Governing Mobilities in Times of "De-Globalization": Migration Policies and State-Building in Interwar Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia

You are cordially invited to the lecture Governing Mobilities in Times of "De-Globalization": Migration Policies and State-Building in Interwar Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia by Dr Miha Zobec (Slovenian Migration Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana; Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia), organised by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which will take place on 8 April 2025 at 10:00 in the Large Meeting Hall of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the Institute of History of the CAS (Prosecká 809/76, Praha 9). 

Invitation

Governing migrations is related to the ways in which countries’ define their identity and position themselves in the international division of labor. An inquiry into Czechoslovak and Yugoslav regulation of mobilities following the Great War could thus help better comprehend how these two similar but yet different countries performed nation- and state-building projects and operated internationally. This research, concerning the transition from the global liberal order to the one characterized by “de-globalization”, hence restricting mobilities and creating protectionist and eventually autarkic states, is all the more relevant today when we are again confronted with the decline of liberalism. Both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia established their migration services as a response to numerous returnees and repatriates entering the respective countries following the Great War. Concurrently, at their establishment, they both faced large population outflow. Yet, while both countries faced similar challenges, they provided different responses, mainly as a result of their distinct modes of governing. Whereas Czechoslovakia, as an industrial republic, treated emigration as a safety valve for relieving pressure on the labor market, Yugoslavia considered nationally constitutive population as a major asset and aimed at limiting its outflow. With the shifts in the international system which signaled the cessation of laissez-faire economics and the onset of state interventionism, the divergence between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia got only more pronounced. This talk will present some preliminary findings on similarities and divergences between Yugoslav and Czechoslovak migration policies in the wake of systemic changes following the Great War. In particular, it will reflect on the link between migration governance and nation- and state-building projects. Therefore, it will ask how management of mobilities was used as a vehicle for defining the countries’ identity and as a means of their social and economic development. 

Miha Zobec is a Research Associate at the Slovenian Migration Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia. His research interests include relations between migration and nation-building processes in the contexts of two Yugoslavias, the study of migration policies, migration control, diasporas, and the history of the family in migration settings. He has published several scholarly articles both in Slovenia and abroad, as well as a monograph on translocal connections between a village on the Slovene Karst and its emigrants in Argentina.

Additional information: Milan Sovilj, sovilj@hiu.cas.cz