‘Crude’ Alliance – Economic Decolonisation and Oil Power in the Non-Aligned World

Ljubica Spaskovska

doi:10.1017/s0960777321000321

Abstract

The article examines Yugoslavia's and by extension the Non-Aligned Movement's relations with the Middle East, reflecting more broadly on the developmental hierarchies and inner divides between the oil producing and non-oil producing countries within the Movement. The ‘energy shocks’ of the 1970s had a dramatic impact on non-OPEC developing countries and sowed long-lasting rifts in the non-aligned/developing world. The article embeds these events within the debates about the ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), economic decolonisation and the nationalisation of energy resources in the 1970s, but also seeks to provide a longer-term overview of the economic and political relations that non-aligned Yugoslavia sought to forge with the Middle East, in particular with other non-aligned partners such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. New forms of Cold War developmental multilateralism emerged as a consequence of the energy crisis – the supply of Arab oil to areas which had traditionally relied on Soviet energy not only foreshadowed the emergence of a new hierarchical and dependent relationship between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, it also engendered new forms of economic cooperation and strategic economic multi-alignment through the pooling of resources and expertise from non-aligned, Eastern Bloc states and the United Nations, illustrated here through the Adria Oil Pipeline built in the 1970s and co-financed by Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Libya, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the World Bank.

Highlights

Introduction ‘The financial centers of the world will no longer be limited to New York, London, Zurich and Paris
The article embeds these events within the debates about the ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), economic decolonisation and the nationalisation of energy resources in the 1970s, and seeks to provide a longer-term overview of the economic and political relations that non-aligned Yugoslavia sought to forge with the Middle East, in particular with other non-aligned partners such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Kuwait
How does a geopolitical and a global political economy lens enrich our understanding of the relations and circulations between Eastern Europe and the Middle East in a longue durée perspective? Situating the relationship between South Eastern Europe and the Middle East within a broader framework of international economic relations and economic decolonisation provides us with a venue for approaching and analysing the Non-Aligned Movement differently, through the debates on national and economic sovereignty and the role played by primary commodities and petroleum in particular

Summary

24 The countries that contributed military personnel to UNEF I were

Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden and Yugoslavia. Still not completely divorced from the ethos of sovereignty and non-alignment, more lucrative economic trade centring on oil and weapons took precedence: in 1989 Yugoslavia joined the Soviet Union, the United States, France and the United Kingdom in procuring the Kuwaiti military with state of the art equipment by signing an $800 million ‘advanced military equipment’ deal consisting of 200 Yugoslav-made M-84 tanks that were eventually deployed during the Gulf War the following year.[84]. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Yugoslav government, which was chairing the Non-Aligned Movement after having hosted the last NAM Cold War Summit in 1989, condemned the aggression and annexation and called for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi troops.[85] As oil wealth had turned both Iraq and Kuwait into important economic partners and buyers of Yugoslav military equipment and expertise, this presented Yugoslavia with an inconvenient dilemma. Future studies could take seriously the importance of the dynamics of external energy crises in an interdependent globalised economy and how they could offset unforeseen acute economic trouble and cause irreversible damage to delicate political balance in complex multinational settings

Conclusion

Findings

90 Makroprojekt NMEP