Branko Milanović – Multipolarity, neutrality, and peace

Branko Milanović is an economist specialised in development and inequality. His latest book, The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World, was published November 2025.

I recently wrote a couple of Substack pieces that were seemingly disparate, but did have one theme in common. They argued against joining military alliances, and being in favor of peace not just by saying so but doing it in the real world by refusing military entanglements.

The first piece criticked Baltic countries’ suddenly-found belligerence and global irresponsibility, and indirectly (and in the later exchanges I had), directly, praising the policy of Finlandization. The second piece tried to delineate what, in my opinion, should be Serbia’s international policy (before the current change of government, and even more now) of holding to Tito’s legacy of non-alignment.

In both articles, the common theme was this: for small counties in Europe and in the world (and especially so in Africa), the best policy is that of neutrality between the great powers. It is the only policy that gives them agency, freedom of maneuver, and relevance in the world. Without it they would be gobbled up by great powers, reduced to irrelevance or serfdom, impotence and nothingness.

Moreover, such a policy of N and N (neutral and non-aligned) is not only good for the countries themselves but is good for the world as a whole because it limits the area where the big powers fight each other, prevents them from using the rivalries and contradictions within these countries to sow discord, to pit one tribe, or one people, or one ethnic group against another. and create endless wars, and then, through inter-imperial rivalry, to hurl the word into a cataclysm. As they did before.

Small, and big non-Western, countries too have a duty to preserve world peace.

But then why did I get such horribly negative response to my articles? Many supporters of the belligerence of the Baltic states accused me of being a Putin’s stooge. They wrote that the policy of Finlandization was wrong, or if it was not wrong, it was, they wrote, just a clever ruse to trick the Soviets. They thought that their countries should have joined NATO even much earlier, become fully part of the West, and perhaps gone to war.

My piece on Serbia’s foreign policy got attacked as a vulgar attempt to revive Communism and Titoism (by one set of people) and to keep Serbia away from Russia (by another set of people). They did not care for my argument that, due to historical events, Serbia was the only country in the former Yugoslavia able, at lead theoretically, to pursue the policy of neutrality and non-alignment that Tito so skillfully crafted. No, they argued, we need to get aligned with the West. The fact that Yugoslavia was the only country in Central and Eastern Europe that never belonged to the Tripartite Nazi pact (no longer than 72 hours that it took the Army to make the anti-Nazi coup in 1941), nor to the Warsaw Pact, nor to the NATO pact, was not an argument for them.

Some pro-Orthodox Russian bloggers attacked me from trying to “neutralize” Serbia from its Orthodox “brothers”. They also wanted the alignment but from the other side.

Everybody wanted to fight. No-one wanted to be neutral.

But they failed to reflect on the counterfactual that had Ukraine stuck to its originally Constitutionally-enshrined policy of neutrality, it would have had more than a million people, who are now dead, alive and happy. It would have flourished by trading with both the European Union and Russia. It would have been on its way to be a rich developed country. And they did not reflect on the fact that Finland’s economic growth was made possible by its neutrality and equal trade with the Soviets and the West. Nor that Swiss and Singaporean wealth was made possible by the policy of neutrality.

Nor that the global cold peace during the Cold War was made possible and maintained by the Bandoeng meeting and the numerous non-aligned countries’ Summits from Belgrade in 1961, to Cairo and Algiers, and ultimately Havana in 1979. They did not care to think that without neutrality and nonalignment, millions of people would have perished in a nuclear war between the superpowers. They have forgotten –or never learned—history.

Multipolarity and neutrality are the only way forward to have peace and save humankind.