Prospects and boundaries of international friendship: Polish-Yugoslav relations between 1956 and 1968

The project will apply ‘international friendship’ as a meaningful interpretive framework for researching Polish-Yugoslav relations between 1956 and 1968 and thus integrate international relations’ conceptual toolkit into the field of diplomatic history. It will explore how shared identities, trust, and emotions interacted with strategic and material interests in Polish-Yugoslav relations and influenced the behaviours and interactions of both political elites and ‘ordinary’ people. Thus the study will provide a complex and multifaceted understanding of Polish-Yugoslav postwar entanglements. In this study, international friendship is interpreted as a bilateral relationship formed out of overlapping identities and revolving around shared projects that seek to build a particular kind of world order. A friendship bond is marked by a high degree of trust and affinity, embedded in close cooperation at multiple registers of state and society, and expressed in a range of friendship practices. The study departs from an assumption that for most of the period between 1956 and 1968 Polish-Yugoslav relations grew sufficiently close and mutually trusting enough that actors at different political and societal levels referred to it as a friendship and acted upon this understanding. The project will explore prospects and boundaries of international friendship in postwar Polish-Yugoslav relations through three case studies: ■ The first case study will examine what role the LEGACY OF THE WORLD WAR II played in bilateral relations and how frequent reminders of common war experiences fostered shared identifications and friendship bonds between Poles and Yugoslavs at multiple levels. ■ The second case study will investigate how pursuing SEPARATE ROADS TO SOCIALISM bolstered cooperation between Polish and Yugoslav political elites and state/party officials, and how their institutional and personal connections helped to generate mutual trust and support in the domestic and international realm. ■ The third case study will focus on TRANSNATIONAL ENCOUNTERS and explore how cross-border interactions of Polish and Yugoslav exchange students and tourists contributed to growing familiarity between Poles and Yugoslavs and shaped friendship bonds between the two countries. The case studies will comprehensively address the questions related to the main components of international friendship, namely shared identities, trust, and emotions, which can be seen as both as a source and an expression of friendship bonds. The latter will be tracked by exploring practices of friendship, such as symbolic and commemorative acts, privileged access to information, high tolerance of bad news, acts of solidarity and friendship discourse. The three case studies will explore how Polish-Yugoslav friendship bonds were created, maintained, and weekend at different political and social levels. The project will build on the premise that Poles and Yugoslav at all levels invested in bilateral relationship as citizens with agency and as such helped to shape interstate friendship and thus the idea of the socialist world. The use of both a top-down and a bottom-up approach will allow an analysis of the motivations and agency of the actors and explore their contribution to friendly bilateral relationship. All case studies will also address the importance of personal bonds and institutional ties as a source of stability, familiarity, and thus amity in the interstate relationship. The overall dynamics and intensity of Polish-Yugoslav cooperation between 1956 and 1968 will be explored with the tools of digital humanities (Nodegoat). At the end of the project, all the collected data will be available in an open-source data-base (SI-DIH repository) in order to be easily findable and freely accessible to other researchers for further analyses and extensions.