A non-aligned business world - the global socialist enterprise between self-management and transnational capitalism

Abstract

This article explores the role and the engagement of Yugoslav self-managed corporations in the global economy, with a particular attention to the late socialist period. Guided by a vision of a long-term integration of the Yugoslav economy in the international division of labour on the basis of equality and mutual interest, by the late 1970s the country's foreign trade and hard currency revenue was boosted by a number of big globally-oriented corporate entities, some of which survived the demise of socialism and the dissolution of the country. These enterprises had a leading role as the country's principal exporters and as the fulcrum of a web of economic contacts and exchanges between the global South, Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc. The article seeks to fill a historiographic gap by focussing on two major Yugoslav enterprises (Energoinvest and Pelagonija) which were based in the less developed federal republics– Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. The article also investigates the transnational flow of ideas around the ‘public enterprise’, itsembeddedness in an interdependent global economy and the visions for equitable development. Finally, the article explores these enterprises as enablers of social mobility and welfare, as well as spaces where issues of efficiency, planning, self-reliance and self-management were debated and negotiated.