Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INDSOC (Individualising Socialism. Individual Agency and Social Change in Socialist Yugoslavia\'s Periphery, 1950s-1970s)

Teaser

Reflecting global patterns, the 1960s in Socialist Yugoslavia were a period of economic growth, socio-cultural dynamism, and political liberalisation. These trends generated social conflicts and tensions, but brought the Yugoslav promise of a good and normal life within reach...

Summary

Reflecting global patterns, the 1960s in Socialist Yugoslavia were a period of economic growth, socio-cultural dynamism, and political liberalisation. These trends generated social conflicts and tensions, but brought the Yugoslav promise of a good and normal life within reach for large parts of the population.

The Yugoslav promise was not equally spread, however. Socio-economic regional inequalities within the country were enormous. Slovenia, the most developed republic of the federal state, boasted socio-economic indicators on par with Western Europe, while Kosovo, the least developed province, stood at the level of Northern Africa. In Kosovo, socio-economic underdevelopment overlapped with ethnic inequality. Albanians made up the majority of the province’s population, but faced historically-rooted barriers to political decision-making and public education and employment. In the mid-1960s, Socialist Yugoslavia initiated an intensive programme of Albanian emancipation through increased political autonomy for Kosovo and positive discrimination in public education and employment. This “catching-up” manoeuvre led to industrialisation and urbanisation and increased participation of Albanians in the Yugoslav public space (politics, economics, culture), but also led to Serb resentment against what they perceived as Albanian majorisation. The rise of ethnic tensions in the 1980s indicate that the fundaments for the ‘Yugoslav promise’ in Kosovo remained feeble.

The potential overlap of socio-economic inequality and other social lines of division is one of the crucial social questions of our time. The violent and still unresolved conflict in Kosovo is a reminder in Europe’s backyard about the acuteness of this issue. This project makes a historical contribution by scrutinising the tensions inherent to Yugoslav modernisation through state-building and socio-economic “catching up” in Kosovo in the decades preceding the outbreak of conflict and political deadlock.

The project shifts the scale of analysis to the micro-level of social relations in an urban environment. It looks at the reach of the Yugoslav promise and its overlap with various social lines of division in Mitrovica, a medium-sized city in northern Kosovo. Mitrovica is currently renowned as the prime site of ethno-political division in Kosovo. In Socialist Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic city was the industrial centre of Kosovo and arguably one of the places where the Yugoslav promise was most tangible. How did the city transform under the ideological premises of Socialist Yugoslav modernity? How did state-building efforts and institutional decentralisation impact social relations in the city? What was the width of individualising norms of modernity in the city and to what extent were they associated with the Yugoslav ‘good life’? How did urbanisation and individualisation relate to social lines of division related to ethnicity and urbanity? And how do contemporary citizens of Mitrovica remember the socialist city against the background of current ethno-political division and socio-economic decline?

Work performed

The action conducted pioneering micro-historical research in the city of Mitrovica. The research focussed on the rich but under-researched local archive, which provides a wealth of documentation related to local government and local cultural and economic institutions. Archival sources were complemented with a close reading of local press, a series of 25 life-story interviews with contemporary inhabitants of Mitrovica, and observations of the legacy of the socialist and industrial city. Preliminary research findings and analyses were presented and discussed at presentations, workshops, and academic conferences. These exchanges were helpful in relating the micro-level particularities of Mitrovica to general macro-level observations of socialist modernity and urbanisation in Eastern Europe.

The main findings of the research can be presented in four parts. First, the action analysed accelerated urbanisation and urban development in parts of Europe characterised by extremely low degrees of urbanisation. The analysis focussed on the interaction between the ideological, political, and economic constraints imposed by Yugoslav urbanisation and the role of local actors in a small and relatively peripheral urban environment. The main results from this part of the research are an article detailing the dualist nature of socialist urban development in Mitrovica in the Annual for Social History (Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju) in Belgrade and an article on shifting understandings of private and social in housing published in the Journal of Urban History, the journal of the Urban History Association.

Second, the action scrutinised the social impact of industrial development in underdeveloped parts of Yugoslavia, through a case-study of local economic development. Through a micro-history of a wood-processing enterprise, the action introduced a number of starting points for a social history of industrial development in Kosovo, focussing on political interventionism, management, and labour relations in an industrialising locality.

Third, the research analysed the politicisation of ethnicity in contexts of urbanisation and industrial development. Through a study of employment politics in the mining enterprise Trepça/Trepča, the action was able to establish how nationhood became politically relevant in competition at the managerial level (published in Labor History). The action also explicitly engaged with the complex question of the legacy of ethnically-framed socio-spatial differentiation taking place during socialist urbanisation on the current ethno-political division of Mitrovica.

Fourth, the action portrayed the legacy of socialist urbanisation in Mitrovica through a joint publication with the Belgian photographer Thomas Janssens. The book Layers of Time in the Urban Landscape: Visions of Socialist Urbanity in Mitrovica (jovis verlag) consists of a historical essay and a series of photographs that portray the overlap between the current divided city and the socialist and industrial city it once was.

Final results

The action was pioneering in many ways. It documented and analysed development and modernisation from a local perspective in an underdeveloped part of Yugoslavia and Europe, thus complementing dominant macro-economic and political accounts that favour the experience of the centre.

The action also “normalised” Kosovo and shows that is more than a mere conflict region. The action showed it is possible to do historical research in a post-conflict environment fractured by ethno-political partitioning and returning flares of politicised ethnic tensions. Histories of Kosovo do not have to be prehistories of conflict. This action integrated Kosovo in ongoing research on modernisation in Socialist Yugoslavia, Southeast Europe, and Europe as a whole. It thus introduced numerous further research questions, which focus on the social experience and impact of accelerated development in Kosovo in comparison to other underdeveloped parts of Yugoslavia and Europe, as well as innovative research methodologies.

Website & more info

More info: https://ios-regensburg.academia.edu/PieterTroch.