The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool and the Paradox of Self-Sufficiency

Abstract

The article focuses on the process that led to the creation of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP) and the factors that shaped its emergence. The author explains the emergence of NANAP by three groups of factors. The first were interests and strategies of Yugoslav political elites and of Yugoslavia’s Tanjug news agency. While Tanjug was interested in increasing its global reach and position on the global marketplace of news agencies, federal political elites saw Tanjug as an important tool of foreign policy. Yugoslavia was actively pushing to institutionalize informational cooperation within NAM already in the run-up to the IV. NAM summit in Algiers, even though objective conditions were deemed minimal. The second factor are changes in international relations, as NANAP emerged in the context of the institutionalization of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1970s and its efforts to build “self-sufficiency” in order to increase its position within the global economy and bargaining power vis-a-vis the developed countries. NANAP therefore recontextualized Tanjug’s bilateral news exchange agreements into a multilateral project of economic cooperation within NAM, aimed at strengthening mutual understanding and gaining independence from global (primarily Western) news sources. Finally, the development of NANAP was shaped by the institutional history of the movement, as NANAP was conceived and institutionalized in the mold of pre-existing forms of economic cooperation. To respect the movement’s decentralized ethos Yugoslavia had to downplay and disguise its significant degree of involvement in establishing NANAP and other forms of informational cooperation and present them as multilateral projects with a broad basis of support within NAM.