Yugoslav Gastarbeiter Migration and its Discontents: Inequality and the Question of Development

Yugoslavia was the only socialist country to legalize, and even facilitate, migration of workers to Western countries. By 1971, almost a fifth of all Yugoslavs with a job worked abroad. However, migration presented the Yugoslav government with major, ultimately unsolvable challenges. Professor Brunnbauer's talk will highlight the ambivalent consequences of labor migration from socialist Yugoslavia. 

Initial hopes, such as of a significant development impact of migrant remittances, turned out to be elusive. On the contrary, intellectuals, experts, and the migrants themselves formulated a social critique with respect to the inequalities that have produced migration in the first place. Drawing on diverse sources (migrant letters, expert literature, archival evidence, newspapers, and films), Professor Brunnbauer will show that migration became erosive for the legitimacy of self-managed socialism.

Ulf Brunnbauer is a social historian, specialized on 19th and 20th century history of Southeastern Europe. He received a PhD in history from the University of Graz, Austria (1999), and a habilitation from the Free University of Berlin (2006). Since 2008, he has been Professor of Southeast and East European History at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he also acts as the Academic Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS). 

His research revolves around questions of migration, labor, family, demography, and nation-building. His most recent book is the co-authored monograph In the Storms of Transformation. Two Shipyards from Socialism to the European Union (University of Toronto Press, 2024, forthcoming). He is also author of Globalizing Southeastern Europe. Emigrants, America and the State Since the Late 19th Century (Lexington, 2016).

Photo credit: Monument to the Yugoslav gastarbeiters taken by Ulf Brunnbauer