Allies Are Forever (Until They Are No More): Yugoslavia’s Multivectoral Foreign Policy During Titoism

Abstract

Yugoslavia’s political development after the Second World War was largely shaped by Josip Broz Tito, the founder of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), her Prime Minister (1943–1963) and President (1953–1980) as well as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) from 1939 to 1980.1 The long period of his dictatorial rule was based on several elements with a notable cohesive effect: not only on repression and prosecution of political enemies, but also on the Yugoslav model of Socialism; respectively Communism, the militarization of society, the leitmotif of ‘brotherhood and unity’ against the diverging national aspirations within the country, the cult of personality and of the glorious partisan past, and last but not least on a very special kind of foreign policy (Grothusen 1975; Pavlowitch 1988; West 1995; Lampe 2000), which nowadays would be called ‘multivectoral’; that is, pragmatically open to many alternatives at the same time. Characterized by the first Communist heresy in history and by the policy of ‘nonalignment,’ this special aspect of the ‘phenomenon Yugoslavia’ under the Tito regime will be the focus of the following discussion. It will be argued that foreign policy was an impressive unifying factor in Tito’s time, but it left a legacy that afterwards Yugoslav politics could never match.