Non-aligned Cities in the Cold War: Municipal Internationalism, Town Twinning and the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia, c.1950–c.1985

Abstract 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.


Introduction
In June 1965, the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia (Stalna konferencija gradova Jugoslavije, SKGJ) celebrated an important diplomatic success. It hosted 1,000 delegates from 45 countries for the seventeenth congress of the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. 1 The SKGJ hoped to use this success to further its influence in transnational networks of municipal internationalism, relying as it did so on the country's policy of non-alignment in the Cold War. Non-alignment was a policy of balancing between the superpower blocs, but also of forging global collaboration of non-aligned states and non-state actors, often through international institutions, with a view to increasing their room for independent manoeuvre at home and abroad. Concomitantly, the SKGJ tried to promote East-West and North-South dialogue, largely through the two principal international municipal organisations, the pro-Western IULA and Eastward-leaning F ed eration mondiale des villes jumel ees-United Towns Organisation (MFVJ-UTO). The SKGJ also spurred on a multitude of direct municipal links between Yugoslav municipalities and those in the First, Second and Third Worlds of the Cold War. In doing so, leading Yugoslav municipal officials aimed to minimise Cold War obstacles to the participation of their own local governments in global transnational networks of local authorities, allowing them to tap into international material economic flows and the circulation of knowledge, ideas and technologies. Certainly, recent studies have shown the degree to which Yugoslav cities' embeddedness in global and non-aligned networks shaped their architecture, 2 public spaces, 3 and even status as sites of transnational construction. 4 Over time, however, the pattern of Yugoslav municipal activity abroad began to diverge in some important ways from the intentions of higher-level policy makers. Namely, the more urbanised, developed and Westleaning republics saw their municipalities disproportionately more active in international affairs and twinned with West European municipalities. By contrast, Serbia's municipalities developed more links in Eastern Europe and the Third World, and the municipalities of the poorer republics remained less active overall. This article investigates the significance of this divergence for understanding the Yugoslav quest for non-alignment.
Non-alignment for Yugoslavia became a constitutive narrative both abroad and domestically in the Cold War. Balancing precariously between the superpower blocs ever since the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, Yugoslavia sought to ensure its security and development prospects through what became the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Yugoslavia hosted the Belgrade Conference in September 1961, which brought together 25 states as full participants and three observer countries from four continents, which acted as a significant catalyst in the creation of the NAM. 5 To ensure the broadest possible coalition of states, Yugoslavia consistently argued that membership of NAM should not be determined by region or race. Its president, Josip Broz Tito, secured rather the adoption of more open political criteria, that is, having an independent foreign policy, pursuing so-called peaceful coexistence, non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and rejecting membership of the superpower military alliances. 6 While this could unite a broader set of states geographically, it was also designed to cut across different domestic political arrangements, which could include liberal democracies, one-party states and in some cases military dictatorships. From the domestic standpoint in Yugoslavia, these postulates helped preserve single-party rule by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ). Similarly, members of the NAM placed importance on universal global institutions as a way of reducing superpower influence on world affairs and strove to act as 'mediators in the service of the UN Charter'. 7 The effects of Yugoslav non-alignment on the domestic sphere were profound, but also ambiguous and contradictory. The country's disproportionately influential global role in the 1960s and 1970s allowed it to extract benefits from both superpowers by balancing between them and enlisting the aid of the non-aligned countries. Non-alignment thus helped to legitimise single-party rule at home and incorporate disparate internal interest groups. 8 In fact, Yugoslavia's non-aligned status in the Cold War became constitutionally enshrined in 1974. 9 Non-alignment therefore afforded Yugoslavia's different republics space to pursue constitutionally sanctioned diverging paths. In the words of Zachary Irwin, non-alignment 'set acceptable limits on the affinities felt by individual republics toward specific areas outside the Federation, e.g. on the putative orientation of Croatia and Slovenia to the West, of the Southern and Eastern Republics towards the East, and of Islamic Bosnia-Herzegovina toward the Middle East'. 10 Such an arrangement proved functional to LCY rule as long as the superpowers appeared threatening and Yugoslav growth continued. It began to experience increasing stresses, however, as the 'shock of the global' of the 1970s saw the terms of trade and borrowing worsen for many developing countries, which affected Yugoslavia deeply. 11 In this context, Benedetto Zaccaria shows that the richer north-western republics, Croatia and Slovenia, lobbied the federal government for particular trading relations and arrangements with the EEC in the 1970s, which the federal government resisted. 12 Furthermore, John Lampe has posited that Yugoslavia's reliance on fading trade with NAM members in the 1980s had divisive domestic consequences. It frustrated Croatia's and Slovenia's keenness to trade with Western Europe. Critically, it also fed Serb-Muslim tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, both Sarajevo-based, largely Bosnian Muslim enterprises like Energoinvest, and the military-industrial complex around Sarajevo where Bosnian Serbs held most of the factory jobs, began to face financial problems and redundancies, in part because trade with NAM members in the Middle East proved difficult or contentious in the 1980s. These difficulties would lead to competing demands on dwindling resources and open the door to nationalist politicians and explosive conflicts in the 1990s. 13 While it is clear that the connection between Yugoslav non-alignment and its domestic politics has been explored by historians, this article incorporates the role of municipalities for the first time. In doing so, it extends our understanding of the contradictory results of non-alignment for Yugoslavia. It allows us to grasp better which international processes affected what level or scale of the Yugoslav state and society as a whole. This approach follows Agustin Cosovschi's dictum that new studies of Yugoslav foreign policy should explore how '[Yugoslav foreign] relations were systematically woven and sustained throughout the years by the action of diverse actors on the ground'. 14 In fact, the right of municipalities to engage in foreign affairs was also enshrined in the 1974 constitution, as shown by a seminal piece by Dejan Jovi c, which is the first to map out the institutional foreign policy set-up in Tito's Yugoslavia. 15 Yugoslav municipalities gained this right almost two decades ahead of those in Belgium. 16 In practice, the SKGJ and individual municipalities had already started to engage with foreign policy initiatives in the 1950s. The SKGJ was the main body representing municipal authorities in the country, and was part of the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia (Socijalisti cki savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije, SSRNJ), the umbrella mass organisation that included other mass front organisations informally led by the ruling SKJ. The SKJ, SSRNJ and other mass organisations all had foreign relations committees that oversaw their international activities. As is shown in this article, the SKGJ worked closely with the SSRNJ and the Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs in foreign policy, but clearly had major operational autonomy, as did municipal authorities themselves.
Besides contributing to the literature on Yugoslav non-alignment, this article also adds to the broader scholarship on municipal internationalism. While most of the literature on town twinning has tended to focus on the first part of the twentieth century or the period since the 1970s, 17 this article follows Nick Clarke's argument that the Cold War period deserves more focused study, as it can more fully elucidate the (dis)continuities in ideas and practices in twentieth century municipal internationalism. 18 The networks of municipal internationalism had emerged on the basis of apolitical or even anti-political notions that municipal settings had much in common across the world, allowing urban policy to travel across borders, as well as that local governance was technical rather than political. 19 While this approach continued to be influential, the Cold War complicated easy assumptions that often still prevail in the literature that the ability of cities to escape national borders leads to 'a decline in the difference-producing impact of national borders'. 20 Oscar Gaspari argues that East-West tensions shaped the re-emergence of interwar European twinning networks in the post-war period, especially the particularly influential new network, the Council of European Municipalities (CEM), founded in 1950. 21 Antoine Vion even posits that the CEM actively campaigned, possibly with American connivance, to counter the influence of Monde Bilingue, a rival twinning association which was open to the Soviet bloc from the mid-1950s and was the forerunner to the F ed eration mondiale des villes jumel ees-United Towns Organisation (FMVJ-UTO). 22 This article adds to this literature on municipal internationalism in the Cold War by showing that East-West tensions not only divided and shaped global municipal networks but national ones as well, in that Yugoslavia's republics saw municipal links turn in different directions in the Cold War. That finding tallies with Wilbur Zelinsky's conclusion that there has historically been an, 'emphatic positive correlation between number (and probably intensity) of twinnings and level of socioeconomic development at both the intra-and international scale, as well as an apparent inverse relationship between size of place and level of local interest'. 23 Furthermore, it shows that many of these networks continued to play a role even after the demise of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s.
This article relies on multiple archives to make its case. The starting point is the SKGJ fond located in the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. This fond contains a wealth of materials collected by the principal body coordinating the work of municipalities in Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, the SKGJ fond contains only a single box containing the materials of the SKGJ foreign affairs committee and these relate only to the 1980s. The State Archive in Zagreb (effectively, the city archive) makes up significantly for the shortfall in the Archive of Yugoslavia. The fond of the office of the mayor of Zagreb, who was in the leading bodies of the SKGJ from its inception in 1953, holds records of the mayor's international activities from 1950 to 1967. Critically, the fond contains materials of the federal SKGJ foreign affairs committee. The article also draws on the political archive of the State Secretariat for Foreign Affairs, based in the main building of Serbia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the foreign affairs committee of the SSRNJ in the Archives of Yugoslavia, both of which oversaw the international activities of the mass organisations in Yugoslavia. It was more difficult to recover the agency of municipalities themselves. Unfortunately, local archives in most of the republics of the former Yugoslavia currently have holdings that only go up to the 1960s. While this is a significant drawback, this article presents the first and the currently most rounded possible archival study of Yugoslav international municipal activism, which will enable further study as more evidence emerges.
The article proceeds in two parts. In the first part, it explores the role of Yugoslav municipal authorities in the transnational networks of municipal internationalism during the Cold War. These included the principal organisations of municipal internationalism of the Cold War, the IULA and FMVJ-UTO. The IULA had been set up in 1913 and was largely Western in composition, while the FMVJ-UTO was set up in 1957 and had roots in France and the former French colonies, but also cultivated close links with Soviet bloc cities. Moreover, while the IULA contained national associations of municipal authorities, the FMVJ-UTO largely championed direct intermunicipal relations like city twinning as its preferred form of international interaction. Remarkably, Yugoslav municipal authorities were simultaneously members of both the IULA and the FMVJ-UTO. Given Yugoslavia's active non-aligned policy, Yugoslav cities and the SKGJ consistently remained major proponents of reconciliation between the IULA and the FMVJ-UTO, and positioned themselves as an East-West, as well as North-South, bridge. In the second part, this article considers the proliferation of direct, municipality-to-municipality links established by Yugoslav local authorities in the Cold War. Realising that their activities in the IULA and the FMVJ-UTO had their limits, and responding to domestic decentralising reforms in Yugoslavia itself, SKGJ officials changed tack in the 1970s and 1980s. Their primary concern became fostering municipal twinning in the First, Second and Third Worlds of the Cold War. Bridge-building remained a key narrative. The second part of the article finds that, while successful in terms of the proliferation of links, this policy was highly uneven and contradictory for Yugoslavia. The article then provides a conclusion, placing its findings in a wider framework.
The SKGJ, non-alignment and the municipal internationals, c. 1950-c.1968 This section concentrates on Yugoslav municipal diplomacy in the main municipal internationals of the Cold War era, the IULA and the FMVJ-UTO. It argues that the higher echelons of Yugoslav municipal officialdom pursued policies that were closely synchronised with the policies of the state, especially their efforts at advocating the universality of global institutions through nonaligned diplomacy. Yugoslav municipal officials gradually found their niche as promoters of East-West and North-South dialogue, and the closer cooperation of the IULA and FMVJ-UTO. This broadly reflected the state's own emerging policy of non-alignment. Following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, Yugoslavia remained suspended between the superpowers, pursuing a position of neutrality, but tilting westwards for security and aid purposes. 24 With Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, however, Yugoslav policy sought to re-establish equidistance between the blocs. The rapprochement with the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev in 1955-6 heralded an era of better relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc, although the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 led to brief periods of renewed tension. 25 Simultaneously, there was a push towards the Third World and problem-solving through the United Nations, which resulted in the Belgrade Conference in 1961 and the formation of NAM in subsequent years. 26 The rise of d etente in the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to open up the possibility of the end of the Cold War. Leading Yugoslav statesmen and diplomats feared, however, that bloc divisions would be cemented rather than overcome, endangering the independence of smaller countries like Yugoslavia, which led to an even greater emphasis on Yugoslavia's nonaligned position after c. 1968. 27 The first steps of Yugoslav municipal officials in the revived post-war international municipal movement were hesitant, and largely shaped by Yugoslavia's precarious position in the early Cold War. In large part for security reasons, Yugoslav statesmen, diplomats and ideologues adapted their country's institutions and the overall ideological framework to the embedded liberalism of the post-war international order. 28 That was evident in relation to municipal internationalism as well. At its founding congress on 21-22 April 1953, the SKGJ nodded to liberal sentiments abroad, declaring continuity with the pre-war and oppositional (liberal) Union of Cities of Yugoslavia (Savez gradova Jugoslavije, founded in 1927) and making the solemn decision to re-join the West-leaning IULA. 29 The Yugoslav capital Belgrade had in fact re-joined already in January 1950, 30 while the capital of the second largest Yugoslav republic, Zagreb, had re-joined in April 1951. 31 Despite leaning to the West in this early period, Yugoslav municipal officials remained suspicious of Western, anti-Communist influences in the IULA. An undated and unsigned statement in the archives, almost certainly a keynote speech at the May 1954 bi-annual assembly in Split, reported that relations with the IULA were 'stagnating' because the IULA was 'engaged with political questions and certain goals, which were in complete contradiction with the principles on which it was founded'. 32 This was likely a reference to IULA's ever closer relationship with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. 33 The SKGJ presidency viewed the formation of a Commission for European Affairs within the IULA, composed of representatives of cities from Western European states, as politically suspect. 34 The SKGJ nevertheless decided by June that it should assume an active role in it, and develop links with Greek and Turkish city federations and cities, consonant with Yugoslavia's then membership of the Balkan Pact with the two NATO members. 35 Links with municipal networks in the West developed further in 1955 and reports underlined the practical use of such contacts. Delegations of the SKGJ, and the cities of Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana, attended the twelfth IULA congress held in Rome from 25 September to 1 October 1955. The SKGJ also visited the German and Austrian national associations in June and December 1955, and a report underscored the applied benefits of a month-long study visit to the UK in June and July, with a return trip by four mayors planned for 1956. The same delegation that visited the UK visited France and held meetings with the national association of cities, planned additional city links, and proffered an invitation to fifty representatives of an association of socialist councillors. Moreover, Yugoslav officials received an invitation to Sweden for a twomonth study trip to explore solutions to the housing problem. 36 With Stalin's death and the subsequent improvement of relations with the USSR in 1955-6, Yugoslav municipal officials began to craft their new role in the municipal international movement as promoters of East-West dialogue. This started when a Belgrade city delegation visited the Soviet capital, Moscow, by invitation, in May 1956. 37 That visit buoyed the SKGJ to suggest to the IULA that it issued an invitation to Soviet bloc cities to join the IULA. At the aforementioned Ljubljana assembly of the SKGJ in May 1956, the new Belgrade mayor Milo s Mini c approached the IULA secretary general Nicolas Arkema, saying he had gained the impression from conversations with representatives of East European cities that they would join the IULA if they could receive assurances in advance that their applications would not be rejected. Arkema had to consult with the leadership of the IULA, but he was personally of the opinion that there would be no obstacles to such a development. Later in 1956, Mini c received a letter stating that the East European capitals and Beijing would be invited to join the IULA. The Soviet military intervention in Hungary in November 1956, however, put a stop to this initiative. Meeting Arkema in late 1956, Zagreb mayor Ve ceslav Holjevac learned that the IULA executive committee would for now only be inviting the Polish capital Warsaw to join. 38 Another freeze in Yugoslav-Soviet relations following the invasion of Hungary, moreover, and lasting until the Sino-Soviet split came into the open in November 1960, prevented new Yugoslav mediating efforts between East and West. 39 While hopes of East-West reconciliation were dashed for the time being, Yugoslav efforts turned to promoting deeper North-South dialogue in the IULA. Such a foreign policy orientation was broadly evident already after Tito's trip to India and Burma in December 1954 and at the July 1956 meeting on the Adriatic island of Brioni, when Tito hosted Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and India's Jawaharlal Nehru. 40 Yugoslav delegates to the thirteenth IULA congress in The Hague in June 1957 joined African and Asian representatives in arguing against the undemocratic practice that the outgoing executive committee should nominate the incoming one, ensuring Northern dominance. 41 They also lamented that the 1959 IULA congress would be held in Berlin, which they saw as a direct political intervention in the Cold War. 42 When the SKGJ Committee for International Links met in September 1957, it affirmed the organisation's 'expert-practical and political' interest in membership in the IULA, 43 but argued that the SKGJ had to 'fight for the principles of universality and democratic organisation'. 44 This approach appeared to be paying off by the time of the IULA Berlin congress in June 1959. In a report, Yugoslav officials noted with satisfaction that some delegates walked out when the secretary general of the Council of Europe, Lodovico Benvenuti described European unity as an ideal against other continents and against Communism. 45 Furthermore, the Yugoslavs applauded the fact that the congress had dedicated a day to Afro-Asian cities and insisted that the next two congresses should be held outside Europe, despite the fact that the nominees, Washington and Tel Aviv, had become controversial. 46 Moreover, it was in Berlin that a SKGJ official was first elected to the IULA executive committee 47 and that the suggestion of the SKGJ hosting an IULA congress first emerged. 48 It was also in Berlin that the SKGJ invited a delegation of the All-Indian Federation of Local Authorities to Yugoslavia. The visit took place immediately after the Berlin congress, in early July, and the SKGJ received an invitation for a reciprocal trip to India. Officials judged this to be a significant result, as India was a central ally in forging what would become the Non-Aligned Movement. 49 With the slow improvement of Yugoslav-Soviet relations in the early 1960s, moreover, SKGJ officials began to harbour ambitions to reconcile the IULA and the FMVJ-UTO, the other main municipal international of the times. The FMVJ-UTO was not in fact Soviet-controlled, and was dominated by its founder, the former resistance fighter, Jean-Marie Bressand, whose power-base was in France and Francophone Africa. Nevertheless, the FMVJ-UTO was open to Communist-run municipal administrations from its very beginning, and these remained influential. The FMVJ-UTO had invited representatives of Yugoslav cities to its founding congress in 1957 and continued to court the SKGJ despite initial suspicions on the part of the SKGJ. Bressand even offered to come at his own cost to Yugoslavia to meet SKGJ officials to put the case for the FMVJ-UTO. 50 As part of discussions related to municipal links, in December 1959, officials from the SSRNJ and SKGJ viewed relations with national and international municipal organisations as politically useful in terms of improving state relations with Italy and France. Links with the FMVJ-UTO were seen as useful in that context, as most members of the FMVJ-UTO were French cities. 51 The SKGJ did not formally join the FMVJ-UTO, but several Yugoslav cities did so between 1960 and 1962. 52 Bressand finally visited Yugoslavia in that period, while Yugoslav officials called on him during his hospital stay in Paris in April 1962. 53 The enthusiasm with which Soviet and Soviet bloc city officials greeted the contributions of the Yugoslav delegates at a meeting of the FMVJ-UTO executive committee in April 1962, as well as invitations to send delegations to the Soviet Union and Poland, did not escape the attention of SKGJ officials. 54 A Yugoslav city representative in fact then joined the executive committee of the FMVJ-UTO and was offered the position of vicepresident, and the SKGJ hoped to organise the following spring's executive committee meeting in the Slovene capital Ljubljana. 55 When the IULA jubilee congress in Brussels in June 1963 formally decided to hold the next congress in Belgrade in 1965, though, the position of Yugoslav cities in the FMVJ-UTO was temporarily made more difficult. Controversially, the IULA congress in Belgrade would contain a session on twinning, which the FMVJ-UTO saw as an IULA attempt to widen its remit and supersede the FMVJ-UTO as the twinning international. Bressand therefore criticised the Yugoslav delegates at an executive meeting held in September 1963. 56 Despite this, Yugoslav officials did not feel isolated. They had a separate meeting with representatives of Communistrun cities and federations days after the FMVJ-UTO executive committee session in Aosta. The meeting was hosted by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The PCI's top international affairs official, Giancarlo Pajetta, and the mayors of Leningrad, Volgograd, Warsaw, Prague and Sofia took part, as did a representative of Ljubljana. Their meeting focused on problems with the FMVJ-UTO. It was important for the Yugoslavs, however, that Pajetta and Vasily Isayev, heading the Leningrad delegation, both stated that they were open to cooperation with the IULA and the latter criticised Bressand for the manner of his attack on the Yugoslavs as 'too personal in nature'. 57 Georgi Petkov, representing Sofia, described Bressand 'a petit-bourgeois with a certain positive history' and 'too personal'. 58 Pajetta and the Warsaw mayor Janusz Zarzycki both criticised the FMVJ-UTO for a lack of concrete work. 59 Isayev said that he was perplexed by the absence of English delegates and that he feared that the organisation was in danger of dividing into African and European parts, likely again a jibe at Bressand, whose power base lay in France and the former French colonies. 60 Representing Ljubljana, Marko Bulc agreed that French influence in the secretariat was a problem but argued, true to Yugoslavia's policy of global non-alignment, that the FMVJ-UTO should spread to new territories to overcome this imbalance. 61 Despite leaning momentarily on their new-found Soviet bloc allies in the FMVJ-UTO to defend their positions within the IULA, Yugoslav municipal authorities appeared consistent in their hopes that the future of the IULA and FMVJ-UTO would be in opening up to the cities of Africa and Asia. Indeed, when the SKGJ presidency met in April 1964, it laid out its new approach, based on its belief that non-alignment was on the rise globally. The SKGJ presidency argued that the IULA and MFVJ-UTO were 'lagging behind positive trends in international relations … because they still revolve around the East-West axis'. 62 The SKGJ therefore had to act to overcome these negative trends, by treating the two organisations as equally important, and by proactively suggesting concrete ways in which bloc divisions could be overcome. To this end, 'it is necessary to more openly speak about the need for the bringing closer of the two organisations, since we can have the support of representatives of cities of Asia and Africa in that direction'. 63 The SKGJ would ultimately succeed, by late 1966, in its mediation efforts, resulting in a joint statement of the IULA and FMVJ-UTO promising future cooperation. The road was not an easy one, however. Initially, the SKGJ's standing in the FMVJ-UTO appeared unaffected by Bressand's displeasure. The SKGJ hosted an executive committee meeting of the FMVJ-UTO in April 1964 in Yugoslavia, which acted as a preparatory meeting for the organisation's Warsaw congress in September 1964 and saw some criticism of Bressand. 64 The congress itself proved significant in so far as it pushed for aid from cities in the industrialised world to their sister cities in the Third World. 65 Nonetheless, prospects of rapprochement between the FMVJ-UTO and IULA looked bleak. The executive committee of the FMVJ-UTO, meeting in February 1965, took the stance that it neither advised nor forbade members to attend the IULA congress in Belgrade, but the SKGJ leadership noted that FMVJ-UTO officials would nonetheless informally discourage attendance. 66 The SKGJ had decided to invite officials from FMVJ-UTO member cities to the IULA congress in Belgrade, but most, including the Soviet bloc cities, demurred or ignored the invitation, and only a few from Africa and Italy accepted. 67 Yet momentum was on the SKGJ side when it suggested at the IULA congress in Belgrade that an appeal for cooperation with the FMVJ-UTO be made. 68 It is unclear why exactly the IULA executive committee accepted this, but there is indirect evidence in Yugoslav documents that some discussion about it had already occurred before and that there was support for the idea within the IULA. Indeed, despite being opposed to rapprochement, Bressand had accused the SKGJ in September 1963 of not having publicly supported a Canadian initiative at the 1963 Brussels congress for cooperation between the IULA and FMVJ-UTO. 69 Moreover, preparatory materials for the 1965 Belgrade congress again mentioned fear that Canada may bring up the FMVJ-UTO in Belgrade. 70 At a non-quorate meeting of the executive committee which took place in Leningrad in July 1965, however, Bressand once again attacked the SKGJ for hosting the IULA congress and decried the IULA as a reactionary organisation. 71 Even though the FMVJ-UTO executive committee agreed to open discussions with the IULA in November 1965, subject to their ability to solve outstanding issues between them, correspondence between them descended into another attack on the IULA on the same lines that Bressand had pursued in July 1965. 72 It appears that Yugoslav diplomatic links with Soviet bloc cities proved important in bringing the FMVJ-UTO to the table and ultimately to signing the joint statement. The issue dragged on throughout 1966. The FMVJ-UTO president Doudou Thiam wrote a series of letters to the Yugoslav authorities complaining about Yugoslav stances in the FMVJ-UTO, which threatened to derail the entire initiative. Following SKGJ consultations with Italian cities and the PCI, and officials from Czechoslovakia, Algiers, the USSR, East Germany, Hungary and Poland, however, the Yugoslavs decided to take the matter again to the executive committee of the FMVJ-UTO in October 1966. They proved successful in bringing about another affirmation of the need for a meeting between representatives of the FMVJ-UTO and the IULA. 73 This joint meeting finally occurred in November 1966, at which the two organisations made a public statement that they had resolved their differences, were apolitical in nature, would exchange delegations and materials, and would explore the possibility of joint activity in international organisations like the UN. 74 This was a victory for the SKGJ, but it proved to be a limited one. Despite the declaration, and a similar declaration in 1976, relations between the FMVJ-UTO and the IULA remained fractious for the rest of the Cold War, and it was not until 2004 that they united to form the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). 75 For SKGJ officials, though, the 1965 IULA statement which led to the 1966 joint agreement continued to serve as a point of reference for decades to come. It would be used and re-used to affirm Yugoslavia's important position in both the IULA and FMVJ-UTO. Successive Yugoslav internal reports referred back to it as a source of inspiration for contemporary political work in municipal internationalism and as proof of Yugoslav influence. In 1970, a keynote report underlined that the statement had lifted Yugoslavia's profile in both organisations. 76 In 1975, a report repeated the same formulation about the standing of the SKGJ but only after having stated that '[t]he declaration … is still relevant even 10 years after its adoption, as relations between [the IULA and MFVJ-UTO] are not satisfactory, which has led to the postponement of the conference about the cooperation between cities of the developed countries and of the developing countries which was meant to be held in 1974'. 77 The SKGJ continued to demand an international conference that would lead to North-South cooperation in 1982, 78 and again in 1985. 79 The SKGJ leadership also used the 1965 statement again in 1984, this time within the MFVJ-UTO. The SKGJ backed the successful candidacy of Pierre Mauroy, Mayor of Lille, for president of the MFVJ-UTO, appreciative of his desire to bring the MFVJ-UTO closer to the IULA. Indeed, Yugoslav delegates took the 1965 statement with them to the MFVJ-UTO congress in Montreal, Canada, in 1984, to underline the possibilities of working together-but clearly also to highlight the SKGJ's longerterm role in the rapprochement process. 80 As this section has showed, SKGJ officials followed a policy of non-alignment that saw Yugoslav local authorities act primarily through the municipal internationals. Their hopes of democratising the structures of the IULA and MFVJ-UTO and bringing the two internationals closer together in defiance of the Cold War blocs, of deepening the inclusion of municipalities from the Third World, and of reducing obstacles to the circulation of knowledge useful for municipal purposes, clearly achieved some successes. Critically, these activities raised the SKGJ's standing and they were internally judged as having been a major source of the SKGJ's relatively high status in the world of municipal internationalism. It is important to underline that this section has served to illustrate how closely the SKGJ's outlook reflected official state foreign policy, by focussing on the SKGJ and the higher echelons of municipal officialdom, and their activities in the main municipal internationals of the day. This allows the next section to explore how far the SKGJ was able to spur the international activity of the lower echelons of municipal officialdom in the spirit of the state policy of non-alignment.

Yugoslav non-alignment and municipal twinning, c.1968-c.1985
Towards the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, SKGJ officials began to re-orientate the work of their organisation. The focus moved explicitly from prioritising work in the international municipal organisations to fostering inter-municipal links abroad. As noted by a report in 1975, 'despite achieving positive results, it should be noted that the practice hitherto has been oriented more towards cooperation with international non-governmental organisations of local authorities and less towards cities'. 81 This shift came partly in response to frustration with the extent to which bloc divisions affected the work of the IULA and FMVJ-UTO. It was, however, also consistent with decentralising reforms domestically, which, as noted, conferred greater powers to lower governmental echelons to engage in foreign policy. The SKGJ duly transformed its character from principal protagonist in foreign affairs to facilitator with a supporting role for municipalities themselves. It sought now to provide municipal authorities with support for their own work through reports, knowledge-exchange activities and expert advice, but also to ensure that international activities were consistent with Yugoslav foreign policy and domestic priorities.
The Yugoslav foreign policy establishment in this period deepened its commitment to nonalignment and the NAM. Consistent with Yugoslav worries that superpower d etente in Europe could lead to the strengthening of the blocs rather than their dismantlement, threatening the independence of non-aligned countries like itself, Yugoslavia sought to pursue policies which would help overcome the bloc structure of Europe. This meant pursuing multilateral and equal collaboration between independent states as an antidote to superpower competition. 82 Addressing the ninth LCY congress in 1969, Tito signalled that improving relations with neighbouring countries was an important part of this endeavour. 83 The same claim re-appeared in the resolution on foreign policy at the tenth LCY congress in 1974. 84 It was in this overall spirit of pushing for an end to the bloc division of Europe that Yugoslavia approached the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki in 1975 and the Follow-up Meeting in Belgrade in 1977-8. During this period, Yugoslav officials often underlined that Yugoslavia's status in Europe was strengthened by its leading role in the NAM. 85 Yet Yugoslavia's position in the NAM was under constant challenge in the 1970s. The decade saw a rise in pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World, leading to a Cuban diplomatic offensive to align the NAM with the USSR in world affairs. Yugoslavia successfully managed to resist this orientation. It did so narrowly at the Havana Summit in 1979, and more decisively at the New Delhi Summit in 1983. It did so, though, without managing to secure its own vision of non-alignment, premised on equidistance from the blocs, within the ever more diverse and divided NAM. 86 Moreover, Yugoslavia's position in the world suffered after Tito's death in 1980 and from its increasingly severe economic problems arising from the debt crisis it found itself in in the early 1980s. 87 The SKGJ throughout this period was determined to transmit the spirit of the federal state's foreign policy priorities to Yugoslav cities in terms of their links abroad. Its influence is visible in terms of the overall trends in municipal twinning abroad over time. In 1970, the SKGJ produced a revealing report on the history of municipal links in Yugoslavia. The report divided Yugoslav experiences in two periods: before and after 1962. The period before 1962 was characterised by 'the very modest participation of cities in the overall foreign relations of our country': a total of 16 Yugoslav cities had established relations with a total of 32 foreign cities. Yugoslavia's main twinning partners up until then were in England and Poland, countries in the West and East that Yugoslavia had good relations with in the 1950s. 88 Reflecting Yugoslavia's diplomatic hopes in the 1960s to broaden its international links outside Western Europe, especially towards the East and the Third World, the SKGJ had then resolved that more needed to be done to establish links with local authorities in the Soviet bloc, Scandinavia and Mediterranean Africa. 89 By the end of 1969, 60 Yugoslav cities had relations with 150 cities from 20 countries. 90 The SKGJ was satisfied with the increase in twinning with cities in neighbouring countries, 91 as well as East and West Europe, 92 but still bemoaned the paucity of links in the developing world, as well as 'cities in other regions (Latin America, the USA, Canada, Asia and Australia)'. 93 Closer examination of how the SKGJ hoped to overcome this deficiency and pursue deeper links in the non-aligned countries in particular, though, shows that there were limits on the SKGJ's influence on municipal authorities. The aforementioned report in 1970 was produced for the first of a series of recurrent meetings, or 'consultations' (savetovanja), of city representatives in the 1970s, which aimed to facilitate exchanges of experiences and best practice in international cooperation. Officials of the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs were invited to the SKGJ savetovanje in 1970 to help with the international activities of Yugoslav municipalities. The account of am official from the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs of the event is valuable as there is no record in SKGJ materials about how the event proceeded or with what results. The official in attendance, Mili c Bugar ci c, notes that the savetovanje did not garner much interest from municipalities, party and state organs, or the mass organisations. It drew only 39 of 60 invited municipalities, and neither representatives of federal institutions nor of the foreign relations committees of the SKJ or the mass organisations like the SSRNJ attended. The president of the SKGJ international committee Josip Kolar even criticised the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs for not displaying more interest. 94 Nevertheless, Bugar ci c applauded the SKGJ's overall foreign policy orientation. He also agreed with the view that municipalities were playing an increasing role domestically and should have more of a say in the crafting of foreign policy, which, as pointed out in the introduction of this article, would be enshrined in the law in constitutional amendments the following year. 95 The Secretariat for Foreign Affairs duly acted on the SKGJ's prompts, but, here, too, the process would suggest that there was a lack of response among many Yugoslav municipalities. The Secretariat for Foreign Affairs sent telegrams to Yugoslav embassies in Latin America reporting on the SKGJ's desire to shift away from 'the current orientation on establishing links only with European cities'. It asked the embassies to find potential twinning partners for Yugoslav cities. 96 The Secretariat for Foreign Affairs received several responses, which it relayed to the SKGJ . The embassies suggested links with several cities in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. 97 What the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs document did not relay to the SKGJ was the information that, in 1968, Mexico had proposed a link between Dubrovnik and Acapulco, both major international tourist destinations on the coast, but that Dubrovnik had not expressed reciprocal interest. 98 It is unclear how the other Yugoslav cities reacted to this particular initiative of the SKGJ, but a report for another savetovanje in 1975 reports that only one of the proposed links was successfully set up, between Belgrade and Mexico City. 99 Despite the stated ambitions of the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs and the SKGJ, then, the spread of Yugoslav municipal links abroad did not correspond to Yugoslavia's overall foreign policy drive in the 1970s. The slow increase in municipal links with non-aligned states contrasted with a deepening neighbourhood orientation. While the paucity of materials at local level makes it difficult to understand why some international municipal links flourished and others did not, the overall trend was unmistakeably towards more links with European, and largely Western European, cities. Moreover, a geographic Cold War division was emerging within Yugoslavia in terms of municipal links. If 80 links in 1977 were with Soviet bloc municipalities, 40 of those were maintained by municipalities in Serbia, 24 in Croatia, nine in Slovenia, four in Macedonia, four in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one in Montenegro. If 142 links were taken to be in Western bloc states (though this count includes some neutral but liberal-democratic states like Austria and Finland), then 40 such links were in Croatia, 36 in Slovenia, 35 in Serbia, 12 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 10 in Macedonia and six in Montenegro. If 16 links were with non-aligned states or countries in development, then eight were held by cities in Serbia, five in Croatia, and one each in Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. Thus, Serbia held a total of half of all Yugoslav links both in the Cold War's Second (40 of 80) and Third (eight of 16) Worlds, while Croatia and Slovenia between them maintained more than half of all links with Western partners (76 out of 142). 100 The Cold War division by republic present in 1977 was still there in 1982, according to an appendix to an already cited report. The appendix appears to be at odds with the report itself, given that the number of municipal links cited in the appendix is 343, while the report itself cited 325 links. The reasons for the discrepancy are not clear, but the similarities between the 1977 and 1982 reports still suggest that the discrepancy is unlikely to be of significance to interpreting the overall trend. 101 Viewed from the Yugoslavs' own categories of relations with municipalities in neighbouring states, non-aligned and developing states, and countries of the East and West, it is obvious that twinning remained a neighbourhood policy in 1982. A total of 154 out of 343 links were with municipalities in neighbouring states. When these are broken down by bloc allegiance, the same disparities as in 1977 emerge. Of a total of 195 links with Western states, 66 were maintained by cities and towns in Slovenia, 51 in Croatia, 39 in Serbia, 16 in Bosnia, 14 in Macedonia and 9 in Montenegro. By contrast, of 115 links in the Eastern bloc, 59 links were maintained in Serbia, 30 in Croatia, 13 in Slovenia, six each in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia, and just one in Montenegro. In the non-aligned and developing states, once again, Serbia predominated, with 22 of 33 links, with Croatia hosting five, Slovenia four, and Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina one each. Of the total 343 connections, cities and towns in Croatia and Slovenia still held almost half of the total, 86 and 81 links respectively. 102 Such trends, though never overcome, were noted and frequently commented on. The SKGJ interpreted them through the prism of foreign policy non-alignment. Such interpretations were not crude and showed nuance in treating a variety of factors, but nevertheless returned to familiar motifs. The aforementioned report from the 1970 savetovanje, for instance, explained the geographical unevenness of links according to a plethora of factors, arguing that the era in which municipalities set up international links, the changing international and inter-state situation, the uneven development over time of municipalities in terms of size or economic growth or even cultural (dis)similarity, and the changing concrete opportunities for cooperation all played a role. Despite this, the SKGJ blamed superpower politics for preventing better, all-round development of relations. The SKGJ cited the protectionism of the Common Market in the West or the tendency for all relations to have to go through state institutions in the Soviet bloc countries as blocks on relations, for instance. 103 Over a decade later, the SKGJ still saw superpower competition as present and indeed criticised Yugoslav municipal authorities for 'inadequately following and analysing the influence which our foreign partners wish to achieve in our country'. 104 Furthermore, it affirmed the 'non-aligned politics of Yugoslavia and its readiness to collaborate on an equal basis' and that the 'non-interference in domestic affairs, the respect of integrity and sovereignty were the baseline and lasting principles of the foreign-policy orientation of our country'. Yet it also claimed that this was the reason why '[Yugoslavia] is so interesting and [why] there are occasional attempts through particular cooperation between cities for it to be dragged into bloc-laager activities' by cities of both the West and the East. The SKGJ called on more vigilance and consultation with the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs before decisions are taken on such potentially damaging activities. 105 The SKGJ was also keen to claim the benefits of international twinning for individual cities, but also for the non-aligned foreign policy of Yugoslavia. The overall tone of reports in the 1970s and 1980s continued to communicate relative satisfaction with results achieved by municipalities abroad, albeit with the explicit caveat that the links did not live up to their full potential. The paucity of local materials makes it difficult to understand the extent to which formal foreign policy goals were effectively pursued in individual international inter-city links. Nevertheless, the SKGJ claimed in 1975 that the international activity of municipalities had 'contributed to cultural, economic, political and other cooperation which had a positive influence on the friendly relations of our country with other countries and contributed to international understanding in general'. There was a veritable plethora of different purposes to twinning links. A snapshot of these purposes is provided by the same report in 1975: 'The international cooperation of Yugoslav cities is ever broader and more diverse-from the exchange of experiences in the fields of communal, urbanistic and other activities to health, education and culture, the protection of children etc. Under the influence of city ties, economic cooperation, the linking of work organisations, economic councils and other expert bodies is increasingly coming to the fore'. 106 Municipal links were seen as an important aspect of inter-state d etente and reconciliation, and received specific mention in terms of the achievement of the Treaty of Osimo with Italy in 1975, which had laid to rest the territorial disputes blighting relations between the two countries ever since the Second World War. 107 By the time of the 1980s, however, when Yugoslavia implemented deep austerity measures under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund, the increasing sense of impasse facing the country came to be reflected in the field of municipal international activism. Unsurprisingly, there was an increased worry about the need for foreign currency. A joint meeting of the SKGJ and the SSRNJ foreign affairs committees from May 1983 concluded that the country's economic difficulties should not affect its international links, but in fact spur them on to help the programme of economic stabilisation. 108 Nevertheless, a report in 1985 admitted that the economic results of municipal links were still not living up to what was seen as their potential. 109 The report also repeated now standard warnings about Western and Eastern attempts at drawing Yugoslav cities into their orbit, but also appealed that more should be done to develop links in the West and the developing world, rather than in the East, probably a reference to the need to earn more hard currency. 110 Appendices to the 1985 report also underlined how difficult the situation had become for the SKGJ internationally, noting that it had been unable to send delegates to the international conference of the IULA in Rome and the FMVJ-UTO congress in Toronto in 1984. 111 The thinning of the archival trail for the period after the mid-1980s makes it difficult to reconstruct later trends. Yet, it is clear that, despite the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars of the 1990s, some of the networks established during, and trends visible in, the Cold War survived into the post-Cold War period. Some of the continuities revolve around the domination of European links, but also the continued relevance of the West-East axis of the Cold War in post-Cold War times. For instance, the close cooperation between the north-western republics of Yugoslavia with Italian and Austrian regions through the Alps-Adriatic Working Community contributed to the regions' active attempts to get their governments to recognise Slovene and Croatian independence in 1991, a key moment of controversy surrounding the wars of the 1990s in the post-Yugoslav space. 112 By contrast, some cities in Serbia saw their international links in the West severed with the start of the wars. Their later restoration in 1996, following opposition victories in local elections in that year, facilitated humanitarian aid during the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia, 113 but also became a tool in the EU's soft power arsenal to end the rule of Slobodan Milo sevi c. 114 Some Serbian municipalities have since also mobilised international links to suit Belgrade's more problematic relationship with the West. Belgrade in particular still uses its twinning with Moscow to underline the country's ability to balance between East and West in international affairs. 115 Given the orientation of the region as a whole towards EU integration since the 2000s, twinning remains important to EU enlargement policies, 116 as well as intra-regional peace efforts, 117 also echoing certain past motifs, but in new ways.

Conclusion
This article is the first to explore Yugoslav foreign policy during the Cold War from the perspective of municipalities as subnational actors in international affairs. Going beyond high diplomatic approaches, this article underlined how different a country's foreign policy can appear when viewed from different levels or scales. For much of the Cold War, the Yugoslav federal state pursued a policy of non-alignment between the superpower blocs. This meant attempting to maintain sovereignty by balancing between the blocs and extracting benefits from them, as well as by seeking out bilateral and multilateral alliances among other non-aligned states, largely in the Third Word, and expressing loyalty to international organisations like the United Nations. Yet pursuing such an orientation in practice was fraught with difficulties in different spheres of international affairs. This article explored how the Yugoslav national municipal association, the SKGJ, attempted to put non-alignment in operation. The article found that the SKGJ attempted to pursue federal foreign policy closely, despite having relatively high operational autonomy. Working above all with the Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, the SKGJ grappled with changes in international affairs and worked at different levels or scales. The primary levels or scales investigated included the international municipal organisations of the Cold War, the Westleaning IULA and the East-facing FMVJ-UTO, and international bilateral ties between municipalities in Yugoslavia and abroad.
The first part of the article found that the SKGJ's attempts at acting as an international East-West and North-South bridge in the IULA and MFVJ-UTO raised its profile, but ultimately fell short of its expectations. With Cold War divisions playing a relatively dominant role in the international municipal organisations, the activities of non-aligned states like Yugoslavia remained relatively marginal and marginalised. Most obviously, the SKGJ's attempts at reconciling the two principal international municipal organisations of the Cold War did lead to a joint statement about cooperation between the IULA and FMVJ-UTO in 1966, but this statement did not lead to meaningfully increased cooperation. The IULA and MFVJ-UTO did not in fact fuse until 2004, by which time Yugoslavia itself no longer existed, while Great Power competition in world affairs was re-asserting itself following the Iraq War in 2003. Although unsuccessful in terms of reconciling the IULA and MFVJ-UTO, the pursuit of non-alignment did bring the SKGJ significant prestige and room for manoeuvre in the international municipal movement during the Cold War. This article showed that the SKGJ did have a degree of impact on how international municipal cooperation developed during the Cold War. In doing so, the article has contributed to the growing challenge to the 'myth of 1989', which holds that Eastern Europe before 1989 was cut off from world affairs and only emerged from its isolation after 1989. 118 It has also tangentially brought to light the histories of the IULA and FMVJ-UTO, which deserve more scholarly attention than they have so far received from urban and international historians.
The second part of the article highlighted that, even in a one-party state like Yugoslavia, and in a rigid context like the Cold War, local government could to a degree move beyond statesponsored activities and Cold War boundaries. The article could not systematically investigate local government motivations and initiatives in foreign policy, or the social forces driving them, hindered as it was by the current paucity of relevant primary sources. Nonetheless, in showcasing their diversity, it has opened the way for future researchers to develop a fuller picture. Moreover, it has showed beyond doubt that there was a level of divergence between higher and lower echelons of the state in the pursuit of foreign policy. To understand the extent of the divergence, it is necessary to underline that the higher echelons of state diplomacy broadly saw municipal connections as useful. The SKGJ often noted that twinning between Yugoslav and Italian cities had contributed to the successful negotiation of the Treaty of Osimo in November 1975, which settled the post-war border dispute between the two states. Nevertheless, a visible degree of divergence did develop between the higher and lower echelons of municipal officialdom, as the federal state and the SKGJ stressed the global character of non-alignment, while individual municipal authorities ultimately followed a largely neighbourhood and European approach to twinning. An uneasy West-East divide in terms of twinning trajectories emerged among the republics of Yugoslavia as well. Municipalities in Yugoslavia's north-west were disproportionately active in international affairs and became more entangled with Western neighbours. By contrast, the municipalities of the less developed republics played a much more modest role in international affairs, while Serbia's municipalities linked more with partners in Eastern Europe and the Third World. Viewed from this perspective, Yugoslav foreign policy did not manage to overcome Cold War divides, but in some important ways reproduced them within its own borders. This clearly underscores the limits of non-alignment in practice.
The extent to which international municipal connections ultimately mattered in terms of impacting high diplomacy, high politics, socio-economic change and transformation, or the wars that followed Yugoslav state-collapse, is not a straightforward question and would require more research. The fact that Yugoslavia remained among the least urbanised societies in Europe probably limited the overall importance of international municipal connections. Nevertheless, the urban-rural divide has drawn much comment in the literature on Yugoslavia and its collapse, in a variety of scholarly disciplines. This suggests that a deeper understanding of how urban elites and populations engaged over time with international connections would be fruitful from the perspective of understanding wider political and societal dynamics in the country. 119 In fact, the links and networks set up by Yugoslav municipalities during the Cold War proved remarkably resilient in the post-Cold War framework. As noted, for instance, various Italian municipalities and regions played an active role in providing diplomatic and humanitarian support to their sister municipalities, or their republics, during the wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Clearly, such municipal links did matter to at least a section of their populations, suggesting that it is important to interrogate individual links from below as well as from above in future studies. Overall, the study of historical trends in municipal connections can be shown to be important for understanding more recent developments. 120 Current events in the post-Yugoslav region may indeed help to renew interest in the history of municipal internationalism of the era of the Cold War. For several decades, the hollowing out of local government has led to increased popular dissatisfaction with what has been called the 'authoritarian neoliberal' transformation. This has accelerated across the world since the economic crisis of 2008, leading to the global rise of the 'new municipalism', spurred on most obviously by the local breakthrough of the radical Barcelona en Com u ('Barcelona in Common') in Spanish local elections in 2015. In an attempt to bring together disparate anti-neoliberal municipal alternatives, Barcelona en Com u launched a new international movement by hosting a gathering called 'Fearless Cities' in 2017, bringing together representatives from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. 121 Drawing inspiration from these developments, local movements have begun to gain notable traction in municipal centres in Croatia and Serbia. Their high point has undoubtedly been the decisive victory of Mo zemo! ('We Can!'), a new green-left coalition, in the city elections in Zagreb in June 2021. 122 Similar initiatives, like Ne da(vi)mo Beograd! ('Don't Let Belgrade D(r)own!'), gained prominence in Serbia since 2016. 123 These political projects differ significantly from the single-party, top-down municipal schemes of the Yugoslav era during the Cold War, and they operate in a comparatively less geopolitically polarised international context. Nonetheless, their striving for more space for independent international manoeuvre, and cooperation with like-minded municipal authorities, in an even more unequal and still divided world, echoes some of the activities and preoccupations of past municipal movements. Some parts of today's movement may therefore seek a critical engagement with that history.