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Brigitte Le Normand, Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its 
Migrant Workers in Western Europe
Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2021, 286 pp.
In analyzing states’ responses to human mobilities, migration studies have long 
focused on the role played by the states that received migrants. However, scholar-
ship examining governments’ outreach toward emigrants has been expanding, and 
Brigitte Le Normand’s book Citizens Without Borders falls precisely into this emerg-
ing field. Le Normand, a historian of Southeast Europe and a migration scholar at 
Maastricht University (who previously held a position at the University of British 
Columbia, Canada), employs new trends in migration research to shed light on how 
socialist Yugoslavia monitored its emigrant workers, i.e., migrants who, in the official 
discourse, were referred to as “workers temporarily working abroad.”
Exercising transborder policies to engage emigrant “co-nationals” was noth-
ing new in the region—even the state’s predecessor, interwar Yugoslavia, devised 
its diaspora policies. However, labor migration and subsequent governance over 
migrants made Yugoslavia, in many ways, idiosyncratic among socialist states where 
the politics of exit were much more restrictive. Building on the existing scholarship, 
Le Normand persuasively demonstrates that Yugoslavia applied active measures in 
fostering government outreach toward emigrants. Contrary to previous research, 
which dealt with the Yugoslav state and the migrants separately, she highlights 
migrants’ agency which enabled them to reinterpret policies targeting them.
Applying the concept of transnational political space, Le Normand shows how 
multifaceted state-diaspora relations were. Even though a single party ran the state, 
the state was by no means a compact unit exercising unison policy. To illuminate the 
complexity of relations, Le Normand brings to light the collision between different 
levels of administration in deploying policies geared toward “workers temporarily 
employed abroad.” As she emphasizes, not all government bodies advanced the 
same idea of homeland. Essentially, the categories with which state institutions oper-
ated were incredibly fluid and depended on the modes of knowledge production in 
various state and social enterprises. The diverse ways of producing knowledge on 
migrations and migrants lie at the heart of Le Normand’s analysis.
Therefore, in the first part of her work, she examines how scholars and the Yugo-
slav cinema perceived migrants. In the second, she pays attention to various modes 
of diaspora building, covering areas from the media to scholarship and government 
policies. Yugoslavia’s outreach toward the emigrants ranged from radio broadcasts to 
organized visits to the homeland. Le Normand’s portrait of Yugoslav workers abroad 
is restricted to the Croatian “case,” which might sound disappointing. However, given 
that she justifies this decision by explaining the importance of Croatian emigration, 
both in quantitative (Croatian emigration was the most numerous) and qualitative 
terms (the nexus between the emigration and tumultuous national revival in the 
late 1960s, which challenged Yugoslavia’s unity known as the Croatian Spring), her 
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choice does not distort the understanding of the overall phenomenon. It is, however, 
beyond a doubt that focusing on some other republic or trying to display the inter-
play between different ethnic groups would result in a different image. However, the 
set of problems she aims to address has a general relevance and could be applied to 
other case studies.
In the first chapter, Le Normand explains how the notion of governing migrants 
the same way the country controlled workers on Yugoslav grounds was contested 
by the media and migrants themselves. Many migrants shared distrust toward the 
Yugoslav government, as also exemplified in their reluctance to participate in the 
interviews conducted by the Zagreb-based Institute for Migrations in its survey 
“Yugoslavia in the European Labor Migration.” The scholars stressed that migrants 
were becoming alienated from the Yugoslav “homeland” and were convinced that 
the federal system functioned at the expense of Croatia, which was particularly 
evident during the Croatian Spring.
Feelings of emigrant alienation also resonated in the Yugoslav cinema, which 
depicted the controversies of Yugoslav modernization by recording the labor migra-
tion. According to the Yugoslav film, labor migration embodied contradictions of 
the Yugoslav system, namely its failure to develop the countryside on the road to 
progress. By analyzing 30 films recorded from 1968 to 1984, Le Normand argues 
that film directors essentially adopted stereotypical images reminiscent of those 
used by social scientists and the official discourse, particularly one advanced during 
the Croatian Spring. Hence, they portrayed the migrants as male workers (despite 
the fact that, as Le Normand argues, one-third of migrants were women) from rural 
backgrounds who were forced to flee abroad.
Contrary to the film, which displayed migrants as powerless subjects in the 
hands of external forces, the radio program encouraged their agency. In the follow-
ing chapter, Le Normand analyzes the radio broadcast To Our Citizens in the World 
(Našim građanima u svijetu), run by the Croatian public radio, which allowed 
migrants to share their experiences of life abroad. Like the Yugoslav state itself, Le 
Normand argues, the program was a hybrid between socialist mobilization and 
Western appeal for popular music. The broadcast, which distanced itself from poli-
tics to embrace the everyday life of migrants, welcomed active cooperation, also 
in the form of letter writing to the program editors. In a way, as migrants discussed 
issues linked to passports, visas, and the import of goods to Yugoslavia, the program 
proved to substitute consular infrastructure. The idea of homeland promoted by the 
broadcast was deliberately loose enough so that anybody could insert their wishes 
and expectations into it.
Whereas the radio program targeted the Yugoslav public in its entirety, the 
press was a more differentiated endeavor, with newspapers that were published 
on a regional or local level. One of them was Imotska krajina, which referred exclu-
sively to the population from the Dalmatian hinterland. The town of Imotski and 
its surroundings were both places with a tradition of emigration and hotbeds of 
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Croatian nationalism. By creating a transnational, national public sphere, Imotska 
krajina enabled migrants to communicate their experiences and perpetuate an 
essentially localized identity. The fact that the paper was written in the dialect facili-
tated the continuation of localized feelings. Only during the Croatian Spring did the 
nationalist narrative undermine the regional one.
To foster unity and combat the “corrosive” influence of Western capitalism, Yugo-
slav authorities encouraged migrants to join workers’ associations. These societies 
formed part of the Yugoslav web of transnational governance, and the state used 
them to “outsource” the work carried out by the diplomatic infrastructure. While 
these associations were seemingly democratic, they were, in fact, controlled by the 
Yugoslav party, which also stimulated politically active migrants to participate fully. 
Reflecting on associations’ autonomy, Le Normand concludes that as civil society 
was circumscribed in Yugoslavia, associations operated in a clientelistic fashion and 
were thus state-dependent entities. The Yugoslav state perceived them as mediators 
between “crisis-ridden” migrant families and Yugoslavia.
Given that the state perceived the stay abroad as temporary and viewed life in 
the capitalist West with unease, it adopted various measures to encourage migrants’ 
return. The survey, conducted by the Institute of Migrations in Zagreb in 1970–1971, 
was also aimed at inducing migrants’ comeback. One of the core questions in this 
open-ended survey concerned the conditions under which migrants would be 
eager to return. Contrary to what was expected, migrants subverted and appropri-
ated the questionnaire, expressing not only their attitudes but also their feelings 
of resentment and anger toward the authorities. Under the impression of Croatian 
Spring, they tried to link their personal experience to what they saw as the oppres-
sion of Croatia at the hands of Yugoslavia. Despite the convincing narrative of the 
Croatian Spring, however, migrants’ decision to return was most often associated 
with practical concerns related to work and residence.
The fact that many children of migrants were born and raised abroad made Yugo-
slav authorities aware of the need to institutionalize the transnational education 
system. Highlighting the functioning of the education system, Le Normand stresses 
that the goal set by the main body covering education abroad aimed to reintegrate 
migrants back into Yugoslav society rather than helping them to assimilate into 
the adoptive countries. While individual republics essentially regulated education, 
education was also coordinated by the federal body, which displayed concern that 
migrants would cease speaking the “Yugoslav language.” As Le Normand explains, 
education programs depended on bilateral agreements and thus varied greatly 
between different countries of immigration.
The last chapter analyzes how the education system functioned in practice. 
Contrary to popular representations of Yugoslavia’s sway over emigrant communi-
ties, Le Normand shows that many teachers were often at odds with the Yugoslav 
authorities, voicing their complaints about the inadequacy of education and low 
salaries, among others. The role the state assigned them was significant: they were 
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not only expected to give classes but also to guide emigrant social activities. In 
effect, their task was to strengthen ties with the Yugoslav homeland, a duty which 
was most vividly carried out by organizing school visits to Yugoslavia. Visits were fully 
programmed, engaging Yugoslavia’s local and governmental administration as well 
as companies and families that hosted the migrants’ children. By “feeling the breath 
of homeland,” emigrant children could not only confirm their “Yugoslav” identity but 
were also encouraged to speak on behalf of their “homeland” abroad.
Visits to the homeland were one of many means of promoting attachment to 
Yugoslavia. As Le Normand demonstrates, the ways Yugoslavia fostered loyalty were 
multifaceted, involving different administrative levels and agencies. Probably one 
of the more important contributions of the book to our understanding of Yugoslav 
labor migration is the complex web of relations that emerged between Yugoslavia 
and its “workers temporarily abroad.” Moreover, her book is innovative in adding 
migrants themselves to the often simplistic equation of state-diaspora relations. 
Within the transnational political space, as Le Normand explains, migrants not only 
responded to government initiatives, but they also aimed at engaging their Yugo-
slav homeland and taking an active part in its diaspora programs. While the book 
is limited to exploring the case of Yugoslav labor migration, its implications could 
be broadened in contextualizing socialist Yugoslavia’s migrations in the twentieth 
century. In many ways, the second Yugoslavia continued diaspora policies set in 
motion already by the state known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. 
Examining both Yugoslavias and setting them in the comparative European frame-
work would be thus undoubtedly welcome. Le Normand’s book could serve here 
not only to facilitate an understanding of Yugoslavia’s labor migration but also as a 
methodological tool for analyzing state-diaspora relations.
Miha Zobec