Citizens without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe

Product Description
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."
Review
"With humanity and insight, Brigitte Le Normand presents a unique inquiry. How did the only socialist bloc country in Europe to send its workers to the capitalist West as guestworkers perceive its departed citizens? And how did it seek to connect with them? Without oversimplifying the views of social scientists and policy makers – much less filmmakers – Le Normand gives us a nuanced understanding of their programs and portraits of migrants. Likewise, she presents the range of practices seeking to connect Croatian migrants to home via radio, newspaper, workers’ clubs, a signal 1970 survey, and educational programs for migrants and their offspring – a complex of ties to home at the federal, republic, and local levels. This is an important gift to historians of migration and labour, an analysis of postwar mass migrations that is unique and also prefigures the dilemmas of connection to homelands today." -- Leslie Page Moch, professor of History, Michigan State University


"Le Normand’s histoire totale of socialist Yugoslavia as a migration state is both uniquely comprehensive and nuanced. Based on a broad scope of primary material, she offers a fresh perspective on the transnational engagement of a state and how this was shaped by the agency of migrants. Her engaging prose and powerful analysis make the book a must-read not only for scholars of Yugoslavia but also of modern migration history." -- Ulf Brunnbauer, Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg
About the Author
Brigitte Le Normand is an associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.