| Beschreibung: |
The paper examines medical cooperation of socialist Yugoslavia with “developing countries” and international organizations such as the World Health Organization during the Cold War. Medical cooperation became the most prominent form of Yugoslavia’s international scientific-technological cooperation, but its results were, and remain, difficult to assess. How did medicine (including, importantly, public health) come to play such an outsized role in the first place, and what were the reasons for endocrinology, speech therapy, ultrasound, and alcoholism prevention—none of them obvious candidates—becoming so successful fields of cooperation with African and, to a lesser degree, Asian countries? Was Yugoslavia copying, for instance, the Cuban, Chinese, Soviet, or even older European colonial models—or did it attempt to articulate its own science diplomacy policy? Yugoslavia expected to reap economic benefits form scientific-technological cooperation with numerous “Third World” countries by selling goods and services and tie them to Yugoslavia in a longer run, but also to raise its international standing at a time when it precariously balanced between the two confronted blocs. Lines of cooperation with the capitalist, socialist, and newly independent and decolonized countries became intrinsically connected, and Yugoslavs officials, scientists, and physicians believed the country was in a unique position to weave all of them together. However, they seem to have been less aware of the increasing structural tensions between bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements. The paper shows the complexity and messiness of an attempt to translate “high diplomacy” policies into the language of “global transfer of knowledge and technology” and the realization of various forms of scientific-technological cooperation with countries across the worlds. It points to a variety of actors involved in the process, on a federal, republican, and local levels, who occasionally competed with each other. Answers to a fundamental question—What came first, good diplomatic relations or scientific-technological cooperation?—depended on the professional profiles of those who uttered them and points to an interesting power-dynamic between the federal center and constitutive republics, among republics, as well as between different groups of experts. Crucially, the paper highlights the intertwinement of local and global developments, how Yugoslavia’s domestic policies were (re)shaped based on the country’s global engagement, and vice versa, how micro phenomena and developments influenced its science diplomacy policy. |