engleski

Brotherhood of the Equals? Science and Technology Transfers among the Non-Aligned Countries During the Cold War

The paper addresses a unique example of “horizontal” transfer of knowledge, personnel, and technology among the members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the Cold War—a politically charged alternative to the “classic” transfer of knowledge and technology from “developed” to “developing” countries. It examines selected examples of scientific-technological cooperation among supposedly equal and friendly countries—thought the cooperation often challenged this very proposition—in light of post-colonial dependencies, national liberation and state-building efforts. It builds, though in a critical fashion, upon the contemporary belief that quick-paced scientific-technological development was a crucial precondition for sustainable independence. Consequently, it approaches the scientific knowledge, personnel, and infrastructure as diplomatic and economic resources, which was an understanding shared by government officials as well as the experts involved in the cooperation. The paper uses the engagement of socialist Yugoslavia—one of the few European NAM members, and one of NAM’s founding and most influential members—as a privileged entry point into educational, technological, and medical cooperation among developing countries. NAM was an asymmetric organization, whose members exerted different levels of different kinds of “capital”: economic, diplomatic, military, technological, etc., and socialist Yugoslavia was eager to profit from its relative advantage in cooperation with fellow developing countries. Examples from the cooperation in fields of agriculture, civil engineering, and medicine, show the “translational” nature of this circulation and point to different motives for, expectations, and usages of thus exchanged knowledge and technology.

History of science ; Non-Aligned Movement ; socialist Yugosalvia ; science diplomacy ; Cold War

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