Reflecting global patterns, the 1960s in Socialist Yugoslavia were a period of economic growth, socio-cultural dynamism, and political liberalisation. These trends generated social conflicts and tensions, but brought the Yugoslav promise of a good and normal life within reach for large parts of the population.
The Yugoslav promise was not equally spread, however. Socio-economic regional inequalities within the country were enormous. Slovenia, the most developed republic of the federal state, boasted socio-economic indicators on par with Western Europe, while Kosovo, the least developed province, stood at the level of Northern Africa. In Kosovo, socio-economic underdevelopment overlapped with ethnic inequality. Albanians made up the majority of the province’s population, but faced historically-rooted barriers to political decision-making and public education and employment. In the mid-1960s, Socialist Yugoslavia initiated an intensive programme of Albanian emancipation through increased political autonomy for Kosovo and positive discrimination in public education and employment. This “catching-up” manoeuvre led to industrialisation and urbanisation and increased participation of Albanians in the Yugoslav public space (politics, economics, culture), but also led to Serb resentment against what they perceived as Albanian majorisation. The rise of ethnic tensions in the 1980s indicate that the fundaments for the ‘Yugoslav promise’ in Kosovo remained feeble.
The potential overlap of socio-economic inequality and other social lines of division is one of the crucial social questions of our time. The violent and still unresolved conflict in Kosovo is a reminder in Europe’s backyard about the acuteness of this issue. This project makes a historical contribution by scrutinising the tensions inherent to Yugoslav modernisation through state-building and socio-economic “catching up” in Kosovo in the decades preceding the outbreak of conflict and political deadlock.
The project shifts the scale of analysis to the micro-level of social relations in an urban environment. It looks at the reach of the Yugoslav promise and its overlap with various social lines of division in Mitrovica, a medium-sized city in northern Kosovo. Mitrovica is currently renowned as the prime site of ethno-political division in Kosovo. In Socialist Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic city was the industrial centre of Kosovo and arguably one of the places where the Yugoslav promise was most tangible. How did the city transform under the ideological premises of Socialist Yugoslav modernity? How did state-building efforts and institutional decentralisation impact social relations in the city? What was the width of individualising norms of modernity in the city and to what extent were they associated with the Yugoslav ‘good life’? How did urbanisation and individualisation relate to social lines of division related to ethnicity and urbanity? And how do contemporary citizens of Mitrovica remember the socialist city against the background of current ethno-political division and socio-economic decline?
