Rory Archer

This introduction to the special issue The Cold War of Labor Migrants: Opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond seeks to bring forward the conversation between the history of the Cold War and migration studies. It is the result of a workshop con-vened by the Working Group ‘Labor Migration History’, of the European Labor History Network. It maps out the academic debate on international labor migration and it critically engages with its western-centric approach. It introduces the seven contributions which, from different geographic and thematic perspectives, reassess the importance of non-Western experiences in shaping the entanglement between international labor migration and the Cold War. Two lines of inquiry feature prominently in this special issue. The first is a reassessment of the relevance of the regulation of international migration as a political terrain on which the Cold War divide was both constructed and deconstructed by different institutional actors, which, at various levels, were empowered by the existence of Cold War rivalry. The second, is the agency of migrants and aims to explore the fluidity, opportunism and creativity in the ways that migrants themselves experienced state control because of the particular Cold War socio-economic and political context.

This contribution explores the case of Yugoslav Albanians working in the private sector in late socialist Croatia and the ways in which their involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast was shaped by Yugoslavia’s position in the Cold War context as well as domestic political dynamics. Such dynamics include the securitization of Albanians across the country following the violently quelled 1981 student demonstrations in Kosovo and the perennial suspicion held by the authorities towards private business in general, and Albanian owned private businesses in particular. The key argument advanced is that Albanian involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast, as well connections to diaspora communities in Western Europe, facilitated (micro)economic activity and mobility between nonaligned Yugoslavia, capitalist liberal democracies of Western Europe and, increasingly, by the 1980s, neighboring Warsaw Pact states. Methodologically, the research is based on the triangulation of archival documents, regional printed press and oral history interviews to demonstrate how Yugoslavia’s liminal non-aligned position and market socialist economy offered opportunity (as well as notable constraints) to Albanian private business owners and their workforces in the Cold War era and its immediate aftermath.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0023656X.2023.2180625

Open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2018.40

Most studies of the antibureaucratic revolution have focused on political elites and activists in Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Recent scholarship has focused on individual participants, often workers, and takes their agency seriously. Building upon such research, this article explores the antibureaucratic revolution as a particular manifestation of a larger sociocultural process, constitutive of long-term structural changes across the whole of Yugoslavia. An analysis of workplace documents and local newspapers in northwest Croatia demonstrates that antibureaucratic sentiment was not the prerogative of Serbian and Montenegrins but of Yugoslav citizens more generally. Yugoslavs were conditioned by the party-state to be critical of bureaucracy. Workers began to admonish the expansion of administrative positions, which they blamed for their falling living standards. Despite decentralizing and autarkic tendencies in political and economic life in late socialist Yugoslavia, working class discontents (and representations of it) remained remarkably similar across republican boundaries. In Rijeka and its environs, a shift does not occur until in mid-1988. Condemnations of nationalism become more urgent and a skepticism toward the mass protests occurring in Serbia is palpable from this point onward.

Based on oral history research conducted among networks of blue-collar workers in Belgrade, Serbia, this article develops three interrelated arguments regarding workers’ appraisals of the recent past (1980–2014). Firstly, although the tumultuous years of late socialism and post-socialism in Serbia have been represented by scholars as a series of ruptures, I suggest that for blue-collar workers the boundaries between socialism and post-socialism and pre-conflict and wartime eras are blurry. Secondly, despite the conditions of war and economic collapse, blue-collar accounts of the 1990s in Serbia are not universally negative. Some individuals experienced upward social mobility, strongly influenced by class and gender positioning in late socialism. Female workers who had experienced hardship during the 1980s were often better equipped to navigate 1990s ‘economies of makeshift’. Thirdly, social dislocation associated with neoliberal economic reforms since 2000 disproportionally affects blue-collar workers, reshaping narratives of late socialism and the 1990s (sometimes inducing workers to overlook or downplay coercive aspects of the Milošević regime). The accounts of this diverse group of (former) workers highlight that social class, gender and generational cohort condition the rather divergent ways in which the last three decades were experienced, are remembered and continue to be reevaluated in Serbia.

Available open access at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2018.1393997

Housing shortages in Yugoslav cities were a perennial concern for authorities and citizens alike. They disproportionately affected Yugoslav workers who as a consequence were the demographic most likely to independently construct a family home. This article explores how informal builders justified home construction in moral terms, legitimizing it on the basis of physical labour that was invested in home construction. This was couched in both the language register of Yugoslav socialism and patriarchal custom (according to which a male-headed household should enjoy the right to a family home). Construction was also conditioned by the opportunities and constraints of late socialist temporalities.

Available open access:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1340279

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.

Available open access from publisher at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0023656X.2017.1244331

The widespread abuse of socially owned apartments and a perennial housing shortage in Yugoslavia prompted the campaign “You have a house, return the flat” in 1982. This article traces the development (and the ultimately lacklustre results) from its beginnings in Prizren, Kosovo, to its Yugoslav-wide adoption. Throughout the campaign trade unions and sympathisers were unable to systematically rein in the abuse of privilege on the part of elites and ordinary citizens alike and the campaign was frequently ridiculed as an empty party slogan. The anti-elite sentiment evident in discussions of housing abuse would however find expression just a few years later during the 1988-1989 Anti bureaucratic revolution.

This article explores controversies provoked by the Serbian pop-folk musical style “turbofolk” which emerged in the 1990s. Turbofolk has been accused of being a lever of the Milošević regime – an inherently nationalist cultural phenomenon which developed due to the specific socio-political conditions of Serbia in the 1990s. In addition to criticism of turbofolk on the basis of nationalism and war-mongering, it is commonly claimed to be “trash,” “banal,” “pornographic,” “(semi-)rural,” “oriental” and “Balkan.” In order to better understand the sociopolitical
dimensions of this phenomenon, I consider other Yugoslav musical styles which predate turbofolk and make reference to pop-folk musical controversies in other Balkan states to help inform upon the issues at stake with regard to turbofolk. I argue that rather than being understood
as a singular phenomena specific to Serbia under Milošević, turbofolk can be understood as a Serbian manifestation of a Balkan-wide post-socialist trend. Balkan pop-folk styles can be understood as occupying a liminal space – an Ottoman cultural legacy – located between (and often in conflict with) the imagined political poles of liberal pro-European and conservative nationalist orientations. Understanding turbofolk as a value category imbued with symbolic meaning rather than a clear cut musical genre, I link discussions of it to the wider discourse of Balkanism. Turbofolk and other pop-folk styles are commonly imagined and articulated in terms of violence, eroticism, barbarity and otherness the Balkan stereotype promises. These pop-folk
styles form a frame of reference often used as a discursive means of marginalisation or exclusion. An eastern “other” is represented locally by pop-folk performers due to oriental stylistics in their
music and/or ethnic minority origins. For detractors, pop-folk styles pose a danger to the autochthonous national culture as well as  the possibility of a “European” and cosmopolitan future. Correspondingly I demonstrate that such Balkan stereotypes are invoked and subverted
by many turbofolk performers who positively mark alleged Balkan characteristics and negotiate and invert the meaning of “Balkan” in lyrical texts.

This is a draft version of chapter 9, “Social Inequalities and the Study of Yugoslavia’s Dissolution” in Debating the End of Yugoslavia, edited by Florian Bieber, Armina Galijaš and Rory Archer published by Ashgate in 2014 (see: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409467113)

This chapter explores access to housing in Belgrade during the 1970s and 1980s as a case study to inform upon broader concerns of social inequality and working class discontent in Yugoslav society. I argue that housing is a site where social inequality was particularly pronounced in Yugoslavia and intimately linked to educational attainment and employment status. The distribution of socially owned housing and credit through the workplace offer analytically productive sites to explore deepening social cleavages between marginalised workers and more privileged employees in non-productive sectors. I rely on the analysis of
Yugoslav (mostly Belgrade based) print media, Yugoslav sociological research and oral history narratives of workers and their families about housing and labour in the 1980s in Greater Belgrade to demonstrate how the nominally workers’ state and institutions of selfmanagement systematically discriminated against many of its poorer workers. Workers, like all social sector employees, funded the construction of socially owned flats through involuntary contributions but were far less likely to receive use of these flats compared to white collar workers. Many workers had to pay for and/or build their own housing according
to market principles, forming increasingly discrete working class communities which were increasingly less visible in the formal institutions of self-management.

Rory Archer and Goran Musić, “‘Not all canteens are created equal’: Food provision for Yugoslav blue-collar workers in late socialism”, in Ruža Fotiadis, Vladimir Ivanović, Radina Vučetić (eds.) Brotherhood and Unity at the Kitchen Table? Cooking, Cuisine and Food Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia. Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2020, 73-93.

Rory Archer and Goran Musić, “When Workers’ Self-Management met Neoliberalism: Positive Perceptions of Market Reforms among Blue-Collar Workers in Late Yugoslav Socialism” in Martha Siefert (ed.) Labor in State Socialist Europe after 1945. Budapest: CEU Press, 2020, 395-418.

The Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, is pleased to announce the launch of a new research project “To the Northwest! Intra Yugoslav Albanian migration (1953-1989)” supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) P 32345 from April 2020 and led by Rory Archer.

Researchers have explored many aspects of Albanian migration – so much so that one renowned scholar of the field, Russel King, described Albania as a ‘laboratory’ for the study of migration and development. Despite the large number of studies examining the experience of Albanian migrants in countries like Greece, Italy and Switzerland (and the impact of migration in the towns and villages in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia) one crucial part of the story is missing. What about the many Albanians from Kosovo (and Macedonia) who migrated within Yugoslavia during the socialist period in considerable numbers?

Albanians were the largest non-Slavic population in Yugoslavia, reaching up to 8 per cent of the population by the 1980s. Predominantly rural in origin, Albanian labour migrants gravitated to industrial centres around the country in search of work. This project explores the case of Albanian labour migration from the Southeast of Yugoslavia to the country’s northwest (Croatia and Slovenia) between 1953 and 1989 through historical and historical-anthropological methods.

The first research objective of the research is to provide a historical survey to show how the migration of Yugoslav Albanians to Croatia and Slovenia was facilitated and understood by the authorities. The second objective explores how the local communities in Croatia and Slovenia understood and managed the migration. Most importantly, the third objective explores how migration was understood by the Albanian migrants themselves. The fourth and final objective is to compare intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration to the better-documented socialist-era Yugoslav migration to capitalist Western Europe as well as Yugoslav rural-to-urban migration trends.

Methodologically, the research relies on the analysis of library and archival documents and extensive oral history interviews. Oral history will be undertaken by the project researchers in two case study sites of Albanian migration – in Pula, northwest Croatia, and in an industrial town in Slovenia.

The project engages with recent scholarly innovations in SEE studies of race, ethnicity, class, gender and the interaction of these categories of identification in a research paradigm of intersectionality. It hypothesizes that the experience of migration for Albanians was shaped by a range of factors including religion (Islamic, Catholic or secular), gender (male or female?), place of origin (rural or urban?), and political orientation (loyal communist or nationalist sympathiser?). These categories intersect, resulting in different material outcomes for the individuals concerned. The goal of the research is to carefully unpack these outcomes. The research contributes to debates in the fields of Southeast European migration history and Yugoslav historiography. More broadly for migration studies, the empirical case offers an instructive example of cross-cultural migration taking place within state borders in a context of socialist modernisation.

https://tothenorthwest.archerrory.net/

The ELHN Working Group Labour Migration History aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Its objective is to advance knowledge exchange and cooperation through meetings, workshops and conference sessions and to serve as an open space to discuss research projects and potential collaborative publications. The WG will promote collaboration between researchers working in different countries and support projects on labour migration produced in different languages and in less privileged (non)institutional settings.
https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn/wg-migration

Housing shortages in Yugoslav cities were a perennial concern for authorities and citizens alike. They disproportionately affected Yugoslav workers who as a consequence were the demographic most likely to independently construct a family home. This article explores how informal builders justified home construction in moral terms, legitimizing it on the basis of physical labour that was invested in home construction. This was couched in both the language register of Yugoslav socialism and patriarchal custom (according to which a male-headed household should enjoy the right to a family home). Construction was also conditioned by the opportunities and constraints of late socialist temporalities

Melissa Caldwell observes that across the socialist world “food emerged as a practical symbol and medium for articulating both the successes and failures of socialist ideas of progress, equality, and modernity.”1 For Yugoslav workers, like their counterparts across the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe, food provision was organized alongside rapidly expanding industry after World War Two. Collective eating was considered by communist authorities as a means to instil the values of communalism and egalitarianism among industrial workers and forge a sense of camaraderie in the workplace.2 It sought to free up the time of female workers from the task of domestic food preparation by socialising nutrition. Above all however, it served the goal of production – ensuring that the new socialist (wo)man was sufficiently nourished and healthy in order to undertake physical labour on the shop floor. Predictably, in both, the countries of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, the realities of f...