ОДЈЕК „СЛУЧАЈА ЂИЛАС–ДЕДИЈЕР” МЕЂУ ЗАПАДНОНЕМАЧКИМ СОЦИЈАЛДЕМОКРАТАМА 1954–1955
REACTIONS OF WEST GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS TO THE “ĐILAS–DEDIJER АFFAIR” 1954–1955

Summary/Abstract: In the early 1950s, following the split with the Cominform, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia established cooperation with all influential socialist and social-democratic parties of Western Europe. Milovan Đilas, who was at the time at the head of the CPY Foreign Relations Commission, played a distinguished role in this process. Many western socialists considered Đilas to be pro-Western figure and a proponent of democratization within the Yugoslav political leadership. Therefore, his fall from power in 1954 was interpreted as a sign of Yugoslavia’s distancing from the West. The Yugoslav authorities put efforts to neutralize such reactions, and to prove to their Western counterparts that the “Đilas Affair” was merely an internal Yugoslav issue. Most Western governments, and socialist parties’ leaderships, including the West German government and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), formally accepted the official Yugoslav interpretation. However, in the late 1954, the “Đilas–Dedijer Affair” once more challenged the Yugoslav relations with Western European socialists. It occurred at a precarious moment, while the Yugoslav President Tito was away on his first official visit to India and Burma, which heralded Yugoslavia’s non-aligned foreign political orientation. The Yugoslavs therefore interpreted the negative reactions to the “Đilas–Dedijer Affair” as a Western attempt to influence Yugoslavia’s foreign policy and alter its non-aligned course. Although the Bonn government and the SPD leadership refrained from ‘meddling’ in this case, a group of West German social democrats, mostly trade unions’ activists (Kuno Brandel, Siggie Neumann), decided to support Đilas and Dedijer actively. Alongside publishing several articles critical of Yugoslav leadership, they wrote a letter to Tito urging him that a West German jurist and distinguished socialist Wolfgang Abendroth be allowed as a defense lawyer in the process against Đilas and Dedijer in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav diplomats were convinced that this action had a more complex background. They believed that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions from Brussels attempted to use pro-American social democrats within West German trade unions, with an aim of discrediting Yugoslav foreign and domestic policies, and preventing Yugoslav trade unions’ membership in the International Confederation. Indeed, Brandel and Neumann maintained close ties with the American Federation of Labor, but their anticommunist and pro-American orientation alone cannot prove Yugoslav assumptions. Although the “Đilas–Dedijer Affair” challenged the Yugoslav relationship with the German social democrats, inciting mutual mistrust, the official stance of the SPD towards the affair shows that the importance of relations with Belgrade outweighed sympathies towards Đilas and Dedijer.

• Details
• Contents