Filip Mitričević

The 1948 split with the USSR forced the Yugoslav regime to refashion their understanding of socialism, their international relations, and even the representations of the recent past. By the mid-1950s, Yugoslavia was securely on the Non-Aligned course as the only European state championing bloc independence. The Yugoslav regime managed to precisely amalgamate different ideological assumptions and meanings into a diplomatic platform that secured the unlikely path for a Balkan nation. My project analyzes how the Yugoslav communist regime used diplomacy with memory to establish a foothold in the Global South during the Cold War. Yugoslav regime employed World War II history as a diplomatic tool to secure its legitimacy with states with a colonial past looking for a haven from imperialistic tendencies and ideological bloc division. My project shows how the Yugoslav Communist Party and Josip Broz Tito successfully reformulated and synonymized the antifascist resistance and the socialist revolution with anti-colonial struggles, making socialism the ideological foundation stone for its effortless obvious and more appealing to a wider variety of international audiences. Thus, the regime
fostered an international cooperation network and provided a foundation for Yugoslavia to participate in a global anti-colonial movement.

I open the conversation about the Yugoslav regime’s understanding and employment of socialism as a malleable idea by intertwining it with the representation of the country’s antifascist legacy. I pose the following questions: What was the most potent tool of Yugoslav diplomatic efforts in the 1950s? How did the regime employ memory tropes to justify the state’s existence and to create the externally projected image? How did these tropes and the regime’s search for legitimacy change over the early Cold War period? Did the regime’s interpretation of the past shape both domestic and international circumstances? To offer a new historiographical perspective, I analyze the power of language and introduce diplomacy with memory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as tools for deciphering how the Yugoslav regime negotiated and projected reality and power in the 1950s. By qualitatively analyzing the legitimacy discourse used internationally, I show the potential of exploring how the regime rebranded the Yugoslav World War II victory and the subsequent resistance to Stalin into the state’s most successful exported symbolic capital and a foundation for an anti-colonial solidarity network during the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement.