US public diplomacy in socialist Yugoslavia, 1950–70

Soft culture, cold partners

Carla Konta

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526140753
• eBook ISBN: 9781526140777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Representing the first comprehensive account of the public and cultural diplomacy campaigns carried out by the United States in Yugoslavia during the height of the Cold War, this book examines the political role of culture in US-Yugoslav bilateral relations and the fluid links between information and propaganda. Tito and his Party allowed the United States Information Agency and the State Department's cultural programmes to enter Yugoslavia, liberated from Soviet control, open cultural centres and pavilions at its main fairs, broadcast the Voice of America, and have American artists tour the country. The exchange of intellectual and political personnel helped foster the US-Yugoslav relationship, yet it posed severe ideological challenges for both Yugoslavia and the United States.By providing new insights into porous borders between freedom and coercion in Tito's regime, this volume shows how public diplomacy acted as an external input for Yugoslav liberalisation and dissident movements. Building on extensive archival research and interviews, Carla Konta analyses the fluid links between information and propaganda, and the unintended effects that propaganda can produce beyond the control of producers and receivers.

1

Strategies of persuasion

On 31 January 1946, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia proclaimed a constitution embodying six constituent republics and five constituent peoples – Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, and Macedonians.¹ The Five-Year Plan, adopted on 28 April 1947, set grandiose targets for growth. Wholesale nationalization of the economy occurred by the end of 1946, including the seizing of all foreign assets. Industrial production was scheduled for 5 per cent and agriculture for a 150 per cent increase, while 200 major investment projects were planned. The Cominform blockade of Soviet credits and aid reshuffled the deck of cards on the table. The Yugoslav famine crisis turned out to be very serious and, in September 1949, the Export–Import (EXIM) Bank granted Yugoslavia’s request for a $20 million credit, while the International Monetary Fund approved a $3 million drawing for Tito’s government.²

In the following years, US assistance to Yugoslavia would cover three fundamental aspects for Yugoslav independence from the Soviets and their linking with the United States: economic aid, military assistance, and cultural influence. On 10 November 1950, the State Department announced US food relief to Yugoslavia. Before asking Congress for an official grant-aid program, the State Department decided to employ the EXIM Bank, the Marshall Plan, and Mutual Defense Aid Program funds to send $30 million for food purchases. US policymakers accentuated the humanitarian aspects of the aid while masking the self-evident strategic importance of an independent Yugoslavia. On 23 May 1951, the State Department’s policy advisory staff advised to publicly dismantle every aspect of US support for Tito’s regime, or put pressure on Tito for military alliances.³ No doubt, such aid played a crucial role in the economic recovery of the Yugoslav regime. Between 1950 and 1964, the ‘American assistance, broadly defined, covered sixty per cent of Yugoslavia’s payment deficits on the current accounts,’ and ‘added perhaps two percentage points to a rate of growth in national income during the 1950s which averaged 7.5 percent.’⁴ In a letter to Secretary Dean Acheson, Ambassador George Allen wrote from Belgrade in 1950: ‘Such economic assistance as we have given Yugoslavia […] [supporting] its resistance to the Soviet Union and satellite pressure,’ was a ‘small price [to] pay for benefits already enjoyed and expected from Yugoslav independence of Kremlin dictation.’ And he continued: ‘This independence from the West, as well as East, is […] essential to our immediate purpose of promoting disharmony in the ranks of world Communism and thus weakening Kremlin’s aggressive power.’⁵ US military assistance provided Yugoslavia with the essential prerequisite to protect its borders and stabilize its national security system from possible Soviet attack. In early 1951, the Yugoslav Army’s Chief of Staff, Koča Popović, arrived in the United States to secretly discuss military aid to Yugoslavia. Envisioned to enhance what Eisenhower defined as the ‘South NATO wing,’ the Military Assistance Pact, signed on October 1951, included the Yugoslav Army in the Mutual Defense Aid Program providing T-33A aircraft, artillery, machine guns, radars, and electronic equipment. And thanks to US Army training, the Yugoslav Army transformed itself from a guerrilla-like one to a regular one.⁶

Even Project TROY, a special report on how American information could get through the Iron Curtain and reach Russian people, contemplated Yugoslav independence as a top priority policy. Commissioned by the State Department in late 1950, and named after the legendary wooden horse operation, Project TROY brought together twenty-one scholars from MIT and Harvard, who gathered for the first time in October 1950. Submitted on 1 February 1951, the final report ‘urged for the unification of political warfare’ at ‘our national power, political, economic,’ and military levels. The section on Tito’s Yugoslavia made a strong point: among all the communist-dominated countries, Tito’s regime was the most successful, economically, politically and socially. Its value was manifold. First, even if Yugoslavia could not become an ‘American puppet,’ by welcoming Tito into the Western camp without forcing him to change his ideology, the United States would ensure a partner of strategic relevance. Second, the MIT group recognized that there were ‘some indications that the Tito regime may slowly be growing less doctrinaire.’ The decentralization of industry, the abolition of privileges for Party members, and admission of foreigners, stressed the report, were ‘all point[ing] to a general liberalization.’ While partly inaccurate and partly overestimating the chance for the regime’s prompt liberalization, Project TROY emphasized how the United States should give Yugoslavia ‘every possible support in developing an economic and political life independent of Russia.’⁷

The third aspect of US involvement in Yugoslavia – its public diplomacy strategy and soft-power policies – worked to increase Yugoslav orientation, especially in ‘official circles,’ towards ‘the foreign policy objectives of the United States.’⁸ The first USIE Country Plan, issued for the years 1950 to 1953, reflected these major objectives. It envisioned supporting the emergence of Yugoslavia ‘as a democratic, independent member of the world community, cooperating with and adhering to the United Nations.’ The Plan was predicated on the view that ‘Titoism should continue to exist as a corrosive and disintegrating force within the Soviet power sphere’ to ‘extract the maximum political and propaganda advantage from this quarrel.’ But most importantly on the cultural edge, US public diplomacy would encourage in Yugoslav people their ‘democratic and independence aspirations’ and their desire for ‘freedoms and the material advantages of Western forms of government and society.’ Such a wedge public diplomacy strategy incurred several criticisms from the field officers in Belgrade who thought that supporting Titoism in the short-term would not achieve democracy in the end. The Embassy and USIS posts disagreed with the IIA on the abandonment of anti-Titoist rhetoric since it helped to ‘keep alive democratic aspirations’ and proved to ‘the international Communist movement that Yugoslavia’ had not become an US ‘puppet.’⁹ But the IIA policymakers remained firm in their judgements: the communist regime, except for small groups of dissidents such as peasants and former aristocracy, had no serious political alternative, and its young middle class was mostly consentient to the regime. So even if the government failed in observing basic human rights, the IIA decided on a neutralist policy and focused its propaganda in ‘associating the United States […] with [favourable] trends in Yugoslavia.’ Like a rope pulled in two directions, the apparent dilemma continued to worry US administrations in the following decades. On the one hand, US policy included military and economic assistance, while on the other, IIA/USIA cultural policies could ‘result in […] political disaffection and contribute towards weakening the loyalty of party members.’¹⁰ IIA and USIS uncertainty reflected the administration’s hesitations towards the Yugoslav case. Because of Tito’s willingness to resist Stalin and slacken his posture towards the West, the United States and its international aid agencies, like the Agency for International Development, assured the economic support needed to withstand Cominform pressure. Possible Soviet reprisal provided the United States and its allies with reasons for military assistance to Yugoslavia. But, as Lorraine Lees underscored, such an arrangement was full of tensions. In 1950, for instance, when Dean Acheson informed the Yugoslav government that recognition of the Ho Chi Minh government of North Vietnam would provocatively disrupt American public opinion and reduce extraordinary aid, Tito lost his temper. ‘Yugoslavia had refused “to bow to the Soviets” or to the West and would not “beg” Washington for loans,’ declared the Marshal in Titovo Užice, Serbia.¹¹ Indeed, Tito would never take an active role in a possible European war or Western defence system.¹² The wedge strategy would work better in the arena of political bilateral relations between the two countries, rather than for the application of NATO’s military alliance network in southeastern Europe. But both Yugoslavia and the United States were capable of genuine pragmatic ‘ability […] to base a foreign policy on national security requirements rather than ideological imperatives.’¹³

By 1952, Yugoslavia officially agreed, though ‘grudgingly and slowly,’ to American cultural penetration. The joint USIS–MSA Country Plan recognized that Yugoslav ‘openness’ followed the US economic and military support, and the famine-relief aid. By playing the role of ‘ambassador[s] of good will,’ US military items such as textbooks, lectures, specialists, trainees, journals, or CARE boxes, proved American ‘genuine interests’ in assisting Yugoslavia.¹⁴ The first USIS Country Program recognized the Party activists, the youth, the non-communist officials, the rural population, the religious groups, the Army officers, the industrial workers, and the educators as the first targets of US public diplomacy in Yugoslavia. At this point, the Program envisioned the most diverse channels of persuasion such as books, magazines, newspapers, exhibitions and movies, press materials, networks of private American organizations, Voice of America radio broadcastings, and the English language teaching program.¹⁵ With seventeen American officers and forty-one local employees in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Novi Sad, from the early 1950s on, USIS policies shaped the contours of Yugoslav–American foreign relations while being, reciprocally, forged by Yugoslav internal ideological adjustments.

Waging public diplomacy in the 1950s

George Allen replaced William Benton at the head of the information agency in 1948, and held the post until 1949. When he departed to his ambassadorship mission to Belgrade, he was well ready to set up the USIS mission in the new, post-1948 Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, where he remained in service until 1953, he did an extraordinary job. The new margins of liberty in which the USIS now operated astonished the field officers there. In this regard, Allen recalled: ‘Ample evidence that our VOA radio programme is heard comes to us daily through letters from every nook and corner of the country. America is reaching directly into homes of Yugoslavs in villages and hamlets from Slovenia to Macedonia.’ And he concluded, ‘we must fight armed aggression with armed might, we can only fight bad ideas with better ones. […] This is what USIE is trying to do and is doing with increasing success in Yugoslavia.’¹⁶ The ‘tremendous interest and response’ in USIS activities increased exponentially. In only three months, from April to June 1952, around 50,000 Yugoslavs entered USIS Belgrade, in a city that, at the time, counted around 440,000 inhabitants.¹⁷ Staff numbers increased accordingly: in August 1951, two Americans and eight Yugoslavs worked...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on translation, pronunciation, and archival references
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Strategies of persuasion
• 2 The USIS in action
• 3 ‘America’ at Yugoslav fairs
• 4 Art and sound diplomacy
• 5 Yugoslav leaders: (ex)changes and drawbacks
• 6 Beyond the 1960s
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index