AUTONOMY, SOCIALISM AND THE LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ORDER

The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform on 28 June 1948 came on the back of growing tensions between Belgrade and Moscow. Frustrated with the Yugoslav leadership's confrontational stance with the West over Trieste and its continuing support for Greek rebels, by the summer of 1948 Stalin had settled on a policy of toppling the Yugoslav leadership.Footnote ¹² The split with the Soviet Union forced the Yugoslavs to rethink the vision of socialist revolution they pursued. Cut off from Soviet funds and threatened with invasion from the Warsaw Pact countries, the Yugoslavs turned to the West and over the course of 1949–53 the country was gradually integrated into the aid and trade networks of the US and its Western European allies.Footnote ¹³ To be sure, this was not an overt alliance and neither Yugoslav nor US leaders were eager to broadcast the rapprochement.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, US support largely took the form of facilitating multilateral aid and credit agreements or sponsorship within international institutions. By the winter of 1949 the US had extended military and food aid to Tito's government and had successfully lobbied for Yugoslavia's election to the UN Security Council. Within a year the Yugoslavs joined the Coal Committee of the Economic Committee for Europe; successfully sought loans from the World Bank, the IMF and the US Export–Import Bank, as well as British banks; and began to actively pursue trade with Western markets.Footnote ¹⁵ By 1950 Yugoslavia had begun a path to integration into the postwar international system.

The global order into which Yugoslavs sought integration was rooted in the norms and practices of liberal internationalism. Underpinned by the economic and military power of the US, the ideological pillars of this system grew out of classical liberal traditions that had been adapted to accommodate an emerging global sovereignty regime rooted in the nation-state. Articulated in documents such as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen-Point Plan and the wartime Atlantic Charter, this doctrine sought to reconcile liberal economic preferences for free trade and freedom of the seas with respect for national self-determination and the equality of sovereign states. It was this doctrine of liberal internationalism that informed the ordering of the postwar state system. International trade was to be promoted through multilateral arrangements like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, while cooperation between self-determining nation-states took place through international governing bodies such as the UN, UNESCO and the IMF.Footnote ¹⁶ Meanwhile, traditional liberal concerns with individual freedoms were revived under the rubric of human rights. Far from being neutral territory, this system of “embedded liberalism,” as G. J. Ikenberry has observed, was a “milieu-oriented” grand strategy that sought to construct an international environment favorable to Washington's long-term security and economic interests.Footnote ¹⁷

Postwar liberal internationalism differed from earlier iterations of classical liberalism in that it proved more amenable to the increasingly hegemonic principles of national self-determination and the equality of sovereign states.Footnote ¹⁸ To be sure, the legitimacy of national self-determination did not go unchallenged in the new international institutions. In the immediate postwar decade conflicts between the colonial states of Western Europe and the emerging states of Asia and Africa turned on the tension between a classical liberal understanding of individual rights and collective demands for national self-determination.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite this tension, however, anticolonial activists often shared key liberal ideas. Particularly in the first postwar decade, as Roland Burke has demonstrated, postcolonial actors rarely perceived a conflict between their support for national self-determination and their commitment to individual freedoms, religious liberty and democratic governance.Footnote ²⁰ Such complementarity between traditional liberal values and the principle of national self-determination should not be surprising; at a deep conceptual level, arguments in defense of national sovereignty drew much of their legitimacy from an implicit acceptance of liberal norms. To the extent that it allowed, through “the hook of analogy,” an equivalence between the liberal principles that governed relations between individuals and those between states, postwar liberal internationalism built on and extrapolated from classical liberal conceptions of the sovereign individual and transposed these into the register of international relations.Footnote ²¹

It was within the institutional and conceptual framework of this liberal internationalism that Yugoslavia's socialist leadership turned to the postcolonial world, eventually helping to found the nonaligned movement. While authoritative accounts of Yugoslavia's diplomatic pivot to Asia, Africa and Latin America have often highlighted the leadership's efforts to secure “a life outside the two blocs,” they have left undertheorized the degree to which this diplomatic strategy relied on and was pursued through the institutions of the Western international system.Footnote ²² It has, therefore, often gone unacknowledged the degree to which Yugoslav reformers implicitly accepted the “embedded liberalism” of these institutions as legitimate principles for the ordering of relations between states. Even as they set out to criticize Western states for their imperialist policies, Yugoslav leaders often did so by evoking the norms of liberal internationalism. As early as December 1948, for instance, Edvard Kardelj called for the further democratization of the UN, including the ending of all economic discrimination between states and greater protections for the independence of small nations.Footnote ²³ Yugoslav leaders also evoked liberal norms to defend their national interests in the Trieste dispute, during which they frequently accused the Italian government of violating the “human rights and basic freedoms” of Slovene minorities.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, it was precisely around efforts to have the right to national self-determination included in the Covenant on Human Rights during the early 1950s that Yugoslavia first began to establish close alliances with states in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In other words, it was their deepening integration into international institutions, particularly the UN, that fostered Yugoslavia's ties with the postcolonial world.Footnote ²⁵

Highlighting the place of Yugoslavia in the postwar international system allows us to better see the ways in which the leadership selectively appropriated the norms and values of liberal internationalism. This is certainly not to suggest that Yugoslavia was a liberal democratic state. Despite the vitriolic language that Yugoslav leaders would use against their former allies in Moscow, their understanding of political power continued to owe a considerable debt to Stalinist practice.Footnote ²⁶ Even following the separation of the party from the state in November 1952, the newly rebranded League of Communists of Yugoslavia remained the sole legal political organization and continued to monopolize state power, with which it persecuted ideological opponents. It is telling, in this regard, that the decentralization of state institutions went in tandem with the rigorous recentralization of the party. The case of Milovan Đilas, expelled from the league in 1954 and subsequently incarcerated for his public calls for a multiparty system, is only the best-known example of the limits of socialist Yugoslavia's democracy.Footnote ²⁷

That Yugoslavia did not adhere to liberal democratic principles does not, however, mean that reformers did not seek out points of possible imbrication with liberal traditions of thought. The ideological reservoirs of Marxism were deep and offered a wealth of ideas and experiences from which Yugoslav reformers could draw in order to find common ground with liberalism, broadly conceived. Autonomy proved to be one key concept through which Yugoslavs sought to harmonize their own revolutionary project with postwar liberal internationalism.

Although recent scholarship in Soviet history has emphasized the integrative and totalizing practices of Soviet statecraft and, consequently, has insisted on the limits and even the impossibility of autonomous subjectivity in communist ideology, the intellectual history of communist thought suggests a more complicated story.Footnote ²⁸ From its origins in Marx and Engels's writings, communist theory negotiated, critiqued and reinterpreted classical liberal notions of individual or social autonomy outside the normative framework of capitalism and liberal democracy. Marx's early works sketched the process of humanity's liberation from both the alienation of capitalist production and the reification of the modern state. His early analysis of the Silesian weavers’ revolt, for instance, highlighted the antagonism between the social and political spheres that suggested workers’ self-emancipation to be coterminous with the liberation of civil society from the state.Footnote ²⁹ Conceived in this way, within Marx's system the autonomy valued by classical liberals was not to be realized through a legislative program of civil rights or a new social contract but radically recast through the revolutionary reconstitution of social life and the liberation of “total man.”Footnote ³⁰ This effort to radicalize the meaning of autonomy would continue to find expression in communist thought, up to and including Lenin's writings in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Although often identified as the source of an authoritarian communism, Lenin left behind a more complex legacy. While certainly committed to a project of disciplined political rule, much of his bolder theoretical visions were premised on the autonomous activity of a self-conscious working class. Works such as State and Revolution sought out models for the transition to socialism premised on the “withering away” of state power and the self-governance of society, a revolutionary vision that informed early Soviet policies of workers’ control and peasant self-organization.Footnote ³¹ Even in its Leninist articulation, then, communist thought preserved earlier Marxist concerns with autonomy and self-determination that ran counter to the totalizing and integral state of high Stalinism.Footnote ³² When Yugoslavs set out to revise their models of socialism, therefore, they had at their hands a rich intellectual tradition that offered several potential points of conceptual overlap with postwar liberalism.

CREATIVITY AND AUTONOMY IN SOCIALIST SELF-MANAGEMENT

It was during the early years of ideological crisis and shifting international alliances that the conceptual and institutional foundations of Yugoslav self-management socialism were established. Rejecting the Soviet system, leading party theorists such as Edvard Kardelj, Milovan Đilas and Boris Kidrič set out to critique it and, ultimately, pioneer an alternative path to socialism. To this end they seized on Marx and Lenin's concept of the “withering away of the state,” according to which the transition to communism should lead to an erosion of the state as an administrative body reified from society. Writing of this concept in 1949, the Slovene leader, Edvard Kardelj, linked it explicitly to the practice of self-management: “The more a socialist democracy is really socialist … the more daringly will it develop self-government [samoupravu] by the masses, until the moment when it transforms itself into a veritable freedom for all men and thereby dies out as a state.”Footnote ³³ For genuine socialism to develop, he concluded, the Yugoslav revolution should actively facilitate the disaggregation and, eventually, the dissolution of state power through the institution of forums for self-management. Over the course of 1949–53 the party set out to implement this revolutionary vision, transferring greater powers from the federal government to local communal administrations, introducing workers’ councils in enterprises and formally separating the party from state structures.Footnote ³⁴ During these years, self-management grew from an experimental model of industrial relations into an organizational paradigm that could be applied to numerous spheres of life to reorder social relations—from the shop floor to municipal politics to cultural production. Underpinning this paradigm were a set of principles that included the decentralization of administrative powers, the expansion of participatory forums, and the autonomy of individuals and social collectives from the state.

The evolving doctrine of self-management not only allowed Yugoslav leaders to offer a novel model of socialism distinct from and sharply at odds with that of the Soviets, it simultaneously harmonized their Marxism with many of the liberal norms and principles governing the international system. Several reforms of this early period moved explicitly in this direction. Unlike elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, Yugoslav leaders such as Moše Pijade were emphatic about the need to cleave closely to the rule of law and by 1951 a new criminal code guaranteed citizens greater personal protections from the state.Footnote ³⁵ Likewise, as the Yugoslav leadership moved away from the command economy of the Soviets, it relied more and more on market mechanisms to stabilize the economy, a decision guaranteed to meet with praise by liberal economists in the West. By the 1960s the party had moved towards a nationwide system of market socialism and Yugoslav neoclassical economic advisers began to traverse the transnational intellectual networks of the postwar world.Footnote ³⁶

But the effort to harmonize Marxism with liberal doctrines went further than the legal or economic realm; this effort sank deep into the ideological configuration of Yugoslav socialism. As a paradigm that sought to mobilize initiative outside the state, self-management socialism rested on certain assumptions regarding the autonomy of the individual and civil society that brought it in line with liberal traditions and that contrasted markedly with the integrative state of high Stalinism. Rooted in the Marxist assumption that the path to socialism would lead to the withering away of the state, self-management presupposed spaces of autonomy beyond state power that could be transformed into future loci of sovereignty. While Yugoslav leaders still primarily spoke of this autonomy as it applied to collective subjects—workers’ councils, peasant cooperatives, national communities or revolutionary organizations—the independence they sought to preserve for these collectives trickled down to a growing concern for the autonomy of the individual in ways that resonated more clearly with liberal traditions. In a lecture from 1952, for instance, Milovan Đilas emphasized the importance of the “free personality” (slobodna ličnost) for the construction of socialism and castigated the Soviets for their disregard for personal freedoms. Drawing on Marx's earlier texts, Đilas argued that the Stalinist state was at odds with the German revolutionary's view that “the freedom of the individual does not presuppose the freedom of the collective but is rather its presupposition.” The free individual, he insisted, was the sole “creative force” (stvaralačka snaga) in society and, therefore, the building block of socialism.Footnote ³⁷ Such a concept of an autonomous individual was a strategic necessity for theorists as it offered a counterweight to the growth of bureaucracy. Tito, in a speech from 1950, likewise cited the importance of this autonomy when he warned that “bureaucratism flowers just there where people are not conscious of their right to control.”Footnote ³⁸ And Kardelj too insisted on the need of the socialist state to mobilize “individual initiative,” just as capitalism had done at an earlier stage of human development, in order to advance the process of economic development.Footnote ³⁹ The defense against Soviet-style bureaucratism, that is, was the individual's awareness of themselves as an active subject of social creation, not a passive object of state administration.

Creativity was bound up with Yugoslav socialists’ language of autonomy, and one of their chief accusations against the Soviet system was that its bureaucratic despotism stamped out the creativity and initiative that socialism needed to thrive. These qualities, they argued, could only emerge from the activity of an individual or social collective autonomous from state administration. In his attempts to steer a path away from the command economy of the Soviet model, the chief architect of the self-managed economy, Boris Kidrič, emphasized the importance of the “autonomous initiative [samostalnu inicijativu] of the working collectives” and warned against the state's overzealous efforts of taxing or planning, which might stamp out such grassroots creativity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Tito, too, identified this autonomous initiative as “the motor force for the development of all the creative powers [stvaralačkih snaga] in our people.”Footnote ⁴¹ But it was Kardelj that perhaps best articulated the significance with which this notion of autonomous creativity was imbued in Yugoslav socialism. In his 1949 pamphlet On Socialist Democracy, he explained,

For Yugoslav reformers, self-management socialism was an attempt to harness the population's creativity and initiative by institutionalizing forms of autonomy and decentralizing power to its lowest possible scale—the individual enterprise or municipality. That the priority accorded to the new language of autonomous creativity resonated with liberal values and norms was hardly coincidental; it was an intellectual effect of the harmonization of local revolutionary visions with postwar liberal internationalism.

FROM SOCIAL SELF-MANAGEMENT TO NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION

The language of autonomy that underpinned the paradigm of social self-management also resonated with and reinforced the other key principle that guided the Yugoslav leadership on its independent road to socialism: national self-determination. And just as self-management helped Yugoslavs harmonize their Marxism with liberal political and economic norms, defense of the principle of national self-determination and the equality of sovereign states helped them maneuver within that central institution of liberal internationalism: the UN. These two ideological planks of Yugoslav socialism—self-management (samoupravljenje) and self-determination (samoopredeljenje, samostalnost)—formed an intellectual synergy rooted in the language of autonomous creativity.

Since their emergence in the 1870s, socialist movements in Southeast Europe had raised the demand for the liberation of the small nations of the region, seeing the goals of social revolution and national independence as bound together. This vision continued to underpin the revolutionary left, from the social democrats of the fin de siècle, the activists of the interwar Comintern and the communist-led partisans of the Second World War.Footnote ⁴³ It is little wonder, then, that when the Soviets threatened their hard-won independence, Yugoslav communists risked a clean break; Tito's willingness to prioritize Yugoslav self-determination over his allegiance to Moscow revived the communists’ sagging domestic support. In their insistence on the right of national self-determination, Yugoslav leaders were in harmony with the principles of liberal internationalism that would come to underpin the global sovereignty regime after the Second World War.

However, Yugoslav support for this principle was not just a question of navigating the new emerging norms of international politics. Shaped, as they were early on, by Soviet theories and experiences of the national question, Yugoslav communists drew on an ideological tradition that offered its own understanding of national self-determination and autonomy. This tradition reached back to Lenin and Stalin's writings on the national question in the years surrounding the First World War, in which these Bolshevik theorists insisted on the need for communists to support the liberation struggles of oppressed national groups.Footnote ⁴⁴ Following the Russian Revolution, this principle informed the federal organization of the Soviet Union, with large and compact national groups being granted varying degrees of territorial autonomy especially with regard to cultural affairs.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Soviet experience, therefore, had furnished Yugoslav communists with a practical guide and theoretical framework through which to defend the principle of national self-determination and autonomy. Over the course of the interwar and wartime period, Yugoslav communists sought to develop a nationality policy crafted to the complex demands of their multiethnic region. Although often just as informed by opportunistic, strategic calculations as were their Soviet guardians, Yugoslav communists evoked the principle of self-determination for the major national groups of the state and recognized territorial autonomy for its national minorities.Footnote ⁴⁶ Well before their turn to the postwar international order, therefore, Yugoslav communists spoke a language of national autonomy whose roots stretched back into the intellectual history of Bolshevism.Footnote ⁴⁷

By the time of the 1948 split, however, this language of national autonomy had become somewhat compromised. In the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact and the later Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, such calls for the respect for self-determination and autonomy appeared particularly cynical. It was precisely the heavy-handed approach that Moscow took to its Eastern European satellites that precipitated the Tito–Stalin split and Yugoslav theorists seized on Soviet behavior in the region to discredit its leadership. Moše Pijade, in a series of lengthy articles written in 1949, for instance, sought to demonstrate that Soviet policy had adopted the tactics of imperialism in Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the same year Milovan Đilas undertook a study of Lenin's writings on international relations, in which he savaged the idea, advanced by Moscow, that the Soviet Union was the “leading nation” in the socialist bloc. For Đilas, the very idea of “leading nations” was contrary to the principles of socialism, and in effect merely served to mask the Soviets’ status as the “ruling nation” in the socialist camp.Footnote ⁴⁹ During their split with the Soviets, then, Yugoslav leaders evoked what they understood as a communist principle of support for national self-determination and autonomy.

In the years following the split, however, the principle of national self-determination would develop a specific significance for Yugoslav reformers. As it came to be articulated during the years of domestic political and economic reform, this principle took on a deep conceptual resonance with the paradigm of social self-management, and socialists began to use the same language of autonomy and creativity to speak of both. The degree to which these two doctrines overlapped is demonstrated in Yugoslavia's efforts to support the inclusion of the right of self-determination in the Covenant on Human Rights in 1950–52.Footnote ⁵⁰ In these debates, Yugoslav interventions suggested a conceptual affinity between national self-determination and the new notions of individual and social autonomy that were coming to shape domestic reform. In 1952, for example, Yugoslav delegates submitted a resolution to the General Assembly that proposed to expand the right of self-determination to include “the right of every person to participate in action to assure or maintain the free exercise of that right.”Footnote ⁵¹ Although the resolution failed to pass, it testifies to the fluidity between individual and collective conceptions of self-determination that animated Yugoslav reformers. Indeed, by highlighting the free activity and initiative of the individual as part of a national community, the language of the resolution echoed that of social self-management and sought to use a collective right of national sovereignty to secure protections for individual autonomy.Footnote ⁵²

Yugoslavs offered two arguments in defense of national self-determination. On the one hand, they maintained, an international consensus on the inviolability of self-determination, especially for small nations, would alleviate the tendency to great-power competition and war. On the other hand, national self-determination was imbued with a greater ideological significance by the historical worldview to which Yugoslav communists adhered. Nestled within this worldview, arguments for national self-determination echoed those for social self-management more clearly. Throughout the early years of the reform period, Yugoslav theorists emphasized that their struggle with the Soviet Union bore world-historical significance. According to the president of the Commission for Foreign Cultural Relations, Marko Ristić, Yugoslavia not only had a right to defend its national independence, but also, indeed, bore a historical “responsibility” to the “community of nations” to defend the principle of self-determination for small nations.Footnote ⁵³ Such appeals to an emerging international community certainly sought to use the principle of self-determination to legitimize Yugoslavia's break with the Soviets, but they also made a broader ideological claim, in which Yugoslavia's struggle for independence represented a watershed event in the history of universal human progress.

To make sense of this rather grandiose claim, we have to appreciate the degree to which the Yugoslav defense of national self-determination turned on the same values of autonomy and creativity that underpinned ideas of social self-management. Just as social self-management was seen to facilitate the creativity and initiative that would help Yugoslavs construct socialism, so too did national self-determination preserve the unique, creative contributions that individual peoples made in their struggle for historical development. The pursuit of these individual national struggles made up what Yugoslav socialists understood as the worldwide movement of human progress. In a 1949 speech to the UN General Assembly, Kardelj set out this argument, insisting that by “[d]efending their independence and struggle for equal relations between nations, the peoples of Yugoslavia are in effect struggling for the conditions of human progress, namely, for the right of every people to freely develop their own creative powers.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In this sense, great-power interventions in the life of small nations, just like state interventions in the life of individuals or social collectives, stamped out the initiative and creativity that were necessary if humanity was to progress to an era of peace and plenty. The principle of national self-determination preserved the heterogeneity of experience and the wealth of knowledge that had been accumulated by humanity over the course of endless struggles for progress. While this vision preserved the teleological contours of Marxism by anticipating a future internationalist utopia, it no longer sought its realization through armed struggle and ideological competition, but rather through international cooperation and principled negotiation between sovereign peoples. The vision of historical change here had shifted remarkably from the aggressive pursuit of world revolution that goaded Yugoslav confrontations over Trieste or Greece a few years before. It was a Marxist grand narrative in which the locomotive of history was driven not primarily by revolution but through the genteel practices of liberal internationalism.

THE CREATIVE SELF AND SELF-MANAGEMENT IN CULTURE

In the realm of political and economic reform, by and large, the new language of autonomy and creativity typically tended to highlight collective subjects, although, as we have seen, concerns with individual freedom did trickle down in the process. As the self-management paradigm was introduced into the sphere of cultural production, however, the problem of individual autonomy and creativity became a chief concern. From the early 1950s onwards, cultural reformers set out to secure the freedom of individual creativity from state intrusion. That culture should have become the privileged site of autonomous subjectivity owed to the fact that the paradigm of self-management came to be reinforced by modernist aesthetic theories dating from the interwar period. These theories, which rejected Stalinist models of literary production, emphasized the primacy of subjective experience in the creative process, thereby rejecting efforts to subordinate artistic production to a political program.

The link between the interwar and postwar anti-Stalinist intellectual currents was embodied in the careers of two prominent leftist intellectuals: the Croatian modernist Miroslav Krleža and the Serbian surrealist Marko Ristić. Although in the early 1920s both writers were part of an avant-garde left with close ties to the communist movement, by the end of the decade they had become alienated from an increasingly Stalinist Comintern. During the 1930s Krleža and Ristić publicly criticized Stalin's Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, eventually leading to their being shunned by the movement. Neither participated in the antifascist campaign of the Second World War and, although begrudgingly incorporated into the postwar state, were kept at arm's length from power. Following 1948, however, these two figures were ideally placed to launch a rigorous critique of the Soviet Union and to pioneer reforms in Yugoslav cultural policy. Within a few years of the split, Krleža became one of the foremost cultural authorities in the country and Ristić was promoted to the position of president of the Commission for Foreign Cultural Relations, where he represented Yugoslavia in international bodies such as UNESCO and the European Society of Culture.Footnote ⁵⁵

In crafting a new cultural policy to replace socialist realism, Krleža and Ristić drew on the criticism of Stalinist aesthetics that they had developed in the polemics of the 1930s. These earlier ideological disputes had turned on the question of the relationship between creative freedom and the political responsibility of the artist. They pitted leftist avant-garde intellectuals, such as Krleža and Ristić, against a younger generation of communist writers who had begun to insist that progressive writers turn to more sober and constrained forms of realism.Footnote ⁵⁶ These social realists, such as the young Milovan Đilas, his comrade Radovan Zogović, and their mentor Jovan Popović, advocated a politically engaged literature and pitted themselves against what they sneeringly termed larpurlartizam (l'art pour l'art), the modernist aesthetics associated with interwar writers like Tin Ujević and Miloš Crnjanski. In their fascination with literary form and emotional interiority, these modernist writers were perceived by their left-wing opponents as propagandists of a decadent bourgeois culture, detached from society and lost in an alienated individualism. Writers on the left, social realists argued, had to oppose bourgeois individualism with politically charged, didactic realism. It was a position guaranteed to antagonize many of the avant-garde revolutionaries.

Krleža, who had come to Marxism from his earlier fascination with Nietzsche and had been profoundly influenced by modernist writers like Antun Gustav Matoš, Baudelaire, Ibsen and Dostoevskii, rejected the premises of social literature entirely and publicly challenged the movement's growing influence in left-wing circles. At stake for him was more than the freedom of the artist, but the very nature of creativity itself. For Krleža, the creative impulse that inspired great works of art was born from a physiological and psychological unconscious that could not be subordinated to political programs. Writing in 1933, he set out an aesthetics that foregrounded subjective experience over a supposedly more “objective” reality:

Creativity, for Krleža, was rooted in the intensity of subjective experience, through which reality was manifested. While this aesthetic philosophy did not deny the political dimensions of art, it rejected the efforts of ideologues to subordinate the artist to a political program. Such programmatic efforts of far-left intellectuals, he argued, “inoculated” beauty with reason, seeking to harness art to their political agendas “like a mule to their quadrigae, ploughs and carts.” To create, he insisted, was “to abandon oneself to intense instincts of life,” a view clearly at odds with rationally planned, ideological directives.Footnote ⁵⁸ Creativity, in short, was made possible by the artist's very autonomy from political commands.

This modernist emphasis on subjective experience as the basis for artistic creativity underpinned both Krleža's and Ristić’s post-1948 efforts to craft a new cultural policy, and it resonated with the wider reform program of the party leadership. Interwar modernist ideas, that is, facilitated the implementation of the self-management paradigm in Yugoslav culture, which in turn became the privileged site of individual creative autonomy.

Krleža and Ristić’s attack on socialist realism revived many of the critiques they had made of the interwar social-literature movement. Specifically, they disputed the prerogative of political programs over cultural production. For Krleža, the totalitarian impulse that he perceived in social literature, with its attempt to restrict and direct the artist in line with the party's political views, found its fullest realization in the Stalinist system. In the Soviet Union, he argued, this impulse had led to an absolutism in which “a single law-giver presents himself as a preternatural modeler [vrhunaravi modelator], who models not only the people and not only the world revolution, but the entirety of Humanity.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Stalinism, in other words, sought to transform and homogenize the myriad of individuals into a single despotic will. Nowhere was this totalitarian tendency clearer than in the doctrine of socialist realism, where the politically approved writer was triumphantly declared an “engineer of the human soul,” a job title that reflected the top-down efforts at social manipulation that Krleža found so disconcerting: “such an aesthetics is not logically and cannot ever be socialist.”Footnote ⁶⁰

If artistic creativity was rooted in subjective experience, then culture could only flourish where the individual was free from state interventions or where those interventions were limited to promoting this freedom. Fortunately, the repressive “engineering” of culture from above was predicated on a totalizing state power that, according to Yugoslav reformers, was well on the way to withering in their own country. The self-management paradigm provided no mechanism through which the state could impose its proscribed cultural programs.Footnote ⁶¹ This model of culture, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the artist and the restriction of state power, harmonized Yugoslav socialism with principles of creative freedom that were quickly becoming a point of tension in the Cold War. If, as Mary Nolan has noted, the cultural politics of the early Cold War played out in Europe as a conflict between Soviet calls for world peace and US defense of intellectual freedom, then Yugoslavs walked a fine line, protesting Soviet attacks on intellectual freedom while trying to maintain a distance from the more spurious US propaganda campaigns.Footnote ⁶² However, even when they echoed the Soviets in calling for world peace, Yugoslavs rarely missed an opportunity to criticize their former allies’ contempt for intellectual freedom. Speaking at an international gathering for world peace held in Zagreb in October 1951, for instance, Krleža used his platform to rail against the Soviets, provocatively declaring, “Socialism means a peaceful life under warm roofs, not igniting fires around the world … [it] means the cult of good books and beautiful art, not the drilling of skulls and morals.”Footnote ⁶³ In the vision Krleža evoked, socialism was to be identified not with ideological struggle, global revolution and Chernishevskian asceticism, but rather peaceful cooperation, a celebration of beautiful literature regardless of its political utility, and the autonomy of individuals from the inquisitorial gaze of state officials. A socialism that could not guarantee the freedom of its own people, he argued, could hardly be expected to pursue cooperation and peace on an international level.

Although Yugoslavs were aware of and sought to cultivate the harmony between their Marxism and western liberalism on the question of intellectual freedom, there were limits to collaboration on this front. Ristić, whose role as international spokesperson for Yugoslav culture put him at the center of these early Cold War debates, was careful to steer a clear path away from the more egregious Western cold warriors. In 1952, for instance, he penned a scathing open letter to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he criticized for its indiscriminate anticommunism. Ristić was especially indignant at the way in which anti-Soviet intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and Sydney Hook lazily juxtaposed “totalitarianism” with “the West,” identifying cultural freedom only with the latter. Such a “simplistic antinomy,” he claimed, uncritically lumped “all that is not the West” into the camp of Soviet totalitarianism, willingly discarding the role of small nations, such as Yugoslavia, China and much of the “colonial world” that, he asserted, struggled for socialism but remained independent of the Soviets.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yugoslavia, for Ristić, “prove[d] to the world that communism does not lead necessarily to Stalinist despotism, to state totalitarianism, to the stifling of cultural freedom.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Western liberals, that is, did not have a monopoly on defending the creative freedom of the artist.

THE NATIONAL SELF AND YUGOSLAV CULTURAL INTERNATIONALISM

While the convergence of modernist aesthetic theories and the self-management paradigm reinforced ideas of creative autonomy, Yugoslav reformers also sought to craft a cultural policy that answered to the distinct priorities of their country's revolutionary development. These priorities meant that, although cultural reformers like Krleža and Ristić criticized the imposition of official aesthetic policies on artists, they did not reject the role of the state in cultural production completely. As a small, developing nation, historically relegated to the peripheries of surrounding empires, the national cultures of Yugoslavia were perceived by leading intellectuals as vulnerable to the influence of more powerful, established cultures. Yugoslav communists, who had promised national liberation alongside social revolution, understood themselves to have a responsibility to promote the development of the federation's composite national cultures. This commitment to national cultural development meant that reformers had to reconcile their defense of the creative autonomy of the artist with a state-led cultural program of nation building. They did so by emphasizing the importance of an independent national culture for the flourishing of the autonomous individual, in effect aligning the principles of individual and national self-determination.

Krleža made the most powerful case for this alignment in a paper from 1952, in which he set out the tasks of the monumental Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia, over which he had just been assigned editorial control. Reflecting on the goal of a socialist cultural policy he argued,

If Soviet socialist realism envisioned cultural producers as “engineers” of the soul, Krleža suggested the far less invasive metaphor of the “compass.” The metaphor reinforced the new forms of autonomy that Yugoslav reformers were in the process of promoting; socialist culture was to orient the citizen and to equip him/her with the skills to find their way “in a sovereignly fashion” in the world. Although he rejected the “romantic illusions” of nationalism, which in the early years of his career he dismissed as a narrow petite bourgeois parochialism, Krleža's report nonetheless insisted on a certain national or, perhaps, regional distinctness of this autonomous individual. Socialist consciousness signified the citizen's self-recognition as part of a community inhabiting both a distinct history and a mission. Yugoslav selfhood, it followed, was only possible once the contours of this community had been defined and secured, a responsibility that fell on the shoulders of artists and writers. In his insistence that the autonomy of the self was secured through the cultural independence of the collective, Krleža's argument set up the same imbrication of social self-management and national self-determination that ran through Yugoslav socialist discourse during these years of reform. Just as Yugoslav representatives in the UN sought to use the right of national self-determination to protect the autonomy of individual political action, so too did the defense of national cultural independence secure the conditions for the flourishing of the individual socialist citizen.

Krleža's call for a civilization “worthy of being called human” anticipated the turn to a “humanist” Marxism that would bring together anti-Stalinist Marxists of Eastern and Western Europe in the postwar decades. From the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s Marxist humanism underpinned a network of East–West intellectual exchange in the center of which stood the Yugoslav philosophers of the journal Praxis.Footnote ⁶⁷ Growing out of the fertile intellectual fields that the reforms of the early 1950s had cultivated, Praxis philosophers, such as Gajo Petrović, Zagorka Golubović or Vanja Sutlić, sought to break with Soviet Marxism and, as they saw it, “return” to the early, humanist writings of Marx. Of particular concern for these revisionists was to compose a reading of Marxism that centered on and privileged “the human” as epistemological standpoint, ontological foundation or supreme moral value.

However, despite their shared concern with reorienting the priorities of socialism from the perspective of the human, Krleža and the Praxis philosophers were committed to quite different intellectual projects. For the Marxist humanists of the later 1950s and 1960s, the appeal of Marx's early writings and those of more contemporary philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, was that they could be made to offer a universal philosophical anthropology. Starting with the human offered philosophers a way of thinking subjectivity and history that centered on the universally applicable concept of praxis as the ontological minimum of human reality. For these philosophers, who were involved in a dialogue that not only spread across Eastern and Western Europe, but also engaged with North American, African and some Asian thinkers, this seeming universality of Marxist humanism was of great appeal. However, as we have already seen, humanism did quite different work for Krleža, for whom the concept of “man” anchored the practical problems associated with the construction of a socialist, Yugoslav civilization. Central to his concern was nationality or, at least, familiarity with and awareness of one's belonging to a community with a distinct historical “memory.” If the Marxist humanists of Praxis sought to move away from cultural particularities to a universal philosophical anthropology, Krleža's earlier orientation towards “man” led him to emphasize the particular and the local. Man was not a philosophical abstraction, but was always embedded in a distinct national history and it was the “enriched memory” of this history that socialist cultural production was to cultivate if the creative self was to be truly autonomous and self-determining.

TOWARDS A WORLD CULTURAL ORDER

As in the field of politics, so too in culture did the concern with self-determination prompt Yugoslav intellectuals of the reform era to look to the liberal international order to secure their independence. In so doing, they projected a vision of world culture modeled on the principles of national self-determination and the equality of sovereign states, which would lay the foundations for Yugoslavia's later orientation towards the Third World. Although this phenomenon has gone largely overlooked by scholars, Yugoslavia's turn towards the nonaligned movement in the late 1950s promoted a broader political and cultural engagement with the Third World in Yugoslav society. From the early 1960s onwards, social movements in solidarity with national liberation struggles in Asia and Africa sprang up across Yugoslav cities, and intellectuals, such as the filmmaker Stevan Labudović, promoted independence struggles in Algeria, Vietnam and Congo.Footnote ⁶⁸ On college campuses the large numbers of exchange students from the developing world formed clubs that organized social events, exhibitions of art and culture, and lectures.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yugoslav newspapers stationed correspondents in the major cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America who regularly reported on these regions and broadcast photos of Tito's diplomatic journeys to these exotic (and often exoticized) locations. During the 1960s and 1970s the Third World had a deep cultural and social influence on Yugoslavia.

It was the early efforts to strategize the defense of Yugoslavia's cultural independence on the world stage that laid the intellectual groundwork for this later affinity for the Third World. Furthermore, the conceptual basis for this defense lay not primarily in the revolutionary language of communist internationalism, but in a commitment to the rules and principles embedded in the postwar liberal order. It also leaned heavily on developments taking place within UNESCO, which offered a more favorable terrain for Yugoslav reformers following its turn away from envisioning a single world culture, to emphasize the equality and distinctness of cultures.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Marko Ristić, this emerging world cultural order could best be cultivated by working through the concept of cultural “coexistence,” a concept that he outlined in a series of articles and lectures published between 1952 and 1955.Footnote ⁷¹ As a normative framework for organizing international relations, coexistence presupposed the heterogeneity of and potential rivalry between states, but sought to undermine the “sphere-of-influence” politics of great powers and their subsequent military competition by strengthening the principles of noninterference and international equality. Applied to the field of culture, however, coexistence sought to preserve the autonomy of national or regional cultures from both the historical weight of colonialism and the contemporary ideological pressures of the Cold War powers. Ristić’s notion of cultural coexistence, in effect, was anchored in the same concern with creative autonomy that informed domestic cultural policy; through the hook of analogy, the autonomy of the artist from state power was used to argue for the independence of small national cultures from the great powers.

However, securing this autonomy on the international plane, Ristić recognized, depended not on cultural isolation, but rather on global integration. Taken in this sense, coexistence was not merely a principle of noninterference and cooperation between hermetically sealed national cultures, but a framework for the creation of a universal world culture. We should, therefore, differentiate between Ristić’s model of cultural coexistence and those models then becoming hegemonic in UNESCO, which were premised on the preservation of cultural distinctions and difference. While both views rejected the earlier Eurocentric cosmopolitanism associated with Julian Huxley, Ristić nonetheless saw the possibility, even a strategic need, for a higher integration of national cultures: “Today there is no existence of a nation without coexistence, nor security for the integrity of their culture without the integration of cultures.”Footnote ⁷² Integration here did not imply the dissolution and homogenization of distinct national cultures but, given Ristić’s Hegelian–Marxist background, suggested a dialectical sublimation of cultural difference in a movement towards a synthetic, universal culture. At the same time, however, Ristić was keen to transpose this Hegelian metaphysics into the strategic language of postwar liberal internationalism; just as small nations, like Yugoslavia, sought political security through their integration into the institutions of the international order, so too were they already looking to internationalism, cooperation and integration into bodies like UNESCO to secure their cultural integrity. Precisely owing to their need to preserve their independence through international alliances, small nations were at the vanguard of this world-historical movement, promoting cooperation, dialogue and mutual understanding in a world of ideological polarization. These values, in turn, inscribed in their respective national cultures “developmental aspirations” that were “international, universal, of general human scope.”Footnote ⁷³ It was for this reason, Ristić argued, that efforts to construct a universal culture had to begin with the defense of the political and cultural self-determination of small nations; that is, with the preservation of cultural differences.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was the cultural autonomy of small nations that unleashed the creativity that would contribute to the general historical progress of humanity.

Yugoslavia, Ristić noted, had a leading role to play in these efforts. Not only did its struggle for an “independent path to socialism” defend the principle of national self-determination and undermine great-power politics; but also Yugoslavia itself, as a federal state in which several national cultures coexisted in different stages of historical development, also modeled the possibilities of a world culture built on the integration of autonomous national elements. At the same time, he argued, Yugoslavs needed to more actively promote the study of other national cultures, especially those of the non-European world, where indigenous cultural development had been disrupted by colonialism: “This universality of contemporary culture … this process of its universalization, its dialectical, humanist integration, presupposes and demands conscious and versatile work on mutual awareness, engagement, and interpretation of the cultures of individual peoples and countries of all the continents, all the parts of our planet.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The most obvious effect of this political and cultural turn in the early 1950s was a growing interest in and familiarity with the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This cultural turn pre-dated the socialist state's diplomatic efforts to form an alliance with the nonaligned countries of the Third World (which would only begin in 1956, with the meeting of Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamel Abdel Nasser on the Adriatic island of Brioni). In the first half of the 1950s a fascination with non-European cultures had already begun to characterize Yugoslav intellectual circles. Prominent literary newspapers, in particular the monthly Književne novine, the organ of the Yugoslav Union of Writers, carried articles on Japanese woodcuts and kabuki theatre; reviews of the Guinean dance troupe of Keite Fodebe; photographic series on the construction of boats in the Gold Coast; and interviews with theatre directors from India, Indonesia and China; as well as regular translations of contemporary poetry, folklore and spiritual texts from Central America, West Africa, Ethiopia, India and the Middle East. These efforts to familiarize Yugoslav readers with the cultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America were an answer to Ristić’s demand for greater “mutual awareness, engagement, and interpretation” that the global integration of cultures required.

Although many of these attempts to open Yugoslav audiences to a more inclusive “world culture” often relegated non-European cultures to a precolonial, premodern past, it would be unfair to treat them as an expression of Yugoslav orientalism. Ristić himself had warned against such a vulgar “exoticizing” of other nations, noting that the peoples of the Balkans had suffered from the same orientalizing of their cultures by Western Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁶ Echoing the views of his fellow surrealist, the French anthropologist Michel Leiris, Ristić emphasized that the promotion of cultural difference should not lead to the fetishizing of alterity, which would lock so-called “primitive” cultures into their premodern folkloric forms, but should, rather, promote the free and autonomous pursuit of their unique historical development.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rather than evidence of a Yugoslav orientalism, then, we should instead consider the priority these intellectuals assigned to the premodern civilizations of Asia, Africa and the Americas as part of an effort to locate cultural models that pre-dated the epoch of European colonialism. It is telling that just as they were fascinated with the “primitive” sculptures of West Africa or the woodcuttings of ancient Japan, leading Yugoslav intellectuals were equally obsessed with the cultural legacy of the heretic Bogumils and their “primitive” tombstones that dotted the remote mountains of Bosnia and Bulgaria.Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, as high an authority as Krleža saw in the Bogumils an indigenous artistic heritage that could serve as a revival of a common South Slavic civilization independent of the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Austrian imperial legacies.Footnote ⁷⁹ This interest in precolonial traditions served the recuperation of the diverse, creative legacies of non-European peoples that would contribute to the universalizing culture of humanity as a whole.

In addition to this growing cultural familiarity with the non-European world, from the mid-1950s onwards Yugoslavs witnessed the publication of a steady stream of travel writing from diplomats or journalists who had visited the Third World. Beginning in 1954 with Aleš Bebler's Journey through the Sunny Lands and Radoljub Čolaković’s Impressions from India there emerged in Yugoslav literature the genre of the Third World travelogue, in which authors introduced readers to the history and cultures of the non-European world while reflecting on the contemporary political moment of decolonization.Footnote ⁸⁰ Other classics from this period included Fadil Hadžić’s comedic The Buddha Received Me Well, Mahmud Konjhodžić’s I Saw Egypt, Zuko Dzumhur's Letters from Asia and Letters from Africa and Europe and Čedomir Minderović’s ultramodernist Traces of India.Footnote ⁸¹

Minderović’s book, which he penned during his time serving in the Yugoslav diplomatic corps in India over the 1950s and 1960s, serves to bookend the period of cultural reform this article has delineated, as it clearly illustrates the place of culture as the privileged site of autonomous creativity following 1948. It was a curious text, combining elements of Third World travelogue with a focus on psychological interiority and a stream-of-consciousness narrative mode that nodded to the modernism of James Joyce, Knut Hamsun or Miloš Crnjanski. Whereas other texts in this genre combined reportage with adventure plots or political tracts, Traces of India used the backdrop of 1950s India to explore the author's own emotional interiority in often morose ways, musing on loss, homesickness and a nostalgia for his childhood in Serbia. Here the problems of a postcolonial state's struggle for political independence and economic development, its efforts to maneuver between the competing temporalities of a glorious ancient past and a confusing postcolonial modernity, mimic the author's own struggle with the almost oppressive power of the memories and emotional impulses that intrude on his present political concerns. In its effort to align the experience of the autonomous writer and the independent nation, Minderović’s novel appropriated the attempt by early Yugoslav political and cultural reformers to reorganize socialism around the figure of the autonomous, creative self. Here, however, in the humid streets of Bombay or the villages of Kerala, the autonomy that in the early 1950s marked the locus of a self-managing (samoupravljenje) or self-determining (samoopredeljenje) sovereignty instead highlighted the author's loneliness (usamljenost), solitude (samit) and isolation (samoće).Footnote ⁸² Minderović’s narrator was a lonely poetic soul that seemed to resonate more with the radical individualism of the fin de siècle than with the heroic age of decolonization. This should not, however, necessarily be read as an indictment of the hopes of national liberation and anticolonialism. As we have seen, since the reforms of the early 1950s Yugoslav literature had been freed of the need to prioritize political concerns or readings. Contra Jameson's thesis on the Third World novel, what mattered to Minderović was not to use the individual's biography as an allegory for the political fate of a nation, but precisely the opposite, to use the independent nation as a backdrop to explore the interiority of the autonomous individual.Footnote ⁸³