes sense for Serbia to freeride on Yugoslavia’s legacy,” Vladimir Gligorov, from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told Emerging Europe. 

“And it makes sense for Bosnia to keep some of the connections alive, given that its foreign policy capacity is limited. But there are declining returns as there is no longer any movement to speak of.”

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Nonalignment is instrumentalized at times, but otherwise its legacy is neglected or actively forgotten. 

As with Yugoslavia itself, nonalignment in that former country lives on in the cultural realm, as heritage. But barely, says Ljiljana Kolešnik from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. 

LJILJANA KOLEŠNIK: Well, I wouldn’t say that there is much left. In the material sense, heritage is here, but it’s not visible, it’s not presented. And it’s closely connected to the relation of the former Yugoslav republicsto the idea of nonalignment, and to the way they conceptualized the politics of nonalignment as a kind of non-wanted or legacy of the socialism.

Nonaligned Monuments and Architecture

PETER KORCHNAK: A lot of what was built or made for Nonaligned Movement summits in Belgrade still exists and fulfills its purpose.

The Monument to the First Nonaligned Movement Conference AKA the Nonaligned Obelisk AKA the Monument to Nonaligned Countries still stands at the eastern end of Brankov most where all delegates would see it as they arrived at the summit. The monument was repeatedly restored, for the 9th summit in 1989 and then again in 2021 for the 60th anniversary commemorative meeting.

Several murals around central Belgrade were created by some of the best Yugoslav artists for that 9th summit. They were part of an open air gallery featuring gifts to Belgrade from all Yugoslav republics and provinces, except Slovenia, and many municipalities and individual artists. Others included fountains, mosaics, memorial plaques, and statues, again many of which can still be found around the city. The open-air gallery was intended to show solidarity and friendship of Yugoslav cities and regions, to demonstrate the people’s commitment to the country’s unity, and, because they represented the area of their origin, to make the capital a “Yugoslavia in miniature.”

One of the university dormitories, built in the Zvezdara neighborhood in 1961, still bears the name of the assassinated leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. 

And still in operation is the Museum of African Art, which opened in 1977 as the only anti-colonial museum in Europe and which functioned as a de facto African cultural center in Yugoslavia.

In New Belgrade, the seat of Yugoslavia’s federal government, the Palace of the Federation, was officially opened for the 1961 summit, when ceremonial sessions were held here. Today known as the Palace of Serbia, the sprawling modernist building is a cultural monument, houses several ministries, and serves as a ceremonial site for state visits. 

Nearby—

[SOUNDBITE]

The plane tree was chosen as a long-lasting species, to symbolize efforts to make peace likewise, and trees were planted so as to form intertwined rows once grown. A plaque with each leader’s name, country, and year of planting was placed at the foot of their sapling. 

[SOUNDBITE]

In the ensuing years, more trees were added to the park, planted by various world leaders, including the recently deceased Jimmy Carter. The park was renovated in 2019, though I found some of the trees and plaques damaged just a few years later.

Demolished last January, the nearby Hotel Yugoslavia had been built at the behest of Ethiopia’s emperor Selassie, who at that first Nonaligned Movement summit told Tito that Belgrade lacked a prestigious hotel. Tito is said to have picked up a phone and ordered the construction of one; eight years later he cut the ribbon.

Around New Belgrade, people live in apartment buildings on streets named after leaders of nonaligned countries, including Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, and Neto of Angola.

In Podgorica, formerly Titograd, the Center of Contemporary Art hosts collections from the former Josip Broz Tito Art Gallery of Non-Aligned Countries, which opened in 1984 as the Nonaligned Movement’s only art institution, and shut down in 1991.

In Ljubljana, the Museum of Modern Art continues to host what started out in 1955 as the International Biennial of Graphic Arts, which over its Yugoslav-era history featured a large number of artists and artworks from nonaligned countries.

And then there’s art created in colonies, residences, and symposia organized in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. 

LJILJANA KOLEŠNIK: Yugoslavia used art colonies for attracting artists from the Global South. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslav artists and artists from nonaligned countries attended these art colonies and residencies around Yugoslavia, including in Budva, Počitelj, Prilep, and Strumica. 

These events served as examples of quote “direct labour exchange between cultural and material production,” according to a period description. Artists collaborated with local workers and citizens and ended up transforming villages and small towns into “locations of intense art production,” thus inventing “new forms of participatory artistic culture.”

LJILJANA KOLEŠNIK: Those were colonies organized very often in very small communities, and you can find now in a number of municipal museums and galleries works from artists from [the] Nonaligned Movement.

PETER KORCHNAK: On one of my road trips I stumbled into the Ostrožac colony, near Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a lot adjacent to a defunct socialist era Hotel Sedra. A number of statues poked through the weeds and overgrown grass on the bank of the Una River. There are more up at the Ostrožac castle. 

LJILJANA KOLEŠNIK: The works they have left, as they were not paid for participating in the colonies, some of their works have been bought or they have left them as as a kind of sign of their gratefulness for the hospitality of the local communities. 

Such artworks you can find all over Yugoslavia. For example, there is a sculpture park in Arandjelovac,  in Serbia, which has more than 150 sculptures. At least one third of the of the entire display was made by were made, was made by what the artists coming from the from the Global South. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Traces of nonalignment remain standing across the Global South as well, including dams, power grids, roads, hotels, conference centers, office and governmental buildings, airports, hospitals, and other infrastructure built by Yugoslav companies. To name a few visible ones:

A sculpture in central Lusaka, Zambia installed for the Third Conference of the Nonaligned Movement is a variation of the triangle sculpture “peace-independence-equality” that was one of several temporary so-called ‘vertical points’ installed around Yugoslavia’s capital for the inaugural summit.

The sculpture stands outside the Mulungushi International Conference Center complex, which the Belgrade-based Yugoslav company Energoprojekt built in record time for that third summit in 1970. 

Yugoslav companies also built conference centers in Libreville, Gabon; Kuwait City; Kampala, Uganda; and Harare, Zimbabwe (that last one for the 8th summit in 1986).

Finally in Lusaka, the Yugoslav-built FINDECO House highrise, built in 1974, continues to be the tallest building in Zambia. Today it is mostly a general office and retail space; an adjacent skyscraper was also designed by Yugoslav engineers and architects.

In Lagos, Nigeria, the International Trade Fair complex, built in 1977, is also partly still in use today, for exhibitions but mostly for marketplaces and warehouses.

And so on and so forth. Spomenik Database has a good article showcasing a bunch of these and other Yugoslav-built structures across the nonaligned world. Check it out.

As in Yugoslavia, the memory of nonalignment across the Third World was erased, if for different reasons. Goran Musić.

GORAN MUSIĆ: When one talks about the current remembrance or standing of Yugoslavia or the continuities of these, of these connections, we must keep in mind the demographic situation of African states. 

These are very young societies, and life expectancy is, you know, much lower than it is in Europe. So many of the main protagonists are, unfortunately, no longer among us, among us and the younger generations do not have the kind of living memory of these connections. 

So it is often, once you point to a material object which refers to this, such as these buildings, you know, these, these projects, it is then that this, this heritage, is kind of resurrected, it is invoked. And then, you know, people start remembering that, oh yes, my father or my uncle  was working for [a] Yugoslav company, or I heard this connection. And you know, it takes some triggering to get this memory or to make it alive.

PETER KORCHNAK: Sociologist Paul Stubbs has had similar experiences. 

PAUL STUBBS: So I recently was in Lusaka, and I, of course, took photographs of the kind of monument that was built to celebrate the 1970 Nonaligned Summit, and there were workers cleaning the monument, and they had no idea of  what that was. It felt, you know— people were saying to me, Zambia is a very young country, people don’t remember that far back. But nearby is Tito Road. And once you start talking less about nonalignment, but more about like were there Yugoslav companies, then you get into the kind of story. So it’s not necessarily on the surface nonalignment, but it’s very much those interesting circuits of global solidarity.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: The legacy of nonalignment lives thanks to the good work of historians.

I’ve compiled a bibliography of sources about nonalignment at Yugoblok.com; it’s at just over a 100 entries so far, and I’ll be adding more over time. 

Exhibitions About Nonalignment

Similarly, writes Nemanja Radonjić, “gaps in memory are…at least partially filled by artists, architects, and curators, who raise public awareness of this heritage through exhibitions, installations, and research.” 

Over the last dozen plus years, a number of major exhibitions around the former Yugoslavia have showcased the legacy of nonalignment. They don’t all necessarily engage specifically with nonalignment, but nonalignment plays a role. Either way, Ljubica Spaskovska has noted that they’re part of “a growing trend of recovering silenced voices and aspects of the Yugoslav non-aligned/global past.”

In 2011, the Museum of Yugoslavia held the exhibition “The Nonaligned: From Belgrade to Belgrade,” showcasing items from some of the nonaligned countries.

On my very first visit to the Museum of Yugoslavia, in summer 2013, I took in a big exhibition of gifts world leaders had given to Tito on their visits to Yugoslavia. Items included a golden filigree fruit bowl from Ethiopia’s emperor Selassie and a statue of Buddha from the Afghan king Zahir.

2014 was particularly rich in exhibitions.

“Traveling Comuniqué” was specifically about the inaugural summit of the Nonaligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961. It combined archival material with texts reinterpreting nonalignment as an early example of globalization. Tellingly, aside from the Serbian Ministry of Culture, the exhibition’s multiple funders included Algeria, Egypt, Germany, and Indonesia as well as a Dutch and an Ethiopian art organization. 

“Up Close and Personal with Tito” displayed a collection of photographs of Tito’s meetings with foreign leaders. 

Witnesses of History at the National Library of Serbia told the story of Tito’s cinematographer Stevan Labudović who had spent three years with the FLN fighters documenting the Algerian Liberation Struggle and teaching them his craft. Exhibits included a collection of photographs and reels.

“Tito, a Yugoslav Icon” at the Ljubljana Exhibition and Convention Centre was privately financed, by a Maribor-based company Ti & To, and featured a section about the Nonaligned Movement.

And in Skopje, “Solidarity: An Unfinished Project?” was a tribute to artists from all over the world who donated works to the new Museum of Contemporary Art, built after the 1963 earthquake. According to the organizers, the exhibition “highlight[ed] the importance of asking ourselves if it is still possible to believe that somewhere within us lies a utopian spark worth preserving; a spark necessary not only for great changes but sometimes needed in order to persevere and to continue to defend the abandoned or forgotten idea of solidarity.”

In 2016, the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade held the conference Nonaligned Museum. The following year, the Museum hosted the exhibition, “Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity.” Tito’s trips in the 1950s to African countries on the background of the emerging Nonaligned Movement were presented through a rich collection of photographs, which, writes Nemanja Radonjić, showed “the messages  of friendship, cooperation and solidarity sent to the Yugoslav, African, and global publics.” The exhibition then toured Oxford and Los Angeles. 

In 2019 in Ljubljana, the exhibition “Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Nonaligned” at the Museum of Modern Art quote “emphasize[d] the ideas, ideals and principles of the movement, particularly in close connection with its cultural policies and place[d] them in a contemporary context with the question: Could there be a non-aligned contemporaneity? And if so, what would it be like?” 

[T]he focus of the art exhibition was “on the way the ‘southern constellations’ envisioned forms of politics that took as their starting point the life of peoples and societies that had been forcibly relegated to the margins of the global economic, political, and cultural system.”  

BOJANA PIŠKUR: So the first one, as I said, was maybe a little bit more historic than the rest, the others, because I wanted to emphasize this richness of cultural production that existed from the six from the 60s to, say, late 80s, in the nonaligned countries. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Bojana Piškur is a writer and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. Southern Constellations culminated a decade of her research on nonalignment.

BOJANA PIŠKUR: So we included a lot of cases from around the world. We invited the different institutions, different biennials, we invited collections, also artists and so on. And we, besides that, invited also contemporary artists, artists that deal with the topics of the Nonaligned Movement. So in total, we had 26 cases at the exhibition, and this was the first one, maybe focusing more on Yugoslavia. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The exhibition then went on the road, each edition with a different emphasis depending on the location. 

BOJANA PIŠKUR: There was an exhibition in Gwangju in South Korea, then there was an exhibition in Croatia. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In Rijeka, in September 2021, marking the Movement’s 60th anniversary.

BOJANA PIŠKUR: Then [there] was an exhibition in Podgorica, Skopje, and there was also an exhibition in Ramallah, Palestine; Mosaic Rooms in London; and then we had another exhibition just closing a couple months ago here in our museum. 

PETER KORCHNAK: There will likely be more.

BOJANA PIŠKUR: It’s too early to say when maybe next year, but it’s going to happen, for sure, somewhere in the in the Persian Persian Gulf in one of the countries there, because they’re quite interested in these topics, they’re very interested in our work, and they want to support us in further researches and planning even new exhibitions and publications. 

PETER KORCHNAK: What’s more, “Southern Constellations” entails more than just exhibitions.

BOJANA PIŠKUR: We produce a lot of other formats. We produce events, discussion, seminars, and also, every year we have international summer school here in our museum. And in the past few years, the main topics in the summer school was dedicated to the Nonaligned Movement, because we feel that this idea, this knowledge about the movement, kind of is still alive that we do not forget it in the same way as it was forgotten after the 1990s.

PETER KORCHNAK: Belgrade in September 2021 hosted not just the commemorative summit but also the exhibition “Nonaligned World,” organized by the Institute for Recent History of Serbia and the Museum of African Art. To quote one of the curators, Nemanja Radonjić, “Through a wealth of material from [archives, museums] and personal collections, non-alignment was presented as a comprehensive, ideological movement that transcended the foreign policy doctrine of individual…countries and…politicians. A bottom-up approach was adopted as an innovative way to show what non-alignment looked like through the lens of a worker, student, or journalist, while the [summit] served only as a point in time to examine the ideas associated with nonalignment.” End quote.

A conference about the legacy of nonalignment accompanied the exhibition. One of the permanent exhibits, or products if you will, is the website nesvrstani.rs. This is a map of Belgrade containing quote “a true archaeology of nonalignment” including street names, plaques, monuments, student dormitories, murals, parks and so on. The map is open to submissions from the public.

A month later, the Museum of Yugoslavia hosted the exhibition “Prometheus of the New Century”, which highlighted the ties between Yugoslavia and India, particularly the work of the Yugoslav painter Petar Lubarda, who spent some time there. Following the exhibition, Serbia and India signed an agreement to create an “Exchange Program on Cooperation in the Field of Culture and Arts.”

In 2024, the Slovene Ethnographic Museum marked the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Museum of Non-European Cultures in Goričane with the exhibition, “Intertwined Worlds: The Non-European Collections in the Time of the Non-Aligned Movement.” 

The Museum of Non-European Cultures was the first Yugoslav institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting ethnological objects from other continents. It operated between 1964 and 2001, and its collections included items gathered in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries as well as those resulting from various contacts and exchanges between Yugoslavia and developing countries within the framework of the Nonaligned Movement. Across more than 80 exhibitions the Museum emphasised the People’s Liberation Struggle as a connecting element with nations from other continents, highlighted nonalignment, advocated anti-colonialism, and helped promote Slovenian national identity. After the museum closed, its collections were transferred to the Slovene Ethnographic Museum.

Also last year, the Museum of Yugoslavia hosted a series of conversations and screenings exploring the cultural connections in the Nonaligned Movement.

And also in 2024, artist and past podcast guest Olja Triaška Stefanović, who is from Novi Sad and lives in Bratislava, published the book, Yutopislavia: Intimate Stories of Non-Aligned which quote, “explores the culture and everyday life of her upbringing in a state built on the principle of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ that instigated the Nonaligned Movement. Using the intersection of the biographical and the familiar with the national and global political contexts, the book traces how the state’s involvement in the [Nonaligned Movement] shaped and oriented local political and cultural identities and lived experience. [Across] a wide range of found and archival sources juxtaposed with contemporary images, Triaška Stefanović asks what of the [the Nonaligned Movement’s] legacy today, what might it reveal to us in our current moment and what resources, if any, might it provide for the future?” End quote.

I’m sure I’ve missed some exhibitions, but this should suffice to show nonalignment lives on in a certain manner.

[SOUNDBITE]

Historians on Nonalignment

PETER KORCHNAK: I must mention scholarly interest in nonalignment. The academia began seriously looking into nonalignment in the early 2010s. The seminal work here was Jurgen Dinkel’s The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927-1992), first published in German in 2015, about when first works out of the former Yugoslavia began appearing in noticeable numbers. The first such works focussed on the high-level, geopolitical, foreign policy matters, great leaders, summits, and so on. In time, research extended into other areas, as you’ve heard on this show. And the work is ongoing. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Ten years ago the legacy of nonalignment showed up in an unexpected place. The foundation here was the fact that many nonaligned countries were majority Muslim. “Yugoslavia’s incorporation into the Nonaligned Movement also allowed the country’s Muslims contact with their coreligionists abroad,” writes Jurgen Dinkel. In a majority Christian country like Yugoslavia, Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims were able to develop and experience connections and solidarity with other people on a level that was impossible at home. Then, thanks to the scholarship program—

PAUL STUBBS: The people who came, who spoke Arabic, who came and perhaps fell in love and married and stayed in somewhere in Yugoslavia, and then, you know, would become dentists, they’d become integrated in the local community. 

And then when the kind of refugee asylum, so called crisis happened, they become interpreters, they become kind of agents of solidarity with the refugees. You get Muslim clerics from Bosnia who, because of the Nonaligned Movement, are able to make links with other Islamic scholars in parts of the Global South and are able to kind of think about what a kind of pan Islamic, kind of solidarity might look like. So you’ve got incredibly varied offshoots of these things. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia crossed (or tried anyway) Bosnia and Herzegovina on their way to the European Union. This was part of the so-called European Migrant Crisis.

In addition to various humanitarian organizations, Islamic communities and individual Bosniaks have been providing assistance as well, meals, housing, blankets and clothes, and so on. As reasons, they cite Muslim solidarity and their own experience of war and being refugees.

Finally, in Rijeka, Tito’s Peace Ship Galeb is undergoing a long-overdue and very slow restoration to be turned into a museum.

[SOUNDBITE – “Da’il Ayyaam” by phrex] – part 1

Children of Nonalignment

PETER KORCHNAK: Nonalignment is also embodied. Literally. Many of those foreign students who stayed and married in Yugoslavia had children. You’ve already met one such child.

RIMA SABINA AOUF: Brotherhood and unity, when my family and our friends describe growing up with this concept to me, like it was something that they really took to heart, and tolerance and compassion was widely practiced. And so I guess, yeah, that was what nonalignment brought to Yugoslavia?

PETER KORCHNAK: Rima Sabina Aouf, is a Croatian-Yugoslav-Syrian graphic artist from Australia, living in the UK. Her late mother was from Zagreb, and Yugoslavia’s scholarship program enabled her father, who is from Syria, to get a university degree in Zagreb. In essence, Aouf is a child of nonalignment.

RIMA SABINA AOUF: The way that it affected my life is that I exist with this mixed ethnic background that I think is a profound gift to anyone who is lucky enough to have a mixed background. 

It means you experience multiple cultures as your own from the inside, and that gives you a facility with others. It makes it easier to connect and understand and empathize with nearly everyone and to actually enjoy that difference.

That’s not obviously specific to nonalignment but it’s an experience that nonalignment enabled.

I very much grew up in the Croatian diaspora in Australia, like all of our friends were either Croatians, Bosnian or Bosnians or Serbs in Perth. And sometimes I don’t think that other Croatians within the diasporas see me as fully Croatian, because when I get talking to someone and we realize we’re both from there, they’re always like, What’s your surname? And because everyone there has an -itch surname. When I say, Oh, I’m Aouf, they’re always confused. So sometimes we actually have a nickname. Among the other Croatians, they call us the Aoufićs.

I think having a mixed background doesn’t make you less Croatian. It means you’re Croatian plus something else, not Croatian minus the other thing. So, yeah, that that would be my message for everyone.

[SOUNDBITE – “Da’il Ayyaam” by phrex]

PETER KORCHNAK: “Da’il Ayyaam” by phrex, with the lyrics being a poem by the 8th century cleric Imam Shafi, translating to “Let the Days Pass By.”

The Future of Nonalignment

PETER KORCHNAK: What do the passing days hold for the future of nonalignment? On the geopolitical level, at the top of the show you heard some of the ideas floating out there. I’m doubtful of their viability, but only time will tell. 

Nonalignment will live on in various ways. First, in a continued exploration of its legacy, in various realms and levels and directions. 

As Spaskovska writes, “Nonalignment was…also a living practice, refined through involvement in peace-keeping missions, in business practices, education, film, art, cultural exchange, and activism.” End quote. 

This legacy is being continually rediscovered.

PETRA MATIĆ: Nonaligned world is a big world. Because, I mean, [the] Nonaligned Movement is the majority of the world at some point, right? But currently there’s a lot of us trying to make it bigger.

PETER KORCHNAK: Petra Matić is an artist and curator from Zagreb. 

Not only is the study of non-alignment expanding, it’s transcending the traditional top-down, macro narratives that focus on the political and geopolitical realm, diplomacy, the Cold War, the summits. New works—primarily in academia and arts and culture—explore non-alignment from below. You’ve heard about some of these in our series. 

Matić is behind one of the latest such projects.

After working at a Kurdish refugee camp in Calais, France during the so-called European Migrant Crisis, she undertook museum and heritage management studies back home, in Zagreb. While working at a newspaper archive, she came across information about the International Student Club of Friendship, established in 1961. 

The Club’s publication, Solidarnost, provided insight into the lives of foreign students and testimony to the Club as a quote “unique meeting place for strong and active student organizations from different countries, many of which were just experiencing their independence, operating as branches of their national organizations and intertwined in global diaspora networks…”

PETRA MATIĆ: And I became obsessed, because this publication was really incredible. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Down the rabbit hole Matić went. And the things she found! 

• In the 1960 an Indonesian brass band played in town three times a week. 
• Arab students volunteered in the youth work action building the Sava river embankment. 
• Foreign students participated in protests against the Vietnam war, and collected blood for the Vietnamese people. 
• In 1984, the International Student Club of Friendship collaborated with the Union of African Students to organize a series of events called Africa Week, featuring talks by African students, screenings of African films, and discussions of African art. 

“I am constantly surprised by how many traces of nonalignment there are around us, and we don’t notice them,” Matić told Novosti. There are Nehru and Nasser squares in Novi Zagreb; the Institute for Development and International Relations, began in 1963 as the Africa Research Institute; and so on.

PETRA MATIĆ: Since 2019 I have been writing and talking to everybody who wanted to hear. I have been messaging different mostly old men on LinkedIn, like, Are you the guy who was in Belgrade in 1971 on [sic] conference of student unions of this or that country, and just basically trying to find any information I could and trying to talk about it. 

And I made a short film about this, about the club and the history of international students of Zagreb, and then I exhibited that in Vladimir Nazor gallery in Zagreb. This was 2023.

PETER KORCHNAK: In the exhibition “Nonaligned Zagreb,” wrote Nacional, Matić “explores her native Zagreb, which is completely unknown to her, Zagreb which is African, Asian, Arab and Latin American, Zagreb which speaks many languages, Zagreb which is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and nonaligned, Zagreb in color.” End quote.

Matić also invited a Kurdish artist to research the history of the Kurdish student union in Zagreb and Croatia and jointly led Kurdish dance workshops. 

And through a series of meetings, interviews, and other encounters, she arrived at the idea of a community archive. 

PETRA MATIĆ: A community archive would be an archive that is created from below. So it does not involve the state, it is not an institution. A community archive is collecting memories from the people who give consent, who want to share those memories, and who actively participate in shaping those memories. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Asking people from the nonaligned world—

PETRA MATIĆ: What do you think can present your history here. Do you know anybody who could share that? Do you know anybody who would be willing to open their photo albums to talk about their stories, to to share any kind of, any kind of memory and any kind of artifact? 

This is something that has been haunting me since the beginning of my research. Where can you find an image of black people in Croatia before 2000. Even in 1961 we had Africans coming to our universities. We used to have 1,000 Africans studying in Zagreb every year, but there is no record of that. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The nonprofit Matić leads, Jutro, or Morning—

PETRA MATIĆ: —received some funding from Kultura Nova Foundation to actually start the Nonaligned Archive. We commissioned researchers, we commissioned website makers, and we recently launched it.

PETER KORCHNAK: Arhiv nesvrstanih, or the Nonaligned Archive, launched in early May 2025 with a series of activities, including presentations, movie nights, meetups, and a guided tour of nonaligned Zagreb, all designed to bring people together around the topic.

You can find the Nonaligned Archive at arhivnesvrstanih.org. As in a museum, only certain parts of the collection, indeed of the exhibits themselves, are available. If you want to see the whole thing, get in touch.

PETRA MATIĆ: This is about connection. And we actually, yes, we want you to connect to us and tell us, what is your nonaligned work. Why are you doing this? Do you have family connections? We want it. We are not an institution.

Yeah, we are very open to different sorts of collaborations. So even if you don’t know what you want from us, but you want to work with us, let us know.

PETER KORCHNAK: According to Matić, there is willingness, interest, and energy in the region among people and organizations working on nonalignment to collaborate but that work is hampered by funding. But the bigger point is, those conversations are happening. 

The plan is to continue growing the collection, gathering people online, and engaging with artists, researchers, and collaborative institutions. A longer-term plan is to organize a traveling exhibition. 

PETRA MATIĆ: If you have something to contribute, such as documents or photographs or testimonies, please get in touch. We are very accessible. We will definitely continue with the research. We will definitely continue with like making the site better, more accessible to different languages, different needs as well. 

We are interested to creating these connections, and then looking at like growing the archive, but also looking at the archive as a beginning point for new collaborations, for new discussions. Because, I mean, I think, like researching history is interesting, but what matters is today. What do we do with it today? Why is it important today?

PETER KORCHNAK: The project speaks to a bigger trend, which opens up more spaces and possibilities to continue exploring the legacy of nonalignment and its lessons for the future.

PETRA MATIĆ: Croatia is definitely the most right wing country to emerge from Yugoslavia. And you can also see this with the memory, with the non-existing memory of the Nonaligned Movement. The memory has been erased. It has been erased violently. It has been it has been erased as much as it was possible. So you know that comparing to Slovenia, which is curating beautiful exhibitions on Palestine and Nonaligned Movement, or compared to Serbia, which holds two museums, the Museum of African Art and museum of Yugoslavia, or Montenegro, which holds the nonaligned collection, in Croatia, we don’t have such things.

And the International Student Club, which was the center, a cultural center, in the center of Zagreb, was first evicted, and then it was burnt down. The entire archive was taken away, so somebody really worked on removing that memory from collective memory.

PETER KORCHNAK: So in a sense, the Nonaligned Archive is working to create or perhaps recreate a countermemory. 

PETRA MATIĆ: Maybe what is happening is that it’s finally safe enough to talk about it. It’s been 30 years since the war stopped. Well, maybe we are starting to process things a bit, I would say, like, regionally and globally as well. 

It is high time to address these things. And when it comes to my work, it is absolutely last minute to collect, because the people who studied in Croatia, they stopped coming in the 90s. They are old. I mean, a lot of them are dying. And there is this sense of urgency.

PETER KORCHNAK: Matić cites two reasons for this work, for remembering nonalignment.

PETRA MATIĆ: Croatia is the longest land border of the EU and it’s still doing the dirty job of like hurting and sometimes even killing people on the border. And those are people also coming from African and Asian countries. And since they have managed to delete the memory of, like, hundreds and thousands of people coming here and contributing to our community. Like so many doctors…. Most people were studying medicine, so a lot of times the practice was they would study medicine, and then they would be required to do their practice in really remote villages. So we are talking villagers that have never even been to town, and not to imagine that they ever saw an African man or a Syrian man or a South American woman. These people have really contributed to our communities. We have many businesses, even today, that that have emerged from the Nonaligned Movement. So also, because of the rising hate, racism and xenophobia, it is very, very important to show that there is history. We have history of Africans in Croatia. We have history of Asians in Croatia, and we have history of South Americans in Croatia. 

One example that I always like to repeat, was that half of the staff in Gaza hospital are students of Zagreb University. They can all speak Croatian, when it’s Croatian football. they are cheering for Croatia, but they cannot even enter the Republic of Croatia.

Another reason why I believe it’s so important, I really think that globally, we have lost hope. And you can find hope in the 1960s, you can find it in the students’ texts, you can find it in their voices. People were decolonizing all over, they were gaining independence. They were creating new societies. And they really, really believed that things can change, which is something incredibly powerful, and which I believe that we all need today.

PETER KORCHNAK: As Novosti wrote in their intro to the interview with Matić, “The Nonaligned Archive is trying to create a space where the erased and ignored stories of our harmonious life with Africans and Arabs can be retold, not as nostalgic reconstructions, but as active questions about what kind of society we want to build today.”

PETRA MATIĆ: The archive is a tool in a way. I did not dream of establishing an archive. I established an archive because there is none, and I really feel the urgency for such a thing to exist.

My work with the Nonaligned Archive is one of ways to heal collectively.

What are the ways that people come together? What are the ways that people can act together, that they can talk without fear, that they can be together without fear. 

How can we heal or how can we overcome colonial border violence that all of us, I would say, are subjected to living in today’s society.

[SOUNDBITE – “Depths of Kerala” by Tolga Maktay] 

PETER KORCHNAK: “Depths of Kerala” by Tolga Maktay, who is from Turkey. I’ve played the track for you with the kind permission of the artist and the label Kosha Musika, from India, a founding member of the Nonaligned Movement. Buy Tolga Maktay’s and Kosha’s music on Bandcamp!

Nonalignment will continue to be studied in more and more areas.

AGUSTÍN COSOVSCHI: I think the field has really given amazing research in the last few years. I think that there is amazing research being done, being conducted, and I think that really we have come to understand a lot about Yugoslavia’s engagement with the Third World thanks to colleagues who have done amazing work, and not only in the former Yugoslav republics, but also elsewhere. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Historian Agustín Cosovschi. 

AGUSTÍN COSOVSCHI: I feel that we are now reaching a point in which we have to go to other topics. I think that we have to also start studying the issue of nonalignment through other lenses, other angles, which are not exclusively through nonalignment itself. 

I have not seen almost anything on nonaligned sports, on how nonalignment shaped like sport networks? And I think that’s a fascinating topic as well. 

I would love it for my colleagues and for myself as well, to start treating other topics.

PETER KORCHNAK: For my part, I look forward to attending the Socijalizam na klupi (or Socialism on the Bench) conference this September in Pula, which in this, its seventh edition will be all about global socialism and nonalignment. 

Until then, in my own research for this series, I detected quite a few gaps in scholarship, especially in terms of nonalignment on the ground, or from below if you will. 

PAUL STUBBS: Nonalignment from below, and it is fascinating. (…) Those connections at the level of individuals, or at the level of people who stepped outside their appointed roles and became fascinated by the culture or the music or the art of the place where they were based is really one part of the story and one part of the legacy. 

PETER KORCHNAK: To quote Jelena Djureinović, nonalignment from below encompassed “relatively autonomous spaces created for meaningful transnational exchanges in the realms of science, art and culture, architecture, education, and industry.”

I ask questions like:

• How was nonalignment presented and represented in the Yugoslav media, pop culture, textbooks, school or cultural activities, the built environment? 
• How did the regular Yugoslavs feel about their country’s nonalignment? And how do they remember it? 
• The same goes for the people of countries receiving Yugoslavia’s assistance or doing business with Yugoslavia in the nonalignment framework. 
• What about the workers literally building the Third World, employees of Yugoslav companies on site there, their memories, nostalgia even? 

Student or feminist activism, tourism, material culture, socialist internationalism, institutional collaborations… 

Being from Czechoslovakia, I’d like to learn more about how Yugoslavia compared with that and other Eastern Bloc countries in terms of their efforts in the Third World. 

I also kept reading about solidarity within the movement and beyond, but perhaps not enough about its concrete manifestations, meanings, legacies, and outcomes. 

And while this podcast is of course about Yugoslavia and has a correspondingly narrow lens, I’m painfully aware that even in this series Yugo-centrism limited my own understanding of nonalignment. To expand it, it would help to look at it from the perspective(s) of other nonaligned countries.

AGUSTÍN COSOVSCHI: All of us who work in Yugoslavia are still completely inside the prison of Yugoslavia exceptionalism. And I cannot stand it. I think that it really doesn’t at all help us understand the Yugoslav experience to still reproduce the discourse that Yugoslavia had about itself. Yugoslavia was the only country to be between the East and the West. It was the only country to have black people in their universities. It was the only country….

Well, no, actually, no, not at all.

Yugoslavia had much less of those students from Third World than Czechoslovakia, let alone the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was extremely involved with the Third World, which is something amazing, it’s a story of international solidarity that should be studied, it should be not only taught, but transmitted as an important value of what international solidarity, solidarity should be. But it was not at all an exception. So many people in so many different countries, regions, continents, were working towards towards similar goals of international solidarity at the time. 

Yugoslavia had a lot of unique things, definitely, as every country, I don’t think that engaging with the Third World was one of those things. 

We gain much more, or at least we gain many things if we also see it as part of a bigger picture in which Yugoslavia was also like other countries.

[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Ey yare man (feat. Sharmin Hasanzade)” by Tetouze]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s our show today and our series on nonalignment. So many times throughout the research and the recording and the re-listening I had a “who knew” moment. Nonalignment was a non-entity when I first started studying Yugoslavia in graduate school a quarter century ago, when the dissolution and the ensuing wars were all the academic rage. It just goes to show that, Yugoslavia’s non-exceptionalism aside, there’s so much more yet to learn and uncover. Yugoslavia’s story keeps on being written.

By the way, the song you’re listening to is “Ey yare man” (featuring Sharmin Hasanzade) by Tetouze, who kindly gave permission to play it for you here. Buy his music on Bandcamp! 

This was a first multi-part story here on Remembering Yugoslavia. Thank you for sticking with me and everyone you’ve heard along the way. 

I learned quite a bit, not just about nonalignment, but also about doing a series in the first place. It was a tough go at times, as other interests and ADHD pulled me to something else, and any future series will be shorter for sure. But I think it came out nicely. 

“This series…is now becoming a major source of information on many aspects of [the Nonaligned Movement]!” facebooked Paul Stubbs, whose edited book Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement provided the foundation for the series, pointing me to many of the guests you’ve heard. So there.

I will do more series in the future, on the Roma or nostalgia, for example, as I quite enjoyed diving deep into a topic. For the next few months, we’ll be back to single-episode stories. First, we’ll take a trip from Poland to Croatia with a fellow honorary Yugoslav. Stay tuned (or subscribed, as the case may be). 

[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. 

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 to take part in a growing community of yugosolidarity and enjoy the extended version of this and other episodes of Remembering Yugoslavia. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. 

The track by phrex licensed under Creative Commons. Additional music courtesy and with permission of Sticky Keys, SZ, Tolga Maktay and Kosha Music, and Tetouze. Buy their music on Bandcamp! 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

BOJANA PIŠKUR: I think in today’s world, maybe we need a new nonaligned, not necessarily the non aligned that exists, but the new new Nonaligned Movement. And let’s maybe all work in this direction.

Additional Sources

• Keethaponcalan, S.I. “Reshaping the Non‑Aligned Movement: challenges and vision.” Bandung: Journal of Global South Vol. 3 No. 4 (2016)
• Kolešnik, Ljiljana. “Yugoslav Art Colonies – International Cultural Exchange, and Public Cultural Diplomacy ‘From Below’.” In: Darko Fritz, ed. 20th Century Heritage. 2022 Symposium Proceedings. Korčula: Siva Zona, 2025, pp. 52-67
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