Remembering Utopia
Remembering Utopia

Author: Breda Luthar

Publisher: New Acdemia+ORM

Published: 2010-01-30

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1955835195

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Essays and photos that reveal and reflect on everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia, from tourism to television. Research about socialism and communism tends to focus on official aspects of power and dissent and on state politics, and presuppose a powerful state and a party with its official ideology on one side and repressed, manipulated, or collaborating citizens on the other side. This collection of essays instead helps uncover various aspects of everyday life during the time of socialism in Yugoslavia, such as leisure, popular culture, consumption, sociability and power, from 1945 until 1980, when Tito died. “A highly original project, which will cover a much neglected area, helping those who either did not make it to Yugoslavia in Tito’s time or were born too late to understand what life then and there was all about.” —Sabrina P. Ramet, Professor of Political Science at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway “This collection represents an original and highly useful work that helps fill a gap in the existing literature on socialist Yugoslavia and East-Central Europe in the Cold War. It also makes an important contribution to cultural history of the region in the second half of the twentieth century.” —Dejan Djokic, Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Studies, The University of Nottingham “This book focuses on a cultural and social history of socialist Yugoslavia from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ people and by reconstructing their memories. The contributors, many of them belonging to a new generation of scholars from the former Yugoslavia, employ new approaches in order to make sense of the complicated past of this country.” —Ulf Brunnbauer, Department of History, Freie Universität Berlin

A History of Yugoslavia
A History of Yugoslavia

Author: Marie-Janine Calic

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1612495648

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Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.

Ideologies and National Identities
Ideologies and National Identities

Author: John R. Lampe

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2004-01-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 6155053855

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Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.

Beyond Marx and Tito
Beyond Marx and Tito

Author: Sharon Zukin

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1975-03-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780521206303

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This study examines the distance between theory and practice in the lives of ordinary Yugoslavs living under socialist self-management.

Socialist Unemployment
Socialist Unemployment

Author: Susan L. Woodward

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1995-08-13

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780691025513

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In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds as from the political and social divisions created by a failed socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring socialist states into the world economy. By 1985, Yugoslavia's unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically "invisible," owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial society.

Economic Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia
Economic Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia

Author: Rudolf Bicanic

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780521153300

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This book provides a lucid survey of the economic development of Yugoslavia from 1918 to the 1970s.

The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia
The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia

Author: Zsófia Lóránd

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-27

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 3319782231

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This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women’s emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

Yugoslavia's Sunny Side
Yugoslavia's Sunny Side

Author: Hannes Grandits

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9639776696

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This book undertakes a critical analysis of the history of domestic tourism in Yugoslavia under Communism. Despite the central role of tourism in the political making of the Yugoslav socialist state after WWII and in everyday life, the topic has remained neglected as an object of historical research, which has tended to dwell on war and "ethnic" conflict in the past two decades. For many former citizens of Yugoslavia, however, memories of holidaymaking, as well as tourism as a means of livelihood, today evoke a sense of the "good life" people enjoyed before the economy, and subsequently the country, fell apart. The story evolved from the popularization of tourism and holidaymaking among Yugoslav citizens in the 1950s and 1960s to the consumer practices of the 1970s and 1980s. The essays review tourism as a political, economic and social project of the Yugoslav federal state, and as a crucial field of social integration; it is investigated how ideologies aimed to turn workers into consumers of "purposeful" leisure, and how these ideas were set against actual practices of recreation and holidaymaking.

Designing Tito's Capital
Designing Tito's Capital

Author: Brigitte Le Normand

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0822979543

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The devastation of World War II left the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in ruins. Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito saw this as a golden opportunity to recreate the city through his own vision of socialism. In Designing Tito's Capital, Brigitte Le Normand analyzes the unprecedented planning process called for by the new leader, and the determination of planners to create an urban environment that would benefit all citizens. Led first by architect Nikola Dobrovic and later by Milos Somborski, planners blended the predominant school of European modernism and the socialist principles of efficient construction and space usage to produce a model for housing, green space, and working environments for the masses. A major influence was modernist Le Corbusier and his Athens Charter published in 1943, which called for the total reconstruction of European cities, transforming them into compact and verdant vertical cities unfettered by slumlords, private interests, and traffic congestion. As Yugoslavia transitioned toward self-management and market socialism, the functionalist district of New Belgrade and its modern living were lauded as the model city of socialist man. The glow of the utopian ideal would fade by the 1960s, when market socialism had raised expectations for living standards and the government was eager for inhabitants to finance their own housing. By 1972, a new master plan emerged under Aleksandar Dordevic, fashioned with the assistance of American experts. Espousing current theories about systems and rational process planning and using cutting edge computer technology, the new plan left behind the dream for a functionalist Belgrade and instead focused on managing growth trends. While the public resisted aspects of the new planning approach that seemed contrary to socialist values, it embraced the idea of a decentralized city connected by mass transit. Through extensive archival research and personal interviews with participants in the planning process, Le Normand's comprehensive study documents the evolution of 'New Belgrade' and its adoption and ultimate rejection of modernist principles, while also situating it within larger continental and global contexts of politics, economics, and urban planning.

Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989
Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989

Author: Marsha Siefert

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9633863384

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Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.