Constructing the “City of international solidarity”: Non-aligned internationalism, the United Nations and visions of development, modernism and solidarity, 1955-1975

Abstract

This article embeds the United Nations (UN) plan to reconstruct the city of Skopje after the 1963 earthquake in a broader story about decolonisation, visions of post-war modernisation, Yugoslavia’s global role as a leader of the non-aligned world and the collaboration and tensions between developed and developing countries at the UN regarding economic development and technical assistance. With Warsaw’s Chief architect Adolf Ciborowski at the helm as project manager of the Skopje Urban Plan Project, the development plan for the city was arguably unlike any other operation of its kind undertaken by the United Nations Special Fund (later the UNDP). Drawing upon material from multiple archives, this article seeks to enlarge the scope of “socialist internationalism” and address what I call “internationalist constellations”, in order to account for the interconnectedness and cross-fertilisation between liberal and socialist internationalisms and the role of non-aligned internationalism therein.