Josip Broz Tito

On 6 April 1941 German forces, joined by Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian units, invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the Luftwaffe's bombing of Belgrade is estimated to have killed between 5,000 and 17,000 people. The invasion ended after little more than ten days with the unconditional surrender of the royal army, and the country was partitioned. Tito, then living in Zagreb under the alias "Tomanek", organised a military committee within the Central Committee and moved to Belgrade, and on 1 May he issued a pamphlet calling on the people to unite against the occupation. On 27 June the Central Committee appointed him commander-in-chief of all national liberation military forces, the Comintern's instruction for immediate action followed on 1 July, and a mass uprising began in July.

The Partisans were organized on Tito's initiative and began as a guerrilla force, but by late 1944 they had grown into a conventional force of some 650,000 organized in four field armies and 52 divisions. Their stated objectives were to liberate Yugoslav lands from occupation and to establish a communist-ruled Yugoslav state. The Republic of Užice in September 1941 was their largest gain of that year, and Tito met Draža Mihailović on 19 September and 27 October, proposing joint struggle against the Axis and offering him the post of chief of staff of the Partisan forces, which Mihailović refused. By the end of that month Mihailović had concluded that the communists were the true enemy, and within months the Chetniks began collaborating with the Axis against the Partisans. The Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) convened in Bihać on 26–27 November 1942 and in Jajce on 29 November 1943, where a 67-member presidency was elected and a nine-member National Committee of Liberation (NKOJ, with five communists) was established as a de facto provisional government, with Tito named its President.

The 1948 Cominform rupture confronted Tito with more than a diplomatic break: he had to legitimise an ideological alternative. The answer the Yugoslav leadership offered in place of Soviet central planning was workers' self-management. Its point of departure came in November 1949, when the first workers' council was formed at a factory in Solin, Croatia, and on June 27, 1950 the Basic Law on the Management of State Economic Enterprises by Workers' Collectives placed enterprise management in the hands of workers' councils rather than state administration. Edvard Kardelj and Boris Kidrič elaborated the theory, and Tito proclaimed the law's passage with the slogan 'factories to the workers'. Under self-management, worker collectives directly decided purchases of raw materials, output volumes and prices, wage funds, and profit distribution, while the state's economic functions were progressively reduced. In the 1950s Yugoslavia sustained industrial growth above 13 percent a year and abandoned forced collectivisation. Yet the experiment carried a fundamental contradiction: a participatory economy at the enterprise level coexisted with an authoritarian one-party political system. Workers' councils often merely ratified plans drawn up by managers and specialists, and self-management, granted from above, never fused with a direct-democratic movement from below. Even so, self-management stood as the first systematic alternative to the Soviet model, and together with the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement it marked the two great experiments that defined Tito's Yugoslavia.

The roots of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) trace back to the Brioni Declaration of July 19, 1956, signed by Tito, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser on the island of Brioni, affirming a joint anti-bloc policy. Tito then extensively engaged newly independent African and Asian states, building a decolonization solidarity network. On September 1–6, 1961, the First Non-Aligned Summit convened in Belgrade, and Tito was elected the movement's first Secretary-General (1961–1964). Twenty-five heads of state attended, with Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah joining Tito, Nehru, and Nasser as co-founders. The Belgrade Conference was a direct response to Cold War bipolarity, institutionalizing a 'third way' in international politics, whereby nations outside the great-power military alliances asserted collective self-determination and peaceful coexistence. Tito steered the NAM not as passive neutrality but as a forum of active peaceful coexistence, remaining its central leader through the 1970s. Until his death in 1980, Yugoslavia served as the diplomatic hub of the non-aligned world.