Being European and Decolonial: Utopian Realism of the Yugoslav Nonaligned Internationalism

The project address the ‘global’ Yugoslavia – the only major European member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – as a fascinating conjuncture of political, economic and cultural ideas and realities of the industrialised North and the postcolonial South from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Through a series of case studies focusing on the activities of Yugoslav agencies and individual projects in political and primarily non-political spheres, we will gain insight into the multidirectional process of circulation of ideas, strategies, knowledge, cultures, practices and values which developed within the NAM at both the macro and micro levels. Through a multidisciplinary historical-anthropological-political examination of the experiences of economists, students, cultural and political thinkers, the project will, on the one hand, outline the imaginary of the non-aligned alliance co-created by these agencies, and on the other hand, trace their lived experience with the Global South along with many of its ambiguities. Using archival sources of Yugoslav federal and republican institutions and oral histories, we will present the negotiated relationship between the individual components of Yugoslav internationalism and examine its reception by their partners from non-aligned countries. As in practice, this represented a critical test of the declared partnership, especially in terms of development cooperation, studying specific projects in African countries and tracing the experiences of individual agencies on both sides will enable one of the first epistemological insights into the ambitious NAM programme of ‘collective self-reliance’. Equally original are our findings regarding the changing interactions between domestic politics, society and culture on the one hand, and international commitment to non-aligned partners on the other, which we will explore by studying cases of education and cultural exchanges. At the macro level, the project will open up a new perspective on the transnational and comparative historicisation of the phenomenon of non-alignment. Based on multi-site archival research, we will identify the impulses originating from different parts of the world and different ideological contexts that became codified in Yugoslav theoretical and political thought, and consequently to an important extent also in the normative framework of the NAM, the G-77 and UNCTAD. All of these perspectives, for the examination of which we will use state-of-the-art conceptual tools and bottom-up and top-down methodological approaches so as to illuminate the problems of Yugoslav internationalism, will make a valuable contribution to the debates on the geopolitical structuring of the post-war world into the 'centre', 'semi-periphery' and 'periphery', on the dialogue between the North and the South, and on the encounters of socialist modernity with the post-colonial realities addressed by recent global history. With their strong involvement in international academic networks and the development of its own multidisciplinary approaches that are still rarely used in the historical perspective, members of the project team form a dynamic research core and strive to strengthen the contact of Slovenian humanities with more distant global contexts by examining shared issues in the study of history and contemporary issues.