Sunday, January 5, 2025: 8:50 AM
Gramercy (Sheraton New York)
"I know too well that only a few townsmen, a few educated men, understand how people really live,” testified Yugoslav economist Rudolf Bicanic, reflecting on his 1935 travels in Yugoslavia's countryside. Histories of Yugoslav international relations and high diplomacy frequently capture the diversity, division, and conflict inherent in the first Yugoslav state (1918–1941). However, they often overlook the international implications of the country's almost unifying feature—the predominantly agricultural nature and the strenuous life of peasants.
This paper introduces a novel category of national and international historical agents, termed “peasant internationalists.” Peasant internationalists—in this case, the Yugoslav experts in health, economics, education, and law—overcame their ideological and political differences to cooperatively improve peasant living conditions in Yugoslavia, East-Central Europe, and worldwide. By examining their “lived experience of internationalism” placed in Geneva and intertwining it with the analytical category of “national indifference,” the paper outlines how peasant internationalists utilized the conditions of peasant life as a template for conceptualizing the world and the Yugoslav place within an international system 1920–1948. In their dual roles as technical experts and diplomats, “peasant internationalists” were agents of nationalism and internationalism. They prioritized economic over political sovereignty and championed the principles of social justice, federalism, and global capitalism. Peasant internationalists were also pragmatic idealists. They believed in universal notions of health, international law, and national sovereignty. Yet, they fought to pragmatically apply international standards and laws to diverse local contexts by decentralizing public health services and including local actors in national and international modernization initiatives. In outlining this analytical category, this paper demonstrates its potential to reveal new facets of Yugoslav and Central-Eastern European history by placing the region at the center of global debates about modernization, decolonization, international development, and aid.
This paper introduces a novel category of national and international historical agents, termed “peasant internationalists.” Peasant internationalists—in this case, the Yugoslav experts in health, economics, education, and law—overcame their ideological and political differences to cooperatively improve peasant living conditions in Yugoslavia, East-Central Europe, and worldwide. By examining their “lived experience of internationalism” placed in Geneva and intertwining it with the analytical category of “national indifference,” the paper outlines how peasant internationalists utilized the conditions of peasant life as a template for conceptualizing the world and the Yugoslav place within an international system 1920–1948. In their dual roles as technical experts and diplomats, “peasant internationalists” were agents of nationalism and internationalism. They prioritized economic over political sovereignty and championed the principles of social justice, federalism, and global capitalism. Peasant internationalists were also pragmatic idealists. They believed in universal notions of health, international law, and national sovereignty. Yet, they fought to pragmatically apply international standards and laws to diverse local contexts by decentralizing public health services and including local actors in national and international modernization initiatives. In outlining this analytical category, this paper demonstrates its potential to reveal new facets of Yugoslav and Central-Eastern European history by placing the region at the center of global debates about modernization, decolonization, international development, and aid.