Unmaking Détente: Yugoslavia, the United States, and the Global Cold War, 1968–1980 by Milorad Lazic

Abstract

Although Yugoslavia was not a major power, it played a significant role in the Cold War. The West initially perceived Josip Broz Tito, who became the country’s leader in the wake of its partition and occupation by the Axis, to be the most loyal follower of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. But Stalin soon came to perceive Tito as a rival and expelled Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1948, hoping to precipitate Tito’s downfall. Yugoslavia, facing economic ruin and fearing a Soviet invasion, had no choice but to turn to the West. U.S. officials believed that Yugoslavia’s geographic location could make a significant contribution to the security of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and they assisted the country in its battle to survive Soviet pressure. Tito took full advantage of his position and became adept at playing the United States and the USSR against each other to enhance his country’s economic and political security and to develop new initiatives at home and abroad. Yugoslavia’s importance as a Communist state resisting Soviet imperialism, as a champion of a “third way” between the capitalist and Communist camps, and as a model for a different kind of state-managed economic system enabled the country to “punch above its weight” in international affairs (p. 256). By the 1970s, Yugoslavia’s position had become more precarious. In this wellresearched monograph, Milorad Lazic analyzes the challenges to Yugoslavia’s stability posed by several internal and external factors. Tito in the final years of his life was increasingly concerned about how the country would handle the transition to a new leader. Unity and cohesion at home had always been viewed as essential to Yugoslavia’s survival, but internal divisions, both ethnic and political, had accelerated. These developments magnified what the Yugoslavs saw as a constant external threat, namely, meddling or outright invasion by the Soviet Union. Tito had always been adept at balancing his country between the United States and the USSR, but Lazic posits that Tito viewed their détente in the early 1970s as a threat to that policy and hence to his country’s existence. Was détente merely a façade for a spheres-of-influence agreement, “a new Yalta” (p. xvi) that would leave Yugoslavia at the mercy of the Soviet Union? The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which Tito had championed as an alternative to a bipolar international order, was also vulnerable because of the efforts by Fidel Castro’s Cuba, encouraged by Moscow, to bring the NAM into the Soviet camp.