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Welcome to a migration seminar titled For the Benefit of the State: socialist Yugoslavia’s institutional efforts to control, shape, and utilise labour migration during 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker

Mato Bošnjak, PhD student in history and historydidactics, Department of Society, Culture and Identity,
Malmö University

Abstract

This study examines the role of socialist Yugoslavia in the governance of international labour migration during the post-Second World War period. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the agency of economically advanced Western labour-receiving states, either marginalising labour-sending countries or reducing their involvement to functionalist explanations—such as alleviating unemployment or profiting from remittances. Focusing on Yugoslavia—one of the principal labour-sending countries in the post-war decades—this study challenges such interpretations.

Labour migration was a central component of Yugoslavia’s political and economic strategy, conceived to advance the country’s socioeconomic development and support its transformation from a relatively closed and economically peripheral socialist country into one integrated into the global market and international political and economic exchanges. This study explores Yugoslavia’s institutional and organisational frameworks established to manage labour migration, tracing their construction, adaptation, and implementation. It demonstrates the Yugoslav state’s efforts to align labour migration with domestic labour market conditions and to maintain control over migration currents. Furthermore, it demonstrates the state’s aims and strategies to maximise social, economic, and political benefits of labour migration through frequent institutional adjustments, both domestically and in cooperation with Western governments and employers. These efforts were driven by the objective of positioning the Yugoslav state as the principal broker of labour migration, ensuring that it remained a state-regulated and multiply beneficial process for Yugoslavia.

The study draws on Yugoslav archival sources, including documents from federal, republic, and municipal levels, Yugoslav embassies and consulates, articles from contemporary Yugoslav press, and published and unpublished statistical data.

Attendance

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.
If you have any questions, send an email to mim@mau.se.

Zoom

Link will be available closer to the seminar date.

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