‘They Came as Workers and Left as Serbs'

It certainly sticks out as an oddity that among the volumes of books written about the events leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a country officially built on workers’ self-management, not a single one deals with organised labour. It is often assumed that individuals with high material well-being and supposed cultural openness were in the best position to counterweight the activities of regional political leaders (e.g. Vejvoda 1996: 22–4). Following this reasoning, one encounters laments over the nationalist turn of the Serbian dissident intelligentsia (e.g. Magaš 1993: 49–77) and a keen interest in various civic initiatives dealing with issues of ecology, pacifism, feminism, religion or youth counter-culture (e.g. Bokovoy, Irvine and Lilly 1997), but there is little inquiry into the activities of blue-collar workers. The weight given to mobilisations based on ethnic identity and new social movements as the main protagonists of democratisation and change seems all the more misplaced when one looks at the ever-increasing figures of industrial action and their presence in the media of the time. To a large extent, it was the striking industrial workers who sensitised the Yugoslav public to controversial political issues and opened a space for other mobilisations in the second half of the 1980s. ²