| Beschreibung: |
In the mid-1970s Yugoslav officials proposed a bold plan: to make socialist Yugoslavia a nexus of all scientific-technological cooperation among the developing countries of the world, including the projects that Yugoslavia did not take part in. The proposal was clearly unfeasible; and yet, in the late 1970s and during the 1980s Yugoslavia came to play a similar role in the field of global public health policy, as it became a linchpin of WHO’s Primary Health Care/Health for All by the Year 2000 initiative, codified in the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration. Yugoslavia had implemented socialized medicine, gave a strong voice to the local community (unlike other socialist states, it had built a bottom-up system), and favored social(ized) prevention over the expensive bio-medical treatment—just what the declaration called for. (Plus, it was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement and had worked closely with the WHO.) With financial support of the WHO, other UN and national organizations, Yugoslav public health officials organized seminars and travelled to fellow developing countries, raising a new generation of public health officials in Africa and Asia, who would learn from each other, instead from the developed countries, in order to implement the Alma-Ata agenda. The paper, however, complicates the narrative, highlighting tensions between Yugoslavia’s bilateral (often financially rewarding) and multilateral (closer to the concept of “science for diplomacy”) medical cooperation; between clinical and public health professionals; between medicine as a universalist and a context-specific body of knowledge and practice; and the growing critique of self-management in the public health. It examines the nature of this global transfer of knowledge: did it live to expectations—and what were the expectations in the first place? It argues that, counterintuitively, the (largely successful) attempts of public health officials to position Yugoslavia as a coordinator of global public health initiatives ran against the attitudes of local experts and Yugoslavia’s high diplomacy, but also disregarded an important conflict within the WHO over policy as well as the contemporary shift from “international” to “global health.” |