US-Yugoslav Relations during the Tito-Stalin Split and the "Informbiro Period". Do Democracies Promote Authoritarianism? (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Cultural Studies - East European Studies, grade: 1,3, Free University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: This article seeks to uncover whether and in what way democratic countries engage into autocracy promotion based on the example of US-Yugoslav relations during the famous Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and in association the "Informbiro period". In particular, it will try to prove that even democracies will support authoritarian regimes and consequently promote autocracy, if it is in their national interest as it was in the case of the U.S. during the Eastern Bloc crisis.

After Yugoslavia was excluded from the Cominform, a supranational alliance of Marxist-Leninist communist parties in Europe, the United States aided the South Slavic country politically, economically and militarily, because Tito, at that time, became an important international factor in the process of undermining the Soviet Union. Even though Yugoslavia was and remained to be a communist country after being excluded from the Soviet Union, and accordingly was an ideological adversary of the liberal as well as democratic United States, this did not discourage the great power to open its markets and use its international impact to help a former enemy in need. It turned a blind eye on the political repressions which were conducted through the incarceration of political opponents and alleged 'Stalinists' on the Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur islands, additionally helping the autocratic leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party - Marshal Josip Broz Tito - to remain in power.