Mladen Zobec

🔗 cup.org/4kuS07r

#Yugoslavia #Albanians #SocialistModernity #MigrationHistory #NationalitiesPapers

The article traces how Albanian migrants engaged the language of socialist modernity – revealing both the mechanisms of exclusion and the emancipatory potential of the Yugoslav political project that could, at times, be challenged from within.

The result: some succeeded – securing licenses, opening shops, and carving out space in the urban economy. They appealed to socialist morality to claim the right to work, demand national equality, and argue that their private crafts supported socialist development.

Their resistance wasn’t passive. Craftsmen learned to strategically appeal to higher authorities:

“So, no Brotherhood and Unity for Albanians? I’ll escalate this to Belgrade!”

Republican-level officials were often more receptive than exclusionary municipal bureaucracies.

Exclusion was tied to orientalist and balkanist stereotypes that framed craftsmen and their products as backward, foreign, and incompatible with socialist modernity.

And yet: many successfully negotiated access to urban economies – not by rejecting socialism, but by appealing to its core values.

In early socialist Slovenia, Albanian-speaking confectioners – classified “oriental” – faced economic exclusion. But it wasn’t just because they were private entrepreneurs.

🆕 Just out in @nationalitiesp.bsky.social:

“Negotiating Brotherhood and Unity: ‘Oriental Confectioners’ and Socialist Morality in Post-war Slovenia”

Albanians in socialist Slovenia/Yugoslavia weren’t just victims – they negotiated inclusion from within YU socialism
🔗 cup.org/4kuS07r
🧵 key findings