Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism

Rory Archer, Igor Duda, Paul Stubbs, Rory Archer, Igor Duda, Paul Stubbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472459541
• eBook ISBN: 9781317053941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Socialist countries like Yugoslavia garnered legitimacy through appealing to social equality. Yet social stratification was characteristic of Yugoslav society and increased over the course of the state's existence. By the 1980s the country was divided on socio-economic as well as national lines. Through case studies from a range of social millieux, contributors to this volume seek to 'bring class back in' to Yugoslav historiography, exploring how theorisations of social class informed the politics and policies of social mobility and conversely, how societal or grassroots understandings of class have influenced politics and policy. Rather than focusing on regional differentiation between Yugoslav republics and provinces the emphasis is placed on social differentiation and discontent within particular communities. The contributing authors of these historical studies come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, linking scholarship from the socialist era to contemporary research based on accessing newly available primary sources. Voices of a wide spectrum of informants are included in the volume; from factory workers and subsistence farmers to fictional television characters and pop-folk music superstars.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Bringing class back in: an introduction
• 2 What nationalism has buried: Yugoslav social scientists on the crisis, grassroots powerlessness and Yugoslavism
• 3 The gastarbajteri as a transnational Yugoslav working class
• 4 ‘Paid for by the workers, occupied by the bureaucrats’: housing inequalities in 1980s Belgrade
• 5 Education, conflict and class reproduction in socialist Yugoslavia
• 6 Roma between ethnic group and an ‘underclass’ as portrayed through newspaper discourses in socialist Slovenia
• 7 Of social inequalities in a socialist society: the creation of a rural underclass in Yugoslav Kosovo
• 8 ‘They came as workers and left as Serbs’: the role of Rakovica’s blue-collar workers in Serbian social mobilisations of the late 1980s
• 9 ‘Buy me a silk skirt Mile!’ Celebrity culture, gender and social positioning in socialist Yugoslavia
• 10 When capitalism and socialism get along best: tourism, consumer culture and the idea of progress in Malo misto
• Index