“At its inception, the policy of providing scholarships (to foreign students) was based on political-humanitarian principles … Today, the scholarship policy is more selective and determined by its utility and the level of cooperation with certain countries and regions in terms of economic interests.”Footnote 1
In November 1984, officials from the Socialist Republic of Croatia’s Bureau for International Scientific-Technical Cooperation (Republički zavod za međunarodnu znanstveno-tehničku suradnju; ZAMTES) met with members of their Republic’s Council for International Relations to brief them on recent developments regarding Yugoslavia’s scholarship program for students from developing countries. The career administrators of SR Croatia’s ZAMTES—at once both a development aid agency and a facilitator of the Republic’s international economic relations—warned the Council that the combination of a “new international market” for higher education and Yugoslavia’s economic crisis was incentivizing faculties across Yugoslavia to maximize revenue by increasing enrollments of self-financing international students, many from Greece. The administrators worried that this trend threatened Yugoslavia’s aid program for students from nonaligned partner states because ZAMTES could not cover the rising tuition costs which SR Croatian faculties charged both self-financing and scholarship students. The ZAMTES officials presented their case primarily in political terms: it was in Yugoslavia’s interest to accept politically “more relevant” students, such as Palestinian refugees, rather than potentially more lucrative Greek students. But they also appealed to the Council’s economic sensibilities: policies based on unstable market forces and fluctuations in international student flows would damage Yugoslavia’s long-term, carefully cultivated economic relations with nonaligned partners.Footnote 2
Most of the Council disagreed. Emil Ludviger, for example, argued against ZAMTES: “the enormous discrepancy between private students and scholarship students is […] good for us. We should look at this as a positive because it means that Yugoslavia has become attractive for whatever reason, whether economic desirability, favorable study conditions, quality of education, or our tolerant political system […] What’s more, we aren’t spending any money but rather making money from this.”Footnote 3 Another member of the council voiced his support for the new market and pleaded with his colleagues to “have no moral scruples” when planning SR Croatia’s entrance into the “new market.”Footnote 4
The Council’s aspirations were soon realized, albeit briefly. What had been a modest increase of Greek and Arab students into Yugoslavia since 1982, mostly into SR Serbia, became a deluge by 1984. Between 1981 and 1987, the number of international students in Yugoslavia ballooned by more than 60 percent, from approximately 11,000 to roughly 18,000 (Cammelli Reference Cammelli1991, 365).Footnote 5 At their peak in 1987, self-financing international students in Yugoslavia made up approximately 97 percent of all international students in Yugoslavia and roughly five percent of total student enrollments at the country’s institutions of higher education, a sizable figure by any standard (Uvalić-Trumbić Reference Unkovski-Korica1990, 401).Footnote 6 According to government reports and university officials, these full-paying international students represented a windfall for cash-strapped Yugoslav universities buffeted by inflation, falling enrollments, and unfavorable government reform. In SR Serbia, international students allegedly brought in more foreign currency in 1985 than any factory in the Republic (“Jorgos kod Kneza Mihaila,” NIN, November 9, 1986). Commenting for the newspaper NIN in November 1986, Miloš Kukolj, the dean of instruction for Belgrade’s Faculty of Physical Education, claimed that, thanks to overseas students, his faculty had finally been able to fix the “roof over head, rent gyms, procure essential equipment—from footballs to sailboats—and even set aside two billion [dinars] to purchase a computer center” (NIN, November 9, 1986). At the same time in Zagreb, 300 international students at the Faculty of Medicine alone were paying the equivalent of $1,600 in tuition annually, which, according to an approving report commissioned by the SR Croatian Chamber of Commerce, “resulted in a significant infusion of foreign currency.”Footnote 7 In 1987–1988, however, the Greek and Arab students funding this “marketization” suddenly stopped coming. By 1989, the number of international students in Yugoslavia had fallen below pre-1980 levels.Footnote 8
The ultimate consequences of this foray into the market for official scholarship students from developing countries were decidedly detrimental. By the close of the 1980s, students on scholarship, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Near East, reached their lowest levels since the early 1960s. From a peak of nearly 1,500 in 1977, the number of students on scholarship decreased by about ten percent each year over the next decade until it stood at fewer than 500 in 1989.Footnote 9 While citing rising inflation and a budget freeze mandated by the Federal Executive Council (Savezno izvršno veće; SIV), ZAMTES officials also blamed steep tuition increases for international students by many Yugoslav faculties as reason for the diminishing financial resources available for scholarship students.Footnote 10 Because ZAMTES was forced to foot the bill for scholarship students’ tuition and other expenses, not only did rising tuition fees impair the state’s ability to host more scholarship students but they also ate into funds allocated for international students’ living stipends. Whereas many self-financing students could rely on funding from their governments or families, officials at SR Croatia’s ZAMTES reported that scholarship students from poorer countries were “living on the edge of existence.”Footnote 11 In their attempt to compensate for funding deficits by recourse to the market, Yugoslav faculties—particularly those in SR Croatia and SR Serbia that attracted the most international students because of their prestige—had inadvertently priced out scholarship students from developing countries, thereby undermining a long-standing feature of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy of nonalignment.
This article traces the domestic and international changes in development aid that facilitated the evolution of Yugoslavia’s scholarship program for developing states from a largely soft-power program to one based increasingly on commercial interests. I argue that, beginning in the late 1960s, the prerogatives of projects based on market integration and profit-seeking began to dominate Yugoslav policy makers’ thinking about technical aid and eventually eclipsed previous models of technical cooperation. As such, the decline of Yugoslavia’s scholarship program for students from developing countries cannot be understood solely as a casualty of the country’s deepening economic crisis of the 1980s or an inevitability of a weakening Non-Aligned Movement. Rather, administrative decisions and economic reform in Yugoslavia, coupled with changes in global development aid policy and higher education, created conditions that rendered such nonaligned solidarity projects increasingly politically expendable over the last two decades of socialist Yugoslavia’s existence. Domestically, economic reforms and decentralization initiatives in 1960s Yugoslavia created a climate in which concerns about technical cooperation’s return on investment increasingly governed policy. The lack of unified policies from the federal center due to decentralization allowed policy makers of the separate republics to focus on their respective republic’s immediate economic interests and neglect political and humanitarian considerations.Footnote 12 This trend accelerated as Yugoslavia’s foreign economic interests became more intertwined with the economies of petrostates in the 1970s and 1980s. Internationally, widespread disillusionment in the effectiveness of educational development aid produced a battery of reforms enacted by UNESCO, the World Bank, and developing countries to move aid away from university training abroad to more short-term vocational training in situ tied to local projects. These new policies typically served to complement an emerging international division of labor suited more to the economic interests of OECD states (Organization for Ecoomic Co-operation and Development) and multinational corporations than developing states. Finally, vocational education reforms unfolding globally in the 1970s dramatically restructured the relationship between higher education, the state, and society. The reforms, combined with falling state funding, threatened the position of universities and spurred experiments with market-based approaches to university financing and administration. In the 1970s and 1980s, Yugoslav state and higher education officials actively participated in such initiatives to rethink higher education financing at international policy institutes.
The evolution of Yugoslavia’s technical cooperation program resulted in adverse outcomes for many international students in Yugoslavia. For students from the Global South, primarily those from sub-Saharan Africa, the changes appear to have reproduced social inequalities consonant with entrenched geographies of unequal development and an emerging neoliberal international division of labor. In the last two decades of the program, the selection of scholarship students by Yugoslav republics as well as the self-selection of self-financing overseas students represented a balancing act between initiatives of solidarity with the Global South’s least developed countries (LDCs) and the competing interests of the republics, the federal state, and ZAMTES bureaus. Archival sources and oral interviews with former international students conducted in Serbia reveal an increase in the financial precariousness of foreign students on scholarship at this time, the majority of whom hailed from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. These unequal outcomes occurred despite ZAMTES staff’s advocacy for greater support of such students. The lack of support from republic authorities, a policy vacuum from the federal center, and Yugoslav faculties’ responses to education reform and budgetary crises proved formidable impediments to efforts intended to maintain policies of economic solidarity with developing countries.
Changes in Yugoslavia’s development cooperation program with the Global South also refracted recurrent debates regarding the competing roles of the central state, republic governments, and economic enterprises in Yugoslavia’s international affairs. In particular, the growing role of Yugoslav economic enterprises in determining technical cooperation strategies provoked serious concern and debate among the career political leaders overseeing Yugoslavia’s programs with developing states.Footnote 13 While scholars have rightly emphasized how disputes about economic strategies roughly fell along republic lines or a North-South divide in Yugoslavia, they have paid less attention to how bureaucratic culture and institutions as well as economic enterprises’ interests cut across republic borders (Unkovski-Korica Reference Unkovski-Korica2016; Woodward Reference Woodward1995). Career officials at the republic level and federal ZAMTES frequently expressed opposition to the receding role of the state in determining the strategy for development cooperation with nonaligned and developing states. Concerns over what some termed the “commercialization” of the program figured saliently in ZAMTES officials’ reports.Footnote 14 Nevertheless, differences regarding the role that technical cooperation and development assistance should play in shaping Yugoslavia’s foreign policy sometimes did fall along republic lines. The growing lack of centralized coordination of economic activities in Yugoslavia intensified disputes and exacerbated differences over how best to pursue development assistance and cooperation, an undertaking that required careful, long-term planning and coordination.
This article is based primarily on the various federal and republic collections of ZAMTES at the Archive of Yugoslavia (AJ), the Croatian State Archive (HDA), and the Archive of Serbia (AS). In particular, reports and meeting minutes from HDA’s collections—the Republic Bureau for International Technical Cooperation, the Republic Committee for International Relations, and the Education Council—provide rich and novel insights of the relationship between the state’s nonaligned internationalism, domestic higher education, and international institutions, such as the OECD during late socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s, which is a focus of this analysis.Footnote 15 I also rely on UNESCO, World Bank, and OECD reports as well as contemporary scholarship of international education to track debates about development aid in international higher education of the period. Finally, in order to supplement and personalize this bureaucratic and institutional history, my analysis incorporates the voices of international students through archival sources and conversations with former international students in Yugoslavia as part of an ongoing oral history project. Together, this innovative blend of sources yields new perspectives on the domestic, everyday implications of policy shifts in Yugoslavia’s nonaligned internationalism.
From Nonaligned Internationalism to Market Integration
With the acceleration of decolonization in the mid-1950s, leaders of newly independent states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East invoked the imperatives of economic growth and industrialization as prerequisites for true political independence and modernization (Engerman Reference Engerman2004, 36). The effects of colonization, however, left many newly independent states lacking enough professional cadres with which to build new states and new economies. In these conditions, education became a watchword on par with modernization, development, and independence as postcolonial leaders called for the creation of local schools, faculties, and universities (Nkrumah Reference Nkrumah1957, x). In the meantime, postcolonial governments sought assistance for technical training abroad as a stopgap measure. Many leaders of decolonizing states, impressed by socialist East European states’ rapid industrialization and motivated by the desire to break their dependence on their former colonial metropoles, turned to socialist and other European countries for scholarships at universities and technical schools. Among these, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Hungary attracted significant numbers of students beginning in the mid- to late 1950s (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2012; Latham Reference Latham, Leffler and Westad2010, 268; Byrne Reference Byrne2009, 446). For those postcolonial governments seeking development assistance outside of Cold War blocs, nonaligned Yugoslavia offered an appealing option despite its limited resources (Byrne Reference Byrne2015). The state’s neutral international position and eschewal of political or economic preconditions for trade relations and technical cooperation persuaded the leadership of states, such as Morocco, Algeria, Togo, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Tanganyika, Sudan and others, to seek scholarships for their students in Yugoslavia in the late 1950s.Footnote 16 Numbering just a few dozen students in the mid-1950s, approximately 7,000 students from developing countries came to study at Yugoslavia’s technical schools and universities in the decade between 1958 and 1967.Footnote 17
Yugoslavia’s burgeoning relations with developing states prompted the creation of a separate bureaucratic organ in 1961 to manage the country’s increasingly complex international technical cooperation programs. ZAMTES, the resulting agency, oversaw a wide range of both bilateral and multilateral development programs and reported directly to SIV (Federal Executive Council).Footnote 18 Divided into a federal bureau and semiautonomous branch offices in each republic, its portfolio included not only technical assistance programs with developing countries but also development aid programs for Yugoslavia with the OECD, UN agencies, and COMECON (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) states. Initially, its two primary responsibilities entailed recruiting and placing Yugoslav technical advisers in developing countries and overseeing the scholarship program for students in Yugoslavia from newly independent postcolonial states and still-to-be-liberated colonial territories. Predating ZAMTES, these two programs were put in place piecemeal following Yugoslavia’s pivot toward “Afro-Asia” in the mid-1950s, a pivot signaled by President Josip Broz Tito’s trip to India and Burma in 1954–1955 and Yugoslavia’s support to Algeria’s independence movement beginning in 1955 (Rajak Reference Rajak2014).Footnote 19 In accordance with its growing nonaligned leadership position, Yugoslav functionaries emphasized ZAMTES’ mission as one promoting “peaceful and active coexistence,” the deterrence of neocolonialism, and the establishment of a more equitable economic world order.Footnote 20 However, alongside its humanitarian and political goals, ZAMTES operated in tandem with Yugoslavia’s broader economic agenda—much like other states’ technical assistance programs in the wider global development aid economy. Importantly, Yugoslavia’s status as both a recipient and donor of development assistance complicated ZAMTES’ rhetoric of political and economic solidarity with developing states. From the late 1950s into the 1960s, Yugoslavia’s loans and technical assistance from Western sources became increasingly conditional on the acceptance of reforms reinforcing market principles and global market integration (Unkovski-Korica Reference Unkovski-Korica2016, 99; Marković and Obadić Reference Marković, Obadić, Leimbruger and Schmelzer2017, 102). These reforms were most reflected in ZAMTES’ program for Yugoslav technical experts, who increasingly came to function as conduits for Yugoslav enterprises conducting business in newly independent states.Footnote 21
In contrast to the technical expert program, ZAMTES officials described the scholarship program for students from developing states as a form of “pure aid” that, while acting as a catalyst for furthering political and economic relations with the Global South, most clearly demonstrated Yugoslavia’s goodwill and progressive credentials.Footnote 22 Consistent with this vision, the Yugoslav state initially bore almost the entire financial burden of the program. Yugoslav policy makers promoted scholarships for developing states to the Yugoslav public as a necessity to liberate colonies “from the colonial yoke” and prevent neocolonial control;Footnote 23 in diplomatic communiqués and at SIV consultations, they also stressed the political “affirmation,” prestige, and eventual economic benefit that Yugoslavia would accrue through assistance in the form of scholarships to developing states.Footnote 24 By the mid-1960s, Yugoslavia’s commitment to nonaligned solidarity had resulted in the scholarship program becoming the largest component of Yugoslavia’s economic aid and cooperation program with postcolonial states.Footnote 25
Whereas officials within ZAMTES were careful to draw distinctions between pure aid and cooperation as well as emphasizing indirect benefits, policy makers at SIV and other administrative bodies often defined the program in more transactional and instrumentalist terms. At SIV, influential authorities, such as Bogdan Crnobrnja and Rodoljub Čolaković, promoted the education of students from Afro-Asia as a vital component of the state’s new political and economic strategy of trade with the Global South (Bondžić Reference Bondžić2014, 645; Crnobrnja Reference Crnobrnja2016, 212–214). Likewise, leaders of various Party bodies directly involved in managing the scholarship program, most prominently those at the Yugoslav Student League, emphasized the potential economic benefits that replacing former colonial metropoles as the patron for future “Third World” professionals would accrue.Footnote 26 At a 1960 meeting, Franjo Sever, a presiding officer of the League’s central committee, stressed that international students from developing states in Africa and Asia were vital to Yugoslavia’s “economic expansion” in these countries. In language that became standard at SIV and ZAMTES, these students were “investments” and even “capital” for Yugoslavia’s economic growth.Footnote 27
Yet, many in Yugoslavia also viewed these foreign students from the Global South as a threat to their country’s economic development. Public rhetoric of solidarity often obscured the anxiety among certain segments of Yugoslav society about the cost of hosting international students. Many students and residents of Yugoslavia’s burgeoning and crowded cities, where competition for housing and education resources among Yugoslav citizens was already intense, harbored resentment against foreign students who were beginning to arrive in ever larger numbers in the early 1960s (Archer Reference Archer, Duda, Stubbs, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016, 1–20).Footnote 28 In particular, financial aid for postcolonial students in the form of stipends and scholarships quickly became a source of conflict between Yugoslav and postcolonial students. Likewise, it was a point of contention within leadership circles who worried that the apparent discrepancy in aid presented a “political problem.”Footnote 29 ZAMTES and university officials noted frequent Yugoslav students’ grievances about foreign students’ generous stipends and reported physical altercations in dorm rooms and on city streets between foreign and Yugoslav students, ostensibly provoked by resentment over discrepancies in funding.Footnote 30
Because of these and other problems, there were growing concerns about the viability of the scholarship program after its rapid expansion in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 31 Economic recessions in 1961–1962 and 1965 in addition to a growing debt crisis, further strained the federal budget (Unkovski-Korica Reference Unkovski-Korica2016, 20; Woodward Reference Woodward1995, 247). In line with new policies of economic austerity, global market integration, and the rationalization of bureaucracies, officials at the federal ZAMTES bureau, directed by SIV, announced plans in 1966 to “undertake a complete reorientation” of the program and “give priority to those forms of scholarships that would provide greater political and economic benefits with the same, or even fewer, expended resources.”Footnote 32 This new plan for the student scholarship program included an initiative to involve Yugoslav economic enterprises in funding schemes for students from developing states. Critically, this conclusion followed SIV-mandated meetings between ZAMTES officials and the representatives of Yugoslavia’s Chamber of Commerce as well as consultations with Yugoslav enterprises engaged in projects in developing countries. At these meetings, representatives of Yugoslav enterprises successfully advocated for the creation of a consultative body made up of industry representatives and ZAMTES officials in order to coordinate “pre-investment” activities, which would more effectively lead to “the procurement of business” (zaključivanje poslova) in developing countries.Footnote 33
The efforts to more deeply involve Yugoslav firms in the work of ZAMTES quickened pace in the late 1960s but achieved few results. Although republic-level ZAMTES bureaus reached out to enterprises to sponsor foreign students—even offering concessions allowing enterprises more say in what students studied and which students were selected—the challenges of economizing the scholarship program through co-opting Yugoslav enterprises proved daunting.Footnote 34 One problem involved the inability of Yugoslav economic policy makers to sufficiently alter firms’ behavior and attitudes toward developing markets. Besides large enterprises, such as Energoprojekt, Energo-invest, and Ingra, which were directly involved in construction and other projects in developing states, many Yugoslav manufacturing and export-oriented enterprises used markets in the Global South typically only to dump excess inventory after completing transactions with Western and COMECON markets (Dyker Reference Dyker1990, 100).Footnote 35 These firms had insufficient incentives for expansion into developing markets and thus little interest in assuming long-term investments in funding students who may or may not have produced future commercial opportunities.
The apparent incongruence between the scholarship program and specific economic interests also informed decentralizing reforms within ZAMTES and the scholarship program. Due to some republic leaderships’ mounting dissatisfaction with the cost of technical cooperation with developing states and its lack of connection to their economic interests (most notably SR Slovenia), SIV implemented reforms in the 1960s and 1970s to alter the makeup, allocation, and financing of scholarships.Footnote 36 At this time, Yugoslav policy makers undertook measures to decentralize the work of ZAMTES in order to redistribute costs and allow republics to better align the work of technical cooperation with their respective economic priorities. The most significant measure came in 1973 when SIV divided scholarship students from developing states into two categories: those from the UN category “Least Developed Countries” (LDCs) and those from all other developing countries. New regulations stipulated that the federal budget assume responsibility for all scholarship expenses from LDCs and that republic budgets cover the rest. Such concessions allowed republic leaderships more say in selecting international students from countries more connected to their own economic interests.Footnote 37 In time, the decentralization of ZAMTES reconfigured the distribution of scholarship students between republics. From the late 1960s and through the 1970s, for example, SR Slovenia gradually decreased its share of scholarship students while most other republics or regions, particularly SR Macedonia and the future AP Vojvodina, saw significant increases.Footnote 38
A final obstacle in rationalizing the student scholarship program concerned the behavior of students from the Global South. Following fact-finding missions to developing states in the late 1960s, federal ZAMTES administrators found that most students, upon graduation at a Yugoslav university, either completed specializations in Western countries, where they became integrated into the economies of those countries, or experienced difficulties having their Yugoslav diplomas recognized back at home, remaining unemployed. In both cases, the administrators concluded, Yugoslavia’s scholarships were being “overshadowed,” and the state was not receiving “any benefit from (our) long-term investment.”Footnote 39 Despite the slew of reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the basic economy of Yugoslavia’s scholarship program in the mid-1970s did not change much since 1968 when SIV’s Commission for International Cultural Relations asserted that the scholarship program had failed because, while it had “certainly helped countries in development,” Yugoslavia’s economy had “not derived any use from it.”Footnote 40
International Development Aid
Yet, contrary to this assessment that developing countries largely benefited from Yugoslavia’s scholarships, a consensus was forming at the end of the 1960s, the first development decade, that international aid for education was actually causing greater dependency of the Global South on the North rather than closing the gap between developed and developing states.Footnote 41 Experts in the North and South expressed concern that aid for traditional university studies, especially abroad, reinforced developing states’ domestic social inequality by favoring urban elites and hampered development by investing resources in qualifications for fields and industries more suited to advanced, Western economies than to the needs of developing states’ economic development (United Nations Reference Nations1978; Salifou Reference Salifou1974, 471–479). Thus, the dominant international development aid model of funding higher education for high-level human capital and academic studies fell out of favor by the late 1960s. In its place, experts called for more investment in primary and rural education, more emphasis on shorter-term technical training programs, and, in particular, vocational training connected to specific employment and “localized regional projects” (Platt Reference Platt1974, 244–245; Society for International Development 1974, 222–223).
The shift toward vocational education in international aid coincided with an important restructuring of multilateral international aid in education. In 1968, Robert McNamara, the former US Secretary of Defense, became president of the World Bank and began directing more resources to education development as part of a larger emphasis on population and family planning (Heyneman Reference Heyneman2003, 320). These World Bank loans for education–administered through the Bank’s International Development Association (IDA)–favored vocational and practical skills education until the end of the 1970s (Abrokwa Reference Abrokwa1995, 135). Importantly, however, as the World Bank jumped into global education policy, UNESCO and UNICEF sharply decreased education funding in the late 1960s and gradually abdicated more policy authority to the World Bank through cooperative programs with the Bank (World Bank Reference Bank1971, 71; Latham Reference Latham, Leffler and Westad2010, 274; Reiff Reference Reiff1983, 451).Footnote 42
The expanding role of the World Bank in education development aid in the Global South in the late 1960s and 1970s gradually subordinated strategies of education aid investment to the economic and political interests of the World Bank’s donors, which were largely industrialized OECD states (Heyneman Reference Heyneman2003; Carnoy Reference Carnoy1980, 281–282). While the shift toward vocational education in the Global South initially reflected a desire for more efficient use of education funds, such as a higher return on investment on the part of both donor organizations and recipient countries, vocational education programs turned out to be more expensive and required more investment in material than general academic education. As a result, developing states often became dependent on foreign loan providers who conditioned aid on purchasing material from certain countries and corporations (Abrokwa Reference Abrokwa1995, 134–135). In this way, Western loan providers and multinational corporations who produced education training equipment acquired even more power in determining education aid priorities and in selecting projects for training and educating groups in developing countries (Reiff Reference Reiff1983, 453). Thus, the new role of the World Bank in education development policy not only institutionalized the logic of rationalized investment but also, according to policy experts and scholars, tailored education aid to match the international division of labor and production pursued by donor countries. While justified on grounds of efficiency and equity, this intervention of the World Bank in education development aid may have only exacerbated existing inequalities between the North and South, especially in the turbulent 1970s (Harris and Seid Reference Harris, Seid, Harris and Seid2000, 7; Carnoy Reference Carnoy1980, 282).
Many of the initiatives adopted by Yugoslav administrators in the 1970s adhered to the new thinking and policies gaining traction within international education development policy.Footnote 43 The recalibration of Yugoslavia’s scholarship program in the late 1960s eventually resulted in new policies and programs, which restructured international education in Yugoslavia according to more market-based, profit-driven principles.Footnote 44 The first initiative, underway since 1965, decreased the number of overall scholarships, particularly for four-year university studies. While this measure was in line with international expert opinion on the need to shift away from traditional academic programs, it also stemmed from Yugoslav efforts to conserve more resources for activities for which Yugoslavia had more economic interest (Zimic Reference Zimic1982, 13–16). Second, in place of university scholarships, ZAMTES advocated for shorter specialization programs in Yugoslavia, post-graduate programs, and vocational training on site in developing countries. These changes were deemed more cost effective and more in line with Yugoslavia and developing countries’ immediate economic priorities. Thus, in 1976, federal ZAMTES and the governments of Libya, Nigeria, and Iraq contracted for students from these states to be trained in two-year-long high-school (srednje škole) programs organized “on a commercial basis” to meet the needs of local industries and Yugoslav enterprises. This program was fully funded by these foreign governments and more than a thousand students, primarily from Nigeria, enrolled at specially built schools in Yugoslavia during the first year.Footnote 45 This initiative—and the broader emphasis on specialized training and post-graduate programs—largely catered to wealthier, oil-producing states’ economic priorities and Yugoslavia’s expanding interests in those states.
The emphasis on vocational education and nonformal training also figured to solve the problem of the international dislocation of labor, namely, “brain drain.” This was to be done by focusing more training in situ as opposed to in developed countries (Reubens Reference Reubens and Leiter1975; Symonds Reference Symonds1970). Studies commissioned by ZAMTES conceded that the Yugoslav scholarship program was contributing to the problem of brain drain as students from developing states used Yugoslavia as a transit country to Western Europe, either during their studies or upon graduation (Ivić Reference Ivić1991, 12; Cvjetičanin Reference Cvjetičanin1971, 93). As they became increasingly aware of the effects of brain drain in the late 1960s and 1970s, diplomats and state officials from developing countries began lobbying Yugoslavia directly for more in-country training centers and support for the development of local institutions of higher education.Footnote 46 Yugoslav leadership was responsive to these requests but stipulated that on-site training centers and their courses be organized according to the “goals of our economic reform” and in coordination with Yugoslav enterprises operating in developing countries.Footnote 47 In guidelines proposed in 1973, the federal ZAMTES bureau recommended that Yugoslav enterprises should assume the responsibility for training the bulk of personnel from developing countries while ZAMTES bureaus in Yugoslavia could, “with a contribution of funds” from enterprises, organize the training of workers from developing countries in Yugoslavia “necessary for their commercial arrangements.”Footnote 48 By the time of this report, Yugoslav enterprises estimated that they had already provided training for over 10,000 workers on site in developing countries for their projects.Footnote 49
The 1970s also saw increased efforts at SIV and the federal ZAMTES bureau to “internationalize” the scholarship program by engaging in more multilateral projects. In directives to ZAMTES, SIV sought more UNESCO-funded scholarships and greater international cooperation in place of a previous emphasis on bilateral arrangements for scholarships.Footnote 50 SIV’s Commission for Developing Countries and federal ZAMTES also undertook initiatives to work more closely with countries with successful technical cooperation programs as a means to better address “the interests of the Yugoslav economy and the possibilities of its entrance into the markets” of developing countries.Footnote 51 Accordingly, in 1972, Yugoslavia began a program in partnership with the Netherlands to train students from Tanzania, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in agricultural innovation and management methods at Yugoslav institutions. Funding and instructors for this program, which continued and expanded through the 1980s, were fully provided by the government of the Netherlands.Footnote 52 Despite earlier objections that a turn to Western-based programs imperiled Yugoslavia’s political priorities and socialist principles, ZAMTES came to highly prize these multilateral programs as budget balancers and opportunities to promote Yugoslav faculties and economic enterprises.Footnote 53 Finally, in the mid-1970s, ZAMTES officials began focusing more resources to attract self-financing students who predominantly came from states in the Middle East. ZAMTES, in coordination with Yugoslav universities and faculties, began publishing and distributing brochures abroad to promote Yugoslav higher education to an international student population in 1974.Footnote 54 In its 1980 annual report to SIV, ZAMTES leadership reported that “the new field of cooperation” and “special contracts” whereby foreign partners paid the costs of education in Yugoslavia, including self-financing international students, represented a promising source of “surplus income” for the bureau and education institutions as well as business for Yugoslav enterprises. They argued that Yugoslavia should seek to expand these programs to the fullest extent possible.Footnote 55
These new programs were not universally accepted by officials, however. To many staff members at the various ZAMTES bureaus, the decoupling of technical assistance and economic investments in developing states from a broader political strategy signaled the crude “commercialization” (komercijalizacija) of Yugoslavia’s technical cooperation program.Footnote 56 In 1971, alarmed federal ZAMTES officials informed SIV leaders that ongoing attempts to “completely commercialize technical cooperation” would cripple ZAMTES’ work as only “those activities that with absolute certainty lead to direct business deals” for Yugoslav enterprises could be arranged. This, they claimed, would lead to “the abandonment of the fundamental […] principles of this form of international cooperation.”Footnote 57 Such concerns would only grow over the 1970s and 1980s as ZAMTES’ operations became more concentrated in oil-producing states, especially Libya.Footnote 58 Yugoslavia’s closer economic relations with these states came at a time of acrimony within the Non-Aligned Movement and the wider Global South about the growing gap between wealthy OPEC states and LDCs, of which most were located in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of Yugoslavia’s technical cooperation policies appear to have exacerbated this divide. Already in 1969, Predrag Dramičanin, the deputy director of SR Serbia’s ZAMTES bureau, for example, noted the “absurd situation” in which Yugoslavia was devoting increasingly more resources to wealthier developing states rather than to the most needy in “black Africa.”Footnote 59 Cutbacks in Yugoslavia’s scholarship program in the 1960s and 1970s disadvantaged less developed states, which relied more on forms of assistance than cooperation. Following persistent demands by representatives of LDCs in the mid-1970s, ZAMTES sought to rectify this problem by offering proportionally more scholarships to sub-Saharan African and other developing countries disadvantaged by the economic turbulence of the 1970s.Footnote 60
Vocational Education Reforms in Yugoslavia
Changes in Yugoslavia’s technical cooperation program, which aimed for the closer integration of education aid and industry, were part of a larger, global process of educational reforms intended to improve access to higher education and more closely align education with labor markets following the unrest of 1968. Across Western Europe, the Eastern Bloc, and developing countries, state policy makers sought to reduce the role of general or academic education, which typically led to university, by expanding technical and vocational training programs in high schools, specialized training institutions, and within enterprises themselves. For many state policy makers, these reforms were the solution to the problem of a growing misalignment between education and employment; to others, the “vocationalization” of higher education represented a “crisis of education” in that it broke the historic bonds between the state and the university (Neave Reference Neave1982, 238; Touraine Reference Touraine1973). Confirming many education experts’ critiques was the trend in Western Europe, the USA, and European socialist states of reductions in state support for higher education in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the proliferation of “public-private” initiatives in higher education that were slowly commercializing key functions of the university (Bok Reference Bok2003, 2; Cerych Reference Cerych1990, 352; Benveniste Reference Benveniste1983, 353–354).
Vocational and other education reforms in Yugoslavia during the 1970s produced fundamental changes in the financing and administration of higher education. In 1974, Yugoslavia enacted its own vocational education reforms known as the Šuvar reforms named after the SR Croatian minister of education Stipe Šuvar (Bačević, Reference Bačević, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016, 88–89). Around the same time, policy makers introduced self-management in education institutions under the slogan of the “democratization” of the university and increased local and institutional autonomy. However, the new administrative apparatus whereby instructors, faculty, and university staff were to have greater power in decision making also did away with federal state financing of higher education, ostensibly to increase its “economic independence” (Pribićević and Gligorijević Reference Pribićević and Gligorijević1973; Šoljan Reference Šoljan1979, 60). In place of federal funds, organizations of associated labor (OOURs), which received the “services” of higher education, financed institutions of higher education within the individual republics. Through these reforms, it was hoped that higher education would become more responsive to the economy and the interests of enterprises (Resulovic Reference Resulovic1980, 43–47). For universities, however, these reforms produced arbitrary decision making and funding shortages rather than stabilize funding due, in part, to the complete “absence of any connection between the universities and economic planning” (Ivić Reference Ivić1992, 118). These unfavorable reforms also immediately preceded a demographic shift–the decline in college-age individuals in Yugoslavia–which contributed to a steady drop in enrollments at Yugoslav universities beginning in the early 1980s (Šoljan Reference Šoljan1991, 136). As funding for faculties was apportioned based on enrollments, university budgets, already beset by rising inflation, were squeezed tighter.Footnote 61
This era of budget reductions and the restructuring of higher education associated with vocational education reforms contributed to a growing interest in rethinking the management and financing of higher education in Europe and other industrialized states, including Yugoslavia. UNESCO, the World Bank, and the OECD played leading roles in developing and promoting policies of rationalized management and program planning, including market-based financing approaches in higher education. Such initiatives were in keeping with what scholars of education policy have noted as the beginning of a steady rise in invocations of the private sector, the global market, and market competitiveness in reference to higher education within official UNESCO and other international education policy literature (Buckner Reference Buckner2017, 480–481, 485).Footnote 62 This new direction in policy helped produce public-private partnerships in higher education globally and, in Yugoslavia, closer collaboration between industry and universities. In the 1970s, for example, UNESCO helped Yugoslav universities establish commercial partnerships with enterprises from Yugoslavia, Europe, and developing countries predominantly in the petrochemical and agricultural industries (Zimic Reference Zimic1982, 15).Footnote 63 Some of these projects and new policies were developed at UNESCO’s new European Center for Higher Education (CEPES) established in 1972 in Bucharest, Romania, where Yugoslav university, republic, and federal state officials collaborated closely with international and regional education experts and policy makers (“CEPES Activities” 1976, 43). In addition, the OECD Education Committee and Centre for Education Research and Innovation (CERI) led similar projects to reshape higher education budgets and administration (“OECD Programme” 1977, 23). New forms of cost-benefit analyses, organizational theories, and budget planning popular by the late 1970s in education policy at CERI and the Education Committee increasingly served as extensions of conservative European governments’ marketization and privatization policies of the period (Eide Reference Eide1990, 35, 38; Bürgi Reference Bürgi, Leimbruger and Schmelzer2017).
Yugoslav delegations were active participants in this work of CERI and the OECD’s Education Committee from the early 1970s onward (Marković and Obadić Reference Marković, Obadić, Leimbruger and Schmelzer2017, 91). While the majority of its early joint projects focused primarily on addressing the disjuncture between traditional university education and the labor market through vocational education, the 1980s saw more OECD-funded research into possible alternative and hybrid funding of higher education, including private and market-based approaches (Šoljan and Schutze Reference Šoljan and Schutze1989).Footnote 64 At sessions of the Education Committee and CERI seminars in the 1980s, government delegations, university and industry representatives, and education experts presented and debated new models of financing higher education, including different forms of student loans, tuition models, and public-private partnerships. Yugoslav representatives were interested, yet cautious, in examining such proposals. After attending the 42nd session of the Education Committee in June 1989, for example, Ivan Ivić, Yugoslavia’s representative from the University of Belgrade’s department of psychology, expressed the need to study not only the benefits of market relations, which would render higher education “more dynamic” and provide “greater financial autonomy,” but also the “dangers,” such as “the exposure to temporary oscillations in demand.”Footnote 65
The Market for International Education
Yet, serious attempts to introduce market principles to higher education had already been proceeding apace at Yugoslav faculties since the early 1970s. Mirroring trends in many OECD and other European states of the period, self-financing students at faculties in SR Croatia and SR Serbia had become a key fixture of, and a growing source of funding for, higher education (Wagner and Schnitzer Reference Wagner and Schnitzer1991, 276; Barber, Altbach, and Myers Reference Barber, Altbach and Myers1984, 163; Williams Reference Williams1984).Footnote 66 While barred from charging full-time Yugoslav students and international scholarship students tuition, Yugoslav law did not regulate the amount of tuition and others fees faculties were allowed to charge self-financing international students. From its introduction in 1969/1970, the price of tuition for overseas students in Yugoslavia had risen steadily through the decade and into the 1980s. By the time the large influx of self-financing students arrived in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s, Yugoslav faculties—particularly the country’s medical, veterinary, and pharmaceutical faculties—had policies and programs in place to cultivate international students as a lucrative source of income.Footnote 67
The administrative and regulatory vacuum created by decentralizing educational reforms of the 1970s facilitated Yugoslav faculties’ turn to “the market” of international students. According to reports from faculty at Zagreb’s Faculty of Medicine, the introduction of self-management at faculties and the resulting uncertainty surrounding funding induced a survivalist mentality, which manifested itself in higher fees, tuition hikes, and a nickel-and-diming approach to students and instruction (Lacković and Kovač Reference Lacković, Kovač, Petrak, Buneta and Kostović1992, 82). ZAMTES officials in the mid-1970s and later in the 1980s reported that exploitative pricing strategies were especially prevalent in specialization and post-graduate studies, programs which international students patronized in high numbers.Footnote 68 International students from developing countries who were particularly affected complained that faculties treated them as “customers” instead of people and partners.Footnote 69 Although some authorities, specifically in SR Croatia’s Parliament, contended that the commercialist impulse was degrading the quality of once-reputable faculties by admitting low-quality students through lax admission standards where the only “qualification” was money, many republic officials and higher education representatives increasingly came to view overseas self-financing students as a viable solution to mounting financial and administrative problems of higher education in Yugoslavia.Footnote 70
By the late 1970s, the promise of profits from international students fueled a novel competition between Yugoslav faculties and republics for overseas students’ tuition and foreign currency. As republics assumed more of the financial burden of technical cooperation from the federal budget after 1974, both faculties and industry leaders in SR Serbia and SR Croatia clamored for an increase in self-financing students while authorities in SR Serbia sought to reduce its disproportionately large share of scholarship students.Footnote 71 Whereas previously the leadership of larger republics and universities found self-financing international students a burden, SIV’s introduction of tuition for international students in 1969 reversed the calculations of the faculties’ cost-benefit analysis. The ability to levy tuition at unregulated levels made overseas students a coveted commodity when, ironically, the original intent of SIV’s mandated tuition for international students had been to depress the number of foreign students in order to unburden the limited resources and infrastructure of Yugoslavia’s faculties (Cvjetičanin Reference Cvjetičanin1971, 85). Between 1970 and 1973, republic parliaments and institutions of higher education in SR Serbia, SR Croatia, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, and AP Vojvodina ratified tuition for international students; SR Slovenia, SR Macedonia, and (soon-to-be) AP Kosovo, however, either ignored the mandate or charged only nominal fees for international students.Footnote 72 Despite the higher cost of study, however, most self-financing international students from the Global South preferred to study at well-known faculties in Belgrade and Zagreb rather than in other smaller republics. Before the 1970s, the federal state took no initiative to prevent this concentration of international students in Belgrade and Zagreb. In the late 1970s, however, a combination of lower prices and federal reallocation efforts connected to decentralization began to succeed in drawing more scholarship and self-financing international students to universities in Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, and Skopje.Footnote 73 This trend alarmed officials in SR Croatia who had begun to realize international students’ value. In 1983 and again in 1984, officials in SR Croatia’s Parliamentary Executive Council alleged that tuition-free education for international students in these republics was a strategy to encourage the enrollment of international students by undercutting more expensive faculties in SR Croatia.Footnote 74 Because this archival research is based on collections from the federal state and SR Serbia and Croatia, information about how officials in SR Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Macedonia dealt with competition for international students is limited and represents a potentially fruitful direction for future research.
In the 1980s, as international student enrollments steadily climbed, the uncoordinated recruitment of overseas students created difficulties for both international scholarship students and wider Yugoslav society beyond competition between universities. While the value of student stipends steadily decreased due to inflation and budget freezes, some faculties in SR Croatia aggressively began charging scholarship students tuition in contravention of republic and federal regulations.Footnote 75 These circumstances forced many students to seek employment as day laborers to make ends meet, which hindered their ability to focus on their studies and maintain their stipends. According to international scholarship students, a cycle set in where international students sought employment to supplement their income only to lose or have their stipends reduced due to poor academic progress (Dias 2016).Footnote 76 In the 1980s, international students and Yugoslav sources also reported incidents of housing discrimination against international students. In Belgrade, inflated rents were attributed to the presence of wealthy international students; in Zagreb, republic authorities found it more difficult to accommodate international students in limited student housing, a situation which led to allegations of discrimination (NIN, November 9, 1986).Footnote 77 The unilateral admission policies adopted by faculties, often without coordination with republic authorities, ultimately resulted in acute shortages of housing for international students and tension with broader Yugoslav society. Student and general housing deficits in 1980s Yugoslavia disproportionately affected international students of fewer means.Footnote 78
In seeking solutions to the problems associated with unregulated market competition in international higher education, the various ZAMTES bureaus offered contradictory responses. On the one hand, while railing against the cupidity of Yugoslav faculties, the leadership at federal ZAMTES actively championed the political and economic benefits of self-financing international students to SIV and helped recruit overseas students—specifically self-financing students—by issuing brochures to be distributed by Yugoslav embassies in developing countries (Popivoda-Endresen Reference Popivoda-Endresen1979; Popivoda-Endresen and Kljaković, Reference Popivoda-Endresen and Kljaković1987).Footnote 79 On the other hand, staff at both federal and republic ZAMTES bureaus worked assiduously to mitigate the negative effects scholarship students faced from Yugoslav faculties’ commercialist tendencies. In stressing to their university and republic leadership counterparts the primacy of political considerations over economic interests in international higher education, ZAMTES officials consistently advocated for moderate tuition fees, tuition waivers, and other economic incentives for certain categories of non-scholarship international students.Footnote 80 Republic authorities and universities were reluctant to acquiesce to such demands. In SR Croatia, for example, it was not until 1988—roughly fifteen years after concerns about tuition and competition were first raised—that an agreement between ZAMTES, republic governing bodies, and universities could be reached regarding the regulation of tuition prices for faculties within the republic.Footnote 81 It is unclear, however, whether Yugoslav faculties abided by the new regulations governing tuition.
Conclusion
In April 1989, a group of African scholarship students from across sub-Saharan Africa studying in Zagreb petitioned SR Croatia’s ZAMTES bureau to enact fundamental policy changes in the scholarship program because of their dire economic situation. They warned ZAMTES that if their conditions were not met, they would “undertake mass measures.”Footnote 82 The timing of the students’ threat to protest was markedly unpropitious. In September that year, the ninth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement was to take place in Belgrade. The venue of Belgrade was specially chosen to commemorate the inaugural 1961 conference in Belgrade and Yugoslavia’s leadership over three decades of anti-colonial solidarity and efforts to establish a new international political and economic order. The students’ demonstration threatened to disrupt that narrative. The director of SR Croatia’s ZAMTES bureau, Faruk Redžepagić, warned Belgrade that it would be “politically damaging” if the students protested on the “eve of the conference.”Footnote 83 In a subsequent meeting with the African students, Bureau officials requested the students’ patience and that they, under no circumstances, carry out their threats to demonstrate. While emergency funds were distributed later in the year, no fundamental changes in funding and policy were forthcoming.Footnote 84
Federal budget deficits and economic crises only go so far in explaining why Yugoslavia’s scholarship program for developing countries lacked sufficient support in this period. Over the last two decades of socialism in Yugoslavia, administrative and policy changes in Yugoslavia, coupled with structural changes in the global aid economy and higher education, gradually diminished the political relevance of Yugoslavia’s scholarship program and inhibited Yugoslav functionaries’ ability to adequately respond to its problems. These changes blunted Yugoslavia’s technical cooperation program as the spearpoint of Yugoslavia’s soft-power diplomacy in the developing South.Footnote 85 By the late 1970s, even before the debt crisis, the vast majority of resources and labor at Yugoslavia’s various ZAMTES bureaus were dedicated to technical cooperation programs with COMECON, OECD, and OPEC countries. The gradual reorientation of ZAMTES’ work over the 1970s and 1980s away from the long-term investments for the development of the least developed states in the Global South and toward more immediate and profitable ventures in wealthier states illustrated the misalignment between Yugoslavia’s iconoclastic nonaligned politics and the state’s increasing entanglement in international markets.
Changes in Yugoslavia’s scholarship program for students from developing countries reflected this wider restructuring of the work of ZAMTES. As Yugoslavia enacted reforms that decentralized key bureaucratic organs and liberalized economic policy in the 1960s, republic leaderships, economic enterprises, and faculties pursued priorities that diverged from progressive models of global economic development. In the 1970s, republic parliaments and SIV demanded that selektivnost—meaning the prioritizing of cooperation with countries with which Yugoslavia had the greatest economic interest—be the guiding principle in work with developing countries.Footnote 86 Detached from centralized policy making, Yugoslav republics, primarily SR Croatia and SR Serbia, turned to Yugoslav enterprises and wealthier developing countries to subsidize technical cooperation and the scholarship program.Footnote 87 Smaller republics, in turn, began taking on more federal scholarship students. When offering scholarships, republic leaderships made decisions, in the assessment of concerned ZAMTES officials, “according to immediate economic interests and opportunities” and thus left “entire groups of developing countries […] unaccounted for.”Footnote 88 This strategy widened growing inequalities in the distribution of economic aid and resources within the Global South. Finally, when the market for overseas students emerged, Yugoslav faculties’ and republic leaderships chose the minimal investments required for the immediate profits of self-financing international students over the long-term investments of scholarship students. As support for forms of international exchange based on solidarity politics in Yugoslavia waned, scholarship students became expensive vestiges of an earlier era of anti-colonial solidarity and nonaligned economic development.
Disclosure
Author has nothing to disclose.
Financial Support
This research was funded by the American Councils for International Education, The Association of Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies, and the History Department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
