Tito and Non-Alignment

From the archives: Ken Coates

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When Josip Broz Tito was born in 1892, a superficial observer would have thought that he had entered a very stable and structured world. Empires stretched around the globe, centring on cultured European capitals. Their poverty was concealed, but their opulence was flaunted. Industrialism and imperialism, meshed together, fashioned a universal web of communications. Rebellion must have seemed a distant and hazy memory. The Paris Commune was forgotten by all but a handful of dreamers. In Britain, Queen Victoria’s office even asked one of these, the revolutionary poet William Morris, whether he would like to be poet laureate. He would not. The German Social Democrats had newly adopted the Erfurt programme, which was explicitly Marxist; but already critics were accusing them of bureaucracy and dull conformity. Everywhere, as the young Tito arrived, the old order must have seemed safe.

Now the loss of Tito will be lamented by everyone who has followed his work. His contribution to the development of democratic socialism is evident to innumerable students of the Yugoslav system of participation, self-management and socialism. The same William Morris, who disappointed Queen Victoria’s Court in the year of Tito’s birth, provided the Workers’ Control Movement in modern Britain with its watchword: “no man is good enough to be another man’s master”. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, he wrote a prophetic essay on ‘A factory as it might be’. Nowhere in the world has his dream of a free fraternity of producers yet been fully realised. But if Morris were to return to the modern world, who can doubt that he would begin his search for clues to the cooperative commonwealth here in Yugoslavia? Yet it is equally important also to register the decisive importance of another seminal concept of Yugoslavia’s founder, that of non-alignment. This is crucial to the future of the world, if indeed the world is to be allowed to have a future.

In 1980, when President Tito died, the old imperial stability had vanished, and the world was in unconcealed turmoil where nothing either old or new seemed safe. Empires had collapsed, but exploitation still condemned vast populations to underdevelopment and worse. East/West rivalry had frozen into a yet colder war, in which re-armament became ever more frenzied and uncontrolled, while the deployment of nuclear weapons was widespread and becoming wider. Slump and mass unemployment had returned to the capitalist world, and stern repression was becoming more common in every zone, including both major power blocs. At a time when many peoples were balanced on the edge of famine, world military spending passed a figure of $1.3 billion a day. The authorities who monitor these matters report that it will pass the figure of $1.6 billion per day rather early in the decade we have just entered. Rightly, the nonnuclear States are uniting to express their strong resentment of the fact that vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons between the superpowers seems to know no rational limits. Indeed, new policies initiated by NATO positively insist on horizontal proliferation, with the stationing of so-called ‘theatre’ weapons in countries which have hitherto been able to eschew the presence of nuclear warheads in their territories.

A deepening slump intensifies these insane pressures, as if it were determined to prove the conventional socialist critique of capitalism to be precisely true. While some economies are experiencing a net contraction, military budgets mount consistently. This then means quite literally a policy of guns before butter, or in the modern idiom, nuclear missiles before education, health and welfare. Tito’s major statement to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia at their 11th Congress in 1978 gave a characteristically far-sighted and strong warning about the dangers of this renewed arms race.

If every nation had pursued similar policies to those which have been followed by Yugoslavia, then this fateful indictment would not be possible. In the given situation, however, it is entirely apposite.

Another statesman, Olof Palme, speaking at the Helsinki Conference of the Socialist International, has drawn attention to the special peril which Europe faces because it has in the main, so far rejected the course of non-alignment. “Europe”, he said, “is no special zone where peace can be taken for granted. In actual fact, it is at the centre of the arms race. Granted, the general assumption seems to be that any potential military conflict between the superpowers is going to start some place other than in Europe. But even if that were to be the case, we would have to count on one or the other party - in an effort to gain supremacy - trying to open a front on our continent, as well. As Alva Myrdal has recently pointed out, a war can simply be transported here, even though actual causes for war do not exist. Here there is a ready theatre of war. Here there have been great military forces for a long time. Here there are programmed weapons all ready for action ... “

Basing himself on this recognition, Palme recalled various earlier attempts to create, in North and Central Europe, nuclear-free zones, from which, by agreement, all warheads were to be excluded.

“Today more than ever there is, in my opinion, every reason to go on working for a nuclear-free zone. The ultimate objective of these efforts should be a nuclear-free Europe.” (My emphasis).

Olof Palme’s proposal would not be easy to achieve, and no-one has more reason to know this than the small, but crucially significant group of European neutral States. Foremost in experience of the struggle for independence and freedom of action is socialist Yugoslavia, as Tito reported in his address on the sixtieth anniversary of the Communist Movement in Yugoslavia. Pointing up the many difficulties which beset a policy of genuine non-alignment, he said:

“In a world divided into blocs, in which social, economic and political contradictions are still resolved by means of force and outside interference, it has been no easy matter to conduct such a policy, nor is it so today either. We have continually been subjected to various pressures and attempts to make us bow to the policies which are against the interests of our country and our movement. We have been and still are deeply convinced that the bloc politics can resolve none of the essential problems of the world, nor can it open up the prospect of democratisation of international relations for which nonaligned countries are striving. The policy of non-alignment, of which we were one of the co-sponsors, is therefore our permanent policy”.

Affirming the results of this prolonged struggle, Tito told the 6th Conference of Heads of State of the Non-Aligned Countries in Havana:

“The results of our activities so far represent a rich harvest.

During the past two decades we have asserted the original principles and objectives of non-alignment as permanent values.

We have resolutely fought for peace, security and freedom in the world.

We have made a substantial contribution to the successful pursuit and outcome of the anti-colonial revolution.

We have codified the principles of active and peaceful co-existence and staunchly advocated their implementation.

We have opposed power politics and foreign interference in all the forms in which they manifest themselves.

We have initiated long-term actions for the establishment of the new international economic order.

We have contributed to the realisation of the universality of the United Nations and to the strengthening of its role and importance.

We have taken marked steps to initiate the solution of the disarmament problem.

We have started a resolute struggle for decolonisation in the field of technology, information, and culture in general.”

It is plain, to everyone who cares to look, that this balance sheet is valid. In the field of disarmament in particular, all the most insistent pressures come from nations grouped within the non-aligned movement. The campaign of the Organisation of African Unity for an African Nuclear-free Zone, or the similar campaigns in the Pacific and South Asian areas, are cases in point. Indeed, the only existing Treaty which forbids nuclear warheads over a wide populous area is the Treaty of Tlatelolco which covers the Latin American continent. Most recently, the rebellion of the non-aligned world at the Geneva Conference which met to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and which was rightly unable to agree upon any ‘certificate of good health’ within this area, constitutes a powerful signal to all in the nuclear-armed States who have eyes to see.

Europe, having generated two world wars, and constituting the prime target for self-destruction in the third, is the slowest of the continents to awaken to these challenges. True, half aware of the menace so properly reported by Palme, Europe has seeded a very large number of partial plans for restricted nuclear-free zones. Central Europe, Baltic, Balkan and Mediterranean free zones have been propounded by numerous statesmen and scholars. But real progress is slow, whilst the arms race is anything but slow.

Now we face in Europe the forced development of the concept of ‘theatre’ nuclear war, and the rapid emplacement of the military hardware which is making it real.

The conventional notion of nuclear deterrence had always been wrapped in swathes of assurances by its proponents that the actual use of nuclear weapons was unthinkable. This had been apparently borne out during the Cuba crisis, when, as one American commentator put it, “we were eyeball to eyeball with the Russians, and they blinked”. But in today’s world, nuclear forces in the superpowers are at near parity, so that nowadays Time magazine offers up the pious hope that, next time, both parties might blink at once. Meantime, so vast are the investments tied into the manufacture of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems, that in any real war, it is not their use but their non-use which has become ‘unthinkable’. Since we must still presume that neither major power really wishes to destroy the world, we may begin to understand why more and more weight has therefore been placed on this notion of ‘theatre’ weapons, which it is canvassed, might be actually employed without annihilating the whole of civilisation.

Thus, an unlooked for transformation has come over the logic of deterrence. It followed the development of highly accurate, adaptable and lethal weapons delivery systems. Now this threatens the very survival of European civilisation. In his last speech, to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Earl Mountbatten, a former Chief of Staff in Britain, and one-time chairman of NATO’s military committee, seized the heart of the question:

“It was not long, however, before smaller nuclear weapons of various designs were produced and deployed for use in what was assumed to be a tactical or theatre war. The belief was that were hostilities ever to break out in Western Europe, such weapons could be used in field warfare without triggering an all-out nuclear exchange leading to the final holocaust. I have never found this idea credible (my italics). I have never been able to accept the reasons for the belief that any class of nuclear weapons can be categorised in terms of their tactical or strategic purposes.”

Another qualified specialist from Britain is Lord Zuckerman, once Chief Scientific Policy Advisor to the British Government. He points at Mountbatten’s insistence, saying that he sees no military reality in what is now referred to as tactical or theatre warfare, because in Europe there are no vast deserts or open plains: on the contrary, urban sprawl makes it certain that even accurate strikes at military targets will inevitably destroy huge civilian populations. “I do not believe”, Zuckerman told a Pugwash symposium in Canada,

“that nuclear weapons could be used in what is now fashionably called a ‘theatre war’. I do not believe that any scenario exists which suggests that nuclear weapons could be used in field warfare between two nuclear States without escalation resulting. I know of several such exercises. They all lead to the opposite conclusion. There is no Marquess of Queensbury who would be holding the ring in a nuclear conflict. I cannot see teams of physicists attached to military staffs who would run to the scene of a nuclear explosion and then back to tell their local commanders that the radiation intensity of a nuclear strike by the other side was such and such, and that therefore the riposte should be only a weapon of equivalent yield. If the zone of lethal or wounding neutron radiation of a so-called neutron bomb would have, say, a radius of half a kilometer, the reply might well be a ‘dirty’ bomb with the same zone of radiation, but with a much wider area of devastation due to blast and fire.”

It is often claimed that ‘It is not where nuclear weapons come from that matters, it is where they land’. To that we must add that it does not matter, when they land, whether some occult philosopher of war has originally styled them ‘tactical’ or ‘strategic’, ‘theatre’ or otherwise. Once we have seen the trend involved in reasoning about theatre war we cannot fail to draw some very unpleasant conclusions about it.

First, if Mountbatten and Zuckerman are right, any ‘theatre’ in which such weapons of whatever provenance are used, will be eliminated. Second, the corollary is that if there is any meaning in the restriction implied in the concept of ‘theatre’ weapons, it is not that they will be selective within a particular zone, but that they might possibly be unleashed in one comparatively narrow area rather than another wider one. That is to say, and this is the whole point, they might be exchanged in Europe prior to ‘escalation’, which in this case would mean extending their exchange to the USA and the USSR. This carnivorous prospect is not at all identical with the simple supposition with which supporters of nuclear disarmament are often (wrongly) credited, that ‘one day deterrence will not work’. It rather implies that there has been a mutation in the concept of deterrence itself, with grisly consequences for all of us in Europe.

If the great powers drift into a conflict which requires a bit of a nuclear war, they will want to have it away from home.

If Europeans do not wish to be their hosts for such a match, then, regardless of whether it is right or wrong to suppose that it may be confined to our ‘theatre’, we must discover a new initiative which can move us towards disarmament. New technologies will not do this, and nor will either superpower find it easy to respond unless there is a significant and powerful pressure upon all concerned so to do.

This involves the search for a political step which can open up new forms of public pressure, and bring into the field of force new moral resources. Partly this is a matter of ending superpower domination of the most important negotiations.

But another part of the response involves a multi-national mobilisation of public opinion. In Europe, this will not materialise until people appreciate the exceptional vulnerability of their continent. Then they will begin to organise for the removal of nuclear weapons from all European soil, East and West alike, and for a new approach to de-alignment. It seems very plain that the gradual and peaceful dismantling of the European blocs can never begin by agreement, until nuclear polarization and escalation is reversed. The goal of a nuclear-free Europe, from the Soviet border to the Portuguese coastline, is beginning to attract serious and thoughtful consideration in many countries. If it can become a campaigning issue, then a whole variety of intermediate steps to ultimate European nonalignment become first conceivable, then practical. Once this progress begins, detente and disarmament may indeed become irreversible processes.

It is for this reason that Tito’s testament is burningly relevant far beyond the Yugoslav frontiers, and particularly in a Europe over which the final holocaust may be unleashed at any time. Homage to the memory of a far-sighted man thus reinforces a resolve to carry forward his struggle. Unlike many powerful national leaders, Josip Broz Tito’s posthumous influence will increase and widen, as the meaning of the concept of nonalignment comes home, in its full force, to the peoples of our continent.