Effects of the Cold War on the Science in Yugoslavia (1945-1963)

Abstract

In this presentation I examine the changes in Yugoslavian science after the radical political and ideological turn that followed the break with the USSR since 1948. Prior to the split, the scientific discourse in Yugoslavia was critical of ‘reactionary’ ‘capitalist science’, and the scientific practice was placed in the framework of Marxism-Leninism. This framework assumed that the science should be as close as possible to the concrete realities of the socialist society. The basic theoretical premise of this framework was "partisanship", which saw science, as all other spheres of human activities, as a field of ideological struggle. The preferred model of scientific organization was almost identical to the one from the USSR. This meant that the science was developed in the context of the planned economy and with centralizing tendencies.

After the break with the USSR, however, Yugoslavian science policy took a different turn: it was increasingly characterized by decentralization in the organization and the introduction of the concept of autonomous science. I argue that those developments reflected the introduction of the limited market economy in FPRY, that followed the break with USSR and its economic and political model. The nature of changes in the organization of science in the FPRY could shed light on the relationship between political ideology and science in general.