Svetozar Rajak

No Bargaining Chips, No Spheres of Interest: The Yugoslav Origins of Cold War Non-Alignment

This article reevaluates the origins of Yugoslavias instrumental role in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and elucidates the roots and conceptualization of Titos strategic reorientation toward nonalignment. Yugoslav foreign policy became truly independent only after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet fold. The article shows that Belgrade began searching for a “third way” earlier than is acknowledged in the relevant historiography. The search began when, faced with the distinct threat of a Soviet invasion in the early 1950s, Yugoslavia became all but formally incorporated into the Western alliance. Based on previously unknown or inadequately researched documents from the Yugoslav archives, the article demonstrates that Josip Broz Titos trip to India and Burma in December 1954, particularly his first encounter with Indias Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, played a key role in shaping Titos principles of active peaceful coexistence and noncommitment and in transforming them into a global initiative. The article highlights the well-defined political and philosophical rationale behind the principles that became embedded in the concept of non-engagement and, later, nonalignment.

The Balkans in the Cold War

Positioned on the fault line between two competing Cold War ideological and military alliances, and entangled in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, the Balkan region offers a particularly interesting case for the study of the global Cold War system. This book explores the origins, unfolding and impact of the Cold War on the Balkans on the one hand, and the importance of regional realities and pressures on the other. Fifteen contributors from history, international relations, and political science address a series of complex issues rarely covered in one volume, namely the Balkans and the creation of the Cold War order; Military alliances and the Balkans; uneasy relations with the Superpowers; Balkan dilemmas in the 1970s and 1980s and the ‘significant other’ – the EEC; and identity, culture and ideology. The book’s particular contribution to the scholarship of the Cold War is that it draws on extensive multi-archival research of both regional and American, ex-Soviet and Western European archives.

From Regional Role to Global Undertakings: Yugoslavia in the Early Cold War

In 1945, Yugoslavia constituted itself as a socialist state. Its legitimacy derived from the most successful anti-Nazi resistance movement, under its charismatic leader, Josip Broz Tito, and the autochthonous social revolution carried out during the war of liberation. In the new reality of the world following a second global conflict, with the emerging ideological confrontation between two social systems, socialist and liberal capitalist, Yugoslavia firmly allied itself with its ideological paragon, Stalin’s Soviet Union. Within three years, however, Tito and the Yugoslav leadership had rebelled against Moscow’s tutelage, setting the stage for the first paradigm shift of the Cold War. The 1948 Soviet–Yugoslav break-up blurred, and eventually challenged, the fault lines of the Cold War. This chapter provides insight into how the policies of Yugoslavia and its leader, Tito, during the nascent Cold War contributed to paradigm shifts affecting the dynamics and structure of the Cold War system. It will focus on geostrategic implications, namely the 1948 Yugoslav–Soviet break-up, the Yugoslav military realignment that followed the split and the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which aspired to challenge the Cold War bipolarity. In exercising disproportionate activism in the international system, Yugoslavia was the only country of the region that harboured the ambition to play a global role. Its leadership saw it as the means to safeguard the country’s independence and security.