The Search For A Cold War Legitimacy Foreign Policy And Tito S Yugoslavia

An alternative argument for understanding the success of Titoist Yugoslavia (1945–1990) and raises new questions about the bipolar international relations between East and West.

This book develops a conceptual model of legitimacy as a value-judgement in international relations in contrast to Weberian and legal approaches. The model is based on the interaction of the states-systemic value of order with a liberal ideal of the state and a free-market, liberal international economy. Whilst formulated as a principally Western model, the analysis of the rise and fall of Yugoslavia and the international response points towards a wider applicability as well as confirming the value of the concept as an analytical tool.

This book is aimed at presenting fresh views, interpretations, and reinterpretations of some already researched issues relating to the Yugoslav foreign policy and international relations up to year 1991. Yugoslavia positioned itself as a communist state that was not under the heel of the Soviet diplomacy and policy and as such was perceived by the West as an acceptable partner and useful tool in counteracting the Soviet influence.

Keeping Tito Afloat draws upon newly declassified documents to show the critical role that Yugoslavia played in U.S. foreign policy with the communist world in the early years of the Cold War. After World War II, the United States considered Yugoslavia to be a loyal Soviet satellite, but Tito surprised the West in 1948 by breaking with Stalin. Seizing this opportunity, the Truman administration sought to "keep Tito afloat" by giving him military and economic aid. President Truman hoped that American involvement would encourage other satellites to follow Tito's example and further damage Soviet power. However, Lees demonstrates that it was President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who most actively tried to use Tito as a "wedge" to liberate the Eastern Europeans. By the end of 1958, Eisenhower and Dulles discontinued this "wedge strategy" because it raised too many questions about the ties that should exist between communist, noncommunist, and neutral states. As Tito shrewdly kept the U.S. at arm's length, Eisenhower was forced to accept Tito's continued absence from the Soviet orbit as victory enough. In the period between 1958 and 1960, Lees examines U.S. political objectives that remained after military support for Tito was discontinued. Although use of Yugoslavia as a wedge never fully succeeded, Lees shows how that strategy reflected the pragmatic and geopolitical policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Keeping Tito Afloat utilizes diverse sources including personal interviews with key U.S. and Yugoslav officials, official and private papers and oral histories from the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower libraries, State Department records, some only recently declassified, from the National Archives, and the papers of George F. Kennan and John Foster Dulles.

In American Foreign Policy and Yugoslavia, 1939-1941, Ivo Tasovac contends that Yugoslavia acted as an unwilling prop for American involvement in World War II. As a result of America's commitment to Britain as an exception to their doctrine of neutrality, and of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt's shared eagerness for conflict and suppression of Germany, the war and ensuing Communist takeover of Eastern Europe were inevitable. With Yugoslavia cast as the endangered barrier between the Germans and the Mediterranean, Churchill was able to establish an unquestionable need for U.S. military action. Britain's leader could seize on the small country as a staging area for activating the Soviets in order to eliminate Italy and weaken Germany in the process. Tasovac contends that pressure from the British government and the American diplomats investigating the situation in fact enforced the Serbian coup d'etat to overthrow Prince Paul of Yugoslavia when he appeared sympathetic to Germany, even though the Serbians had no intentions of fighting. With all of the ingredients for conflict in place, the ensuing struggle for Yugoslavian freedom was unavoidable. By bringing the war to the Balkans, Churchill and Roosevelt shaped the next half-century of international politics and domination. American Foreign Policy and Yugoslavia documents and analyzes the decisions and policies that made this action so detrimental to Yugoslavia and other Balkan states. Tasovac brings new light to the realities of the engagement in Yugoslavia and the long-standing effects, discarding the appearances of history for the truth. This study is ideal for a broad audience of scholars, including those interestedin NATO policies applied to the Balkan states, the relationship between the United States and those states, Franklin D. Roosevelt's influence on the world stage during his presidency and World War II, and the history of Yugoslavia as a whole.

This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy. Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.

Throughout the twentieth century in the lands of Yugoslavia, socialists embarked on multiple projects of supranational unification. Sensitive to the vulnerability of small nations in a world of great powers, they pursued political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between the national and the global – from regional strategies of Balkan federalism to continental visions of European integration to the internationalist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Mediating Spaces James Robertson offers an intellectual history of the diverse supranational politics of Yugoslav socialism, beginning with its birth in the 1870s and concluding with its violent collapse in the 1990s. Showcasing the ways in which socialists in Southeast Europe confronted the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, the book frames the evolution of supranational politics as a response to the shifting dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition. Arguing that literature was a crucial vehicle for imagining new communities beyond the nation, Robertson analyzes the manuscripts, journals, and personal correspondence of the literary left to excavate the cultural geographies that animated Yugoslav socialism and its supranational horizons. The book ultimately illuminates the innovative strategies of cultural development used by socialist writers to challenge global asymmetries of power and prestige. Mediating Spaces reveals the full significance of supranationalism in the history of socialist thought, recovering a key concern for an era of renewed geopolitical contestation in Eastern Europe.