Home is where the heart is: Yugoslavia’s ties to its migrant workers during the Cold War

How can you tell the difference between a refugee and an economic migrant? Are migrants most loyal to their places of origin or their host states? Brigitte Le Normand explains why we are asking the wrong questions, drawing on her research for Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe. Brigitte is an associate professor in the History Department. Last year her book Citizens without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe appeared with the University of Toronto Press.

 

Migration is often in the news these days as politicians want to tell economic migrants apart from refugees and worry about the loyalty and integration of immigrants. But a cursory glance at the post-World War II period would quickly reveal that these are far from new preoccupations. The Western European postwar economic boom relied heavily on labor imported from Southern Europe, the former colonies, Yugoslavia, and Turkey.  Based on my research on Yugoslav migrants to Western Europe after the Second World War, I can tell you that politicians today are simply asking the wrong questions.

Migrants typically have complex motivations for leaving their homes and seeking a new life abroad. Their motivations may consist of a combination of economic precarity, political instability and persecution, and other types of insecurity.  Moreover, rather than shifting from belonging from one country to belonging to the other, they typically participate in two societies: that of their place of origin, and the one in which they live their everyday lives. The continued engagement with the homeland often happens spontaneously, but sending states also have an interest in nurturing ties with their citizens – a practice which also has a long history.

In my new book Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe, I examine how, following the decision to open up the Yugoslav border and allow citizens to seek work abroad in the mid-1960s, Yugoslav authorities continued to communicate actively with their citizens through a variety of channels. These included consular offices, newspapers, radio broadcasts, Yugoslav workers’ associations, scientific studies, and mother-tongue education. Curiously, they even tried to activate the League of Communist membership that was working abroad – a remarkable plan given that many West European states were paranoid about Communist activities on their territories at the time.

Yugoslavia spent all this time and energy on maintaining ties with these workers, because it anticipated – similarly to the recipient states – that they would return home after a few years. Authorities became concerned by 1968 that those ties were becoming threatened. Their perception was that workers, who were exposed to difficult living conditions, discrimination, and isolation, were being preyed on by groups of anti-Yugoslavs who corrupted them – in particular, pro-Ustasha or pro-Chetnik groups that had fled Yugoslavia at the end of the war – while yet others were cutting their ties to Yugoslavia and bringing their families abroad.

The truth was more complicated, of course. For instance, the migrants who left for economic reasons also felt victimized by the failures of the promises of socialist modernization. A survey carried out at the height of the Croatian national revival, in 1970-1971 – when Croatian reformist Communists pushed for greater autonomy for Croatia within Yugoslavia – revealed that many migrants, far from losing touch, were continuing to closely and passionately follow Yugoslav political life. Migrant workers from Croatia even tended to understand their own lives using narratives that were promoted by reformist communist politicians in Croatia.

In wooing its citizens, Yugoslavia drew heavily on the language of homeland. What is fascinating here are the many different ideas of homeland that were presented. The radio program “To our citizens of the world,” for example, promoted a very modern, pan-Yugoslav idea of homeland anchored in popular culture, whereas for the newspaper Imotska Krajina – named after the region in the Dalmatian hinterland that had the highest proportion of inhabitants living and working abroad in all of Yugoslavia – homeland was tied to local dialects, traditions, landscapes, and history of economic backwardness.

Yugoslavia’s ambitious and remarkable program for providing “mother-tongue” education to the children of labor migrants introduced pupils to a complex, multi-national idea of homeland. This idea was simultaneously anchored in belonging to one of Yugoslavia’s nationalities and in participating in the broader Yugoslav project.

While these diverging ideas of homeland offered migrants different reasons for staying connected to Yugoslavia, they would come into conflict during the Croatian Spring of 1970-71, when migrants were invited to take a position: which homeland did they really belong to? The crushing of the Croatian national revival in 1971 was, predictably, followed by the erasure of discourses about homeland that were seen as anti-Yugoslav, such as Croatian nationalist ones. This is evident, for example, in the temporary shut-down of Imotska Krajina, and the new, neutral tone it adopted when it eventually reappeared.

The actual experience of homeland was also critical. Radio listeners might experience a sense of communion with listeners at home and abroad, all gathered around the radio at the same time. Members of a folklore association would combine their knowledge and collaborate to put on a performance that would celebrate their heritage.  And children might participate in an exchange trip that would take them to different parts of Yugoslavia, allowing them to “feel the breath of the homeland.”

Perhaps the most important lesson of the Yugoslav case comes from the voices of migrants themselves, as conveyed in particular through their answers to surveys carried out by Yugoslav researchers.  They sometimes embraced the stories that authorities and Yugoslav society told about them. Many migrants cherished the idea that they were loyal citizens and full participants in Yugoslav society.

But in other cases, they defied and pushed back against these stories. Yugoslav film-makers tended to portray them alternately as fools, madmen, and spreaders of corruption, or as victims of the failure to modernize the Yugoslav countryside. In their own retelling, migrants acknowledged material and emotional hardship, but they also talked about resilience, hard work, new experiences, accomplishment, material success, and having control over their future, as well as the complexity of living lives in two places.

We would surely craft better, more responsive policies today if we actually started by listening to migrants before we talk about them.