Yugoslavia was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement and one of its leading forces. In September 1961, the country hosted the first summit in Belgrade, launching the movement alongside representatives from India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. Yugoslavia’s socialist independence from both Cold War blocs, as well as its advocacy for decolonization and global equality, shaped the movement’s founding principles. Nataša Kovačević explores the continued relevance of these ideas.
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Whenever I present on the cultural and literary solidarities inspired – and made possible – by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), someone in the audience asks how this legacy is relevant today. Are there any lessons to be drawn from the Non-Aligned Movement, even though its (some would say negligible) global relevance declined after the end of the Cold War? Has it left any visible traces on contemporary politics, economy, or culture? Over the last decade or so, many scholars, filmmakers, and museum curators have painstakingly reexamined and reconstructed NAM’s concrete legacies. However, I would also like to highlight this movement as a collective source of ideas about the importance of fair international relations, cultural exchange, diversity, and egalitarian economic and trade terms.
In a situation where the US President takes stock of the country’s first 250 years by announcing tha “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty” while a tech investor accuses the Pope of serving “Chinese communism” because he calls for AI regulation, it is clear that neither the Red Scare nor the Cold War are things of the past. Although it was not always implemented perfectly, the Non-Aligned Movement counteracted the hegemonic ambitions of the superpowers during the Cold War – the United States, the Soviet Union, and China – and abandoned geopolitical binarism as the primary political narrative. It was a moral force composed of many small and poor nations, most of them newly decolonized, which denounced foreign aggression and war as neo-colonial tools.
NAM countries once united against the nuclear arms race. Today, we should follow their example and unite against the AI (arms) race, deregulation, and nefarious use. In formerly socialist European countries, which are often presented with an either-or choice – Russia or the EU, the EU or the US, or China or the US – the history of nonalignment calls on us to organize around alternatives that transcend political investment in any one ‘great power’ and practical affiliation with any one military bloc.
New International Economic Order
NAM, along with the related Group of 77 developing countries and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), also developed a detailed program for dismantling the (neo)colonial trade and monetary systems that entrenched global inequality between the North and South, known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Adopted at the 1974 UN General Assembly, NIEO was a worldmaking project oriented toward greater equitability, which argued for the right of the recently decolonized countries to develop and modernize on their own terms and create economic institutions that would ensure non-domination.
In the context of the global changes to financial systems and deep economic (as well as oil) crises in the 1970s, NIEO supporters upheld the following principles for developing countries: self-determination, liberation from colonialism and racial domination, and freedom from external interference; international trade terms and monetary systems that favor them; regulation of transnational corporations; access to modern technology and the development of indigenous technology; sovereignty over one’s natural resources.
Between the organization’s founding in 1945 and 1970, the number of UN member countries more than doubled as European empires dissolved. This development gave NIEO traction in the UN. However, neoliberal backlash from powerful Western countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s effectively ended this initiative. But most, if not all, of the problems that the architects of NIEO articulated persist today. Following four decades of neoliberalism and the violence of structural adjustment, inequality between individual countries is essentially where it was at the height of Western imperialism in the early 20th century, even if it declined from its peak in 1980. Additionally, inequality within individual countries is steadily growing. It is therefore not surprising that the Progressive International recently called for the renewal of the project of non-alignment and for a New International Economic Order adjusted for the 21st century.
Anti-extractivist alliances across state borders
As I already mentioned, one of the NIEO provisions was “full permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources”. NIEO also considered the nationalization of resources an inalienable right of all states, along with the postcolonial “restitution and full compensation for the exploitation and depletion of, and damages to, the natural resources.” In the face of neocolonial extractivism and climate degradation that asymmetrically affect precisely the countries that NIEO aimed to protect, we can take inspiration from this Non-Aligned initiative as we create anti-extractivist alliances across state borders, such as the recent movement against lithium exploitation that united activists from Portugal, Germany, Serbia, Chile and Spain, or the intensifying popular protests across the Balkans against mining, water pollution, and elite construction projects that threaten protected urban or natural zones.
Nonetheless, despite NIEO’s provisions against the “waste of natural resources,” the history of Non-Aligned developmentalism and modernization also teaches us to be wary of environmental destruction under the auspices of national sovereignty itself, and to pay much more heed to local activist movements and Indigenous peoples’ struggles for environmental justice.
Decolonizing cultural collaborations
Furthermore, decades before postcolonial and minority studies, contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and calls to decolonize museums became popular, NAM countries launched decolonizing cultural collaborations. These collaborations aimed to expand the concept of world culture beyond Eurocentric definitions. They also strove to democratize the production and access to culture and media in newly independent states. Additionally, they developed shared anticolonial and antiracist vocabularies and advocated for the restitution of looted art.
NAM partners’ bilateral agreements ensured state sponsorship for the exchange or scholars, writers, artists, films, exhibitions, and beyond, establishing new cultural connections between the Global East and South. Literary collaborations, for example, aimed to increase the visibility of minor and non-European literatures through reciprocal translations and literary festivals, as well as create independent publishing venues in a situation where both former colonial powers and Cold War superpowers’ pursuit of cultural influence retarded the development of local infrastructures. In the late 1970s, two-thirds of the world’s population were responsible for publishing a mere one-sixth of all books.
In nonaligned Yugoslavia, for example, such partnerships helped internationalize the country’s literary festivals, translation, publishing, and readership beyond the traditional cultural orientation toward Europe. While many writers traveled abroad, local audiences were introduced to contemporary Asian, African, and Latin American writers who participated in prominent literary festivals, including Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia, October International Writers’ Meetings in Serbia, or Sarajevo Poetry Days in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Archives also help us glean the history of collaborations between universities, journals, and libraries in the Global East and South.
In turn, journals in Yugoslavia preserve the debates among writers from NAM countries about the problems of exchange and translation among peripheral literatures, or the relationship between literature and social engagement, for instance. Also, these journals often translated and featured scholarship from journals in the Global East and South. Certainly, the rich history of such collaborations and initiatives can provide important lessons for the present era, still marked by the metropolitan domination of literary publishing in the former colonies, which means, for example, that Africa’s indigenous book industry accounts for only 5.4% of global publishing revenue.
Also, the attempts by NAM countries to share knowledge, technology, and develop independent intellectual infrastructures is in stark contrast with contemporary epistemic inequality and bibliometric coloniality, cemented through the domination of academic publishing by Western European and North American journals.
“Anti-imperial rather than European”
Finally, the establishment of NAM and its active participation in the United Nations, meant that, to quote Adom Getachew, the “universal international society” was now envisioned as “anti-imperial rather than European,” which required equitably distributed geopolitical representation. Non-Aligned countries tried to hold the UN to its promises of sovereign equality among member states, peaceful international arbitration of conflicts, and opposition to nuclear armament. They also tried to democratize this organization by reforming the lopsided representation on the UN Security Council and directing decision making toward the more representative General Assembly, which for them held potential as a global parliament.
Nowadays, the UN is stripped of real power, and the decision-making authority lies with powerful countries, corporations, and organizations such as the IMF and WTO. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a globally representative body that protects the rights of peripheral states, Indigenous and minority groups, activists, workers, the growing precariat, and nature. Efforts to achieve this goal range from the UN Parliamentary Assembly campaign, which aims to recreate representative democracy on a global scale by electing officials from all UN states rather than appointing them, to the concept of a global assembly operating through non-hierarchical, direct democracy and international networks connecting diverse agents, as envisioned by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in “Commonwealth”.
Although our world is substantially different from the Cold War era, which marked the peak of NAM activity, the problems NAM identified and the solutions it developed can still serve as blueprints for anti-imperial worldmaking.