Socialist Yugoslavia’s Challenge to Chicago’s “Cartography of Colonialism”

Inspired by a lifetime of learning and applying Marxist-Leninist principles, Josip Broz Tito soon after World War II identified weaknesses in the Chicago aviation system. His critique recognized that the prewar history of civil aviation, which the Chicago Conference resuscitated, developed hand-in-hand with Western imperialism. As such, the prewar cartography of aviation—with America’s and Western Europe’s air routes drawn as vectors atop the globe–actually mimicked an older cartography: that of colonial conquest.

This paper considers Yugoslavia’s JAT Airways (Jugoslovenski AeroTransport), founded in 1947, as an important precedent and role model for airlines in the developing world. On the one hand, JAT conceded to the exigencies of the Chicago system by adopting Western standards for aviation technology and customer service, and its initial air routes prioritized Western European destinations (especially after the 1948 Tito-Stalin Split). On the other hand, JAT aspired to redraw Chicago’s “cartography of colonialism” by exploiting Yugoslavia’s geographic uniqueness in the Cold War and in the decolonization process, with the goal of turning its federal capital, Belgrade, into something Chicago’s American framers neither foresaw nor desired. The city’s airport through the 1960s grew from an insignificant stopover for the West’s airlines into a legitimate global aviation hub. From Belgrade, the state-owned airline JAT built out an impressive route network that not even the West’s legacy carriers could match, for a time. Its routes followed Tito’s creative foreign policy of non-alignment to the West, to the East, and into the Global South. For a brief period, JAT drew vectors of connectivity that reflected a “cartography of postcolonialism,” one very much out of step with the Western aspirations that rendered the Chicago Convention.