Non-aligned cities in the Cold War: municipal internationalism, town twinning and the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia, c.1950-c.1985

In the Cold War, Yugoslavia was famous for its non-aligned foreign policy. Non-alignment was a policy of balancing between the superpower blocs, but also of forging global collaboration of non-aligned states and actors in international institutions, with a view to increasing their room for manoeuvre at home and abroad. Relying on local and federal archives, this article explores the role of municipalities in Yugoslav foreign policy in two parts. The first part shows that the national municipal association, the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia, interpreted non-alignment as the pursuit of mediation on an East-West and North-South axis, largely through the two principal international municipal organisations, the pro-Western International Union of Local Authorities and Eastward-leaning Fédération mondiale des villes jumelées—United Towns Organisation. The second part examines the multitude of direct municipal links pursued by Yugoslav cities in the East, West and South. The article finds that municipalities tended to prefer direct links in Europe rather than the Global South, and that Yugoslavia’s republics faced different ways between East and West in terms of their municipal links. These foreign policy divergences at different levels of the state raise important questions for understanding Yugoslav foreign policy in the Cold War