Abstract
This article analyses the emergence of modern migration studies in socialist Yugoslavia and their contribution to the debate on the development effects of migration. In the mid-1960s after massive outmigration from Yugoslavia to Western Europe started, the government supported the establishment of migration studies as a new scientific field. This article argues that migration research was initially closely aligned with political agendas. Development was a priority in policymaking, which is why Yugoslav migration research was strongly interested in the development impact of migration. This study shows, however, that scholars became increasingly sceptical about such an effect. Instead, some highlighted the limitations on development of the restrictions on private business created in Yugoslavia’s self-managed economy. The government thus decided to blame the messenger and disbanded the leading migration research centre in Zagreb. This article is based on the analysis of original research from that time, archival documents and expert interviews.
Introduction
In 1989, Branislav Mikulić, then a researcher at the Economic Institute in Sarajevo, published a critical assessment of Yugoslavia’s attempts to connect outmigration with economic development (Mikulić, 1989). He deplored the fact that the thinking on the effects of migration on the Yugoslav economy had not changed since the 1960s, even though migration patterns had changed greatly ever since massive outmigration from socialist Yugoslavia began in the mid-1960s. What policymakers had thought would be a temporary sojourn abroad had in many cases become permanent relocation. Mikulić therefore called upon the Yugoslav government to finally acknowledge the new reality and change its policy regarding labour migrants or the so-called
Stimulating, channelling, and organising the return of these groups of temporary migrants (migrant ‘productivists’ and migrant innovators) would produce multiple positive effects for the society of origin. Production would increase, not only traditional production but also production based on innovation and new qualitative processes, and employment would increase. (Mikulić, 1989, p. 197)
Mikulić did not fail to note that, so far, the measures taken by the authorities to support the return of labour migrants were insufficient. He called for a fundamental policy change: The government, which was still communist, should create a positive environment for migrant investments by abandoning restrictions on private business. Thinking about the development–migration nexus thus contributed to calls for economic liberalisation when Yugoslavia’s self-managed socialism looked increasingly like a dead end. Mikulić’s call for a ‘change of direction in the policies regarding outmigration’ came at a time when Yugoslavia was in a deep economic and political crisis. High unemployment, rising inflation, falling wages, shortages of consumer products and growing political antagonisms did little to entice labour migrants to return—many of whom had already built up a new life abroad. The long-standing paradigm of return, which had formed the basis for official migration policies in socialist Yugoslavia, looked outdated. The second pillar of the government’s expectations for positive domestic effects of outmigration was eroding as well: The amount of money the migrants sent back was decreasing as one function of the length of their stay abroad and their social ties in Yugoslavia were weakening. While Yugoslavia recorded a remittances net inflow in 1982 of almost 3.8 billion USD, the amount fell to 3.18 billion USD in 1986 while capital outflows were increasing (Dyker, 1990, p. 129).
In this article, I will analyse expert opinions about the (potential) contribution of outmigration to economic development in socialist Yugoslavia and their political reception, drawing on contemporaneous research reports as well as archival documentation. The analysis of knowledge produced by researchers on the effects of migration helps not only to understand the functioning of migration research in Yugoslavia but offers also valuable insights in the reasons why lofty development goals were not reached. Development was
The arguments and visions formulated in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s sounded similar to present-day debates about the potential of migrants and their remittances to support economic development in their native countries. Despite the specificity of Yugoslavia’s political organisation and of the historical context (the Cold War), Yugoslavia’s efforts to turn economic outmigration into a ‘win’ for the country itself—and not only for the receiving countries—were part of similar strategies of emigration countries to leave their (self-perceived) peripheral situation (cf. Seers, 1979). My analysis of Yugoslav knowledge production on the migration–development nexus can highlight the difficulties for even a well-informed and development-obsessed government to steer the use of remittances and to direct migrant return. Current efforts to link migration to development, such as those supported by the World Bank (e.g., World Bank 2019), might draw lessons from such a historical example, for example, regarding the necessary conditions for stimulating migrant entrepreneurship.
One of the immediate effects of Yugoslavia’s ambition to steer outmigration towards domestic development was the emergence of comprehensive migration studies which were thought to produce policy recommendations. The study of migration in Yugoslavia developed in clear connection with political priorities, like in other countries (cf. Venturas, 2004). As Christoph Rass has observed, migration studies are part of the production of migration regimes. Migration scholars are not only observers but also actors in this field, and they should be observed as well (Rass, 2016). The close alignment of Yugoslav migration experts and policy makers began to dissolve in the late 1970s, however, as researchers grew increasingly sceptical about the viability of the underlying political and ideological assumptions. The participation of Yugoslav migration studies in international research efforts, the encounter with real-life migrants and their problems as well as the research ethos of its leading protagonists enhanced the autonomy of this scholarly field. The authorities, though, failed to adopt their epistemology and ignored insights by scholars. In the 1980s, when the gulf between the promises of Yugoslav socialism and the lived realities in the country widened from a gap to a canyon, expert knowledge about migrant practices and expert assessment of policy failures turned into a critique of the prevailing socio-political conditions.
This is why the authorities decided to shoot the most important messenger: In 1983, the only Yugoslav research institution specialised on the study of the so-called gastarbeiter migration, the Centre for the Study of Migrations (
From Liberalising Outmigration to Comprehensive Migration Studies
Considering the quantitative dimensions of labour migration—Ivo Baučić (1975b, p. 286), the leading Yugoslav migration scholar, estimated that there were already 960,000 Yugoslav workers in foreign countries in 1973—it is not surprising that the government funded research into this phenomenon. Modern governments typically want to control cross-border movement. The topic was even more acute in Yugoslavia than in other South European sending states, such as Greece or Spain, because the communist government had promised rapid economic development when they gained power after their liberation of the country in 1944/45. Outmigration was a stain on this vision, which is why it should at least contribute to development and thus eradicate its own causes, so the regime thought (Schierup, 1990). In the context of Yugoslavia, development implied—as in other socialist countries—mainly industrialisation, expansion of infrastructure and urbanisation (Macesich, 1964; Jambrek, 1975). A particular focus was paid to the development of ‘insufficiently developed regions,’ as the poor areas of Yugoslavia were officially called. These areas received substantial subsidies from a special federal fund and from loans by the World Bank (Dyker, 1990). Yugoslavia’s participation in international monetary institutions was one of the features differentiating it from other communist countries and helped to align development thinking in Yugoslavia with international trends (Schrenk et al., 1979). Nevertheless, the attempt to close regional disparities proved to be a spectacular failure, despite substantial funds being transferred and high external debts. Regional disparity, as measured in GDP per capita, employment levels and social indicators, even increased during Yugoslavia’s existence (Bogunović, 1985; Flaherty, 1988; Gregory, 1973). The growing inequality between the richer north and poorer south was a major factor in the dissolution of the country as it translated into political antagonism and heavy resource conflicts between the six republics and two autonomous provinces of federal Yugoslavia (Allcock, 2004, pp. 206–210). Migration even seems to have contributed to this tension reproducing spatial inequality. Furthermore, the leaderships of the different territorial entities (republics and provinces) of Yugoslavia also argued over the allocation of hard currency remittances.
When it came to migration and development, the Yugoslav government had initially high hopes for positive feedback. First, migrants would alleviate labour market problems in the country during a time of economic readjustment and unemployment. Second, the government assumed that migrants would send money back which could spur local development. Finally, they would return with new skills and their savings. The official assumption by both Yugoslavia and the receiving countries was that the migration of workers from Yugoslavia was to be temporary (a few years at most) and that migrant workers would return. This was reflected in their official designation in Yugoslavia as ‘workers temporarily employed abroad’ or, colloquially,
Expert opinions had already been important for the emergence of the belief that outmigration could support development in the first place: When the government pondered whether to remove restrictions on outmigration in the early 1960s, one of the arguments in favour was drawn from the insight of government experts that, during the interwar period, emigrants had remitted substantial sums to Yugoslavia (Socialistički savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije, 1963; see Brunnbauer, 2016, pp. 289–290). Once massive outmigration to Western Europe started in the mid-1960s, the government began to fund research on migration (Mežnarić, 1985; see Mlinarić, 2009). One of the experts’ tasks was to find out how the migration process exactly played out and what the government could do to facilitate the intended development effects. In the end, it seems that the establishment of modern, empirically based migration studies was one of the few real innovations brought about by migration in Yugoslavia; the urge to study migration resulted in scholarly development—while its economic development effects remained elusive.
The main driver of migration research in Yugoslavia was a group of scholars at the University of Zagreb led by the geographer Ivo Baučić (1929–2014). The roots were laid in 1967, when the Institute of Geography at the University of Zagreb successfully applied for money from the Fund for Science of the Socialist Republic of Croatia for the research project ‘The Yugoslav Workers in the FR Germany’. The project received funding from 1968 to 1970 that was used, for example, for a survey among more than 6,600 labour migrants and an analysis of more than 12,000 vacant employment opportunities for return migrants in Croatia (Baučić, 1973a). This project was the beginning of continuous research on outmigration and its manifold manifestations in Yugoslavia. In emigration countries, systematic migration research started later than in immigration countries, and in Yugoslavia even later than in Italy, Spain, or Greece (Baučić, 1975a). But Yugoslav migration studies soon caught up or even surpassed other South European emigration countries, mainly thanks to the work of the group around Baučić in Zagreb. They conducted state-of-the art empirical research, bringing together different disciplinary perspectives (especially from geography, sociology and economics, later also from social psychology). A notable feature from the very beginning was their international cooperation. The first project was conducted with an international partner, Technical University of Munich. The fact that German universities became the most prominent partners was not only due to the fact that West Germany hosted the largest number of Yugoslav migrant workers but also due to Baučić’s academic trajectory: In 1966, he had been awarded a scholarship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a postdoctoral research stay in Germany (Baučić, 2024).
Since this first project, the number of migrants from Yugoslavia only continued to grow and so did political attention, which translated into further funding for research. In 1970, the Federal Fund for Scientific Work granted an annual amount of 700,000 dinars to the Geographic Institute in Zagreb to study migration, which established a separate Migration Unit (
Thanks to these projects and skilful networking, the Zagreb-based Centre grew into Yugoslavia’s leading place of systematic social science-based knowledge production about contemporary migration from Yugoslavia and its effects. No other institution in Yugoslavia published a specialised journal and book series on current outmigration, for example. Sure, there were important individual research efforts on migration at other social science institutions, such as the Economics Institute in Zagreb, the Ethnographic Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and the Arts (see Lukić-Krstanović, 2014), the Economics Faculty of Belgrade University and the Institute for Social Sciences in Belgrade (especially by this institute’s demographers, as evident in some articles on the demographic dimensions of migration in their journal
Zagreb as a Migration Study Hub
So, Zagreb had clearly the dominant position in institutionalised social science research on migration—which is one reason why the gastarbeiter migration from Croatia was studied the most compared to the other republics of Yugoslavia. There was a certain path dependency because Zagreb had been the most important place of knowledge production on migration in interwar Yugoslavia as well, and, even before 1918, outmigration had been monitored by the provincial government of Croatia (then an entity within the Habsburg Empire). Croatia was also the Yugoslav republic with the highest number of migrant workers proportional to its population, which explains the stronger interest by the Croatian government in these issues than of any other republican/provincial government in Yugoslavia. As a result of this, there were more interfaces between government and experts in the Socialist Republic Croatia than in other republics.
The early research agenda of the Centre was clearly characterised by the empirical interest into development and social effects in line with government priorities, while questions of identity which would later come to preoccupy migration research in independent Croatia were not addressed at all (Baučić, 1973a, 1973b). In one project, for example, 228 households of migrants and more than 200 owners of small businesses, who had worked abroad, as well as 268 employed returnees in Dalmatia were interviewed in order to understand their contribution to the development of this region. Together with the
One notable factor in this success was the Centre’s international orientation, as its monthly bulletin (
The international visibility of the Centre is evident in the many visitors from abroad: Its monthly bulletin (renamed
At the same time, the Centre’s research was closely tied to policy advocacy and consulting work for a diverse group of governmental, political and social institutions and organisations in Yugoslavia. Particularly close were the contacts with the employment offices (
Impact and dissemination were also achieved through its four series of publications: The monthly
Development Expectations and Disappointments
From the very beginning, the possible development effects of outmigration attracted the attention of policymakers on different government levels and experts. The Centre’s work is a case in point: To study the ‘economic and social significance of the invested savings of the labour migrants for the transformation of particular regions’ was one of its early research priorities (Baučić, 1973a). In 1972, for example, the Centre organised, on behalf of the OECD, a working meeting in the city of Split on the ‘Productive use of savings of labour migrants’ (Miurina, 1972). The Centre aimed to explore the motives behind such investments and their efficiency and to produce recommendations on how the government could increase them. Remittances were the most popular object in this context, again in line with international thinking. An almost magical quality was attributed to them. Economist Mladen Vedriš wrote in the Centre’s bulletin that Yugoslavia could not receive enough of them and, ideally, for as long as possible. He saw the debate on whether remittances might also have harmful effects as an ‘utterly rhetorical question.’ Quoting a Chinese proverb, he pointed out that it is irrelevant whether the cat is white or black as long as it catches mice (Vedriš, 1983, p. 39).
Nonetheless, it turned out that the question of potentially negative consequences of migrant remittances was not only rhetorical; and it would be researchers to raise doubts about lofty government hopes. First, Yugoslav economists started to question the headline figures on the inflow of foreign migrant savings. In 1981, the Yugoslav national bank recorded 5.1 billion USD in migrant remittances, with amounted to 23% of Yugoslavia’s balance of payments and financed more than a tenth of individual consumption in the country. This was a spectacular increase since the beginning of mass departures to foreign countries; in 1965, emigrants and labour migrants had sent 95 million USD to Yugoslavia. After 1981, inflows would begin to decline. Their net effect, however, was much smaller as some scholars drily noted because, at the same time, Yugoslavia’s foreign currency deposits registered significant outflows, which were increasing against the inflows. Baučić (1975b, p. 289) stressed already in 1975 that the largest part of the inflow from migrant workers flowed back to the immigration countries (for imports of consumer goods, for example). An analysis from 1983 concluded that the positive net effect of remittances on Yugoslavia’s perennially negative current account would soon evaporate (Čičin-Šain, 1983). Yugoslav economists found out that imports increased thanks to remittances, with the strongest growth in imports recorded in the trade with the most important destination countries of Yugoslav migrant workers. The value of imports from those countries increased even more than the remittance inflow from them (Mikulić, 1988, p. 30). Migrants apparently not only transferred money but also consumer preferences back home. Migrant savings thus helped to increase Yugoslavia’s trade deficit with capitalist economies—precisely the opposite of what Yugoslavia’s government had hoped to achieve with its export-oriented development strategy. For scholars and policymakers who deplored the dependent position of Yugoslavia towards the capitalist core, this was a depressing insight.
The experts became disappointed not only about the macro-economic effects of remittances but also about the ways how they were spent. In contrast to initial hopes, migrants and their families invested only a very small part of their savings in what policymakers considered ‘productive’ projects. Study after study arrived at the same conclusion: Savings were mainly used to improve the housing situation, to buy essentials and to purchase durable consumer goods (e.g., Nikolić, 1972); so, Yugoslav migrants behaved like migrants from most other places do. Big houses, German cars, and—in the countryside—tractors became the visible symbols of the labour migrants’ financial prowess, instead of new businesses. A 1971 study found that the houses built with money from abroad were ‘very big, most often much bigger than necessary’. Building new houses in the native villages was even said to have a detrimental effect on the relocation of labour from regions with little prospect of development to more productive urban areas. Baučić detected an ‘irrational’ use of migrant savings, most of it being spent on the ‘short-term’ improvement of personal and family living conditions. Only ‘very rarely’ was money invested in the ‘creation of better conditions for productive economic activities, which would provide a better existence and a more favourable social position in the long term’ (Baučić, 1975b, p. 296). The likelihood of migrants investing in small private businesses was not notably higher than among the non-migrant population, despite their better financial situation. ‘Foreign currency savings have not contributed significantly to the inclusion of returnees in the “small economy” sector; in other words, they have not been used for the purpose of employment after migrants’ return from foreign countries’ (Nejašmić, 1980, pp. 85–86). Those limited private sector investments outside of agriculture—which had remained predominantly private in socialist Yugoslavia—went mostly into small service businesses, such as private transport (a lorry or a taxi), small restaurants, small hotels and repair shops—businesses that constituted something the migrants were familiar with. According to an economist, these businesses did not entail any technological breakthroughs nor did they generate much employment. It was ‘more of the same’, Mikulić concluded (1990, p. 265).
Another expert concern was that, even though more than half of the migrant workers had come from farming, ‘investment in agricultural estate is but slight’, as a major survey concluded. Migrant households possessed more savings than other village households, yet ‘only 8 per cent of households among those with land used for farming have improved their estates thanks to the savings gained though employment in foreign countries’ (Nejašmić, 1980, p. 84). They often bought tractors, but they did so less for the sake of efficiency than for prestige reasons, given that many private farms were so small with so many fragmented plots that they hardly needed their own tractor. Živan Tanić (1974, pp. 81–83) wrote that agriculture became ‘tractorised’ but not mechanised because its technological level remained low. He also pointed to the dissolution effects of migration on the cohesion of the village community. Mikulić (1990, p. 264) even detected ‘hypertractorisation’, especially in the poorer parts of the country. These studies also revealed that the migrants had little interest in investing in the improvement of the communal infrastructure of their villages, which often remained woefully under-developed.
How were these expenditure preferences explained? During the 1970s, most experts put much of the blame on the migrants. Prestige and status concerns, selfishness and their low educational levels (80% had gone no further than primary school) were mentioned as factors in migrants investing mainly in housing and consumption. Baučić (1975b, pp. 295–297) was one of the early dissenting voices when he stressed ‘inadequate conditions’ for the investment of savings from abroad because the prevailing system limited private business opportunities. The Zagreb Centre and other migration researchers participated in efforts to improve the institutional conditions for private investments and to change the spending habits of the migrants. In the preparation for the Eleventh Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Centre for the Study of Migrations organised a meeting in 1978 to discuss the issue of labour migration and the reintegration of returnees: 97 people from all the republics and representing a variety of social and political organisations participated. They concluded that the possibilities of ‘our citizens working abroad’ to contribute to job creation in Yugoslavia had not yet fully been exploited (Savjetovanje o suvremenom stanju, 1979). For that reason, the meeting suggested that Yugoslavia participate in a new OECD sponsored project aiming at increasing employment in emigration regions. The implementation of Yugoslavia’s participation was again the responsibility of the Centre in Zagreb, which had worked on the preparation of this project with the OECD since 1977. In April 1979, the Centre organised a large meeting bringing together government officials and representatives of Yugoslav emigration regions with representatives of OECD, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Organisation of Labour to discuss professional training for returnees and international cooperation in development (Savjetovanje o bilateralnji, 1979). Another study suggested that the mobilisation of the migrants’ accumulated savings abroad might have a better effect on development than their monetary transfers to Yugoslavia (Vodopivec, 1983, p. 186).
Yet these initiatives did not solve the underlying problems. By the early 1980s, most eminent migration researchers had grown sceptical regarding the development effects of migration—at a time when the Yugoslav economy showed increasing signs of a structural crisis. Worries about the negative effects of labour migration on the development of Yugoslavia did not come as a surprise. Many Yugoslav migration scholars were rooted in Marxist thinking, viewing international exchange as shaped by power hierarchies and inequality—a fair enough critique, one could say. They subscribed to the then popular dependency theory, which was present also in research in comparable migration contexts of that time, especially Italy and Greece (Leggewie & Nikolinakos, 1975).Yugoslav experts found it even more frustrating that, according to their own estimates, the receiving countries—that is, capitalist economies—benefitted much more from Yugoslav migrants than the sending country. When factoring in the public costs of education and training and the share of remittances used for imported goods, the financial balance sheet of each labour migrant was calculated to be negative for Yugoslavia but positive for Germany (Vinski, 1979). The migration specialists came to understand that, ultimately, outmigration had a very limited positive effect on Yugoslavia’s development, if not an overall negative one. They came to a similar conclusion as Russell King did on Europe’s non-socialist south: ‘“Does migration help the Southern European countries?” The answer, on balance, is “No”’ (King, 1982, p. 221). Representatives of Yugoslavia, therefore, would often call upon Germany and other immigration countries to finance projects in Yugoslavia for the employment of returnees as compensation for Yugoslavia’s losses.
By the late 1980s, some specialists arrived at the obvious conclusion that it was the Yugoslav system that had failed the migrants—and not the other way round. On the other hand, the deepening economic crisis made the use of whatever sources of foreign capital ever more urgent. To do so, the leading experts agreed, the overall political system would have to change. In a ‘consultative’ symposium organised by the Federal Fund for the Financing of the Development of the Insufficiently Developed Regions of Yugoslavia in February 1988, Baučić (1988, p. 43) pointed out that the government had so far failed to mobilise the ‘inactive’ foreign currency savings of Yugoslav citizens. He reported of a meeting between the head of the federal government, Branko Mikulić, and successful Yugoslavs abroad in early 1987 in which Mikulić had promised to improve conditions for investment in Yugoslavia. The migrants had reacted with great interest, but nothing happened since then. Baučić surmised that the interests of migrants carried less weight than ‘the resistance of individual politicians who continue to consider private entrepreneurship a danger for the socialist social relations’. In a similar tone, Branislav Mikulić blamed the ‘restrictive economic system’ and its ‘destimulating economic policy’ for the dearth of migrant investments (Mikulić, 1989).
Indeed, there were so many restrictions on private business in socialist Yugoslavia that the migrants’ reluctance can hardly be called a surprise. Despite the official welcome for returnees and promises regarding their economic reintegration, the climate for private sector investment remained unfavourable. ‘Communist politicians looked at the private sector as a big danger for the existing system; so, they constructed various barriers to “protect” the system (and to protect themselves) from expansion of the private sector (“capitalist sector”)’ (Mikulić, 1989, p. 202). Private farmers, for example, were not allowed to own more than ten hectares of land and were prohibited from employing wage labour. There was a legal limit of 30 seats for private restaurants and 20 beds for private hotels. Income tax was relatively high, and banks were reluctant to lend to private firms and self-employed people. Restrictive legislation in combination with overzealous local communists, who often considered return migrants unwelcome competitors for scarce resources such as housing and jobs (Bernard, 2019, p. 87–107), undermined the oft-repeated promises by the (federal) government to create favourable conditions for return and investments. The execution of migration policy can serve as a case study for one of the structural difficulties of Yugoslavia as a political entity, especially with the 1974 constitution: Competencies between different government levels—federal, republic/provincial and municipal—were often ambiguously defined and not clearly separated so that lower levels of government could undermine top-level initiatives. The decentralisation of state administration and consensual decision-making on the federal level made the system even more difficult to manage. The way how and to what degree federal laws and guidelines would be applied was difficult to predict, also when it came to migration policy. One result of this was the constant shift of responsibility—or lack thereof—between different levels and bodies of government (Höpken, 1984; Ramet, 1992). For some of the scholars empirically studying migration processes, the obvious conclusion was therefore clear: The system had to change by giving more space to private initiative.
Shooting the Messenger: The End of the Centre for the Study of Migrations
Successful research did not secure the existence of the Centre in Zagreb—on the contrary, in 1984, it was forced to merge with the Department of Migration and Nationalities (
From the surviving official documentation in the Croatian State Archive, it becomes clear that the republic’s government had grown dissatisfied with migration research in Croatia. The Committee for International Relations of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, for example, concluded in May 1983 that ‘scientific research in the area of emigration in our republic has so far not led to satisfactory results which would have allowed us to meet these [political] goals’ (Rep. komitet za odnose s inozemstvom, 1983). The government found that the two existing migration research institutions in Zagreb, the Centre and the Zavod, had failed to develop a comprehensive research programme, which is why the merger was mandated (Program rada i znanstveno-kadrovskog razvoja, 1984, pp. 1–9). The new institute had a staff of 34 people (in 1984), 23 of whom were researchers. The government conceived the newly created Centre for the Study of Migrations and Nationalities as the main institution for migration research in Croatia that was to coordinate all other research efforts in this area in Croatia and to provide advice to state bodies.
At the new institution (renamed the Institute for the Study of Migrations and Nationalities in 1987), migration research took a new direction. Reflecting international trends, it became less interested in socio-economic questions and more concerned with cultural and language issues. An economic (development) frame of migration problems was gradually replaced by an identity and cultural frame. The new Centre’s priorities shifted noticeably towards research on overseas emigration (
The new leadership of the new Centre (Institute) for the Study of Migrations and Nationalities lost no time in distancing itself from Baučić and his research orientation. In the second issue of its new journal, the director of the newly formed Centre, sociologist Milan Mesić (1985), published a scathing critique of Baučić’s work, especially his last survey-based study on Yugoslav labour migrants abroad. In 12 pages, Mesić, who had no previous experience in migration research (his 1979 dissertation was on the October Revolution in Russia and workers’ self-management; see Bagić, 2016; Heršak, 2016), lays out convoluted arguments why Baučić’s work was worthless. Arguing from an orthodox Marxist perspective, he faulted Baučić for using the opinions of labour migrants as a data source. Mesić also criticised the less than gloomy portrayal of the migrant workers’ life in foreign (capitalist) countries by Baučić. Mesić stressed the exploitation of the labour migrants and their ambivalent position between the Yugoslav working class and the Western working class (Mesić, 1987). He did not evince any interest in the real-life problems and actions of migrants beyond formulaic dependency theory language.
In the meantime, Baučić had moved to the Economics Faculty of the University of Split, where he stayed until 1988, and later taught at the Maritime Faculty in Dubrovnik and Split. From the archival traces of his activities there, it becomes clear that Baučić tried to take his research agenda and his international network with him. Upon his move to Split, the Economics Faculty of the University of Split established the Research Centre for Migration and Development (
Conclusion
Greek migration scholar Lina Venturas has stressed that ‘knowledge (understanding) of emigration is produced in relation to the actions of politicians, academics involved in policymaking and opinion leaders and against the background of current struggles for material and symbolic resources in a world marked by unequal relations between nation states’ (Venturas, 2004, p. 122). Migration research is, as Rass (2016, p. 14) notes, ‘always a child of its time’. Yugoslavia was no exception. Migration studies as carried out by the Centre for the Study of Migrations in Zagreb until 1983 was in line with the government’s development paradigm and applied it to the study of migration, thereby shaping government policies to the degree that specific legislation was based on the experts’ recommendations.
Yet, this did not mean that policymaking and research developed in tandem. Yugoslavia allowed more academic freedom than other communist systems, and Yugoslav social scientists were often frank in their assessments of social problems in the country (Lazić, 2011). Yugoslav migration scholars were part of an international epistemic community, gaining ideas and recognition not only from within Yugoslavia but also from abroad. This meant that they tried to meet international standards and build networks with institutions abroad, which enhanced the precarious autonomy of their field in Yugoslavia. At the same time, they responded to the government’s request for policy-oriented research. In that, they experienced something scholars often encounter: Policymakers would not listen to them (nor did migrants heed the recommendations by the experts, one could add). Even though Yugoslav officials began to understand that labour migration might have created more problems for their economy and political system than solutions, they were reluctant to acknowledge this publicly, even though media perceptions of migration had turned increasingly critical (Goodlett, 2007, p. 164). State officials were reluctant to draw the necessary conclusion: Yugoslavia’s economic order had failed the migrants twice—it had forced them to leave and had failed to create adequate conditions for return despite the government’s promises.
Even though the migration–development nexus remained elusive, it at least helped trigger research which generated a clearer picture of the fundamental flaws of Yugoslavia’s economy and produced lasting insights into the dynamics of Yugoslavia’s gastarbeiter migration. Again, migration proved to be a productive heuristic lens. The research on its developmental effects, or lack thereof, showed that Yugoslavia’s political economy failed to provide incentives for investment, lacked a capable banking system to channel migrant savings into investments and punished private initiatives. Thus, the preconditions required for positive macro-economic effects of migrant remittances were not present, and Yugoslav scholars were cognizant of that in the 1980s. At the same time, those framework conditions that typically amplify the negative consequences of remittances existed in abundance, such as import dependency, inflation and rent-seeking.
Yugoslavia’s economy in general was geared towards continuous outside sources of financing—in the form of remittances, income from tourism and hard currency loans—making the country dependent on the goodwill of others. While in the 1970s, Yugoslav migration experts tended to interpret this configuration in terms of Marxist dependence theory, blaming capitalism for an unfair global economic order, they would increasingly question the pillars of the Yugoslav system in the 1980s—if they had not been pushed out of academia by the stalwarts of ideological orthodoxy. As I have shown elsewhere, migration had erosive effects on Yugoslavia’s stability (Brunnbauer, 2019); it made apparent to all who wanted to know the hollowness of the communist promise of a self-managed paradise. It highlighted the fundamental tension between cities and a neglected countryside and between ordinary workers and the new middle class. Scholarly discourses helped to push these fundamental realities into the public realm, to the chagrin of the authorities. So, the most important developmental effect of outmigration on Yugoslavia might have been epistemological.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the funding for this article, provided by the Leibniz Association (Germany) through its project grant ‘Transnational Families, Farms and Firms. Migrant Entrepreneurs in Kosovo and Serbia’. The author wants to thank Karolina Novinšćak Kölker for her useful comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as for sharing an interview she conducted with Ivo Baučić in 2009 as part of the ‘Bavaria-Croatia Transnational’ project, which was supported by the Free State of Bavaria and led by the author.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by the Leibniz Association (Germany) through its project grant ‘Transnational Families, Farms and Firms. Migrant Entrepreneurs in Kosovo and Serbia’.