The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to a Seminar

at 3.00 pm on Thursday, 16 May, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

  

on

‘Josip Broz Tito and Jawaharlal Nehru:

From distant countries to closest allies’

  by

Mr. Jovan Cavoski,

Doctoral Candidate, Peking University and

Belgrade University.

Abstract:

History of the Non-aligned Movement during the Cold War period is closely connected with the evolution and performance of countries like India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt on the international stage. The foreign policy strategy of nonalignment became one of the cornerstones of Yugoslavia’s and India’s world-wide entanglements during those decades, while President Tito and Prime Minister Nehru were considered by many in the developing world as the outright champions of such a concept. With time, both countries and their paramount leaders exerted such a prominent and dominant role in the neutralist forums during the Cold War that in many ways their stance affected different international developments.  This lecture deals with the formation and evolution of the Yugoslav and Indian policy of non-alignment during the 1950s and early 1960s, mainly focusing on the emergence and evolution of the specific Indo-Yugoslav strategic partnership during the Cold War years. This was a period marked with Yugoslavia’s and India’s growing political and economic offensive into the Third World, intensive expansion of direct and close contacts with different Asian, African, and Latin American countries, dynamic spread of the concept of nonalignment among newly liberated countries etc. Therefore, this lecture will primarily focus its analysis on the initiation and evolution of India’s and Yugoslavia’s mutual ties, Tito’s and Nehru’s intensive personal diplomacy and interactions, trying to single out the principles and mutual experiences that brought these two distant countries so close to each other. Through meticulous elaboration of Yugoslavia’s and India’s bilateral interactions, as well as emphasizing their relations with different nonaligned countries and the great powers, this lecture will shed additional light on the first decade in the formation of the new global phenomenon in international politics, i.e. the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), and bring closer to us this once crucial bilateral relationship in contemporary history.

Speaker:

Mr. Jovan Čavoški is currently a doctoral candidate at Peking University and Belgrade University. He is also an an associated-researcher at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, member of the Society for History of America’s Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the Commission for History of International Relations. His research focuses on the Cold War in the Third World, especially on the comparative Chinese, Yugoslav, and Indian foreign policies towards that region, analyzing superpower influences, as well as following the rise and evolution of the concept of non-alignment in world affairs. He is the author of Yugoslavia and the Sino-Indian Conflict, 1959-1962, (Belgrade: Institute for Recent History of Serbia). More than two dozen of his articles were published or are in the process of publication in referent journals and volumes in Serbia, China, Russia, Britain, Germany, Indonesia, Myanmar, Algeria, and the United States.