Anna Calori

Agents of Globalisation? Yugoslav Enterprises between Nonaligned Transnationalism and Socialism (1973-1991)

The health crisis of 2020 has brought the world’s economy to a standstill, and is revealing the unwarranted consequences of a global order based on unequal economic interdependencies. In Europe and across the globe, developing countries are unable to solve pressing issues related to the pandemic in a self-reliant way, and yet cannot count on richer countries to come to their aid. This crisis forces us to think of models of globalisation alternative to the one that has deprived semi-peripheries of their capacity to absorb the shocks of a global crisis. Are there other ways of thinking about development and globalisation that give opportunities for self-reliance to smaller countries?

Agents of globalisation looks at the recent history of capitalism and globalisation in order to examine how smaller countries have approached the question of self-reliance in the last three decades of the 20th century. It takes the case of Italian and Yugoslav enterprises and their economic interconnections with the Global South. It will investigate how such companies approached development both abroad and domestically, and how these sought to overcome inequalities between the developed and developing world. It relies on archival research and semi-structured oral history interviews with key participants involved in economic and scientific exchanges.