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An Almost Forgotten Legacy: Non-Aligned Yugoslavia in the United Nations and in the Making of Contemporary International Law

November 16, 2017
By 23904

Arno Trültzsch is a Sylff fellow from the University of Leipzig. He is working on a dissertation to explore the former Yugoslavia’s non-alignment policy and movement and its impact on international norms, including international laws and major UN resolutions for humanitarian and peace-building efforts, between 1948 and 1980. In this article, Trültzsch discusses the essence of his findings and arguments.

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Introduction

The title of my PhD project, “Non-Alignment Revisited: Yugoslavia’s Impact on International Law 1948–1980,” already indicates that the project is set on the crossroads of different disciplines and methods: global and local (i.e., Southeast European) history, international law, international relations, and intellectual history. My starting point was the rather well-known fact that, after its dismissal from the socialist camp in 1948, Yugoslavia became one of the instigators, main drivers, and pioneers of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement. Research on this global phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century is still scarce and scattered along single issues, such as decolonization, economic history, and postcolonial topics. General accounts of non-alignment are either contemporary assessments from the 1960s to 1980s or standout research endeavors done in recent years.[1]

I want to contribute to this strain of research with a study of Yugoslavia’s role and impact on international law through its non-aligned policies. I therefore focus on the historicity of international law and its doctrines as expressions of specific social and political contexts, tied together by the discipline’s normativity and claim to provide a universal set of rules to international problems. I have drawn on important thinkers like Martti Koskenniemi, Bhupinder Chimni, and Hersch Lauterpacht. I also address (early) Marxist and Soviet theories of international law, as both are crucial for understanding the Yugoslav socialist perspective on international affairs and their law.

Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement

Commemorative poster for the first conference of non-aligned states held in Belgrade in 1961. Josip Broz Tito is fourth from right on the top row.


The Non-Aligned Movement first started as a loose dialogue platform and public forum of diverse smaller countries, especially former colonies from the Global South (Africa, Asia, and later also Latin America), who wanted to raise their voices against global inequalities and injustices and the ongoing nuclear arms race in the Cold War. Hence the name “non-alignment,” coined by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to describe the country’s independent foreign policy outside the forming camps of the northern hemisphere—the United States and its allies versus Soviet Union and its satellites.

After 1948, Yugoslavia was mostly isolated in a divided Europe, so the Yugoslavs looked for new allies, which they found among former colonies and mandate territories that had just gained their independence. During the 1950s and 1960s, therefore, Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito engaged in lengthy travels around the globe to build personal alliances with the leaders of these “new” countries. Tito’s personal diplomacy was widely publicized and praised, gaining Yugoslavia worldwide prestige. After an overture in 1956, during which he built a personal alliance with Prime Minister Nehru of India and President Nasser of Egypt, the first conference of the non-aligned countries was held in Yugoslavia’s capital of Belgrade in 1961.

Besides this high-level public diplomacy, Yugoslavia sought to strengthen the United Nations’ system for solving international conflicts, particularly through binding norms of international law, mostly to secure its delicate position in a divided Europe and globe. To that end, Yugoslav protagonists initiated an increasing number of draft resolutions within the organs of the United Nations, together with their new non-aligned partners—especially India and Egypt. Although many of these moves were connected with the complexities of Yugoslav foreign policy, they deserve thorough analysis and reassessment.

Evaluating the Legacy

Milan Šahović, a legal expert of the Yugoslav delegation, speaking at the Fifth and Sixth Committees on legal matters of the UN General Assembly. 

I am about to explore and question whether these initiatives contributed to an increasing legal certainty in international affairs and how they fitted Yugoslav foreign policy interests, especially in the controversial fields of human rights, peace and security, state responsibility, and disarmament. All these issues were discussed and redefined in the course of the Cold War, during which the non-aligned sought to be a “third” option of independent but cooperating countries outside the political camps and military alliances epitomized by the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In this vein, I am examining and evaluating specific Yugoslav approaches to and interpretations of international law, focusing on the triad of political actors, legal experts, and diplomacy. I combine this actor-based approach with the analysis of foreign policy documents—especially diplomatic correspondence and political reports between Belgrade and the UN delegations—and the critical examination of Yugoslav publications on international law. Another group of important sources are Yugoslav textbooks and studies dealing with different aspects and doctrines of international law and the UN system.

Likewise, a set of ideological and political treatises on non-alignment and Yugoslav socialism have caught my attention, as I try to highlight the connection between Yugoslav socialist ideology, legal expertise, and foreign policy initiatives in the United Nations. After 1948, Yugoslavia remained a socialist country (much to the surprise of the West) but outside the Soviet camp, soon developing a particular socioeconomic system and variant of Marxist ideology called “worker’s self-management,” which Yugoslav foreign policy even tried to popularize in some non-aligned developing countries, though to little avail.

Many of the pushes for a further juridification[2] of international relations did not necessarily result in so-called “hard” or codified international law. But I argue that these ideas still had a wider impact both on Yugoslavia’s international and self-image, especially in legitimating the authoritarian rule of its leader Josip Broz Tito and the League of Communists (the ruling party), and on the inner dynamics of the Non-Aligned Movement until the early 1980s. In my further research and writing process, I want to delineate whether these “image politics” were the primary purpose of Yugoslavia’s UN activities, or if they really had a tangible impact on international law.

I have therefore analyzed archive materials from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which still keeps the Yugoslav records) and the Historical Archives of Yugoslavia, both of which are in Belgrade, for the period from 1948 to 1980. In the textbooks and in the archive files, I was able to specify a number of significant UN initiatives and their wider impact. Among these are important contributions for defining acts of aggression against other states that resulted in General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) in 1974 and the codification and elaboration of diplomatic and consular intercourse, leading to the 1964 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Law. Furthermore, Yugoslavia helped establish a general Magna Carta of international legal conduct in line with the political doctrine of “active peaceful coexistence”: the Friendly Relations Declaration of 1970, or Resolution 2625 (XXV). Likewise significant are Yugoslav drafts on counterterrorism measures (specifically, aircraft hijacking and protection of diplomats), leading to important conventions in 1972 and 1973.

Drawing on legal language, while seeking political solutions, Yugoslav UN diplomats and law experts repeatedly requested serious steps on disarmament, calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and supported the decolonization process as well as providing direct support for various postcolonial liberation movements, such as those in Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa. These actions led to the criminalization of apartheid and racism under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (adopted in 1965, entered into force in 1969) and the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973 and 1976). In the disarmament debate, meanwhile, only single issues could be tackled, and Yugoslav experts codrafted the conventions on prohibiting biological and chemical weapons. The former was opened for signature in 1972 and entered into force in 1975, while the latter reached these milestones in 1992 and 1993, respectively.

On the European scale, Yugoslav politicians, together with their colleagues from neutral Finland and Austria, mediated between the power blocs to establish a dialogue on peace, disarmament, and civil rights—the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Belgrade was the host city of the second summit in 1977. The Yugoslav drafts on national minority protection were incorporated into the CSCE framework and are still valid for the CSCE’s successor organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Minority rights were also an important field of action in the United Nations, but without the impact that Yugoslav proposals and concepts had on a European scale. Altogether, the country’s openness and affirmation of human rights stood in contrast to the country’s record at home; human rights were nominally intact but were focused on social and workers’ rights, and Yugoslav citizens could not enjoy the civil rights and freedoms that their country had officially recognized on an international scale.

While Yugoslavia is today remembered largely for the wars that resulted from the country’s dissolution eventually into seven states (if one counts Kosovo), which led to new legal problems on an international scale, the contribution of this socialist, non-aligned country to international matters and their law is largely forgotten—often even inside the successor states. I am about to change that, pending the completion of my dissertation (in German) hopefully by next year.

 

Further reading

For general information on and English abstracts and presentations by the author, see: https://uni-leipzig.academia.edu/ArnoTrultzsch

Trültzsch, Arno. “Blockfreiheit und Sozialismus: der Beitrag Jugoslawiens zur Völkerrechtsentwicklung nach 1945.” Die Friedens-Warte: Journal of International Peace and Organization 90, no. 1/2 (December 2015): 161–88. (in German)

———. “Völkerrecht und Sozialismus: Sowjetische versus jugoslawische Perspektiven.” In Leipziger Zugänge zur rechtlichen, politischen und kulturellen Verflechtungsgeschichte Ostmitteleuropas, edited by Dietmar Müller and Adamantios Skordos, 1st ed., 83–104. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2014. (in German)

Arnold, Guy. The A to Z of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Kilibarda, Konstantin. “Non-Aligned Geographies in the Balkans: Space, Race and Image in the Construction of New ‘European’ Foreign Policies.” In Security Beyond the Discipline: Emerging Dialogues on Global Politics—Selected Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the York Centre for International and Security Studies, 27–57. York: York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2010.

Kullaa, Rinna. Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Mišković, Nataša, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Nada Boškovska, eds. The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi–Bandung–Belgrade. London, New York: Routledge, 2014.

[1] Significant recent publications on the general history of the Non-Aligned are: Jürgen Dinkel, Die Bewegung Bündnisfreier Staaten: Genese, Organisation und Politik (1927–1992), first ed. (München: DeGruyter Oldenbourg, 2015) (in German); Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and Nada Boškovska, eds., The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi–Bandung–Belgrade (London, New York: Routledge, 2014); Guy Arnold, The A to Z of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010); and, with a focus on Finland and Yugoslavia during the 1950s, Rinna Kullaa, Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

[2] Juridification: turning moral ideas and political demands into written law; a wider term for codification, which more narrowly describes the written consolidation of laws that have formed out of custom or sheer practice, particularly in international affairs between two or more states.

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Sylff@Tokyo: First Sylff Visitor to Our New Office

November 15, 2017

Alexandra Tamiko Da Dalt, second from right, and David D. Sussman with Sylff Association secretariat members.

On November 2, Alexandra Tamiko Da Dalt, a 2014 Sylff fellowship recipient at Columbia University, visited the Tokyo Foundation and became the first Sylff guest at the Foundation’s new office in Roppongi Grand Tower.

Alexandra completed her master’s studies at Columbia University and is currently affiliated with Refugee Assistance and Information Network International (RAIN International), where she offers technical assistance for and conducts research on refugee resettlement programs.

A fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, Alexandra visited relatives living in Osaka and Chiba to reconnect with her family roots in Japan. During lunch she described her experience traveling around Okinawa and Hokkaido, the country’s southernmost and northernmost prefectures, which deepened her appreciation of both the natural and cultural heritage of Japan.

Also joining for lunch was David D. Sussman, who received a Sylff fellowship in 2003 while attending the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and who is now a research associate in the Tokyo Foundation’s Policy Research department. He and Alexandra first met in October 2016 at a Sylff fellows’ gathering in New York City, hosted by the Sylff Association. They noted a mutual interest in refugee-related issues and have kept in touch to share information and career insights. The Sylff Association secretariat encourages such networking within the Sylff community.

Sylff fellows and steering committee members are always welcome to stop by the Foundation’s office when visiting Tokyo. We would be more than happy to share the splendid view of the Tokyo skyline from our brand new, thirty-fourth-floor office!

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Indigenous Technology and Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Report

October 23, 2017
By 19603

Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu is a Sylff fellow from Howard University in the United States. She was also awarded an SLI grant in 2016, with which she implemented a workshop on leadership training for future young leaders in Rwanda. Born and raised in Nigeria, Chika first visited Rwanda as a junior consultant for the World Bank during her PhD studies and was enchanted by the peaceful, welcoming, and hardworking nation. She joined the faculty of the University of Rwanda after completing her PhD at Howard and, since then, has been vigorously contributing to further economic and social improvement in the country. The following article is based on her recent research on indigenous technology and how it can empower rural women in Rwanda.

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Need for Local Technology

Drinking banana wine.

Technology is more strategically positioned to trigger innovation and growth within a community when it is founded on the realities and lived experiences of a people; indigenous technology is that technology with roots in a community or group of people. Many industrially advanced societies commenced their journey with indigenous technology as the starting point, from where they have traveled to reach their present place. A dependence on imported technology often leads to stunted growth of the industrial system. As such, and because innovation and creative output arising from indigenous knowledge is a pertinent driver of economic growth, societies aiming toward unhindered industrial progression will need to seriously explore options available within the indigenous technological knowledge pool (Basu & Weil, 1998). Processes, products, services, and systems built in response to existing and projected challenges or even the realities of a particular environment are essentially sustainable and hold potential for further enlargement by community members.

Role of Rural Women in Local Technology

Rural women are increasingly becoming the major custodians of indigenous technology. There are several reasons, including the traditional role of women in homesteads and the migration of men to urban areas in search of employment. Rural women apply indigenous technology to agriculture and food processing, family healthcare, livelihood management, and community development; even where they have access to employment in rural areas, women do not always have access to modern technology for use in the production process and still turn to traditional methods and techniques. Although many governments concerned with rural women’s economic empowerment have made efforts to institute modern technology and make it more accessible, its adaptation and sustainability has been a major challenge. The high cost of importing modern technology pales in comparison to the needed investment of time and funds in continuous education, training, and maintenance of that technology.

In rural areas, women are often marginalized in the distribution of jobs, mostly due to traditional beliefs about men being breadwinners and women being homemakers. Women in rural areas often have to contend with social norms that limit their ability to combine work, family, and other social and personal responsibilities. When they are engaged in meaningful employment, women tend to be clustered in fewer sectors than their male counterparts. In the field of agriculture, for instance, women tend to dominate the subsistence production sphere, even in situations where other nontraditional and commercial farming opportunities exist.

Despite the noted challenges, available empirical evidence across the world indicates that with women being increasingly in control of household resources, either through their own earnings or by cash transfers, the chances of overall economic advancement are remarkably improved. Indeed, at the family level, research outcomes from countries as varied as Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom point to the fact that expenses on overall family well-being and children’s education increase when women have greater access to household income (World Bank, 2011).

Rwanda and Rural Women’s Advancement

Fifty-four percent of Rwanda’s population is female, while 30 percent of rural households are headed by women. Many rural households are not entirely food secure, because they cannot depend on farming due mainly to environmental factors and their utilization of technology that requires intensive labor (IFAD, 2012). In rural areas, women often cultivate smaller plots of less than one hectare and depend on rain to irrigate grain crops, rear traditional livestock, and grow vegetables. Few female farmers compete with men in the cash crops production sector, which occupies only about 4 percent of total arable land. In essence, female-headed households in rural Rwanda are susceptible to poverty and malnutrition.

The government of Rwanda has shown an unwavering commitment to advancing women on several fronts. Economically speaking, the percentage of Rwandan women who are in paid employment is higher than ever in the history of the nation. The government of Rwanda is one of the few countries in the world that have a dedicated Gender Monitoring Office tasked with ensuring the mainstreaming of gender issues in policy making. Still, as in many other parts of the developing world, unemployment and underemployment remain prevalent in Rwanda, especially among poor rural women, who are mostly subsistence farmers. This is despite several pro-poor policies by the Rwandan government that attempt to accommodate the needs of rural women. Several factors account for this, including low financial literacy, poor information access, and weak bargaining power (Pozarny, 2016).

Rwanda: An Empirical Study

The need to find homegrown and grassroots approaches to the economic empowerment of rural women in Rwanda informed research on the role that indigenous technology can play in achieving this aim. The research was conducted by a group of researchers from the University of Rwanda led by the author and supported by the International Development Research Center of Canada. Studies were conducted on the possibility that products based on indigenous technology, such as indigenous beverages (banana wine and juice, sorghum beer and drink), indigenous vegetables, and traditional fermented beer, could contribute to the economic empowerment of rural women.

Indigenous Beverage Production

The results indicate that indigenous-technology-based beverages and fermented milk hold great potential for improving the livelihoods of rural women. We interviewed 100 rural women who produce or sell indigenous beverages and 100 rural producers of fermented milk, who said that they make profits of between 40 US cents and 1 dollar per 20-liter plastic container. Sales can range from a few jerry cans to as much as 40 per week. Female producers also employ a number of casual workers, sometimes as many as five. Many female producers of indigenous beverages note that they were unable to afford meals for their families prior to beginning the business but can now pay school fees, purchase health insurance, and secure decent living spaces. Although these women do not receive government support—as they have said themselves and government officials have confirmed—they do pay taxes. However, many of them note that tax preparation takes up a lot of time, and many have to shut down business during tax preparation. Women producers also find it difficult to obtain loans from financial institutions due to their inability to provide collateral. Women say that although they would like to package their drinks, the cost of packaging is prohibitive and the packaged product would be outside the reach of their current customers.

The study established that rural women can benefit much more economically when diverse beverage products are on offer, especially when basic hygienic and aesthetic standards are met. Rural tourism is receiving a boost in many countries around the world. In France, for instance, tourists travel from all over the world to rural France in order to have a taste of locally made French cheese, crafted using centuries-old indigenous technological know-how. Rwanda can tap into the rural tourism market by identifying local champions in various rural areas and supporting them with branding and marketing.

Indigenous Vegetables

Female rural producers say that indigenous vegetables like urudega, ibidodoki, inyabutongo, and isogo have healing properties and have been used to effectively treat such conditions as anemia, ulcers, constipation, diarrhea, oral candidiasis, abdominal pain, and more. They testify that demand for these vegetables in rural areas far outweigh supply, whereas in the urban areas only a few traditional vegetables, such as dodoki, are in high demand and are quite expensive, as demand far outweighs supply. Female rural indigenous vegetable farmers note the penchant of urban dwellers for imported vegetables, such as cucumber, cabbage, and tomatoes. They say they are unable to produce sufficient quantities of indigenous vegetables due to limited land, lack of manure, limited knowledge, diseases and pests, the damaging effects of climate change leading to droughts and heavy rains, and the perception that the youth and urban dwellers hold of certain traditional vegetables as being food reserved for poor rural dwellers.

Conclusion

The Rwandan government and development partners can play a key role in improving the production of indigenous products by rural women using indigenous technology. Rather than the previous emphasis on imported technology, which is expensive, difficult to maintain, and does not foster local technology, emphasis can be placed on supporting rural women through a variety of means, including training on processing, hygiene, aesthetics, customer service, financial literacy, branding and marketing, business management, and simple production methods. There is also a need to provide these women producers of indigenous beverages with expanded access to finances, as well as ensure that they have improved market access, infrastructure, and facilities. Moreover, the public needs to be enlightened on the nutritious content and health benefits of indigenous products. The government of Rwanda will then be more likely to achieve its vision of turning the country into a self-sustaining economy, not dependent on external funds or resources for advancement and growth, in record time.

(NB: The full article will be published in 2018 as a special issue of the journal Indigenous Knowledge: Other Ways of Knowing.)

References

Basu, S., & D. Weil (1998). “Appropriate Technology and Growth.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, 1025–54.

IFAD (2012). Enabling Poor Rural People to Overcome Poverty in Rwanda. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Pozarny, P. (2016). “The Rwanda Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP) Public Works and Women's Empowerment.” GSDRC at the University of Birmingham/Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

World Bank (2011). World Development Report. Washington D.C.: World Bank.

 

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We’re moving!

October 12, 2017

Sylff Association Secretariat office will be moving to a new address as of October 16, 2017.
Please make a note of changes in our postal address and phone number, as cited below.
We are always very happy to receive Sylff visitors at our office.
Please contact us in advance, and come and enjoy the amazing view of Tokyo Tower from our brand new office on the 34th floor of Roppongi Grand Tower!

1.　New Address
Roppongi Grand Tower, 34th Fl., 3-2-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 106-6234, Japan

2.　New Phone Number
Tel 81-3-5797-8402

3.　New Office Opens
Monday, October 16, 2017

4.　Access
Roppongi-itchome Stn. (Nanboku L.): Direct link from Exit 1
Roppongi Stn. (Hibiya L., Oedo L.): 5 min. from Exit 5
Tameike-sanno Stn. (Ginza L., Nanboku L.): 8 min. from Exit 13
Kamiyacho Stn. (Hibiya L.): 10 min. from Exit 2

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