Active Neutrality, Non-Alignment, and Global Solidarity

Inspirations, Contradictions, and Ideas for Today from Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1970s

12.11., 18.30, Gusshausstraße 14/3

In the 1970s, the collective voice and agency of the Global South was increasingly assertive and cohesive in global governance and geopolitics. At the same time, a global capitalist order began to consolidate in terms of neoliberalism, structural adjustment, and a move away from the UN towards the International Financial Institutions. Fifty years later, we are still far away from real decolonial solidarity and a progressive internationalism. Is there anything we can learn from Socialist Yugoslavia’s involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement situated between the two major power blocs, its support for decolonial liberation and feminist struggles, or from its dissident thinkers? On what can we build and which mistakes should we avoid when re-imagining active neutrality and global solidarity in today’s crisis-ridden world?

Paul Stubbs is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb and a Visiting Fellow at IWM, Vienna. He is a supporter of the left-green Možemo political platform and a founding member of Zagreb je naš (Zagreb is ours).