Building a better world? Construction, labour mobility and the pursuit of collective self-reliance in the ‘global South’, 1950–1990

With the onset of decolonisation, the newly independent and non-aligned countries forged transnational alliances within the United Nations that have represented the collective interests of the developing world in the realm of economic cooperation and development for more than fifty years. This paper situates Yugoslavia’s global role and its labour force mobility in the South within a broader story about economic and technical cooperation in the non-aligned world, the project of ‘collective self-reliance’, and the endeavour to ‘democratise’ international economic relations. These occurred within a framework of nesting hierarchies, both at the global and at domestic level and were not directed at a radical transformation of the existing ‘transnationalised economy’, but rather at the redefinition of the nature of the economic relations/hierarchies in place and reflected an aspiration to partake in the international division of labour and economic exchange as equal partners. The paper also addresses the specificities of the migrant labour experience that accompanied these projects, with workers internalising some of the postulates of socialist self-management and Yugoslav construction companies acting as vehicles for the export of the self-managing welfare state abroad.