This new volume by Robert Niebuhr delves into the Yugoslav state’s search for legitimacy of its Communist experiment during the Cold War. The book’s narrative is situated in between the years of the Tito-Stalin split (1948) and the end of the Yugoslav state and of many Communist systems (1991). The book presents itself as delivering new research on Yugoslavia’s and Tito’s foreign policy, but its true original contribution, perhaps unintentionally, is to author an additional chapter in the story of Yugoslavia’s search for a legitimate and complete form of state after 1945. Our general historiography of Balkan history and of Yugoslavia within it has tended to use the Second World War as a dividing marker: pre-existing state configurations and the first Yugoslavia (1929–1941) are described as regrettably failed constructions. Tito’s second Yugoslavia, on the other hand, has been recognized in the majority of accounts as legitimate (with notable exceptions marked by the significant works of Nora Beloff and Ivo Banac). Narratives about Communist Yugoslavia based upon the premise of legitimacy have often dealt with questions such as constitutional problems within the evolution of the state, i. e. how the state could have functioned better, the role of the institution of the army, and what life was like in Communist Yugoslavia. Niebuhr covers such classic topics to some extent; however, his perspective is fresh, as the time-honoured questions are connected to one another under the umbrella of a philosophy of legitimacy, which in Niebuhr’s account was still to be sought throughout the years after the Second World War. Although this volume does not relate its narrative to the earlier history of Yugoslavism before 1945 in a significant manner, it focuses its analysis on questions of a struggle by Communist Yugoslavia to find legitimacy for its form of state, along with a battle for popular support both from within and outside of its borders. This book therefore speaks to histories of state construction in the Balkans in an innovative manner.

To answer questions of legitimacy and state construction, Niebuhr draws mainly on newspaper articles and a wide selection of secondary sources. He introduces his readers well into studies published on this topic in English, Serbian, and Croatian, although some newer books about Non-Aligned foreign policy are missing. The volume’s six chapters take the reader through: how Tito emerged as a leader in the Balkan peninsula, how the Yugoslav state’s ideology formed and reformed itself, Yugoslavia’s contribution to the Non-Aligned Movement and its politics, what became of the Tito doctrine in Yugoslavia in later decades of Communism, and what happened immediately before the Yugoslav state came to an end.

The main thesis of the book is that in order to properly understand the history of Communist Yugoslavia, one should understand also its struggle with legitimacy as an ever-bewildering and never complete question and a force in politics. While other Communist states such as Cuba could be understood and analyzed through the structures of their Communist parties, and the Soviet Union’s Communist experiment through the roles and characters of its chairmen such as Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev fluctuating back and forth from liberating reformers to clamping-down tyrants, this book shows that Yugoslavia’s Communist experiment at its essence was a search for the abstract concept of legitimacy.

This is not primarily a book of diplomatic history and does not use diplomatic documents in the majority of its citations. I am therefore left somewhat unconvinced of the discovery of truly new threads of Yugoslav diplomacy in the book. However, this is not merely an account of Yugoslavia’s domestic politics alone, but one that situates both domestic and diplomatic foci around questions of how and by which support the second Communist Yugoslavia was founded and functioned. The volume is not dedicated to questions of Communism’s rightfulness or the inherent value of the multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, but engages the subject of state legitimacy both through the eyes of foreign and domestic policies and the evolution of events. I am convinced by this book’s effort to connect diplomatic history to the more abstract concept of legitimacy from multifaceted directions of domestic and international questions.

Despite the complex and abstract thesis, the main character who stands at the center of this book is Josip Broz ‘Tito’; three out of six chapters bear his name. Although the domestic and foreign interlocutors of Yugoslavia’s leader from 1945–1980 are mentioned and their significance described (including importantly the journalist Edvard Kardelj, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno), their contributions to the overall story of this book and thus of Yugoslavia appear peripheral to Tito and the Titoist regime he constructed.

The author skilfully considers the arguments of earlier historians of Yugoslavia such as Dennison Rusinow (p. 5) and of Communism such as Adam Ulam (p. 124), as well as current authors such as Tvrtko Jakovina (p. 7 and p. 9). This combination of older analysis and perspectives of state structures of as well as newer details and information on Communist politics are well brought together here. However, the author rarely debates the secondary sources he uses extensively or examines further the evolution of the historiography of the topics in the book. As the book narrates a long period in history, and the author is exceptionally well grounded in the area studies of the former Yugoslavia (and recognizes the absolutely important subject matter in each decade), it might have been illustrative to bring the evolution of the historiography of Yugoslavia more into the story or under debate. I am left eager to hear more from the author about his argument about the centrality of the struggle with state legitimacy and the texts discussing forms and personalities that came before this volume and are so well cited in the account.

The narrative of the volume often jumps back and forth in chronology within chapters which are meant to be chronological, making the narrative at times a little difficult to follow. Despite such minor challenges, the book has an overall refreshing tone and is a good read for students of Yugoslavia and the Balkans as well as experts in the area, as well as a welcome addition to the historiography of Yugoslavia.