The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 26
One of the most confusing and disturbing developments which joined the starting of Cold War was
undoubtedly the rupture between Moscow and Belgrade in 1948. This event, which was little understood in its
broad dimension even by the Western powers with more experience in the region, generated some rare
consequences, as it had to be expected. As an example we have illustrated the indirect relationship (and
reticence) between Yugoslavia and Spain at that time. They were two countries that never met themselves in
the game of European geopolitics before. But then, in the framework of the emergent Cold War, the rupture of
Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union and the willingness of Spain to overcome its isolation put both countries in
the centre of the intense and tense international geopolitics of this period. Nobody could have expected the
situation that followed. Franco’s government used to entitle itself as »Custodian of the West« and ideologically
it was very close with the most conservative trends in the United States’ administration. However, Franco’s
government entered in competition with a communist state for a favourable geopolitical position in the new
order generated by the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Although that situation
neither caused acute tensions nor lasted for a longer period, the agreements between Spain and the United
States for the installation of military bases did not close until 1953, despite high pressures of militarisation of
every corner in Europe. Yugoslavia’s geopolitical situation was analogical. The Yugoslavian government was
proud of its relationships with the Spanish communists in the exile, especially based on sentimental-like
reasons after the Yugoslavian participation in the Spanish Civil War. However, these comrades themselves
rejected Tito’s government of 1948. In order to preserve the revolutionary image existing before the rupture
with Moscow, Belgrade stopped supporting the Spanish Republican government in exile which had no
diplomatic recognition and excluded carefully all communists. According to the Slovenian researcher J.
Pirjevec, there seemed to be signs that Yugoslavia, in 1959, even established some modest diplomatic relations
with Franco’s Spain. If that proves true, it would mean that the Tito government arrived to its pragmatic
relationship with the Spanish in a surprisingly short time. It seems that these relations consisted in just
commercial contacts which may have existed from the times of Castiella as Foreign Affair’s Minister, who
opened the Spanish regime to contracts with Eastern Europe. In fact, Madrid had some contracts at that time
with most of the Eastern countries. In any case, these commercial contacts represented a paradoxical
counterpoint. Less than one decade before, the Yugoslavian delegate Vlahovi_ strongly opposed Spain’s
readmission to the United Nations and Yugoslavian-Spanish reticence was at its peak. Both countries had
rejected each other as either Fascist or Communist, both had struggled for Western support and aid, and both
played against each other through diplomatic activity and contacts with the other’s opposition movements.
Yugoslavia’s and Spain’s national and international political relations in the emergence of the Cold War
illustrate a world that was becoming highly polarised, where the attachment to one of the extremes seemed
vital for escaping isolation and thus surviving in a world that nobody knew where it was going to.
Agrarian Policy after the Conflict with the Cominform (Mom_ilo Pavlovi_)