Over the last two decades, renewed interest in Yugoslavia's social history has resulted in a burgeoning scholarship on a specifically Yugoslav phenomenon: the liberalization of economic migration and export of labor to Western countries. This was a unique case in the realm of state socialism. Le Normand builds on this research and views this topic from the angle of transnationalism. She shows how the Yugoslav authorities, experts, intellectuals—and the migrants themselves—made sense of external migration. To preserve ties with migrant workers abroad, they were framed as “workers temporarily employed abroad,” which thus emphasized their future reintegration into Yugoslavia.
Yet, the book shows that this concept was coproduced, strengthened, and contested by different actors, and this led to different and often conflicting understandings of the idea of a “homeland.” What is more, this happened amid domestic tensions between the federal leadership and advocates of major autonomy for the Republic of Croatia, which resulted in a crackdown on what became known as the Croatian Spring. This conflict features centrally in the volume, as the book focuses on the first phase of Yugoslav labor migration (until the mid-1970s, but occasionally stretching to the end of that decade), when Yugoslav citizens with an ethnic Croat background dominated among the migrant population.
A top-down project underpinning the establishment of a network designed to nurture migrant workers’ sense of belonging was combined with spontaneous initiatives that were later absorbed into the state-organized infrastructure. Furthermore, migrants appropriated tools available to convey their narratives and requests, and even to point at the system's flaws. Yugoslavs abroad are written back into history as a multifaceted, heterogeneous group, marked by different political views colored by social, gender, and generational aspects. They are also given their own voice, and Le Normand draws on a wide range of sources to achieve this. Similarly, the Yugoslav system's multilayered quality is portrayed in the coexistence of different agendas for the federal, republican, and local authorities.
The historical contexts, as well as the state of the historiography and methodological challenges, are outlined in the introduction (chapter 1). The first part of the book (chapters 2 and 3) explores how the notion of “our citizens abroad” was constructed simultaneously by different actors. Chapter 2 shows that state institutions responded to the ethical challenge of sending workers to capitalist countries by emphasizing the move's “temporariness.” This implied an upcoming return home, and this feature allowed the state to keep governing them while abroad. Conversely, in the climate of the Croatian Spring, several of the republic's authorities inserted the “guest workers” phenomenon into a narrative of Croatian victimization within the federal Yugoslavia. This understanding was reinforced by some producers of knowledge, such as researchers at the newly established, Zagreb-based Institute for Migration and Nationalities.
Chapter 3 unpacks how art, and in particular cinema, depicted “guest workers,” thus contributing to shaping their image. While films and documentaries conveyed different sentiments triggered by migrant workers, ranging from empathy to anxiety, they all highlighted the failure of the Yugoslav export of labor. The second part of the book, stretching from chapter 4 to chapter 9, offers a glimpse of the infrastructure put in place to reach out to migrant workers and nurture their attachment to the country they had left behind. Radio stations established programs aimed at migrant workers, such as the radio show To Our Citizens in the World (chapter 4) and the press devoted inserts or sections to the needs of guest workers, which ranged from providing practical information to maintaining connections with their loved ones (chapter 5). In both cases, the audience responded enthusiastically, often advancing critique or even challenging state legitimacy.
Chapter 6 focuses on workers’ associations and clubs established in almost all the host countries. It shows that although the Yugoslav government used these entities as “transmitters” for its own policy, members tried to adapt the groups’ activities to their own needs. Similarly, an apparently top-down tool, such as the survey conducted by the Institute for Migration and Nationality on workers’ possible return (chapter 7), was appropriated by respondents who used it to share their sentiments, complaints, and suggestions on how to tackle macroproblems that drew on their own life experiences. Similar challenges, such as those that workers’ organizations faced, haunted the establishment of an educational system for guest workers’ children, whose aim was to preserve ties with Yugoslavia and prevent a complete integration of the second generation within host states (chapter 8). What sounded straightforward in theory proved to be more challenging in its implementation, as chapter 9 illustrates. Indeed, both the work of teachers and the crafting of textbooks for Yugoslav children abroad were the result of extensive negotiations.
The book's short conclusion pulls together the various chapters’ many threads, and it additionally elaborates on the many findings: the conflict between different agendas, the migrants’ agency within state structures, and the development of national identities out of localist attachments.
All in all, the book provides an insightful, fresh, and fascinating perspective on the implications of transnational policies for socialist Yugoslavia and beyond. The reader may wonder whether a different periodization (one that included the 1980s migration trends) would have offered a slightly different interpretation. Nevertheless, this volume promises to be essential reading for all those interested in Yugoslav migration policies.
