Popović, Milica

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176employment policies. In the fi nal part of the chapter, he discusses the possibilities for increasing the effectiveness of the coor-dination of European employment policies.EU Socio-Economic Governance in Cen-tral and Eastern Europe: The European Se-mester and National Employment Policies is an important publication and a great con-tribution to the EU policy-making academ-ic fi eld. The research was conducted in four European countries and is one of the fi rst studies showing comparatively the impact of the soft-law-based EU coordinating po-licies on domestic public policies in the for-mer socialist countries, now members of the European Union. Starting from a theoreti-cal approach based on the new intergovern-mentalism followed by a systematically applied qualitative research methodology, Munta offers a valuable and pioneering study when it comes to the Europeaniza-tion of public policies. Evidence of it can be seen in the fact that it was published in the Routledge Studies on Government and the European Union series, edited by Professor Andy Smith (University of Bor-deaux, France), a distinguished researcher of the European policy-making process. The publication of this book will certainly be a great impetus for research into Euro-pean policies in political science and other social sciences in Croatia and abroad. Thus, with his fi rst book, Mario Munta es-tablished himself as an internationally re-levant researcher. While we can look for-ward to seeing more similar research from Munta in the future, this book is highly re-commended to all who are interested in the fi eld of Europeanization of public policies.Zdravko PetakFaculty of Political Sciences,University of ZagrebBook ReviewGoran MusićMaking and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class. The Story of Two Self-Managed Factories CEU Press, Budapest, 2021, 257 pp. The book by Goran Musić looks into self-management and the myth of nationalist working classes’ responsibility for the dis-solution of Yugoslavia. Brilliantly peda-gogical in explaining self-management as theory and as practice, even to the freshest of beginners in economic history and the-ory, this book is an important puzzle piece for furthering our understanding of the dis-solution of Socialist Yugoslavia. Standing among the works of Catherine Samary1, Susan Woodward2, Vladimir Unkovski-Korica3 and Gal Kirn4 – to mention but a few – Musić’s work brings an innovative outlook from the very factory shopfl oors, bringing the subjectivity back to the work-1 Samary, Catherine (1988) Le marché contre l’autogestion: l’expérience yougoslave. Paris: La Brèche.2 Woodward, Susan (1995) Socialist Unemploy-ment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press.3 Unkovski-Korica, Vladimir (2016) The Eco-nomic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment. London: I.B. Tauris.4 Kirn, Gal (2019) Partisan Ruptures. Self-Ma-nagement, Market Reform and the Spectre of So-cialist Yugoslavia. London: Pluto Press.Book Reviews177ing classes and taking up the factory as le-vel of analysis. Published as part of the new series on Work and Labor at CEU Press, and awarded the Michael Mitterauer Prize 2021 for social, cultural and economic his-tory in Vienna, minutely bringing together historical, but also economic and political expertise, Musić’s book stands strong as a must-read for everyone interested in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Goran Musić is a social historian of la-bor in East-Central and Southeast Europe, who has earned his PhD degree from the European University Institute and held po-sitions at the University of Graz, Central European University and the University of Vienna. Currently, Musić is a Research Fellow within research platform “Trans-formations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna.Through 257 pages and seven chapters, we witness Musić’s successful attempt of “bringing class back into history” follow-ing the Thompsonian5 theoretical frame, and remaining focused on the processes of creation of working class on the ground. In two carefully chosen case studies of In-dustrija motora Rakovica (IMR) in Serbia and Tovarna avtomobilov Maribor (TAM) in Slovenia, Musić provides an in-depth analysis of the self-management practices, its successes and failures and their fi nal af-termath and entanglement with nationalist politics which brought the country into the war. The trope of “They came as workers, and left as Serbs”6 is being deconstructed with each chapter depicting us a complex picture of market socialism, Cold War de-5 Thompson, E.P. (1964) The Making of the Eng-lish Working Class. New York: Pantheon.6 Đukić, Slavoljub (1992) Kako se dogodio vođa. Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, pp. 265-266.velopment dilemmas and one of the key Yugoslav contradictions of unequal deve-lopment. Brining into the light the tensions between blue collar and white collar work-ers, without banalizing the importance of the theoretical and practical impact of self-management, the book successfully depicts a historical development, but also analyzes the advantages and failings of the system and the state. The methodological approach of going beyond the largely lack-ing, archival materials, complementing them with factory newspapers and comics, as well as interviews of former workers, brings an abundance of empirical materi-als to substantiate Musić’s arguments.In the fi rst chapter the author presents the historical development of the two factories chosen as case studies, emblematic of two different approaches to implementation of self-management, largely defi ned by their historical heritage and origins. Continuous democratization and decentralization pro-cesses of the ruling party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), as well as the structural defi ciencies of the ap-plied self-management practices, as Musić strongly argues, infl uenced the lack of trans-Yugoslav working-class unity. In the second chapter Musić portrays the 1970s, with the development of market socialism, as “the most prosperous and peaceful de-cade of Yugoslav socialism” in parallel to portraying everyday life in factories, with their diverse cultures in each of the two factories, and in both with a strong rela-tionship of trust in President Tito. In the third chapter, the author focuses on the two key elements of the blooming crises – social inequalities and the gene-ration gap. The process of making of the working class in Yugoslavia remained un-fi nished, accentuating the gaps between Croatian Political Science Review, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2022, pp. 176-178178the workers refl ected in their housing is-sues, double working obligations beyond the factory – whether in the fi elds or in the city, the shop fl oor workers and offi ce em-ployees as well as the so-called veterans and the youth. With much nuance, Musić introduces skills, gender and the place of origin as key to these internal inequalities. The fourth chapter further shows the deva-stating effects of the 1980s economic cri-sis, accompanied by so-called stabilization and austerity measures and the dependen-cy upon foreign loans and the policy direc-tives of the International Monetary Fund. Musić succeeds in announcing the nas-cent roots of the dissolution: unstoppable economic liberalization of the country, supported by middle classes and profes-sional management and the impotence of the LCY in fi nding a common reform di-rection which opened the Pandora’s Box of connecting workers’ grievances to nation-alism. In the fi fth chapter, juxtaposing the developments in Slovenia and in Serbia, Musić elaborates the changing dynamics between class and ethno-national identity. Diving into the innumerous strikes tak-ing place in the late 1980s throughout Yu-goslavia, accompanied with the changes in the top layers of the Party in Slovenia and Serbia, Musić explains parallel pro-cesses of workers’ mobilizations against the economic downfall and the appearance of Milan Kučan in 1986 and Slobodan Milošević in 1987. In search for the cul-prits of the vertiginous deterioration of the life standard, Musić elucidates the arrival of state bureaucracy in the spotlight. Continuing into the seventh and fi nal chapter, the author ends his analysis in the culminating events of the summer and fall of 1988. As workers were pouring into the streets, in Serbia their grievances were hijacked by the top-down imposed “anti-bureaucratic revolution” through media framing and political sharpness of Slo-bodan Milošević, directing the anger of the working class towards, fi rst, bureaucratic elements of the state and, second, the lack of willingness of other Yugoslav republics to participate in socialist solidarity and much needed reforms towards centraliza-tion. However, in Slovenia the grievances were directed towards the backwardness of the other Yugoslav republics, lagging in development, and successfully introduced balkanist outlooks on the need for a Slove-nian future in the West, as author argues.Keeping the critical outlook on the so-cialist state’s successes and failures, the au-thor brings a much-needed understanding of the internal paradoxes of the Yugoslav state that contributed to the violent disso-lution. Having the courage to show histori-cal processes as open-ended, Musić con-cludes with a discussion about how much agreement on the need to reform the state, but disagreement on the reforms’ direction were at the core of the initial dissolution spark between Slovenia and Serbia. Some of the analytical insights would have bene-fi ted from an analysis of the wider politi-cal context, in terms of at least a brief con-textualization of similar processes in other Yugoslav republics, but also by bringing in a deeper understanding of where these events stand in relation to the wider Eu-ropean conditions of economic crisis and disappearance of socialist ideologies and welfare state of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the book stands as a critical contribution to the scholarship of the Yugoslav history and violent dissolution of the state.Milica PopovićCentral European UniversityBook Reviews

Goran Musić - Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class. The Story of Two Self-Managed Factories

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