Among Eastern Europe’s postwar socialist states, Yugoslavia was unique in allowing its citizens to seek work abroad in Western Europe’s liberal democracies. This book charts the evolution of the relationship between Yugoslavia and its labour migrants who left to work in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how migrants were perceived by policy-makers and social scientists and how they were portrayed in popular culture, including radio, newspapers, and cinema.
Created to nurture ties with migrants and their children, state cultural, educational, and informational programs were a way of continuing to govern across international borders. These programs relied heavily on the promotion of the idea of homeland. Le Normand examines the many ways in which migrants responded to these efforts and how they perceived their own relationship to the homeland, based on their migration experiences. Citizens without Borders shows how, in their efforts to win over migrant workers, the different levels of government – federal, republic, and local – promoted sometimes widely divergent notions of belonging, grounded in different concepts of "home."
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
Part I: Seeing Migrants
2. Seeing Migration Like a State
3. Picturing Migrants: The Gastabajter in Yugoslav Film
Part II: Building Ties
4. A Listening Ear: Cultivating Citizens through Radio Broadcasting
5. A Nation Talking to Itself: Yugoslav Newspapers for Migrants
6. Weaving a Web of Transnational Governance: Yugoslav Workers’ Associations
7. Migrants Talk Back: Responses to Surveys
8. Building a Transnational Education System for the Second Generation
9. They Felt the Breath of the Homeland
10. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Brigitte Le Normand is an associate professor of history at Maastricht University.
Review :
"A vivid and nuanced picture of the difficult choices faced by a state seeking to govern its citizens abroad and of the mixed feelings about the homeland that its citizens abroad developed … It will be of great interest and inspiration well beyond Yugoslav studies, in a world in which labor migration continues to be an important phenomenon."
- Sara Bernard, University of Glasgow (Slavic Review) "A fascinating account of a complex social phenomenon … Citizens without Borders can be considered as the first systematic attempt to write about work migrations from Yugoslavia in general."
- Ondřej Daniel, Charles University (American Historical Review) "An insightful, fresh, and fascinating perspective on the implications of transnational policies for socialist Yugoslavia and beyond." - Francesca Rolandi, Masaryk Institute (Austrian History Yearbook)
