Between the “Tenth Banovina” and the “Seventh Republic”: The States and Diasporas in the First and in the Second Yugoslavia

Building on the transnational perspective, the proposed project aims to demonstrate that Yugoslavias and “their” emigration mutually interacted. On the one hand, the states envisaged “their” diasporas. On the other, the emigrants influenced policies and social realities of their “homelands” by maintaining institutional, political, cultural and familial contacts as well as by repatriating. Scholarship has almost entirely neglected the emigrants’ role in shaping the two Yugoslavias. Historians examined either Yugoslavias within their territorial boundaries or the emigrant communities such as Slovene or of other Yugoslav nations abroad. The project group will examine mutual interactions between Yugoslavias and “their” emigration in the frame of two major work packages: in the first one it will examine state’s policies, in the second it will shed light on the reciprocal transfer of influences between the state and the emigrants.    Within the first work package the group will highlight how both Yugoslavias, in their effort for modernization and beneficial usage of population, built mechanisms for maintaining bonds with the emigration. Even though the socialist Yugoslavia operated with different ideological premises, it upgraded the “inherited” infrastructure. Both countries aimed at governing the emigration as though it were an integral part of the nation. Therefore, they strived to control and exploit the emigrants in the same way they controlled the citizens at home. As a result, the first Yugoslavia called the emigrants the “tenth banovina” (in this way supplementing the other nine administrative units of Yugoslavia), while the second denominated the million-strong emigration of “workers temporarily working abroad” (their return was therefore anticipated by the state) the “seventh republic”. Even though both states nominally addressed the emigration in its entirety, they only maintained contacts with those who were loyal and from whom they could reap economic and political benefits. Within the second work package the group will examine how the states, by constructing the bureaucratic apparatus for maintaining links with the emigrants, formed the transfer of influences which the emigrants then used in order to perpetuate their ties to the “homeland”. Their links were of institutional-political character but they were also family-oriented. As a result of emigrants’ incorporation into host societies and Yugoslavia’s inability to control and direct emigrants’ transnational ties, tensions appeared between the emigrants and their Yugoslav homeland. State’s extraterritorial policies confronted emigrants’ transnational and translocal practices creating an ever greater breach between the emigrants and their country of origin. Ultimately, this gap led to intensification of divisions which the state aspired to mitigate by liberalizing emigration. Work in both packages will be based on the assumption that despite the different forms of state and ideological premises, the system of maintaining ties with the emigrants did not alter substantially. In addition, the Slovene part within the Yugoslav system will be highlighted throughout the entire project. In the context of the first Yugoslavia Slovene particularity can be explained with the congruence of ethnic and administrative boundaries of the territory (the Drava Banovina). The second Yugoslavia was a federal state in which migration service was relegated to para-state organizations of Izseljenske matice (the Emigration Queen Bees) linked to republics and their respective nations. Moreover, particularity of Slovene area should be understood in relation to the issue of Slovene national minorities in Italy and Austria which characterized Slovene position within the European framework and influenced relations between the centre (Belgrade) and the periphery in the longue durée perspective.