H-Diplo Article Review 539 on “No Bargaining Chips, No Spheres of Interest: The Yugoslav Origins of Cold War Non-Alignment.” [14 July 2015]

George Fujii Discussion

H-Diplo Article Reviews
No. 539
Published on 14 July 2015

H-Diplo Article Review Editors:  Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

Svetozar Rajak.  “No Bargaining Chips, No Spheres of Interest:  The Yugoslav Origins of Cold War Non-Alignment.”  Journal of Cold War Studies 16:1 (Winter 2014):  146-179.  DOI:  10.1162/JCWS_a_00434.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00434

Reviewed by Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the origins, meaning, and role of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the Cold War. Yet, this welcome historiographical development has tended to focus mainly on the roles of some of the leading Asian and African advocates of Non-Alignment or on the confusion and frustration the movement created among the Cold War’s principal protagonists, particularly the United States.[1] Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the role of one of the movement’s principal founders: Yugoslavia’s long-time leader Josip Broz Tito.[2] Svetozar Rajak’s work aims to fill this lacuna.

 

Rajak’s major argument is clear enough: Tito’s Yugoslavia was a driving force behind the formation of the NAM but its role has been neglected. Given that the initial NAM conference was held in Belgrade and that Tito is habitually cited (alongside India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser) as one of the key shapers of NAM, it appears difficult to fathom how anyone could doubt this. But Rajak goes somewhat beyond claiming a co-founders’ role for Tito. In fact, he argues that Non-Alignment was far more than a realpolitik choice for Tito. In particular, according to Rajak: “Tito gave true meaning to the concept of coexistence between countries with different ideological affiliations and political systems” (176). While acknowledging the important role of other leaders of NAM (particularly Nehru), Rajak essentially portrays the Yugoslav leader as a charismatic globetrotter whose personal role was primordial in the foundation and early stages of NAM.

 

Along the way, Rajak makes a few other key points. Perhaps most significantly, he insists that Tito had no inclination towards an independent (and ideologically suspect) foreign policy prior to his country’s expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. What followed this excommunication was thus at least in some measure improvisation and a search for survival that began with a frustrating attempt to forge links with the West European left and gradually turned towards a search for allies among recently decolonized countries, particularly in Asia. India under Nehru eventually emerged as the natural partner and Rajak reconstructs the evolution of the Indian-Yugoslav relationship in impressive detail. He also provides interesting insight into Tito’s discussions with Burmese leader U Nu, the other major interlocutor that Tito met on his 1955 trip to Asia.

 

The article is essentially a work of diplomatic history that focuses on the correspondence and meetings among the key individuals. Rajak is particularly impressive when it comes to the use of Yugoslav sources which he has mined in a conscientious manner, most significantly the Archives of Josip Broz Tito (AJBT) and the Archive of the Central Committee of the Communists of Yugoslavia (ACK SKJ). In addition, the source base includes various documents from the Cold War International History Project and selected U.S. documents. But the perspective is very much a Belgrade-centric one.

 

The choice of sources raises a few obvious questions about the respective agency and influence of the various actors discussed in the article. In particular, one needs to ask whether Rajak overstates Tito’s role as the founder of the NAM.  The tone is at times overtly laudatory, particularly in the concluding paragraphs, where Rajak essentially describes Tito as a post-modern man, free of racial prejudices, a man who was popular among the newly independent states because “he was the first white European who did not come to subjugate and arrived instead as an equal, professing independence and mutual respect”(179). There may be something to this point, yet it is one of the few statements in the article that is based purely on speculation – we do not know, on the basis of Rajak’s essay, what his counterparts – Nehru and others – truly thought of the Yugoslav leaders motives.

 

In the end, NAM had many fathers (and very few mothers). Svetozar Rajak’s research into Tito’s Yugoslavia’s role is impressive in its utilization of primary sources hitherto unexamined. His article allows readers to gain an insight into the motives that lay behind Belgrade’s activism and provides interesting detail about Tito’s relationship with, in particular, Nehru. Yet, while it adds to our understanding of the emergence of NAM, Rajak’s work should be complemented by other studies, on other leaders and countries, that played an equally important role in shaping the idea of a ‘third force’ in international relations. For the NAM’s ultimate lack of success was undoubtedly bound with its heterogeneity, which was itself derivative of the multitude of motives and goals that led to its founding in the first place.

 

 

Jussi M. Hanhimäki is Professor of International at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. An editor of Cold War History, he is the author of numerous books, including The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (2004) and The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (2013). Professor Hanhimäki is currently at work on a general history of the Cold War and a joint biography of Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

 

 

© 2015 The Author.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

 

Notes


[1] For example: Natasa Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Nada Boškovska (eds.), The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade (London: Routledge, 2014); Robert J. McMahon (ed.), The Cold War in the Third World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[2] Aside from Rajak’s own earlier work, the only significant recent exception is Rinna Kullaa, Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge (New York : I.B. Tauris, 2012). See also the essays by Kullaa and Rajak in the forthcoming Sandra Bott, Jussi Hanhimäki, Janick Schaufelbuehl and Marco Wyss (eds), Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War: The Non-Aligned Movement in the East-West Conflict (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).