Walking in Step with Europe—Both East and West

The first step in restarting the aviation industry came in August 1945, when the country’s transitional government commissioned an esteemed aviation expert, Milenko Mitrović, to assess the state of aviation infrastructure. Mitrović not only knew the prerequisites for running an airline, since he served as Aeroput’s chief technology officer, but he also was well acquainted with aircraft production and design, given his work as the designer of the Yugoslav-produced MMS-3 lightweight airplane. His assessment in 1945 pointed out various challenges for the aviation sector. Yet, Mitrović also emphasized one crucial advantage: postwar Yugoslavia retained a good amount of aviation know-how. Several pilots—some of whom started the war in exile flying for the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force, others for the Nazi-allied Croatian Air Force—had eventually joined Tito’s Partisans and were now ready to work for the new regime. Meanwhile, many of Aeroput’s engineers and technicians, including Mitrović, were also eager to return.

This fact gave Mitrović enough optimism to conclude his report with an urgent but hopeful imperative for restarting civil aviation. Noting that the war had already fostered a well-developed aviation industry among “the great powers and the industrially advanced and strong countries,” he warned that a “small countr[y] like ours—if it does not want not fall behind the great powers in its development—will have to give all available resources so that aviation is reinforced in full measure.”⁴ Here, Mitrović was articulating a desire to keep Yugoslavia in sync with the United States and Western Europe (the “great powers” who were “industrially advanced and strong”). However, he was less specific about where in Europe—east or west—Yugoslavia might land. Instead, he noted that Yugoslavia’s overall desire to modernize was dependent on a retooled aviation sector: “Only in this way can the nation, at least to some extent, walk in step with the general development of social life in Europe.”⁵ In August 1945 this aspiration to “walk in step” with Europe did not yet beg the obvious Cold War–era follow-up question: which Europe—East or West—would Yugoslavia’s aviation system link up with?

When governmental authorities approved Mitrović’s calls to recalibrate factories and revitalize civil aviation, there were two competing visions that would be reconciled only after the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin’s decisive split with Tito in June 1948. In 1947 national security conditions were finally settled enough to transfer civil air operations from the Defense Ministry to the civilian-run Ministry of Transportation and its newly established Main Authority for Civil Air Transport (Glavna uprava civilnog vazdušnog saobraćaja, or GUCVS).⁶ This is when the Yugoslav government made a choice that was unique among the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites: it established two airlines at once. While the moribund Aeroput was dissolved, JAT was incorporated in 1947 as a wholly owned entity of the Yugoslav federal government and managed directly by the GUCVS. Meanwhile, a second airline called JUSTA (Yugoslav-Soviet Joint Stock Company for Civil Aviation) was founded as a joint venture between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.⁷ This airline technically reported to the GUCVS as well, but it was managed by its own board of directors, with a Soviet official in the position of general director and several other Soviets, including pilots, conducting day-to-day operations. JUSTA also held a three-year contract to administer the country’s major airports, including air traffic control. This arrangement gave Soviet technicians oversight over arrivals and departures at the country’s two largest airports, in Belgrade and Zagreb. Clearly, Tito’s government in 1947 had no misgivings about working closely with the Soviets, even to the extent of ceding control of certain national security assets. Yet, at the same time, he resisted keeping all aviation assets under the Soviets’ purview.

This Yugoslav-Soviet collaboration through JUSTA is just one of the Eastern-leaning (if you will) facets of Yugoslavia’s efforts to “walk in step” with Europe.⁸ The Tito government’s choice to follow Stalin’s example and not sign onto the Chicago convention was also a definitive move eastwards. Without signing the convention, Yugoslavia could not become a member of the ICAO (the International Civil Aviation Organization) nor could its airlines join IATA (the International Air Transport Association), both of which established norms of international air transport and eased access to treaty members’ airports. Without these memberships, neither of Yugoslavia’s new airlines would be able to fly to Western states who were convention members, at least not without considerable difficulty.⁹

Stalin’s USSR heavily influenced this decision, one that was also imposed on the other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, save for two exceptions: Poland (a Chicago signatory since 1945) and Czechoslovakia (which signed in 1947, before the country’s communist-led coup). In key ways, this eastward drift aligned with Tito’s stated goals for Yugoslav aviation. In a discussion with Foreign Minister Leo Mates in April 1947, Tito shared a more modest vision that prioritized links to other communist-run states: “we will certainly establish routes to Moscow, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, and the ČSR [Czechoslovakia].” In terms of routes to the West, he was far more equivocal, “maybe [there will be routes to] Italy and Austria and westwards, to Paris. But all of this is a question for the Leadership.” By leadership he meant the country’s federal presidency, with him at the head, not the direct overseers of aviation in the GUCVS.

Importantly, while Tito’s advocacy of an aviation system that linked Yugoslavia only to other socialist states replicated Stalin’s vision, this eastern orientation reflected something other than Stalin’s desire to economically isolate Europe’s East from the West. Instead, Tito was primarily motivated by anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism as he took aim at the goals promoted by Clare Boothe Luce in 1943 and realized in the Chicago system, which was a cornerstone of America’s Market Empire. In additional remarks to Mates, Tito expanded on how routes to the West would have to work: “our Leadership agrees to establish international routes between Yugoslavia and other countries in which reciprocity is possible, taking into account our technical abilities.” On any route to the West, he concluded, “we must be assured that reciprocity be not only on paper, but in the air… . Our aircraft [must] fly and not just foreigners’.”¹⁰

While brief, this statement recognized crucial concerns pertinent not just to Yugoslavia as it arose out of its so-called “stone-age” of aviation, but also to all states whose economic and technological development lagged behind the West’s. It recognized Yugoslavia’s limited “technical abilities” and insisted on parity in how routes were divided between Yugoslavia’s airlines and the Pan Ams and BOACs of the West; Yugoslavia had to defend itself against being overtaken by these wealthier and more accomplished rivals that did not have local interests at heart.

Of course, to implement an eastern-oriented vision, one airline—JUSTA—would have sufficed, just as similar joint ventures with the Soviets adequately served neighboring Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.¹¹ The JUSTA agreement also offered a further advantage of quickly addressing the country’s critical lack of infrastructure: Moscow agreed to send ten Lisunov-2 aircraft (the Soviet-built wartime version of the United States’ exceptionally reliable DC-3 passenger planes that debuted in 1936). These planes would be more than adequate for the routes Tito prioritized to the east. Importantly, the Soviets also agreed to subsidize JUSTA financially, making the Soviet government responsible for half of the airline’s annual losses, which both partners anticipated would persist for the first few years. The infusion of Soviet administrators also represented a form of knowledge exchange that appears to have seemed worth the concession of sovereignty over security assets. Thus, just a year before Stalin’s split with Tito, the Soviets were treated as the primary and most desirable partners in aviation development.

And yet, in a move that on its face was strikingly inconsistent, the Tito regime also founded a second airline, Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (Yugoslav Air Transport, or JAT).¹² JAT operated without oversight from Soviet officials and employed only Yugoslav citizens. Another point of difference, though minor, was that JAT flew American-made DC-3s rather than the Soviet-built version of the same aircraft. By the end of August 1947, JAT had secured five DC-3s, a smaller number than JUSTA’s proposed ten. This slight difference in equipment (Li-2s versus DC-3s) set an important precedent: JAT in the future would opt for Western-made planes, distinguishing it from the other airlines in Europe’s socialist states.¹³

JAT’s western orientation is also clear from the international route network that the GUCVS crafted for it. While JUSTA flew the routes between Belgrade and almost all Eastern European capitals, the Belgrade-Prague-Warsaw line was in JAT’s hands. At the time, flights from Belgrade to Prague and Warsaw were the only pathway for Yugoslav air passengers and cargo to reach Western Europe and Scandinavia. Because Czechoslovakia and Poland had signed the Chicago convention, the airlines in these countries (ČSA in the former, LOT in the latter) could sell tickets to and accept JAT passengers flying onward to Western or Northern Europe. Thus, as the Iron Curtain descended on Europe, Yugoslavia’s JAT shared the same desire as ČSA and LOT to fly westward, even as geopolitical realities prevented direct routes from Yugoslavia.

Documents in Yugoslav archives do not clarify the thinking behind the creation of two airlines at once. One plausible basis for this both-East-and-West strategy is the ideological heterodoxy of Tito himself, who asserted independence from Stalin when crucial Yugoslav interests were at stake. Even before JAT’s and JUSTA’s founding in 1947, Tito drew Stalin’s ire with his aggressive nationalist strategy on Trieste, which enflamed tensions with the West in ways that the USSR did not then desire. Similarly, Tito’s support of a Slavic-led communist uprising in Greek Macedonia created difficulties for Soviet foreign policy, especially when the United States countered by proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, which promised economic and technical support whenever a state faced communist insurgency. Though not yet as well studied by historians as Trieste and Greece, aviation policy under Tito, especially JAT’s founding, exhibited a similar independent streak.¹⁴ The airline’s existence gave Yugoslavia’s leadership a tool to exploit future international opportunities independently of Moscow.

By 1947 planners at the civil aviation authority and JAT had already strategized how to embed Yugoslav aviation into the West’s aerial network. Importantly, while doing so, they also intended to maintain Yugoslavia’s independence from the West and its airlines: they would counter the cartography of colonialism that continued to disadvantage Yugoslavia. Their proposed solution was not Stalin’s, which involved absenting Europe’s East from the Chicago system and promoting a nearly hermetically sealed aviation system there. Instead, they pressed for Yugoslavia to join the ICAO and to open its airspace and airports to Western airlines. Their hope was that integrating into the West’s system would attract foreign currency and enable the modernization of aviation facilities that was so desperately needed. Like in Jamaica a decade or so later, theirs was a proposal to develop through integration with the West, while still aspiring to build up Yugoslavia’s own airports as potential hubs and its own airline as a competitor of Western carriers. The benefits would include Yugoslavia’s increased connectedness to the world and the establishment of JAT as a viable national airline, albeit operating within Clare Boothe Luce’s blueprint of bilateral treaties that often favored Western airlines.

This group promoting a Western pathway for Yugoslavia included the GUCVS’s director of development, Zdravko Pudarić.¹⁵ His two-fold plan to tie Yugoslavia to the West first involved opening Yugoslavia to Western tourists, using JAT to help develop the Adriatic Coast as a vacation destination. In a meeting with Ministry of Tourism officials in December 1947, he laid out a plan to make “tourist aviation the basis of our civil aviation transport.” These Western tourists, valued because they would boost the country’s hard currency reserves, would help raise the number of air passengers from thirty thousand in 1947 (the initial goal set for JAT and JUSTA) to sixty thousand by 1949. Pudarić recognized that this growth would require expanding JAT’s fleet of DC-3s to twenty and adding four new eight- to ten-seat aircraft to serve smaller coastal airports. Most ambitiously, Pudarić added, “In 1949 we may procure amphibian aircraft as well, which could travel in-season,” making water landings in island harbors and other remote outposts and thereby opening the entire Croatian archipelago to summer tourism.¹⁶ Using aviation, Yugoslavia could transform the Adriatic Coast, with its hundreds of sparsely populated islands, into a destination that could compete with the Mediterranean coasts of Italy or France.

Coupled with the development of a Western-centered tourist trade in Croatia was an equally ambitious plan for the country’s east, centered on the federal capital of Belgrade. Here, Pudarić believed that catering to Western airlines could stimulate massive growth. As of 1947, carriers like Pan Am, BOAC, KLM, and Air France were forced by their political disagreements with Tito and the poor state of Yugoslavia’s radio and navigation services to avoid the country’s airspace, even though flying over Yugoslav territory would save them precious time and money on routes to Asia. Pudarić reasoned that participating in the cartography of colonialism by replacing Belgrade’s small and dilapidated airport with one boasting extensive runways, a modern terminal, and quick refueling options offered real benefits. Supplanting Rome and Athens as the preferred stopover point would bring revenue from refuelings and landing fees, while also establishing direct links between Belgrade and both the West and Middle East. Thus, unlike Tito’s eastern-first vision for aviation, Pudarić and the GUCVS placed greater importance on “expanding connections with foreign countries: first with the West, then establishing routes to the Near East.”¹⁷

As Pudarić further reasoned, once these North Atlantic carriers aspired to serve Belgrade (if only for refueling), then Yugoslavia could—in line with Tito’s precepts—also invoke the Chicago convention’s principle of reciprocity to secure for JAT equal access to Europe’s capitals and to cities in the Middle East. In his bullish vision, the new airport would grow into a truly modern aviation hub, with as many as 120 takeoffs and landings in any given hour—comprised roughly equally of Western carriers and Yugoslavia’s JAT and JUSTA.¹⁸ Archival documents detail that the GUCVS formed a working group in May 1947 to select a site for the new airport, with hopes of including the project in Yugoslavia’s first Five-Year Plan in 1948.¹⁹

When published, the Five-Year Plan did indeed include several of these priorities. It called for doubling domestic lines over the 1946 total and for increasing international routes to ten. As Pudarić desired, domestic growth would have been heavily focused on the country’s west, with the plan directing construction of a new aerial network that would “link locations along our Adriatic coast.” Because airfields with grass runways no longer sufficed, the plan also called for the construction of new airports around the country to support the projected growth in travel through Belgrade and the coast. In the tension between Tito’s eastern-leaning vision and Pudarić’s western-leaning goals, the plan sided with Pudarić, prioritizing routes to “several major transportation centers in Europe and in the Middle East” over those to Eastern Europe’s socialist capitals. However, because prioritizing Western tourists and the desires of Western airlines would have been unsavory to admit in the Five-Year Plan, the document aligned these investments with Yugoslav workers’ welfare, stressing that these investments would allow “an ever-larger number of our people” to fly to the coast on their state-supported yearly summer vacations.²⁰

Ultimately, then, Yugoslav ambitions to “walk in step” with European aviation circa 1947 employed a both-and strategy that was different from Europe’s other socialist states. While Tito himself prioritized an eastern-directed route system, the country’s civil aviation authorities also developed ambitious western-inclined plans. This attention to both East and West was also happening in Czechoslovakia and Poland; however, Yugoslavia was unique in creating two separate airlines. The Yugoslav-Soviet joint venture JUSTA served the more modest goal of linking up with socialist neighbors, while also serving some domestic markets—mainly from Belgrade southward to Sarajevo, Titograd (Podgorica), and Skopje. Meanwhile, JAT was the preferred tool to “walk in step” with Western Europe: in the short-term it linked Belgrade with the Western towns of Zagreb and Ljubljana domestically, while serving Prague and Warsaw internationally. There was even more optimism that the airline would grow in future years, in step with the country’s Five-Year Plan, opening the Croatian coast to Western tourists and exploiting routes directly from Belgrade to Europe’s west and the Global South.

Turbulence from the Tito-Stalin Split

However lofty the dreams for Yugoslav aviation were, the realities in these early years were far more modest. Neither JAT nor JUSTA escaped Yugoslavia’s persistent infrastructural limitations: lack of meteorological equipment, deficient radar and air traffic control systems, a shortage of night-landing equipment, and a lack of concrete runways, to name just a few. Meanwhile, a political maelstrom that was in the offing would further complicate Yugoslavia’s efforts to keep pace with Europe: on June 28, 1948, Joseph Stalin commanded that Yugoslavia’s communists be expelled from the Cominform. This was intended as a death sentence for the regime, a means to actively undermine Tito’s rule and replace him with a more reliable ally. Stalin reinforced this threat with an economic blockade and increased military threats on Yugoslavia’s borders with Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Before the split, running JUSTA had already exposed tensions between the Soviets and Yugoslavs. While JUSTA was slated to begin flying along with JAT’s debut in April 1947, none of the promised aircraft had arrived. Only in late July did two planes initiate JUSTA’s first route, Belgrade–Titograd–Tirana, with the other eight planes finally arriving at the beginning of 1948. Consequently, while the target of 30,000 passengers for 1947 was met, JUSTA carried just 6,421 of these.²¹ In addition, even though planners had envisioned that JUSTA would lose money, the actual results from the second quarter of 1947 were far worse than planned. Financial analysts quickly revised the yearly budget: instead of a loss of 1.615 million Yugoslav dinars, the revisions now anticipated a loss of 4.115 million.²² JAT was taking the lead in Yugoslavia’s aviation development, due mainly to Soviet unreliability.

The situation in 1948 was even more dire. Despite aspirations to double the number of passengers, a mere twenty-eight thousand flew during the year, a failure that stemmed directly from the Tito-Stalin split.²³ With Stalin’s announcement, JUSTA’s general director quickly returned to Moscow and absented himself from decisions, while the blockade of Yugoslavia caused JUSTA’s international routes to be canceled and oil supplies from pipelines originating in the east to be drastically reduced, making it difficult to keep JAT aircraft flying as well. Conditions again resembled 1945–46: canceled routes, flights operating ad hoc, and the airports (still managed by the Soviets) vulnerable to foreign attack. A report from early 1949 found this latter situation still unresolved: “JUSTA has administrative control at the following airports: Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Titograd, and Zadar. These airports are in fact under the full control of JUSTA, such that even the clerks of GUCVS at these airports are subjugated to their rival administrative authorities from JUSTA. This situation has created the possibility that foreign aircraft have been able to land, without our proper authorities being informed.”²⁴

Dissolving the JUSTA joint venture became Yugoslavia’s top aviation priority, superseding any plans to develop Belgrade’s airport or the Adriatic Coast. By December 1948, Tito had deputized his new foreign minister, Edvard Kardelj, to negotiate JUSTA’s liquidation. Financially, the resulting deal was calamitous. The Soviets repatriated all property they had brought into Yugoslavia, leaving the aviation sector short of planes, manpower, and airport equipment. The Yugoslav government also reimbursed the original Soviet investment in JUSTA and some of the company’s Soviet-paid losses over 1947 and 1948. These terms placed further demands on the Yugoslav treasury, just as the Five-Year Plan was unraveling under the economic blockade and the increased military spending needed to counter a potential Red Army attack.²⁵

With JUSTA gone, Yugoslav aviation was now exclusively in the hands of JAT and its fleet of DC-3s, which had now grown to ten, technically enough to maintain scheduled flights on the country’s domestic and international routes. Nonetheless, tensions with Stalin resulted in hostile relations with Yugoslavia’s eastern neighbors and volatile fuel supplies. As a result, JAT’s international presence suffered. JUSTA’s routes to Tirana, Bucharest, and Budapest were not replaced, while JAT maintained only its Prague route through most of 1948 and 1949, though with frequent interruptions.²⁶ When the US diplomat Melvin Turner later wrote of a “stone-age” in Yugoslav aviation, he was addressing both the bleakness of 1945–47 and the country’s failure to walk in step with Europe—Western or Eastern—after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split.

The intensity of the Yugoslav Communist Party’s paranoia during the Tito-Stalin conflict—which led to a series of accusations of espionage, show trials, sentences in gulags, and defections—also infected the GUCVS in 1949. Communist Party officials were suddenly suspect if they were perceived as pro-Moscow or, depending on quickly changing strategies in Tito’s inner circle, as pro-Western. In the period between the split in 1948 and Stalin’s death in 1953, prisons in Yugoslavia filled with political dissidents, many subjected to show trials with flimsy evidence and others receiving no trial at all. Amid this chaos, purported pro-Westerners at the civil aviation authority, including Zdravko Pudarić, were condemned by a special investigator as “enemy agents.”²⁷ Pudarić was arrested in December 1948 and, without a trial, was transferred to a concentration camp on the remote island of Goli Otok. He spent four-and-a-half years there before being released, never to return to the aviation sector and never having been convicted of a crime. Another five named “enemy agents” at the GUCVS also presumably lost their jobs. In the panic of these volatile years, Pudarić’s visions of a Western-oriented aviation sector were denounced as both financially irresponsible and ideologically misguided.²⁸

Yet, just months after investigators condemned this Western orientation, decisions were made at the highest levels to tie JAT more closely to the West—albeit neither as a tourist airline for the Croatian coast nor as a competitor to Western airlines at a newly expanded Belgrade airport. Instead, JAT quickly developed a new raison d’être: linking Yugoslavia to new trade and financial partners further West. There was significant urgency to this task, since Yugoslavia was surrounded by uncordial neighbors, including the Eastern bloc adversaries blockading it; Italy (with the Trieste crisis still unresolved); and Greece (still reeling from the Yugoslav-aided insurgency). The country’s lone non-adversarial border ran between Slovenia and British-occupied Austria, though even here the legacy of forced labor and genocide against Slovenes in the province of Carinthia before and during the war made the crossing tense.²⁹

Flying Westward

With the overriding imperative of breaking through the country’s isolation, the GUCVS and the Foreign Ministry in 1949 opened the first bilateral air negotiations with two Western states: Switzerland and the United States. The latter partner was particularly important, as it administered the airports of Frankfurt and Munich in its occupied zone of West Germany, as well as the Austrian airport of Linz. However, the Swiss discussions bore fruit more quickly, with non-scheduled service between Belgrade, Zagreb, and Zurich beginning in August 1949, even as a full air agreement was still being negotiated. Switzerland’s neutrality, both in World War II and in the rapidly developing Cold War (despite its unabashedly pro-capitalist orientation), rendered it a palatable partner to Tito, who “never was hostilely oriented to Switzerland” and showed “sincere interest in practical cooperation,” according to Swiss diplomats.³⁰ When the Swiss-Yugoslav aviation agreement was completed in 1950, it reflected Tito’s long-standing desire for full reciprocity: both JAT and Swissair agreed to fly once per week, using the same aircraft type (a DC-3) and thereby assuring that neither had a distinct quality advantage. Direct service to the vital financial center of Zurich meant that Yugoslavia had a modest beachhead in the West and a pathway for forging partnerships with Swiss financiers and trading companies, which in the ensuing years served as intermediaries for Yugoslav trade with the West.

Just as the JUSTA negotiations with the Soviets had extracted a high price, so too did the Swiss deal. As the historian Thomas Bürgisser notes, an earlier economic treaty that had been finalized in September 1948 also included a confidential transportation protocol that would establish the Swiss as the virtual custodians of transportation into Yugoslavia. The protocol provided that “as much Yugoslav transit business as possible … to both Eastern and Western Europe would transpire via Switzerland.”³¹ Once established as the middlemen for such trade, the Swiss gained a means of securing Yugoslav hard currency assets to pay down Yugoslavia’s debt, both from Swiss-owned properties in Yugoslavia nationalized after World War II and to pay back any additional credits lent to Yugoslavia by Swiss banks from 1948 onward.³² In the ensuing years, cash-starved Yugoslavia turned often to Swiss financiers, who—alongside American public and private institutions—became a primary source of loans to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Stalin’s choice to forsake Tito in 1948 thereby created a financial reality for Yugoslavia that future postcolonial states like Jamaica would recognize all too well: these newly industrializing economies, especially those lacking reliable transportation networks to consumer markets, had to borrow heavily. Western lending institutions were typically the most reliable source for such loans.

Alongside the Swiss aviation agreement from 1950, Yugoslavia stimulated cooperation with another increasingly vital trade partner, West Germany. Here, Germany’s defeat in the war left the Americans in a position to forge the beginnings of this new relationship. The aviation treaty with the United States signed on December 24, 1949, was among the first instances of postwar cooperation with socialist Yugoslavia, ushering in a new era in which the United States treated Yugoslavia as a de facto partner worthy of political, economic, and even military support.³³ This deal was ultimately more vital for Yugoslav aviation than the Swiss treaty, as it gave JAT access to three more Western airports, with the Frankfurt route now allowing Yugoslavia’s citizens fast and simple connections to points further westward, including London, Paris, and New York, thanks to an interline agreement with Pan Am established in the treaty. Customers could pay in Yugoslav dinars at JAT offices for a flight with JAT to Frankfurt, and then fly further westward with Pan Am.³⁴

As compensation for providing Yugoslavia and JAT this beachhead in the West, the Americans, like the Swiss, first demanded that the Tito government compensate US citizens for properties nationalized after World War II. Once this impediment had been cleared, American diplomats facilitated loans from US government sources and international institutions.³⁵ Even before signing the aviation deal, Yugoslavia received a US$3 million loan (in September 1949) from the IMF to close its trade imbalance, and another US$12 million loan from the Export-Import Bank, which was managed by the US State Department. Thus, while Swiss loans covered US$3 million of Yugoslavia’s 1949 debt burden, the Americans helped secure US$15 million.³⁶

Financial fealty was not the only thing the Americans acquired in the treaty. The State Department also demanded for Pan Am a much-desired prize for its round-the-world route: permission to use Yugoslav airspace. Of course, officials like Zdravko Pudarić would have welcomed this development, though with the stipulation that such flights refueled in Belgrade while taking on and dropping off passengers. Yet, plans for a new airport were now mothballed. As the new director of the Yugoslav Civil Aviation Authority conceded in a 1950 meeting with American diplomats, “the few tractors, graders, etc., which the Yugoslavs have are being used exclusively for construction of the expanded military airport program, and the Yugoslav government has no money to invest in the purchase of additional equipment needed for [Belgrade’s new civilian] airport.”³⁷ Given this fact, Yugoslav authorities agreed to less than ideal terms. In a move that American internationalists like Clare Boothe Luce would applaud, Pan Am won a temporary monopoly on using Yugoslav airspace vis-à-vis its Western European competitors. The airline could now leapfrog from Munich to Istanbul without the diversion through Rome and Athens. Furthermore, Pan Am had no obligation to land and refuel at Belgrade’s airport. The country served simply as a fly-over space.

Other parts of the aviation treaty were more favorable to Yugoslav interests, allowing it to reflect Tito’s desire for reciprocity. On paper, the treaty opened Munich, Frankfurt, and Linz to flights from Belgrade and Zagreb that Yugoslav and American carriers could exploit jointly. In reality, with Pan Am executives seeing little economic potential, JAT enjoyed a monopoly on all these routes.³⁸ Given JAT’s profound struggles at the time, the airline needed this reprieve from competition. Overall, these new flights to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria reinforced JAT’s Western orientation. Indeed, with JUSTA’s dissolution and relations with Stalin still tense, the entire Yugoslav aviation system now pointed westward.

Landing Yugoslavia in the Global South

Yugoslavia’s post-1948 formula for economic development was uniquely hybrid in terms of its underlying geopolitics. The country’s primary economic development strategy was learned from the Soviet Union in the east: creating a command economy in which central planners allocated economic resources to prioritize heavy industry. By 1949 Yugoslavia had also availed itself of a key Western development strategy: acquiring loans and foreign aid from banks, governments, and international institutions. In addition, with Eastern European markets blocked off, Yugoslavia experienced its first major push to export goods to the West, especially to West Germany. In these first years, however, the trade westward looked similar to the Yugoslav region’s historical trade under colonialism: agricultural products like pork and raw materials like timber were the only ones the West found attractive. Thus, in the early 1950s, a cadre of officials pushed Yugoslavia to add a third, more novel dimension to its development plans, by forging economic ties with decolonizing states in the Global South.

This process began in earnest in 1950, when the Yugoslav official negotiating a trade treaty with Egypt expressed hope that the Global South offered something more. Unlike in earlier trade agreements with Egypt, which were restricted to trading raw materials (mainly Yugoslav timber for Egyptian cotton), the Egyptians now sought to import Yugoslav industrial goods as well, making it “our first agreement that envisions the possibility to export products of our heavy industry.”³⁹ Over time, this trade in industrial goods and technological know-how with the Global South grew immensely. Importantly, in this new trade nexus, Yugoslavia’s historical and geographical position as a marginalized economic entity finally served as an asset rather than a liability. As a country whose respective regions also endured colonial rule and now embraced communism’s strong anti-imperialist message, Yugoslavia was seen by some leaders in the Global South as a more desirable economic partner than members of the Western Bloc. The country’s Cold War position straddling the two blocs was also an attractive model for many Third World leaders seeking maximal sovereignty. Thus, various states in the Global South welcomed Tito’s efforts to make Yugoslavia an economic and political force beyond Europe.

Essential to these developments were Tito’s newly forged relationships with India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s new leader from 1952, General Gamal Abdel Nasser. This trio shared the same commitments not only to smaller states’ economic and political independence vis-à-vis the US and USSR but also to postcolonial economic development. At their 1956 summit hosted by Tito, they articulated a pathway for the Global South to build on the momentum of the 1955 Bandung Conference, where non-white leaders of Asia and Africa came together to promote common objectives. This process culminated in 1961, when Tito hosted the Belgrade Conference and, as the lone European country alongside a series of states from the Global South, helped found the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).⁴⁰

NAM was a loosely united grouping, rather than a formal alliance. Its commitments included pressing for nuclear disarmament and, even more prominently, resisting entangling bonds with either the United States or the USSR. With its members heavily comprised of newly independent states in Asia and Africa, NAM was also an anti-imperialist force, which hoped to advance the economic modernization of the Global South and the political sovereignty of its members. For Yugoslavia, this alignment with the Global South was motivated by its own legacy of colonization and its suddenly hostile relationship with the Soviets. As Edvard Kardelj, the regime’s primary ideologue and one-time foreign minister, explained, “Yugoslavia might not have survived … had it not started combining with another revolutionary process that shook the entire world. That was the struggle of the colonial and all other non-self-governing and semi-dependent peoples to liberate themselves from foreign domination and economic and political dependence of all kinds.”⁴¹

Importantly for JAT’s ultimate growth, the creation of NAM also entailed economic opportunities for Yugoslavia. As the historian Svetozar Rajak stresses, Tito’s extensive travels in Southeast Asia and Africa during the winter of 1958–59, which were primarily designed to secure political support for NAM, also brought economic benefits: “Tito would point out to his hosts that Soviet and Chinese aid, like that from the West, always came with strings attached.” Yugoslav contracts, however, would only bolster a state’s independence. “Moreover,” Rajak adds, “economic cooperation and assistance between the un-committed countries strengthened the bonds between them, something that [Tito] was keen to advance.” Tito thus returned to Belgrade in 1959 with commitments for ship contracts with Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Sudan, a munitions deal with Egypt, and a variety of construction projects (a dam, railroad, and a variety of factories and plants) with Ethiopia.⁴² After all, Yugoslavia’s industrial know-how—gained in its own domestic development by building dams and other electrical facilities; infrastructural projects for shipping, rail, and road transport; and entire urban neighborhoods for its rapidly growing cities—was far more advanced than that of its newfound partners. Yugoslav engineering firms sealed lucrative contracts, especially in the 1960s with oil-rich NAM member states like Libya and Iraq, to undertake such large-scale construction projects.

In sum, Stalin’s banishment of Tito in 1948 had a profound impact on Yugoslavia and its relationship to the world. By the early 1950s, the country’s dependence on Switzerland, the United States, and West Germany, coupled with its economically lucrative opening to the Global South, had led Tito to accept an open border strategy. Now, Yugoslavia engaged with, rather than isolated itself from, the non-socialist world. This openness fostered not only financial and trade ties with the West and Global South, but also a unique economic migration pattern for Yugoslav citizens that persisted through the 1980s: “on the one hand, highly-skilled, Yugoslav white-collar labor (engineers, technical personal) [was] deployed to the Third World, while low-skilled Yugoslav migrant labor was slotted into the lower ranks of West European economies.”⁴³ In both cases, such migrations meant for JAT an increased homegrown market of somewhat frequent fliers to complement the more frequent business travelers flying to the West and Global South. As such, the country’s aviation needs were significantly different—hardly even recognizable—when compared to its needs both before and immediately after the “stone-age” of the Tito-Stalin split.

By the mid-1950s, JAT was maturing as a uniquely nonaligned airline: as a socialist (and in this sense eastern) airline with routes stretching westward into the North Atlantic region and southward into the Middle East. While JAT would ultimately serve cities that Pan Am, BOAC, and Air France also served (Cairo and Beirut in the south, Paris and London in the west), it did so with unique cargo: its passengers were typically businesspeople and technicians promoting products from Yugoslavia’s modernization efforts that were destined primarily for similarly situated countries in the Global South and, gradually, for the West as well. JAT’s routes were also novel, linking a developing country on Europe’s margins directly with other developing countries in the Global South, without passing through Western Europe’s hubs that served as focal points—and choke holds—of transportation under the cartography of colonialism. In this sense, JAT’s growth resulted in a modest redrawing of this cartography. When JAT inaugurated flights from Belgrade through Athens to Cairo in 1954, it quickly became the young airline’s most financially lucrative route.⁴⁴

The country’s overall western and southern economic strategy was lucrative for Yugoslav citizens who could find work tied to this global trade. Greater exports, coupled with the state’s heavy borrowing from the West, allowed for significant GDP growth to accompany the de-escalation of tensions with the USSR that came after Stalin’s death in 1953. Yugoslav GDP in 1960 was already 70 percent larger than it had been in 1956.⁴⁵ Continuing growth through the 1960s further promoted a more prosperous consumer-oriented economy, where heightened consumer expectations and increased availability of higher-quality goods produced what the historian Patrick H. Patterson refers to as the “Yugoslav dream.”⁴⁶ Parents who endured the privations of World War II relished the fact that their children were more prosperous and better educated. Many citizens attained a standard of living that did not match Western Europe’s, but outdistanced other socialist states’ by far. These consumers of the “Yugoslav dream” were occasional leisure travelers on JAT, using their savings and their freedom to travel as far as they could afford to go. At the peak of Tito’s nonalignment politics in the 1960s, citizens could travel visa-free in most of Eastern Europe (except for Albania), the West (except for Greece and the United States), and the Global South (except for Israel and China).⁴⁷

JAT’s “Walk in Step” with Western Competition

The year 1954 was momentous for JAT, as it took several important steps toward parity with Western Europe’s airlines. On January 6, 1954, the Yugoslav government definitively acknowledged the westward orientation of its aviation sector by signing the Chicago convention. As a result, aviation relations with countries and airlines in the West and Global South were normalized. Joining the Chicago system entailed a commitment to open Yugoslav airspace and update the country’s aviation infrastructure. In addition, entering the ICAO eased the way for JAT to expand further: the airline could now sell tickets outside Yugoslavia, and it committed itself to abide by internationally monitored safety standards.

In terms of timing, 1954 was still slightly before the rise of a Western-style consumer economy in Yugoslavia, which included “self-service shops, supermarkets, and department stores that aspired to Western ideals of luxury, choice, satisfaction, and modernity.” Patterson notes that these anchors of a Western-style consumer culture “started to spring up across Yugoslavia beginning as early as the late 1950s,” especially after reforms were implemented that shifted economic production toward higher-quality consumer goods.⁴⁸ Thus, when JAT in 1954 opened new routes along with its purchase of ultramodern American aircraft and with a Western standard of service aboard, it stood in the avant garde of the country’s efforts to “walk in step” with the West’s consumer culture.

For JAT, this step was sealed with the purchase of three new American-built Convair-340s (CV-340s). Flights from West Germany to Paris had been initiated on DC-3s in March 1952; a flurry of activity by Yugoslav diplomats enabled flights to London soon after the CV-340s arrived in 1954, at which time the Paris route also switched over to the CV-340. Customers from these premiere European capitals thereby voyaged in a state-of-the-art American plane with double the seating capacity of the DC-3 (now about forty passengers), much faster cruising speeds, and a more extensive range of over three thousand kilometers. Once landing in Belgrade, they could remain there or continue in the same plane to JAT’s first destinations in the Global South: Cairo (via Athens) and Beirut (via Istanbul), each of them served twice weekly.⁴⁹ Bilateral treaties now gave Air France and BOAC overflight rights to match Pan Am’s, but they also enhanced JAT’s appeal for customers who normally flew these airlines, since they could now book with JAT and board top-quality aircraft, making it to Beirut or Cairo the same night.

The same American diplomats who dismissively characterized Yugoslav aviation as being in the “stone-age” a few years before had doubts about Yugoslavia’s CV-340 purchase and its expansion both westward and southward. While grateful that Yugoslav authorities chose to spend US$2.4 million for American rather than British aircraft, they also feared that the purchase was a step too far.⁵⁰ After all, airport infrastructure remained so limited in Yugoslavia that the Convairs could land only at one civilian airport in the country, Belgrade Airport. Even there, though, its concrete runway had to be hastily reinforced and expanded. There were also concerns about insufficient pilot training and the lingering lack of radio and radar equipment. Even more concerning, however, were fears that the Yugoslavs might not be able to afford the multimillion-dollar purchase.

As it turned out, embarrassed Yugoslav officials did indeed contact these diplomats just before delivery of the second and third planes to concede that they lacked the needed funds. The alarmed secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, personally intervened, stressing that Yugoslavia’s political value to America—as a socialist state that broke free from Moscow—outweighed concerns about the deal. Dulles ordered the Export-Import Bank to make emergency loans available, even while lamenting that the United States’ new patron was already heavily in debt: “Considering the fact (1) that Yugoslavia has already extended its borrowing capacity to the limit and (2) that the Export-Import Bank has extended a substantial loan to Yugoslavia, the payments of which it has rescheduled, it is unlikely that the Export-Import Bank would consider extending further credit to Yugoslavia unless there exist strong overriding policy reasons for approving such credit.”⁵¹

Various US diplomats were incredulous about Yugoslavia’s commitment to securing aerial independence. The nationalist globalism of State Department officials echoed Clare Boothe Luce from a decade earlier, when she advocated for “keeping America on wings all over the world.”⁵² When the American embassy was informed of the CV-340 purchase in late 1952, the first secretary considered the deal financially unwise and politically misguided. “The Embassy,” wrote Turner Cameron Jr., “does not believe the commercial value of JAT’s present foreign business warrants the indicated foreign exchange outlay at this time.” He then offered an opinion consistent with Boothe Luce’s own, claiming the Yugoslav government should surrender its efforts at aerial independence and instead become a dependent of Pan Am: “From a strictly economic view,” he concluded, “it would probably be more practical to have Pan American work out an arrangement with the Yugoslavs for the former to stop at Belgrade.”⁵³

This thinking points to the double bind that smaller and poorer countries like Yugoslavia encountered in the Chicago system. First, the entry costs for such countries to create new airlines were prohibitive, forcing difficult choices about how to pay for very expensive aircraft and infrastructural improvements. In the case of Tito’s Yugoslavia, part of the government’s policy was to utilize its close ties with the United States and Switzerland to acquire lines of credit and then, in the words of Dulles, “[extend] its borrowing capacity to the limit.” Yet, even this strategy did not prevent last-minute financial crises like with the CV-340 purchase. The second bind was linked closely to the first: the North Atlantic’s preeminent carriers had long since survived the capital crunch facing the likes of JAT as start-ups, meaning they could offer developing countries connectivity at a lower cost. In fact, when doing so, Pan Am could also fall back on an additional revenue source: State Department subsidies were available to underwrite routes deemed to be in the national interest. Thus, throughout the 1950s, Pan Am insisted that it would only add a Belgrade route from West Germany if the State Department covered the projected losses.⁵⁴ In this particular case, the tension blew over when Yugoslav officials found the required funds to complete the purchase of the CV-340s from its own Central Foreign Exchange Fund.⁵⁵

Yugoslavia’s economic expansion and heavy borrowing also enabled a massive expansion of airports across the country. Work on Belgrade’s new world-class airport began in 1956, while planning began for airports with concrete runways and vastly improved terminal buildings further west: in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Split, and Dubrovnik. These airports, when they finally opened in the early 1960s, helped make the Adriatic Coast a major tourist destination that drew hard currency reserves into the country, while finally putting an end to grass runways and inadequate safety equipment.⁵⁶ Interestingly, this airport development strategy closely resembled plans made thousands of kilometers away in Jamaica, where the colony’s popularly elected government in the late 1950s was also spending heavily on airports in Montego Bay and Kingston to ready them for the coming Jet Age tourist wave.

Even before Yugoslavia’s entry into the Jet Age was complete—with the opening of these new airports and JAT’s first acquisition of French Caravelle jets in 1963—Yugoslav officials still sought to expand JAT’s global reach in ways that confounded American diplomats. Here, Tito’s diplomatic investments in and economic ties to the Global South were again decisive. His multiple state visits and subsequent trade deals stimulated interest in yet another set of aircraft purchases, this time involving Yugoslavia’s first four-engine aircraft, the American-built DC-6B from Douglas Aircraft. One of the largest and longest-range pre-jet aircrafts, seating around ninety passengers and flying as far as five thousand kilometers nonstop, this was the same model that Pan Am debuted in 1952 and continued to use on its transatlantic services and its round-the-world flights until the airline converted to jets starting in 1958. Yugoslavia’s purchase of DC-6s could have allowed JAT to open routes to the Americas, an option Yugoslav officials entertained.⁵⁷ However, a confluence of factors led the new DC-6s to bolster Yugoslavia’s ties with the Global South rather than initiate a North Atlantic expansion.

As planned, one of the planes was immediately designated for Tito’s multi-month diplomatic and economic tour that began in December 1958. An American embassy official was again highly critical of this choice, even though the tour attracted business for Yugoslav companies and consolidated support for the Non-Aligned Movement. The diplomat characterized the plane’s purchase as prestige based: “Yugoslavs place great store by [the] prestige value [of] such visits, seemingly out of proportion [to] their substantive worth.” He posited that this prestige, at least in Yugoslav eyes, would “enhance [the regime’s] position at home and increase [its] influence on [the] world scene.” Yet, in his view, these goals were financially too costly: “One measure of [the] importance they attach to [the] prestige factor would appear … in [the] fact they [are] willing [to] spend [a] significant portion [of] their meager foreign exchange reserves for aircraft having virtually no commercial justification.”⁵⁸

There were somewhat similar misgivings in Yugoslav circles, though not in ways critical of nonalignment. Instead, in 1956, as the purchase was initiated, Yugoslavia’s director general of civil aviation expressed concern that the preconditions for these planes’ success were not yet fulfilled, especially if JAT were to initiate service to the Americas. In his view, four aircraft—not two—were needed to assure backups for overseas routes. Additionally, bilateral treaties still needed to be negotiated with countries in the Americas and Belgrade’s new airport needed to be completed before delivery, which was not feasible. His conclusion was that “the investment requirements are premature for our abilities. It is particularly necessary to study the economic feasibility for transoceanic flights, given the competition with strong companies” that would be inevitable on such routes.⁵⁹ Aviation officials’ reticence ultimately led the government to pay for the planes through the Defense Ministry and not the country’s civil aviation authority.

With transoceanic flights temporarily delayed, JAT officials found an ultimately more lucrative use for the DC-6s: they soon replaced the CV-340s on the profitable Paris–Belgrade–Cairo route. By 1960, Yugoslav aviation officials and even American diplomats were positively surprised by the plane’s success. A Yugoslav official who initially asserted that using DC-6s to fortify these routes was “not where the business was” was proven wrong after two years of operation. Even a humbled embassy staff member conceded, “The success of the DC-6 on the Paris and Cairo runs, which was originally viewed as a prestige move, may be stimulating Yugoslav interest in acquiring jets for more extensive route coverage.”⁶⁰ There was momentum to Yugoslavia’s engagement with the Global South, as well as with the West, that made these moves economically sound. As Yugoslav economic growth continued, it allowed such southerly air routes to flourish, even as they disrupted the West’s cartography of colonialism.

A Hub for Yugoslavia’s Nonaligned Airline

After the break with Stalin, Tito and Yugoslavia’s Communist Party were forced to improvise, both in their international politics and their economic path forward. The only priority that remained from Yugoslavia’s original pro-Soviet orientation was the commitment to developing heavy industry first, and even here the regime was forced by popular discontent in 1956 to progress more quickly toward a consumer-oriented economy. As such, by 1961 Yugoslavia was increasingly cosmopolitan in its political and economic relationships. While still committed to socialism, the regime resembled its eastern socialist neighbors in hardly any other way.

Yugoslavia’s first move beyond Eastern Europe was to seal a rapprochement with the West, which quickly became the country’s most important economic partner. Yugoslav firms increasingly oriented their production to the West, while the Croatian coast’s growing tourist sector collected an impressive amount of foreign exchange from Western tourists. The lucrative relationship with the Global South had both a political facet, the Non-Aligned Movement, and an economic expression: the exportation of Yugoslav industrial products and engineering expertise.⁶¹ By 1962 a third and final connection to the larger world—this time with the USSR and its satellites—was growing, thanks to modest trade relationships with the same countries that had blockaded Yugoslavia back in 1948.

This normalization took years to develop. As Tito was deepening relations with Nehru and Nasser from 1954 to 1956, he was also engaged in a process of letter exchanges, then state visits, which ultimately brought Khrushchev to Yugoslavia in 1955 and took Tito to the USSR in 1956. However, the improved relations lasted barely a year. As the historian Petar Žarković notes, the Belgrade Declaration signed by Khrushchev and Tito in June 1955 was historic for the USSR: it was “the first to regulate the relations between Moscow and another socialist country on the principle of equality,” and it also “publicly proclaimed that the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] recognized ‘a different way to socialism’” that Yugoslavia was justified in pursuing. As such, Khrushchev fully disavowed Stalin’s actions against Yugoslavia in 1948.⁶²

However, Khrushchev proved to be an unreliable partner. In 1957, the Soviets backtracked on the Belgrade Declaration and reclassified Yugoslavia’s Communist Party as a pariah. Only in 1962 did relations warm again, as the USSR’s newfound interest in expanding socialism in the Global South—along with attempts to rival China for predominance in global communism—led Khrushchev to again see Tito as a potential ally. This time, Moscow’s re-engagement with Yugoslavia endured through the entirety of the Cold War, thereby allowing Yugoslavia to develop a third pillar of political and economic cooperation: not just with the West and the south, but also with Europe’s socialist East.

Such developments bolstered Yugoslav commitments to aviation, leading JAT to develop a three-pronged route strategy. In the 1960s, the airline both maintained and expanded its scope in Western Europe, complementing flights to major hubs like London, Paris, and Frankfurt with a handful of secondary cities. It also continued expanding into the Middle East and simultaneously opened routes to socialist capitals, from East Berlin (1960) to Moscow (1965). Even before much of this expansion, in 1964, JAT was flying to 25 international destinations and was serving 460,000 passengers annually, a dramatic improvement over the 30,000 passengers carried in 1947. By the close of the decade, the number of yearly passengers had again nearly doubled, to 880,000.⁶³

Inaugurating Belgrade’s new airport in 1962 ushered in the Jet Age and fostered this exponential growth. While based on the original concepts included in the 1948 Five-Year Plan, the one that Zdravko Pudarić hoped would result in 120 hourly takeoffs and landings, the 1956 plans were slightly more modest. This version rivaled the airports of Athens and Rome by accommodating up to forty-five flights per hour. It also adhered to the highest level ICAO standards, making it a legitimate competitor as a stopover on the Europe to Asia routes that Western carriers and a handful of new Middle Eastern airlines were flying.

The resulting increase just in JAT’s international passenger numbers was sizable. In 1961, the last year before the new airport, the airline carried 50,000 international passengers. When JAT accompanied the opening of Belgrade’s new airport in 1962 with its formal entry into the Jet Age by purchasing three Caravelle jets from France’s Sud Aviation in 1963, the airline saw major international growth. The Caravelles—a mid-range jet well suited for JAT’s Western European and Middle Eastern destinations—marked another improvement on the airline’s prime routes linking London and Paris with Cairo and Beirut by cutting flying times in half, while freeing its DC-6s and CV-340s to develop new routes. By 1964, JAT’s international passenger numbers had increased to 131,000—almost threefold over 1961.⁶⁴

The new airport also finally lured the West’s legacy carriers to Yugoslavia. Some came willingly, given that it finally met international safety standards. Others were forced: Yugoslav officials now required that airlines using Yugoslavia’s airspace land at least one-third of the time in Belgrade. Pan Am, BOAC, KLM, and Sabena, among others, started serving Belgrade as a result. Even the USSR’s Aeroflot, now committed to becoming a global airline, used Belgrade to refuel its Tupolev-114 aircraft—the longest-range passenger plane in the world—which flew between Moscow, Accra, and Havana.⁶⁵

For the first several years of the new Belgrade Airport, the DC-6 remained the main workhorse of Yugoslav aviation, even as the Caravelle jets enjoyed pride of place. In 1961 JAT was joined by a second Yugoslav airline, Slovenian-owned Adria Airways, which also used Belgrade as its base for its charter-only operations on DC-6s, a plane that ferried either passengers or cargo payloads over long distances. In the 1960s, both JAT’s and Adria’s DC-6s pioneered new markets for Yugoslavia’s share of the Non-Aligned Movement’s economic trade in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.⁶⁶

Illustrative of the importance of the Global South to Yugoslav aviation is Adria’s application for a new route to the Maghreb in June 1962. Originally envisioned as a single route from Belgrade to Tunis and onward to Algiers and Casablanca, the ultimate result was a bit different. Tunis became part of Adria’s charter route to Leopoldville in 1962, while Algiers became a separate destination in 1964 and Morocco was omitted altogether. Adria’s application was timed to coincide with Algeria’s imminent declaration of independence, a monumental moment in the history of anti-imperialism and one strongly supported by Tito’s Yugoslavia. Adria’s application rosily described Belgrade’s lucrative geographic position now that the new airport had opened. Executives called the city the “predestined starting point” and “natural crossroad” for routes between East-Central Europe and Global South destinations like Algeria.⁶⁷ Those planning the Maghreb route found that “the nonalignment of [Yugoslavia] in international relations is an additional contributing factor that strengthens Belgrade Airport’s already optimal location.” Because Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco had all participated in the 1961 Belgrade Conference, these countries now were deemed even more viable economic partners: “Since the countries of the Maghreb will be economically strongly tied to and dependent on France for several more years, there arises the political and economic necessity that they establish good political and trade relations with the countries of Eastern Europe. Thus, the natural [geographical] bridge aligns with the political, and leads to [Yugoslavia], more precisely to Belgrade Airport.”⁶⁸

In determining the frequency for this route, Adria executives stressed that these countries’ “economic structure and level of development contributes, to a certain extent, an economic complementarity, such that the material conditions exist to increase the traffic in foreign trade.”⁶⁹ Adria therefore envisioned either once-weekly or twice-weekly charter flights that would be filled with “mainly businesspeople—merchants—and then diplomatic officials and couriers, engineers [providing] technical assistance, and cultural-artistic groups.”⁷⁰ The report projected profitability for the route in the second year, as long as other carriers, especially Aeroflot and Czechoslovak Airlines, did not compete.⁷¹

In November 1964, Adria initiated charter service to Algiers. In its first two months, on a total of fifteen flights, the airline flew its DC-6s at capacity, with over two thousand passengers.⁷² This success eventually led JAT to add scheduled service to Algiers, alongside other Middle Eastern and North African destinations, such as Tripoli, Benghazi, Baghdad, Kuwait, and Damascus. Using Libya as an example of this expansion, ties with Yugoslavia were deep even before Muammar al-Qaddafi’s coup against King Idris in 1969. Yugoslav firms had in fact constructed both the Tripoli and Benghazi airports based on the expertise they had gained in Yugoslavia’s airport-building spree. As such, 3,900 Yugoslav citizens—primarily engineers, medical workers, and their families—already lived in Libya in 1968, with contracts held by Yugoslav firms in the country valued at US$160 million. These numbers would grow further after 1969.⁷³

To borrow a term from Tito’s foreign policy, JAT by the dawn of the Jet Age was a uniquely nonaligned airline. The route structure it created was unimaginable under the cartography of colonialism that consigned Yugoslavia to fly-over territory, devoid of easy linkages to the vital metropoles of the global economy. Even in the cartography of the Cold War, in which the American-Soviet rivalry divided Europe between sharply segregated Eastern and Western blocs, Yugoslavia after 1948 occupied an exceptionally difficult position. It lay in between the blocs, tantamount to a no-man’s-land in a time of war. This precarity pushed Yugoslavia to develop a creative foreign policy, building cordial relations with the West and eventually the East as well, while also resourcefully developing ties with newly independent states in the Global South. JAT played a vital role in this foreign policy, as it made the country a busy hub and a desirable destination in its own right. The country’s geographical disadvantages became a source of vitality, as flights took off for destinations in all directions. Rather than a no-man’s-land, Yugoslavia instead became like an open city in a divided world, a crossroad between the communist East, the democratic-capitalist West, and the decolonizing Global South.

Yet, despite the immense benefits that aviation bestowed, including all the ways it enabled the country to “walk in step” with Europe, there were also profound costs. The expenses required to develop a modern aviation system placed a serious strain on state coffers. This was true of the calamitous divestiture from JUSTA in 1949 and also of the 1954 purchase of the Convair-340s, when the Yugoslav government risked defaulting at the last minute. Beyond these previously discussed instances were numerous other pessimistic developments. During every year of the 1950s, the central government subsidized JAT, contributing from 20 percent to over 33 percent of JAT’s earnings; the subsidies totaled at least $1 million every year.⁷⁴ On top of that, when authorities finally invested in new airports starting in 1956, another 14 billion dinars (about US$20 million at the 1960 exchange rate) were budgeted, even before the projects’ major cost overruns.⁷⁵ Further into the 1960s and 1970s, even after these start-up investments were supposed to have resulted in a viable aviation sector, the government continued to subsidize JAT.

Herein lay the Achilles heel of Yugoslavia’s broader ventures in the Cold War to secure political independence and economic prosperity. Despite having experienced impressive economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, its hybrid economy—one that eschewed the basic capitalist principle of private enterprise, while nonetheless nurturing certain state-owned enterprises that competed well on the world market—could not wean itself off Western loans. On the one hand, gainfully employed members of the World War II generation were delighted when the “Yugoslav dream” offered their children better lives. On the other hand, warning signals abounded that this prosperity was not sustainable: state debts increased, going from US$400 million in 1954 to US$5.7 billion in 1971; unemployment rates remained stubbornly high at over 7 percent throughout the 1960s before worsening in the 1970s; and balance of trade deficits were a yearly reality, despite successes in exporting a wider variety of goods.⁷⁶

These nodes of fragility amid an otherwise impressive re-rendering of Yugoslavia’s aerial cartography were shared by the next case study as well. Jamaica’s geographical position was considerably different than Yugoslavia’s, which rested on the tectonic plates splitting East, West, and South. However, the Caribbean Basin did stand on the precipice of a significant North-South divide—between the United States and Latin America—and it even had an “Eastern” presence once Castro assumed power in 1959 and eventually allied Cuba with the USSR. The Jamaican challenge to the cartography of colonialism was, however, not as cosmopolitan as Yugoslavia’s East-West-South strategy. It was decidedly Western, even as it challenged the predominance of Western airlines and their consignment of Jamaica to the position of an overflight locale, or at best a stopover point for refueling. Here too, however, familiar elements from the Yugoslav example are visible, especially the deep tension between costly investments in aviation that would enhance both a country’s economic and political sovereignty and the risk of incurring unsustainable amounts of debt.