1The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP) was initiated by the Tanjug news agency in January 1975. The pool was the most significant form of cooperation between Non-Aligned media and a key project for strengthening “self-reliance” of the Non-Aligned world. As the first form of informational cooperation between Non-Aligned countries, it impacted future forms of cooperation like those between Non-Aligned broadcasters (BONAC) as well as the institutionalisation of informational cooperation within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

2The pool served as a news exchange mechanism that allowed participating news agencies to contribute their news items and make use of news items supplied by other participating agencies. NANAP’s stated goal was to address the gap in communication capacities between the Non-Aligned and other third world countries on one hand and the rich countries of the global North on the other because this gap was believed to have led to the inadequate and distorted representation of Non-Aligned and other developing countries along with unbalanced global news flows.¹ By establishing NANAP, Non-Aligned countries sought to create a system through which they could exchange information about each other without relying on the big global news agencies, which they viewed with suspicion as a legacy of the colonial past and a tool of imperialism. At the same time, the goal was to increase the visibility of the Non-Aligned world and improve its image in Western media.²

3NANAP’s creation and operation continue to be poorly understood. Like with the Non-Aligned Movement in general,³ critical historical research is rare with most published accounts coming from protagonists and contemporary sympathisers of NAM, such as Pero Ivačić, the director-general of Tanjug,⁴ D. R. Mankekar,⁵ the pool’s first coordinator, and Mustapha Masmoudi,⁶ the Tunisian information minister. In 1983, an overview of NANAP’s operation up until that point as well as relevant documents were published by the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, with the publication still being the most comprehensive official account of NANAP.⁷ Scholarly accounts are generally based either on available published sources (mostly documents adopted by the Non-Aligned countries at summits and ministerial meetings or their public statements)⁸ or analyse aspects of the pool’s operation.⁹ The result is that almost nothing is known about NANAP’s creation.

4This paper has two goals. The first is to reconstruct the process of NANAP’s establishment in 1975 and its institutionalisation within NAM in 1976. The second goal is to uncover the factors that shaped NANAP’s creation and early development. Jürgen Dinkel provides a useful analytical toolbox by identifying three groups of explanations for the formation of international institutions like NAM: the first being internalist interpretations, which focus on initiatives coming from within the individual nation states engaged in building an association; the second are externalist interpretations which seek explanations in the context of international relations; and third, approaches grounded in institutional history concentrate on the ways bureaucratic culture and path dependencies emerging from the history of association influence the development of international institutions.¹⁰ These groups of explanations are not mutually exclusive but can be productively combined to offer a fuller explanation of an international association.

5I focus on these three groups of factors to explain the emergence and initial institutionalisation of NANAP:

• internal factors: goals and strategies pursued by actors within Yugoslavia, primarily Tanjug and the federal political elite;
• external factors: changes in international relations in both the global economic and political context as well as within NAM; and
• institutional history: the ways NAM’s institutional history shaped the development of NANAP.

6My research is based on archival sources of the Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade (cabinet of the President of the Republic, relevant commissions of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the Socialist League of Working People of Yugoslavia) and the Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia (containing materials of the Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs of the SFRY). Tanjug’s archives are unfortunately only partly preserved at the Archive of Yugoslavia and do not allow a significant insight into NANAP’s creation.

1After the second NAM summit in 1964, the movement fell into crisis partly due to the changing international relations and partly to factors internal to several participating countries that saw them become less active.¹¹ However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s changes in international relations as well as changes in several Non-Aligned countries sparked renewed interest in the movement. The first significant international factor was the easing of tensions between the USA and the USSR, which met with mixed feelings among third world countries. On one hand, détente was viewed with relief, as the conflict between the blocs had raised the prospect of nuclear annihilation and had drawn third world countries into the power struggle between East and West. On the other hand, it was feared that the third world would lose what little impact it had on global politics as the USA and the USSR began to settle important issues bilaterally. A further concern was that the most pressing issues for third world countries like the persistence of Portugal’s colonial domination, apartheid in South Africa, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and the presence of military bases in third world countries would continue to be ignored.¹²

2The second big international factor was the persisting and even growing differences in development between the global North and South.¹³ The fact that the institutions controlling the global economy – the IMF, the World Bank and GATT – were under the control of the USA and their European allies, gave credence to the idea that the post-war global economic order was designed to protect the interests of the already rich, rather than address the problems of global poverty and underdevelopment. In the 1960s, developing countries turned their focus to the United Nations, with their efforts leading to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) being established and the Group of 77 being formed in 1964,¹⁴ raising hopes that the third world could effectively pursue its goals within the UN system. This then meant the desire for further Non-Aligned conferences and the movement’s institutionalisation was significantly reduced.¹⁵ Still, optimism soon turned to frustration upon the lack of results, as expressed already in the Charter of Algiers adopted by the Group of 77 in 1967.¹⁶ The absence of results from UN initiatives like UNCTAD and the UN development decade led third world countries to re-evaluate their strategies and added to the renewed interest in NAM.¹⁷

3Another impetus to the association of third world countries was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the global crisis of US hegemony during the 1970s.¹⁸ These changes created both hopes and fears: hopes that the entrenched structures of the global economic order, seen as inimical to the interests of third world countries, were open to change, and fears that third world countries and their interests would remain to be side-lined and ignored unless they were to take decisive action to shape the course of events.

4NAM’s revival in the 1970s therefore also implied its reimagining, particularly in the form of a reorientation on North-South disparities in economic development, which would grow into NAM’s two interlinked projects in the 1970s: the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). In addition to efforts within the UN system, NAM focused on practical steps aimed at increasing economic cooperation of Non-Aligned countries with a view to making those countries become less dependent on the rich countries of the global North. The case of OPEC, which made its power felt with the 1973 oil embargo, was a powerful demonstration of the strength that can be gained from association.

5Efforts to strengthen South-South cooperation came to be known as “self-reliance” and were of particular significance for Yugoslavia.¹⁹ The Yugoslav delegation at the Preparatory Committee’s meeting for the 4^th NAM summit in 1973 reported that: “We have suggested that special emphasis be given in the agenda to issues of cooperation and solidarity between Non-Aligned countries and the coordination of their activities in the areas of education, science, culture, information and others, which was accepted”.²⁰

6“Self-reliance” was not simply economically but also politically significant since it provided a binding force for the movement, otherwise plagued by considerable, sometimes irreconcilable, and often hostile political differences. A telegram from the Yugoslav embassy in Algiers in the run-up to the Algiers summit speaks quite candidly about this: “Based on talks with many representatives of Non-Aligned countries, but especially the hosts, the impression is that questions of economic development and the gap between rich and poor will serve as the common denominator that should enable the unity of NAM, which could never be achieved to this extent in the political realm due to the political, religious, ideological etc. differences between individual Non-Aligned countries.”²¹

7Following the summit, President Tito,²² Vice President of the Federal Executive Council Anton Vratuša,²³ and member of the SFRY Presidency Augustin Papić²⁴ all stressed concrete measures for furthering economic cooperation as key achievements of the summit.

8The focus on strengthening economic cooperation between NAM members shaped the institutionalisation of the movement. The Georgetown ministerial conference in 1972 adopted an action programme for economic cooperation and named coordinators for selected areas of economic cooperation, with both becoming an important part of the movement’s operation and institutional make-up. Forms of informational cooperation like NANAP developed within this institutional framework. Further, the notion of “self-reliance” became central to both the NWICO and the NIEO.²⁵ It influenced NANAP by providing an overarching goal and by its framing of the issues – boosting South-South cooperation to achieve independence from the rich countries of the global North – as well as creating the institutional forms through which cooperation was taking place.

1The 1970s saw renewed interest in NAM within Yugoslavia. Two factors were paramount in reviving the Yugoslav leadership’s interest in the movement. The first was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which raised fears of Soviet aggression against Yugoslavia and increased the need to foster international contacts and alliances.²⁶ The second reason was the decentralisation of power within Yugoslavia, which led the federal political elites to look to the world stage as a way of boosting their power and prestige within the federation.²⁷ The changing orientation of foreign policy impacted Tanjug’s role as its position in international communications became more pronounced, both in terms of gathering information as well as promoting Yugoslav viewpoints around the world. The decentralisation of decision-making meant that Tanjug’s role as the “backbone of the Yugoslav mass media system”²⁸ and the gatekeeper of information coming from foreign information sources²⁹ was an important asset for the federal leadership of Yugoslavia. This role was especially significant since information flows across the borders of the republics were otherwise limited and unbalanced.³⁰

2Concurrently with the changes in the Non-Aligned Movement, Tanjug was maturing as a news agency. By the late 1960s it had developed significantly from an organ of national resistance during the Second World War through a phase of an “informative institution centred on the federal administration”,³¹ financed directly from the federal budget until 1962,³² to a largely professionalised journalistic operation³³ focused on both the domestic and world markets, boasting in 1969 that the agency had: “gained its place in the harsh competitive environment of the world market”.³⁴ Already in 1964, Tanjug’s operating budget was USD 1.3 million, it employed 485 full-time personnel and was outputting 85,000 words per day (40,000 for local, 45,000 for international customers).³⁵ While this was only a fraction of AP’s 2 million word output at the time, these figures put Tanjug in eighth place in the international news market after the five international agencies, China’s Xinhua and Egypt’s Middle East News Agency.³⁶

3To gather and disseminate information across the globe, Tanjug had been conducting bilateral agreements with foreign agencies as a way of supplementing its network of correspondents. These included commercial agreements with the major global agencies (in 1968 Tanjug had commercial agreements with AP, Reuters and AFP)³⁷ and news exchange agreements with smaller European and third world agencies, as well as technical aid agreements. Technical aid was primarily in the form of radio receivers, for example, in 1963 the federal government approved funds to Tanjug to supply radio printers to news agencies in Tunisia, Sudan, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia and Afghanistan.³⁸ By 1969, Tanjug had provided radio printers to national news agencies in Ethiopia, Tunisia, Algiers, Ghana, Mali, Congo (Brazzaville), Uganda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Mexico and Bolivia and was in negotiations with several countries in East Africa and the Middle East.³⁹ Technical aid was not entirely philanthropic as the “beneficiary is obliged to use the equipment to receive Tanjug’s news wire and to forward one copy to our embassy”.⁴⁰

4New challenges and opportunities for Tanjug were emerging in the domestic market along with the rapid proliferation of new media organisations. Between 1960 and 1986, the number of radio stations grew tenfold, newspaper circulation threefold.⁴¹ These changes meant that Tanjug had gained autonomy in both an organisational sense – becoming a self-managing working press organisation – and financially because Yugoslav media and companies⁴² were becoming an ever more significant funding source.

5The Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia took notice of Tanjug’s changing role and affirmed the need for the agency to develop as an “autonomous self-managing working organisation”,⁴³ while simultaneously pointing to the need for close cooperation with the socio-political organs and organisations of the federation and republics. Especially in international communication, Tanjug had a “special obligation to present and comment on the foreign-political positions of our country and its international activities”.⁴⁴ Tanjug’s relative degree of autonomy meant that it was not merely acting as an organ of the government but was forming and pursuing its own goals, albeit in close cooperation with the federal government. As is shown in the remainder of this paper, the close cooperation with the Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs and the Federal Secretariat for Information was in no way one-sided. Instead, Tanjug had a considerable influence on NAM and on Yugoslavia’s foreign as well as domestic policy.

6The significance of Tanjug in Yugoslavia’s foreign policy was visible in 1969 when Tanjug asked the federal government for funds for modernising its radio equipment and its bid was supported by the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs: “DSIP [Državni sekretariat za inostrane poslove - State Secretariat for Foreign Affairs] considers that it is in the interests of Yugoslavia and Yugoslav politics that the position of Tanjug is consolidated and further strengthened”.⁴⁵ The Secretariat listed several reasons: the first concerns Tanjug’s role in gathering information on important events around the world and distributing it among Yugoslav authorities, especially when communication with Yugoslavia’s diplomatic missions are interrupted during crises or when foreign media content in Yugoslav languages is involved.⁴⁶ The second relates to Tanjug’s foreign output, where the Secretariat wanted to see foreign news agencies rely on Tanjug’s news when reporting events from Yugoslavia. Moreover, the Secretariat argued that strengthening collaboration with Non-Aligned news agencies would be beneficial for the “break up the monopoly of the agencies of the great powers”.⁴⁷

7With the reorientation of Yugoslav foreign policy, Tanjug also began to pay more attention to the Non-Aligned world. The Non-Aligned world and developing countries generally were seen as an opportunity for expansion since “especially in the areas of the developing countries there is an evident readiness to accept information from a national agency of a Non-Aligned country like Yugoslavia”.⁴⁸ In 1971, the Federal Secretariat for Information recommended to the federal government that Tanjug increase the duration of its broadcasting to Latin America, West Africa, and Benelux and open three new permanent positions for correspondents in Western and Central Africa (1 correspondent), East Africa (1 correspondent) and Turkey.⁴⁹

8Despite Tanjug showing greater interest in the Non-Aligned and developing worlds, its network of permanent correspondents still reflected a very strong focus on Europe (both West and East), with hardly any permanent correspondents stationed in Non-Aligned countries (see Table 1). In Africa, we can even see a reduction in the number of correspondents between 1963 and 1970, with Tanjug having had four permanent (Algiers, Cairo, Accra, Dar es Salam) and three part-time (Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville) correspondents stationed there in 1963.⁵⁰

9Tanjug’s links with foreign agencies followed a similar pattern by being focused on (Western) Europe. Of the 31 agreements with foreign news agencies in 1968, almost half (15) were with agencies from Western Europe (including the global Reuters and AFP), seven with agencies from Eastern Europe (including the Soviet TASS), one with the US-based Associated Press, while just five were with agencies from Africa and the Middle East and the sole agreement in Latin America was with Cuba’s Prensa Latina.⁵¹

10This situation likely reflected Yugoslavia’s foreign policy priorities that had turned away from the Non-Aligned movement during the latter half of the 1960s,⁵² but it was also due to the underdevelopment of communication infrastructure in third world countries. National news agencies did not exist in many of such countries and, even where they did, they often did not have the technical capacities to receive Tanjug’s news service, while Tanjug itself lacked the equipment to transmit to large parts of the world: “Central and South Africa and the northern part of South America remain uncovered. Through technical aid we have given 13 complete radio receivers to national news agencies in Asia, Africa and South America. However, Tanjug is unable to guarantee all of them a reliable signal due to the lack of antennae and sufficiently strong radio transmitters”.⁵³

11The objective conditions for the cooperation with Non-Aligned media and news agencies were deemed “minimal” even as late as 1973.⁵⁴ This view was echoed by the interdepartmental group set up by the Federal Executive Council to implement the decisions of the 4^th NAM Summit: “The objective conditions for furthering this sort of cooperation are minimal as the majority of their [Non-Aligned] agencies do not have an adequate material, technical and financial basis to disseminate information in their own country and to exchange information with other countries”.⁵⁵ Another barrier was the lack of trained personnel.⁵⁶ To help alleviate this problem, the Yugoslav Institute for Journalism in Belgrade was organising short elementary courses for students from developing and Non-Aligned countries after 1962, while Tanjug and the public broadcaster JRT were accepting journalists for practical training.⁵⁷ While Yugoslav universities did offer graduate and postgraduate level journalism courses, few students from Non-Aligned countries applied, favouring the natural sciences.⁵⁸

12Therefore, as Tanjug and the federal government were looking to expand to Non-Aligned and other developing countries, they faced significant barriers. Maintaining a global network of correspondents was costly and Tanjug attempted to stretch its limited resources by relying on news exchange agreements. However, national news agencies simply did not exist in many third world countries or were unable to participate in news exchange by lacking equipment, finances, and trained personnel. Tanjug’s attempts to stimulate NAM countries to establish news agencies and to encourage cooperation were likely a consequence of the fact that its existing growth strategy had reached its limits.

1At the 1972 Georgetown conference, economic cooperation between NAM members was institutionalised in the form of coordinators for specific areas of cooperation and an action plan for economic cooperation, which laid out concrete steps to be taken in the future. As Yugoslavia was attempting to expand the areas of economic cooperation to include information, these were the institutional forms serving as a blueprint. To be compatible with the movement's institutional history and ethos, NANAP had to be recontextualised in terms of multilateral economic cooperation. Yet, at the same time, NANAP was used to expedite the institutionalisation of informational cooperation within NAM since it was believed that a practical success would prove to other NAM members that strengthening informational cooperation was a worthwhile endeavour.

2The Yugoslav efforts to put information on NAM’s agenda could already be seen at the 4^th NAM summit in Algiers. A working paper prepared by the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs following the Preparatory Committee’s meeting in Kabul (13–15 May) stressed the need for closer cooperation in the areas of education, culture, science and information of Non-Aligned countries in order to further the “international affirmation and emancipation of their natural cultures”.⁵⁹ Information was pointed out as an area where “cooperation hardly exists” and Non-Aligned countries are beholden to “the monopolies of the big global information sources”⁶⁰. The primary goal set out in the document is to further cooperation between national news agencies where they exist, and to help establish national news agencies where they do not.

3In the run-up to the summit, several Yugoslav news media came forward with suggestions to expand Non-Aligned cooperation: The public broadcaster JRT suggested that the summit recommend closer collaboration between Non-Aligned media⁶¹ while the publishing house Novi List from Rijeka suggested the establishment of a “League of newspapers, broadcasters and news agencies of Non-Aligned countries” to further information exchange.⁶² For this summit, a draft resolution, outlining measures to strengthen news agencies in Non-Aligned countries and the cooperation between them, was prepared by Tanjug in cooperation with the Federal Secretariat for Information.⁶³ Yugoslavia submitted a draft resolution calling for strengthening the means of information and communication, increased cooperation and exchange in more abstract terms than the draft resolution which had been prepared by Tanjug and the Federal Secretariat for Information.⁶⁴

4The final summit documents contain sections promoting the cooperation of the mass media and emphasising the need for Non-Aligned countries to mutually inform each other about their activities and achievements in the action programme for economic co-operation, as well as a section condemning the influence of “imperialism” on national cultures in the political declaration. The final documents of the summit are more abstract than the drafts prepared by Yugoslavia and Tanjug and the political declaration is notably more aggressive in condemning “imperialism”, “alien cultural domination” and “cultural alienation /…/ imposed by imperialism and colonialism”.⁶⁵ This is quite a change in direction from the very sombre and practical Yugoslav drafts, which had sought to phrase the issues in a way that would not antagonise the West.

5Yugoslavia continued its efforts at future events. At a meeting of the Coordinating Bureau in Algiers (19–22 March 1974), the need to strengthen cooperation between Non-Aligned mass media was reiterated.⁶⁶ Further steps were taken at the first meeting of coordinators of economic activity in Belgrade (9–13 September 1974) where the Yugoslav delegation proposed to broaden the scope of economic cooperation to cover new areas, including mass communications, science, culture, and health.⁶⁷

6The Secretariat for Foreign Affairs soon after sent a telegram reminding all diplomatic missions to work towards the goal of naming coordinators for the field of information within NAM according to the agreement reached at the Belgrade meeting of the Coordinating Bureau.⁶⁸ Tunisia was regarded as a preferred candidate for this position⁶⁹ and Yugoslavia was engaging in intensive diplomatic activity to make it happen.⁷⁰

7Yugoslavia remained in close contact with Tunisia throughout this period, especially with Mustapha Masmoudi, the Tunisian Minister for Information from September 1974 onward. Bilateral relations between the countries were judged to be excellent⁷¹ and Masmoudi shared Yugoslavia’s views on the need to institutionalise informational cooperation within NAM. The Tunisian news agency TAP helped further Tanjug’s plans by inviting Ivačić to a symposium of Afro-Arab news agencies that Tunisia was chairing in 1975. The symposium endorsed participation in NANAP by adopting a recommendation for Afro-Arab news agencies, which helped promote the pool’s cause within NAM, and facilitated bilateral contacts between Tanjug and the participating news agencies.

8The Yugoslav embassy in Tunis was particularly pleased that the recommendation omits mention of Yugoslavia or Tanjug: “The recommendation does not mention Tanjug and Yugoslavia and in this way the pool is given a broad multilateral basis of non-alignment”.⁷² It appears the Yugoslav diplomats were afraid Yugoslavia’s leading role would be viewed with suspicion within NAM as an attempt to hegemonise the movement and therefore wished to downplay and disguise its level of involvement. The fact that very few other countries were showing initiative is a key reason Yugoslavia was eager to institutionalise information as an area of cooperation within NAM: “in this way more countries are included in responsibilities and directly engaged in furthering these activities, in which our country has had a pronounced leading role due to circumstances”.⁷³

9Yugoslavia hoped that a coordinator in the area of information would be named at the ministerial conference in Lima.⁷⁴ In the lead-up to the meeting, India began to show increased interest in institutionalising NANAP and had prepared a draft working paper for the Lima conference.⁷⁵ The Indian draft heavily stresses the need to institutionalise NANAP on a multilateral basis, to develop it according to a “polycentric basis” by establishing regional centres, and suggests that its management be taken over by “a council of government representatives or by a board of directors”.⁷⁶ The Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs viewed the Indian initiative favourably.⁷⁷ The ministerial conference in Lima adopted a resolution (VI. Cooperation in the areas of information and mass media), which gives support to NANAP and names Tunisia as the coordinator for information.

10Two aspects emerge from the archival sources regarding the institutionalisation of Non-Aligned cooperation in the information field. The first is that Yugoslavia was clearly the driving force, while there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm from other countries. The most likely cause is found in the underdevelopment of communication infrastructure as even in 1973 the Yugoslav estimates were that the conditions for the cooperation of Non-Aligned news agencies and mass media were minimal. Even guaranteeing reliable radio transmissions was a challenge, let alone creating the conditions for professional journalistic production able to compete with the global agencies. With the notable exception of Tunisia, which shared Yugoslavia’s views and commitment to furthering Non-Aligned cooperation in the area of information,⁷⁸ other Non-Aligned nations seemed hesitant to commit themselves to the idea, as seen in Yugoslavia’s inability to ensure concrete steps were taken in this direction. The position of India began to shift in mid-1975, around the time Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency, when India took a much more active interest particularly in NANAP and began pushing for its multilateral institutionalisation and acting towards hosting the first NANAP conference.

1While progress in institutionalising information as an area of cooperation among the Non-Aligned countries was slow, Yugoslavia was putting its hopes in strengthening bilateral cooperation between national news agencies in preparation for of NANAP’s launch in January 1975. In September 1974, all Yugoslav diplomatic missions received a circular dispatch from the Federal Secretariat for Information, informing them that the federal government had adopted an action plan to further cooperation among Non-Aligned mass media as a way of implementing the decisions of the 4^th NAM summit.⁷⁹ The dispatch describes four ongoing activities:

• strengthening Tanjug’s bilateral ties with other Non-Aligned news agencies and actions to establish an “interagency ‘pool’”;
• boosting cooperation among broadcasting organisations;
• cooperation between national associations of journalists; and
• facilitating cooperation among newsreel organisations.

2While the other activities were in their very early stages, NANAP was already well advanced since Tanjug had in cooperation with Yugoslav embassies sounded out existing Non-Aligned news agencies regarding the question of intensifying cooperation and the feedback was deemed positive enough to proceed with the planned launch of the pool.⁸⁰

3The goal was for NANAP to start its first phase of operation – meaning Tanjug would extend its radio printer transmissions to include news items from the pool – before the Coordinating Bureau meeting in February 1975 and the meeting of news agencies of African and Arab countries in the same year.⁸¹ This was seen as a way of influencing NAM’s decisions in favour of institutionalising informational cooperation. The declaration from the Havana meeting of the Coordinating Bureau confirms this, citing the existence of NANAP as a reason for naming coordinators: “Given that cooperation in the area of disseminating information and in the area of mass media is already ongoing /…/ the Bureau recommends that coordinators be named”.⁸²

4In the second phase, pool items would be transmitted through several agencies according to “geographic and linguistic keys”.⁸³ This phase was considered more delicate due to the “prestige-oriented and political interests of some agencies”, for example the interests of certain agencies to maintain existing regional alliances or their leading roles in their respective regions.⁸⁴ At this point, 11 news agencies had already agreed to take part in the pool (from Algiers, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Mali, Sudan, Ghana, Cuba, Mexico), while negotiations with a further 20 were still underway.⁸⁵

5The Press Trust of India, the intended Indian partner, however, was conspicuous by its absence from the list.⁸⁶ The sources in the Yugoslav archives do not provide more than speculation as to the causes, ranging from technical difficulties to the influence of Reuters. In any case, PTI’s reticence in joining the pool was seen as a problem because it was believed that “the inclusion of India in the pool would stimulate the interest of other NA [Non-Aligned] in Asia and would remove any suspicion that it was conceived on a regional basis”.⁸⁷ The Yugoslav embassy in New Delhi reported that a spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for the government had informed them that “the position of PTI is not the same as the official position of the Indian government” and that “India will contribute news items to the pool via its embassy in Belgrade regardless of PTI and its editor-in-chief Raghavan”.⁸⁸ These initial difficulties foreshadowed future problems as the participation of India’s national news agencies became even more difficult after Indira Gandhi’s fall from power, as NANAP was linked with the measures to suppress freedom of the press during her state of emergency.

6The pool commenced operation on 20 January 1975 by transmitting the statements of Non-Aligned leaders, beginning with the prime minister of Sri Lanka Sirimavo Bandaranaike, followed by Tito the next day and further statements by Non-Aligned leaders every day.⁸⁹ The information service of the UN (OPI-UN) as well as that of UNESCO voiced their intentions to supply NANAP with their news,⁹⁰ while Živan Berisavljević, adviser and assistant to the Federal Secretary for Foreign Affairs, noted the negative reactions from certain Western news agencies (AFP, DPA, Reuters) and the reserved stance of the USSR and the GDR on the initiative.⁹¹ The USSR remained unenthusiastic, as “Latisev [the editor of TASS] expressed a negative attitude of the USSR towards the pool” in March 1976.⁹²

7Ensuring the success of NANAP was a priority of the Yugoslav government as may be seen from the instructions issued to all Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Non-Aligned countries: “It is required that all DKP [Diplomatic-consular representations] in NA [Non-Aligned] countries keep up to date on the practical effects (impact on publicity, technical and other eventual difficulties) as well as the political ramifications of this pool. Full engagement and quick reactions are expected from all DKPs, including suggestions for further developing this action, which has a distinctly political character.”⁹³

8By April, the number of participating agencies had risen to 18 (19 including Tanjug); in addition to the 11 starting members, these were: Argentina, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, Malesia, and Chad, while news agencies from Zambia and Mali had agreed to participate but were unable to do so.⁹⁴ Yet, it is unclear to what extent the named agencies actually participated in the pool since India was still participating via its embassy in Belgrade, while efforts were being taken to persuade PTI, including a visit from Ivačić and “pressure from the government”.⁹⁵

9There seems to have been some reluctance in the news media to make use of items supplied through the pool: “We are not even satisfied with the attitude of our own press, in which the inertia towards news items from news agencies is still not overcome. Actions along state and party lines are being taken to quickly overcome this state of affairs”.⁹⁶ The reluctance of news media to rely on NANAP items was reported by Yugoslav embassies in Libya⁹⁷ and Egypt,⁹⁸ while newspapers in Ghana and one Mexican newspaper were described as making good use of NANAP.⁹⁹ However, the circulation of pool items was not systematically tracked and it is hard to tell how widely news items from the pool were circulated at this point.

1Activities intensified during 1976 as this was the year of the 5^th NAM summit in Colombo, which had to ratify what had been achieved up until then. The activities in this year reflect remarkably well the Yugoslav plans for further actions laid out in 1974. The symposium proposed by the Yugoslav Institute for Journalism and other organisations was held in Tunis in March, while in August India hosted a meeting of representatives of news agencies and of ministers of information in New Delhi, which adopted the NANAP statute and named its coordinating body. Finally, Yugoslavia was able to attract Tunisia and India to take an active role in furthering informational cooperation.

2The symposium in Tunis was viewed as a possibility to advance the institutionalisation of informational cooperation.¹⁰⁰ The Federal Secretariat for Information considered the symposium “very significant” and attributed a “political character” to it.¹⁰¹ Even though Tunisia was the official host, Yugoslavia was closely involved in all aspects of organising the symposium, from the preparation of documents to logistical and financial matters. The symposium was an opportunity for representatives from Non-Aligned countries (media representatives, scholars, state representatives) to discuss the Non-Aligned informational cooperation in depth. The symposium’s impact is hard to judge since it only adopted recommendations, although its true value was likely to be found in facilitating informal contacts and the open discussion freed from the need to negotiate a resolution or declaration.

3The New Delhi meeting was in many ways the opposite of the Tunis symposium. If the symposium was the culmination of cooperation between Yugoslavia and Tunisia, in New Delhi India asserted its will against their wishes. While significant political decisions were taken at the meeting, it was also marked by political conflict and a battle for prestige. India seems to have increased its activity regarding NANAP more for political and prestigious reasons than a genuine interest in furthering the cooperation among news agencies. While Yugoslavia and Tunisia argued that the meeting was to be held at the level of representatives of news agencies and to focus on NANAP, India insisted that the meeting be held on a ministerial level and the agenda be broadened to include all aspects of informational cooperation. Yugoslavia accepted this since the belief was that “we judged that it is very important to India to host a ministerial meeting of NA [Non-Aligned], especially after similar Indian initiatives have failed (CB [Coordinating Bureau], the summit of Asian NA), and this due to both foreign-political and domestic-political reasons”.¹⁰²

4Because the New Delhi meeting had been elevated to a ministerial level, it was disrupted by political conflicts: “First the minister of Laos attacked ASEAN countries, calling them ‘an extended arm of NATO’. /…/ Then the Palestinians attacked the Syrians because of the invasion of Lebanon and accused them of hindering the liberation struggle of the nation of Palestine. /…/ The atmosphere became especially heated when the minister of Sudan accused Libya of attempting a coup and trying to murder Nimeiry. /…/ The Indians attempted to prevent these accusations, pleading with the representatives that the conference was not a place for such dialogue, yet without success.”¹⁰³

5The events in New Delhi foreshadowed the way political divisions within NAM would hinder the operation of NANAP, for instance, the conflict between the Arab states and Egypt after Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel. Since the Arab countries demanded that Egypt be expelled from NAM, they also put the participation of Egypt’s news agency in NANAP in question. The second NANAP conference, planned to be held before the 6^th summit in Havana, was postponed in the hope the issue of Egypt’s membership would be settled there. However, as the resolution of the issue had simply been rescheduled, the conflict between Egypt and the Arab states marked the NANAP conference despite the postponement.

6Another political factor also came into the foreground as NANAP – and broader questions of informational cooperation – became the fighting grounds for political prestige. India’s ambitions caused some controversy on the side of Tunisia, Masmoudi and Triki (director-general of the Tunisian news agency TAP) “talked about the behaviour of the host – India – with indignation. They believed the primary goal of India is to downplay the role of Tunisia as the coordinator for the area of information and to impose themselves as the main factor, diminishing everything that has been achieved so far”.¹⁰⁴ They suspected – correctly, as it later turned out – that India would attempt to replace Tunisia with Sri Lanka as the coordinator for information.¹⁰⁵

7Despite such political differences, the delegates managed to conclude the meeting, adopting the NANAP statute, a political declaration, two resolutions (Action Plan of Cooperation and the Resolution Regarding Cable Rates) and a draft paragraph for the 5^th NAM summit, as well as naming NANAP’s governing body. The Coordinating Committee of NANAP was “based on regional parity and composed of directors of news agencies from the following countries: India as chairman, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Peru, Zaire, Iraq, Mauritius, Egypt, Cuba, Ghana, Vietnam, Senegal, Tunisia and Mexico”.¹⁰⁶ The statute specifies that the Coordinating Committee must meet at least once annually, while representatives of governments and news agencies must meet at the start of each summit year.¹⁰⁷ The Federal Secretariat for Information judged the results to be “perfectly satisfactory”.¹⁰⁸

1The main driving force behind the emergence and institutionalisation of NANAP was Yugoslavia, where Tanjug and the federal political elites found a common cause in strengthening Tanjug’s ties with Non-Aligned news agencies. Yugoslavia pushed to include mass media cooperation in the documents of the 4^th NAM summit and to ensure further steps in institutionalising mass media cooperation within NAM: the Tunis symposium on communication and meetings of Non-Aligned information ministers and news agencies, as well as BONAC and connections between Non-Aligned journalistic institutes and associations. NANAP served as both a blueprint for other forms of informational cooperation and as proof of concept since Yugoslavia wanted to further informational cooperation and its institutionalisation by providing other NAM leaders with a successful example.

2NANAP may be considered a success by several metrics. The institutionalisation of news agencies’ cooperation within NAM helped Tanjug’s efforts by facilitating contacts with other news agencies and encouraging the development of bilateral relations. NANAP exhibited steady growth over the following 25 years, expanding to encompass more than 50 news agencies and government information services by 1980¹⁰⁹ and 103 by 1992. To indicate scale, the 6th NAM summit in 1979 was attended by 89 member states¹¹⁰ while the 10th NAM summit in 1992 attracted 101.¹¹¹ NANAP’s output grew as well; in 1975, the average daily number of words exchanged among participating news agencies was 8,000,¹¹² rising to 40,000 words by 1983¹¹³ and 120,000 by 1992¹¹⁴. While this increase was considerable, it still paled in comparison to the output of the ‘Big Four’. Namely, in 1978 AP, UPI, AFP and Reuters were outputting 33 million words daily.¹¹⁵ Further, NANAP was also credited for contributing to: “improving telecommunication facilities, including satellites, lowering transmission rates, and increasing training facilities for news agency journalists and assistance to establishment of agencies in countries without such services”.¹¹⁶

3In order to explain the process of NANAP’s creation and early institutionalisation, I have presented three factors: internal, external, and those rooted in NAM’s institutional history.

4Since Yugoslavia was the main driving force behind NANAP, the goals and strategies of Yugoslav actors, chiefly those of Tanjug and the federal political elites, were a key influence on NANAP’s development and the informational cooperation within NAM more broadly. Tanjug had an interest in strengthening its ties with Non-Aligned news agencies. There is no indication that the cause was a political commitment to the idea of non-alignment, but it was framed through the need to bolster the agency’s position in the competitive global marketplace of news. News exchange agreements had already been established as the preferred way of establishing ties with foreign news agencies and were not specific to Tanjug. Especially for a relatively small – at least compared to the big global agencies – and financially limited news agency like Tanjug, this was a way of stretching its limited resources and supplementing its own network of correspondents. Tanjug’s interests coincided with the interests of the federal political elites as strengthening Tanjug’s position in the world market was seen as a way of influencing public opinion in Yugoslavia’s favour. Tanjug’s expansion to the Non-Aligned world was viewed positively and supported by the Yugoslav state, especially the Federal Secretariat for Foreign Affairs, as Tanjug’s information infrastructure was seen as helping to promote Yugoslavia’s viewpoints in the world as well as a mechanism for facilitating information exchange between state institutions.

5The second are external factors, namely, changes in international relations on a global scale as well as within the Non-Aligned Movement. With the rising gap between rich and poor countries, disillusionment with the UN, slowing global economic growth and the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971, NAM began to focus attention on North-South economic disparities and practical efforts for boosting “self-reliance”, that is, strengthening South-South cooperation to improve its position within the global economy and increase its bargaining power vis-à-vis the developed countries. These efforts came to encompass information as well, largely due to Yugoslav efforts.

6The third are factors rooted in institutional history. Even though NANAP was an extension of Tanjug’s bilateral relations with Non-Aligned agencies and its interest in expanding to developing countries, the pool was recontextualised within the drive to institutionalise “self-reliance” through economic cooperation and had to be adapted to the established forms of this cooperation. Pre-existing forms of economic cooperation thus provided a blueprint for the institutionalisation of NANAP and informational cooperation more generally. The prevailing institutional ethos of NAM, reflecting strong opposition to centralisation, shaped the formation of NANAP as a decentralised, multilateral project. Although Yugoslavia was clearly the leading force, it had to disguise and downplay the level of its involvement and was investing considerable effort to attract active cooperation from other NAM countries (particularly Tunisia and India) and presenting NANAP as a multilateral project with a broad basis of support from the outset, even though this was certainly not the case.

7While NANAP achieved impressive growth up until the end of the Cold War, furthered Tanjug’s goals of expanding its presence in the Non-Aligned world and boosted Yugoslavia’s prestige within NAM, there were also important limitations to NANAP’s development. Political divisions within NAM came to hinder the operation of NANAP, it became a battleground for prestige and influence within the movement and was very publicly tied to undemocratic practices of NAM leaders like Indira Gandhi. Curtailment of the freedom of the press by Non-Aligned governments supplied the Western media – most of which were already hostile to the very notion that imbalances in global information and communication flows needed to be addressed – with proof that NANAP was simply a ploy whereby autocrats wished to stifle freedom of expression.

8The factors shaping NANAP’s early development often contradicted each other, for example, the interest of Tanjug and the Yugoslav federal elites in increasing Tanjug’s presence in Western media was counteracted by the need to institutionalise NANAP as a multilateral project within NAM. From the beginning, we can see that the very benevolent rhetoric proposed by Yugoslavia for the Algiers summit had turned into a belligerent battle cry against cultural imperialism during the summit. While former colonies certainly had very good reasons to feel antagonistic towards the cultural domination imposed by their former colonial masters, this antagonistic stance flew in the face of Tanjug’s efforts to cooperate with Western media, and the goal of increasing positive portrayals of the Non-Aligned countries in the West. Similarly, Article 5 of the NANAP statute tasked the pool with: “strengthening the unity of the member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement and the decolonisation of information”.¹¹⁷ Such an explicit political mandate was antithetical to the dominant normative conceptualisations of journalism in the West and likely strengthened suspicions that information from NANAP could not be relied on.

9Moreover, the institutionalisation within NAM compounded another pre-existing problem; namely, that many participating news agencies lacked autonomy from state institutions and reproduced government propaganda, by further politicising the pool’s operation. The conflict between the Arab states and Egypt caused the second NANAP conference to be postponed until after the 6th NAM summit in Havana, and continued to plague the conference since the summit failed to resolve the issue. Another problem was that NAM states could easily regard the inclusion of an item critical of them as an affront, and conflicts between members were certainly impossible to report without causing a diplomatic incident. The need to gain support within NAM and present NANAP as a multilateral project from the very start led Yugoslavia to support India’s bid to coordinate NANAP, even though Indian news agencies did not participate in NANAP. India assumed the role of NANAP coordinator just as attempts to curtail the freedom of the press were in full swing during Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency.¹¹⁸ This unfortunate state of affairs not only added to animosity in the West, but also permanently damaged NANAP’s reputation among Indian journalists.

10Finally, NANAP’s establishment did not solve the problems of underdeveloped information and communication infrastructure in third world countries: the lack of technology, finances, trained personnel and in many cases of autonomy from political institutions continued to plague NANAP’s operations in the time of its existence. Contributions to the pool remained uneven, with just a few countries contributing most of the items, the overall quality of news items remained low, and they too often uncritically reproduced the official perspective of the respective governments, news items from the pool were not widely used even within NAM countries, while they barely had any presence in the West at all.¹¹⁹ In the mid 1990s, NANAP finally stopped operating, unable to survive the Western hostility, the end of the Cold War and resulting geopolitical changes as well as losing its leading force following the collapse of Yugoslavia.¹²⁰

11Acknowledging the limitations of NANAP as well as the double standards of the Non-Aligned leaders, who were much less committed to democratising social communication and supporting independent voices in their own countries than they were in lambasting the dominance of Western information sources in international communication, should not lead us to dismiss NANAP as simply a failure or to affirm the reductionist claim that its primary purpose was to stifle freedom of the press. Western media systematically distorted and misrepresented the NWICO initiative¹²¹ because Non-Aligned demands for balancing the global flow of information would have negatively impacted their global influence and profits. The USA in particular saw the opposition to the policy of free flow of information in a liberalised global market as a threat to the interest of its transnational media corporations as well as the global influence of the American state.¹²² Hence, the Western critiques of NANAP and NWICO also suffered from a hefty dose of double standards since they largely ignored the continuing legacy of colonial domination and the legitimacy of desires to protect national cultures in the circumstances of extreme global power imbalances, as well as ignore the specific limitations and challenges developing countries were facing while attempting to develop their communications infrastructure: “The fact that there was not a sufficient market to create independent media systems in the South, and therefore the state was indispensable to create national media, was lost in the debate. Why was the BBC legitimate while Radio Tanzania was not?”.¹²³

12Instead, the case of NANAP demonstrates the significant structural barriers Non-Aligned countries encountered while seeking to become less dependent on Western news sources. The pooling of resources was meant to overcome this dependence by increasing South-South cooperation, yet, even after pooling their resources, the Non-Aligned countries remained collectively poor. While Yugoslavia offered assistance in the form of technical aid and journalist training, these efforts were woefully inadequate for addressing the underdevelopment of communication infrastructure and the lack of trained personnel, notably in the poorest Non-Aligned countries. This meant Non-Aligned countries remained reliant on outside aid that could only come from the rich countries of the global North and the international organisations largely financed by these rich countries. Hence – paradoxically – the achievement of “self-reliance” very much depended on the aid and support of the very powers the Non-Aligned countries were attempting to break free from.