I am grateful for the speaker who spoke before me because he provided some very important context for some of the aspects that I will touch upon as well. But I will start with some quotes.
'China has been fighting for six years. Every day it is getting closer to its victory. The entire people are united and will win because the people want that and because they have women fighters like Zhao Yiman in their ranks. She wrote with her blood on the walls of the prison cell before being shot by the Japanese fascists: "Fight to the end."'
This is a quote from a partisan women's newspaper published in Yugoslavia in July 1942 in a paper called The Comrades. And another quote:
'Through rains and forests, hour after hour, one after another, step by step, the partisans march—tired, exhausted. They march and march. In their minds, they remember the glorious 10,000 kilometres their Chinese comrades have crossed. They go on without respite or rest. They go persistently towards their camp.'
These lines were written in October 1941 and printed in the first edition of the partisan paper 'The Fighter.' The paper was produced on a typing machine and copied on a simple stencil machine to be disseminated to the local peasants of the region, Sjeničak, a small village in central Croatia, then Yugoslavia. Its author and editor, Vlado Jovanović, came back from Spain some months earlier where he lost the struggle for democracy against fascism, together with his comrades from around the world.
Reportedly, on the way back in French prison camps, he spent time with Chinese comrades who were following the news from China while in the camp. There he wrote in one of the testimonies that, for the first time, he learnt about the concept of liberated territories as a guerrilla warfare strategy. And this strategy, indeed, was the key for liberating Yugoslavia in the People's Liberation struggle. It was also key for carrying out the revolution through the four years of war against fascism in former Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was composed of numerous ethnicities—the nations of South Slavs—who, after World War II, managed to form a state of their own after centuries under the domination of empires like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire, but also the nations on the coast of the Adriatic. Yugoslav partisans were formed from June and July 1941 onwards, upon the call of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The war mostly fought in the rural areas across the Dinaric mountains, which cartographers of the empires couldn't capture in their maps. Here, partisans fought together and in alliance with nature.
From guerrilla units, they formed a respectable army, which was also joined by about one hundred thousand women, almost a quarter of whom lost their lives during the war. Partisans organised hospitals, schools, print shops, and other forms of artistic workshops where agitprop materials were produced. These activities in the liberated territories, where people lived under the protection of their army, were indeed crucial for the socialist revolution led by the party and Tito as the supreme commander. They fought against the ethnic divisions generated and fabricated by foreign and domestic fascists with the 'Brotherhood and Unity,' and defined the common enemy of all ethnic groups as fascists and also as a class enemy. Already during the war, they included women as equals on all levels of decision-making, and women organised their own platforms for emancipation. Losses were huge. It was the third country in Europe for military and civilian losses. I hope these numbers are in alignment with the research that we heard about from Vijay this morning.
But the history was written and rewritten many times after that—from giving huge credits to the Soviet Red Army as Yugoslav allies in the first couple of years after the war ended, through the change of the official narrative that emphasised exclusively Yugoslav self-liberation after Tito split with Stalin, and then finally to the shift emphasising almost embarrassingly Western allies, British and the US, as the key allies, which is mainly pronounced after the fall of Yugoslavia and fall of socialism in the 1990s, and which again has been on the rise in the recent years.
We are witnessing vulgar historical revisionism and legitimation of Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, and Serbian historical fascists, but also their collaborators. And I would like to mention that this is a crucial moment in my home country at the moment, where we are really facing the rise of widespread fascism in the streets, very much similar to what we heard from Germany, and under the guise of the European Union's equation of communism and fascism.
But what has been lost in all these versions of the official history are those initial horizons. I believe much wider than we imagine the world in World War II from a Eurocentric perspective. Yes, Spain has been remembered, as Spain is also part of the European memory of war, and importantly, also the US. My research, which is an in-depth research in the rural area of Croatia in Žumberak, a partisan hotspot, revealed how important those wider horizons were for ordinary people, for peasants, and for their imagination of the scale and the power of those who struggled against fascism.
Another crucial element is their capacity to identify with Chinese peasants who marched in hundreds of thousands. And this sense of internationalism and solidarity as commonality can be felt not just in official materials, but also in partisan folk songs and theatre plays. This memory is still, and I think very significantly, kept in the local community memory where I lead conversations about history—much more informed and critically sharp than many academic events that I attend.
Official Yugoslav memory politics, however, erased the memory of the Chinese almost completely. The famous quote of Mao, which you can see on the slide, which I'm sure you're familiar with, was even ascribed to one of the Yugoslav commanders as his own innovation. The reason for this was also the severance of diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and China for the first 25 years after WWII. However, in the early post-war period, in 1947, during an official visit, Chinese emissary Liu Ningyi stated the following:
'In our own liberated territory in China, we have a strong army of 1,200,000 fighters. Beside our enemy, we also have strong partisan units that count 4,000,000 fighters. In the same way Yugoslav partisans and Yugoslav Army, under the leadership of Comrade Tito, managed to win over the reaction and fascist warmongers. So will the Chinese Army and Chinese partisans successfully win and finally break the reaction.' We can see now how these commonalities and inspirations functioned in both ways.
During the period of friendly relations, this connection between Yugoslav and Chinese struggle against fascism, as one of the researchers from Croatia has recently noted, was in diplomatic circles brought to almost mythological proportions.
In the context of the Cold War, Yugoslavia and China for a long time led opposite foreign policies, but both were committed to connecting and supporting anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles in the Global South. The Yugoslav resistance against fascism, the People's Liberation struggle, was used as the common experience of oppressed peoples across Africa and Asia. Travelling exhibitions of art depicting Yugoslav partisans, or even translations of Yugoslav poetry to Vietnamese and other languages, were promoted. Some even travelled to China, and these are things that I would like to explore further. Yet most successful were the films, such as 'Walter Defends Sarajevo' and 'The Battle of Neretva,' that gained huge popularity in China in the 1970s. I'm sure that many of you could tell me more about this.
To conclude, today's situation differs dramatically from these alliances and horizons that we see. And I would like to emphasise here Gaza and the unprecedented violence, alienation, and the delegitimisation of resistance. Yet the need for wider horizons and solidarity remains urgent. We need solidarity connecting those who oppose the forces of division and war. We must also look at history from below. Heritage deserves the heirs of the past, not those who profit and whitewash history.
More research is needed to uncover these forgotten allies and horizons that inspired people to persist despite hardships. This talk argues that recovering forgotten transnational connections is essential for challenging Eurocentric historical narratives, understanding how revolutionary knowledge travelled through unexpected routes and agents, building contemporary solidarity based on historical patterns of resistance, and recognising that internationalism was real and practical, not something abstract.
The 'forgotten horizons' of the title refers both to the lost connections between Yugoslav and Chinese revolutionaries and to the broader international consciousness that ordinary people once possessed, but which dominant historical narratives have obscured.
I would also like to mention at the end that, despite official policies and historical narratives used today to create a simplified, glossed-over picture of the world and its common struggles of the past, there is great potential in looking at different sources than just diplomatic archives. Especially, what I argue for is what is necessary: going to the countryside, speaking to the people, learning from those who were on the front lines or whose grandfathers and grandmothers fought in the resistance against fascism. In the project I'm coordinating in Croatia with my fellow researchers from different countries, I aim to do exactly that—to approach history and heritage from below and to use micro-history preserved in memory and materiality of the war and resistance to understand macro-historical processes that continue to inform the hyper-political reality of today.
Watch the whole speech here: