Yugoslavia and De Gaulle’s Revision of the Cold War

Abstract

This paper will analyze France’s attempted foreign policy strategy in Yugoslavia and in Eastern Europe during the 1960s, beginning with the various positions of de Gaulle’s France and Tito’s Yugoslavia and the numerous similarities in how the two countries’ diplomacy functioned. In both countries, the course of foreign policy was determined according to the authoritarian characteristics of their systems and of their central figure–the president. Both countries were also interested in transcending the Cold War division of Europe, and they based their strategies on attempts to marginalize the United States and pacify the Soviet regime. De Gaulle’s attempt at a détente, which Yugoslavia was very sympathetic toward and had also committed itself to similar goals, failed due to unrealistic illusions of overcoming this bipolarity by forging a middle way between the two opposing Cold War blocs. Faced with an overestimation of their own influence, along with the Warsaw Pact’saggression toward Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s complete lack of interest in pacification, and the US’s unwillingness to withdraw, end of de Gaulle’s attempts at détente, in which Yugoslavia would play an important role, came to an end. Nevertheless, similar European and global policy goals brought France and Yugoslavia closer together, and this established the principles on which a cooling down period in the mid-1970s became possible.