A non-aligned business world - the global socialist enterprise between self-management and transnational capitalism

This is the author accepted manuscriptThis article explores the role and the engagement of Yugoslav self-managed corporations in the global economy, with a particular attention to the late socialist period. Guided by a vision of a long-term integration of the Yugoslav economy in the international division of labour on the basis of equality and mutual interest, by the late 1970s the country's foreign trade and hard currency revenue was boosted by a number of big globally-oriented corporate entities, some of which survived the demise of socialism and the dissolution of the country. These enterprises had a leading role as the country's principal exporters and as the fulcrum of a web of economic contacts and exchanges between the global South, Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc. The article seeks to fill a historiographic gap by focussing on two major Yugoslav enterprises (Energoinvest and Pelagonija) which were based in the less developed federal republics– Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. The article also investigates the transnational flow of ideas around the ‘public enterprise’, itsembeddedness in an interdependent global economy and the visions for equitable development. Finally, the article explores these enterprises as enablers of social mobility and welfare, as well as spaces where issues of efficiency, planning, self-reliance and self-management were debated and negotiated

'Crude’ alliance – economic decolonisation and oil power in the non-aligned world

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordThe article examines Yugoslavia’s and by extension the Non-Aligned Movement’s relations with the Middle East, reflecting more broadly on the developmental hierarchies and inner divides between the oil-producing and non-oil producing countries within the Movement. The ‘energy shocks’ of the 1970s had a dramatic impact on non-OPEC developing countries and sowed long-lasting rifts in the non-aligned/developing world. The article embeds these events within the debates about the ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), economic decolonisation and the nationalisation of energy resources in the 1970s, but also seeks to provide a longer-term overview of the political and economic relations that non-aligned Yugoslavia sought to forge with the Middle East, in particular Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. New forms of Cold War developmental multilateralism emerged as a consequence of the energy crisis - the supply of Arab oil to areas which had traditionally relied on Soviet energy not only foreshadowed the emergence of a new hierarchical and dependent relationship between Yugoslavia and the Middle East, it also engendered new forms of economic cooperation and strategic economic multi-alignment through the pooling of resources and expertise from non-aligned, Eastern Bloc states and the United Nations, illustrated here through the Adria Oil Pipeline built in the 1970s and co-financed by Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Libya, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the World Bank

The “Children of Crisis”: Making Sense of (Post)socialism and the End of Yugoslavia

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordThis article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak. The article traces certain mnemonic patterns in the ways individuals who belonged to the late-socialist Yugoslav youth elite articulated their values in the wake of Yugoslavia’s demise and the ways they make sense of the Yugoslav socialist past and their generational role a quarter of a century later. It detects narratives of loss, betrayed hopes, and a general disillusionment with politics and the state of post-socialist democracy that appear to be particularly frequent in the testimonies of the media and cultural elites. They convey a sense of discontent with the state of post-Yugoslav democracy and with the politicians—some belonging to the same generation—who embraced conservative values and a semi-authoritarian political culture. The article argues that an emerging new authoritarianism and the very process of progressive disillusionment with post-socialist politics allowed for the emergence and articulation of such alternative, noninstitutionalized individual memories that, whilst not uncritical of the Yugoslav past, tend to highlight its positive aspects

Constructing the “City of international solidarity”: Non-aligned internationalism, the United Nations and visions of development, modernism and solidarity, 1955-1975

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the University of Hawai'i Press via the DOI in this recordThis article embeds the United Nations (UN) plan to reconstruct the city of Skopje after the 1963 earthquake in a broader story about decolonisation, visions of post-war modernisation, Yugoslavia’s global role as a leader of the non-aligned world and the collaboration and tensions between developed and developing countries at the UN regarding economic development and technical assistance. With Warsaw’s Chief architect Adolf Ciborowski at the helm as project manager of the Skopje Urban Plan Project, the development plan for the city was arguably unlike any other operation of its kind undertaken by the United Nations Special Fund (later the UNDP). Drawing upon material from multiple archives, this article seeks to enlarge the scope of “socialist internationalism” and address what I call “internationalist constellations”, in order to account for the interconnectedness and cross-fertilisation between liberal and socialist internationalisms and the role of non-aligned internationalism therein.Leverhulme Trus

Building a better world? Construction, labour mobility and the pursuit of collective self-reliance in the ‘global South’, 1950–1990

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordWith the onset of decolonisation, the newly independent and non-aligned countries forged transnational alliances within the United Nations that have represented the collective interests of the developing world in the realm of economic cooperation and development for more than fifty years. This paper situates Yugoslavia’s global role and its labour force mobility in the South within a broader story about economic and technical cooperation in the non-aligned world, the project of ‘collective self-reliance’, and the endeavour to ‘democratise’ international economic relations. These occurred within a framework of nesting hierarchies, both at the global and at domestic level and were not directed at a radical transformation of the existing ‘transnationalised economy’, but rather at the redefinition of the nature of the economic relations/hierarchies in place and reflected an aspiration to partake in the international division of labour and economic exchange as equal partners. The paper also addresses the specificities of the migrant labour experience that accompanied these projects, with workers internalising some of the postulates of socialist self-management and Yugoslav construction companies acting as vehicles for the export of the self-managing welfare state abroad.Leverhulme Trus

The overstated merits of proportional representation. The Republic of Macedonia as a natural experiment for assessing the impact of electoral systems on descriptive representation

For the comparative study of the effects of electoral systems on the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities in parliament, Macedonia is a highly interesting case because the country had several elections under majoritarian as well as under proportional systems. Whereas most observers claim that ethnic Albanians have benefitted from the introduction of proportional representation, the article argues that the merits of PR have been overstated. First, scholars have often only reported members of political parties but not independent candidates in parliament. Second, when comparing the share of seats before and after the introduction of PR, the growing share of the Albanians in the population is usually ignored. © 2014 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

Introduction: Recovering/rethinking (post-)Yugoslav lesbian activisms

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio