Introduction
In the (post)Yugoslav space, it is hard not to notice the overrepresentation of Albanians in confectionery and ice cream businesses or bakeries and fast-food kiosks. It is remarkable, however, how little this group is accounted for in scholarly literature. While the discrimination of Albanians in socialist Yugoslavia is well documented, the example of migrant businessmen in the Yugoslav Northwest shows that some could achieve social mobility and economic success despite disadvantageous treatment. This article explores how this was possible. Contributing to the literature on the (social) history of Albanians in Yugoslavia, as well as to broader debates on othering within Southeast Europe, this study is a microhistory of a group of Albanian migrant entrepreneurs during socialism. It explores both the lived experiences of Yugoslav Albanians and the ambiguities of the Yugoslav socialist project itself.
The experience of Albanians in Yugoslavia is usually addressed by either focusing on the discrimination and exclusion they were experiencing in Kosovo or (North) Macedonia or by invoking cultural specificities to argue that Albanians willfully distanced themselves from the mainstream Yugoslav society and thus did not want to be included. The first perspective does not account for individual agency, whereas the second perspective relies on agency only in the context of political and national conflicts. However, both perspectives overlook the agency of “ordinary people” in their everyday lives. The findings presented in this article offer both a novel understanding of the Albanian experience within Yugoslavia and insight into the complex interplay of contradictory discourses that shaped the socialist state’s relationship with the (Albanian) “other.” By avoiding victimization and instead highlighting the agency of Albanians in their everyday lives, the research uncovers their precarious attempts to negotiate inclusion. The central significance of this study emerges from findings that demonstrate how inclusion was negotiated within the context of a nonuniform state where postulates of socialist morality, such as “Brotherhood and Unity,” coexisted with discrimination based on orientalizing othering.
The key argument posited is two-fold. Firstly, the economic exclusion of Albanian craftsmenFootnote 1 extended beyond socialist distrust towards private enterprises. Exclusion was deeply intertwined with the (local) state’s orientalist and balkanist perceptions, which culturally diminished craftsmen’s origins and products, and placed Albanian migrants in a conflicting position with socialist modernization. Secondly, and in contrast to the first point, the state’s treatment was not uniformly discriminatory. Albanian migrants were often able to negotiate their inclusion into the urban economy by appealing to socialist morality, to which socialist authorities at the republican level were particularly receptive. In Slovenia orientalism was stronger on the municipal level, contrasted with a more inclusionary socialist morality on the republican level.
With these findings, the article firstly advances the social history of Albanians in Yugoslavia and, secondly, contributes to the broader debates on othering within Southeast Europe. In terms of social history, we see that during the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration to the West (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2009; Le Normand Reference Le Normand2021; Ivanović Reference Ivanović2012), Albanians from Yugoslavia largely remained an invisible migrant group (Blumi Reference Blumi2003). The case of internal Albanian migration to other Yugoslav republics has only recently sparked the interest of historians and anthropologists (Kladnik Reference Kladnik, Fotiadis, Ivanović and Vučetić2019; Rajković Iveta and Geci Reference Rajković Iveta and Geci2017; Orlić and Djerić Reference Orlić and Djerić2014). With the exception of research by Rory Archer (Reference Archer2023), antagonistic experiences that Albanians encountered in everyday, work-related settings, have not been explored. Contemporary research has shown how the Yugoslav model of socialist modernization created new inequalities. In the case of Yugoslav Albanians, authors have, studying multiple sites of discriminatory and disadvantaged outcomes of socialist modernization, examined ethnically divergent paths of development in socialist Macedonia (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2004; Gruber and Pichler Reference Gruber, Pichler, Gruber, Gutmeyr, Jesner, Krasniqi, Pichler and Promitzer2020; Pichler Reference Pichler2021). In research on Kosovo, nationhood was explored in the context of class differentiations (Ströhle Reference Ströhle, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016; Troch Reference Troch2019). By looking at the complex intertwining of national and class inequalities, these works addressed Albanian grievances while shifting the focus away from Serbian-Albanian hostilities and exclusivist claims (Pavlović, Draško, and Halili Reference Pavlović, Draško and Halili2019) to the broader questions of socialist modernization and development in the Yugoslav south. The question remains, however, how Albanians negotiated socialist modernization as migrants outside of their homelands in Kosovo and (North) Macedonia.
Contributions on othering in Southeast Europe, informed by postcolonial theory, also articulated an interest in Albanians from Yugoslavia. Researchers frequently invoke their experiences to showcase Balkan and Yugoslav embeddedness in broader systems of hierarchies, inequalities, and othering discourses. This literature builds on the concepts of orientalism (Said Reference Said1978), balkanism (Todorova Reference Todorova2009), and other locally derived concepts such as nesting orientalism (Bakić-Hayden Reference Bakić-Hayden1995), frontier orientalism (Gingrich Reference Gingrich2013), and Albanianism (Schwandner-Sievers Reference Schwandner-Sievers2008). Recently, categories of race and whiteness became increasingly included in analyses, either within the international context of the Non-Aligned Movement (Kilibarda Reference Kilibarda, Kumar and Maisonville2010; Subotic and Vucetic Reference Subotic and Vucetic2019; Vučetić and Betts Reference Vučetić and Betts2017), or as categories constitutive of regional hierarchies (Krasniqi Reference Krasniqi2021; Bjelić Reference Bjelić2018; Rexhepi Reference Rexhepi2023). Emphasizing the color-blindness and white privilege of Southeast European studies, Catherine Baker has argued that Albanians in socialist Yugoslavia were “treated as a semi-racialized, culturally and ethnically distinct underclass in Slovenia and Croatia” (Baker Reference Baker2018, 73). Conversely, other authors have voiced concerns that the uncritical use of race as an analytical category may mask locally grown differences and hierarchies in the Balkans generally (Todorova Reference Todorova, Bradatan and Oushakine2010) and Yugoslavia specifically (Petrović Reference Petrović2021b; Reference Petrović, Gruber, Jesner, Krasniqi, Pichler, Promitzer and Jesner2021a). While the debate is far from settled, the case of Yugoslavia’s black students’ pledges against experienced racism highlights how the Yugoslav state could be compelled to rethink and act against its racist tendencies (Wright Reference Wright2022). As a whole, the postcolonial applications in the Balkans were successful in including the voices of the disadvantaged, however, there is still room to enhance these voices by examining practices of resistance that unfolded within the framework of Yugoslav modernity rather than against it, a task undertaken by this article.
Methodologically, the article relies on a textual analysis of municipal craft-related archival documents from the broader Ljubljana region, including ego-documents. Personal details and life and business trajectories were reconstructed from the bureaucratic procedures involving “oriental confectioners” (orijentalski slaščičar) and “confectioners” (slaščičar) — the latter sometimes termed “regular confectioners” (redni slaščičar).Footnote 2 This was possible due to the narrative richness of the material, which in part owes to the fact that the nascent bureaucracy was still in its emergent phase and procedures were not yet fully standardized. As a consequence, there was a lot of back-and-forth communication between the different authorities on how to administratively process craft-associated requests, rejections, and complaints. Occasionally, archival sources are complemented by insights from oral history interviews. In the scope of a broader research project,Footnote 3 19 oral history interviews were conducted between June 2021 and November 2022 with former and current Albanian small business owners. Five of the interviews took place in North Macedonia and Kosovo and the rest in Slovenia.
Instead of focusing on well-known and very relevant cases of Albanian hardships in socialist Kosovo, the article focuses on socialist Slovenia, a context where the immediate postwar developments were distinct from the Yugoslav south. This strategic focus not only broadens the geographical scope of the existing literature but also offers a fresh perspective on the multifaceted nature of othering within socialist Yugoslavia. The focus on the first after-war decade (1945–1955) is equally important. During this precarious period, socialist authorities themselves faced both real and perceived existential threats that challenged the foundations of the emerging social order. Most notably, Yugoslavia, war-torn and internationally isolated after its 1948 expulsion from the Comintern, sought an independent developmental path forward. In response, workers’ self-management was introduced in 1950. However, fears and skepticism persisted within the communist leadership — most notably from Tito himself — that self-management could undermine the communist party and its institutional foundations, as it could be seen as potentially deviating from true socialism (Jović Reference Jović2024, 111–115). The article’s focus on the first after-war decade thus encompasses five years before and five years after the introduction of self-management. Focusing on this period is important because it highlights the context in which the Albanian ethnic economy in Slovenia began to grow and redefine itself in relation to socialism. It also sheds light on how Yugoslav socialist authorities approached craftsmanship, a category ambiguously positioned between labor and capital. Unlike the later decades, the years between 1945 and 1955 saw a burgeoning practical and ideological debate within and among the (republican and municipal) socialist administration on how to understand, regulate, or sanction craft and business practices in relation to the evolving Yugoslav postwar social order.
The article begins with a brief overview of the subject of study before detailing the discriminatory treatment faced by Albanians as “oriental confectioners” in socialist Slovenia at the hands of local authorities. Focusing on the craftsmen’s agency, it then examines how they resisted such treatment. Specifically, it explores how “oriental confectioners” negotiated their inclusion into the emerging socialist urban economy with claims rooted in socialist morality. In the concluding section, the article considers supplementing the concepts of balkanism and orientalism with the category of race. It evaluates the possibility of interpreting the treatment of “oriental craftsmen” as a form of (cultural) racism.
Albanian “oriental confectioners” in early socialist Slovenia
During the interwar period, Albanians lacked political representation, and Kosovo faced Serbian colonization efforts (Jovanović Reference Jovanović2015). In the same era, Albanians in North Macedonia were marginalized (Pichler Reference Pichler2021, 291) and Muslims, more broadly, were encouraged to migrate to Turkey (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2012; Pezo Reference Pezo2013). Despite explicit attempts to rectify the pre-war situation, state violence persisted in socialism, especially under Aleksandar Ranković, harshly affecting Albanian civilians for another two decades, notably during the 1955–56 disarmament (Ströhle Reference Ströhle2021). This period also sees the continuation of outmigration to Turkey (Pezo Reference Pezo2018). Despite these continuities, however, the postwar context in Yugoslavia was dramatically novel and became marked by the project of socialist modernization (Allcock Reference Allcock2000). This included efforts to address the developmental lag in the Albanian-populated Yugoslav South, by tackling traditional family structures, high fertility, low literacy and education levels, higher religiosity, and gender inequalities (Islami Reference Islami1985; Reference Islami1986; Burić Reference Burić1973) that became associated with Albanians.
As migrant confectioners, however, Albanians in socialist Slovenia experienced another set of difficulties. Many subjects appearing in this article’s archival sources started migrating to Slovenia before World War II. When the war ended, private craftsmen in Slovenia who held licenses from pre-socialist times had to reapply for them, according to the AVNOJ decree 132 from February 3, 1945, a measure that addressed potential war profiteering. Reapplications for licenses and the arguments they produced, offer a testimony to how local authorities understood private craftsmen, including those assigned to the administrative category of “oriental confectioners.”Footnote 4 Some Albanian-speaking confectioners referred to themselves as just “confectioners,” but were still assigned the administrative craft category “oriental confectioners” by the Slovene municipal authorities. For instance, in 1954, Gafur Nezim Zečirović explicitly requested a “confectioner” license, warning that he was not applying as an “oriental confectioner” and had a confectionary diploma. Nevertheless, the deliberation of the municipal authorities designated him as an “oriental confectioner” and his license request was denied. It is hard to judge how the authorities decided who should be an “oriental confectioner” rather than a “confectioner.” Zečirović’s case is indicative of the fact that “oriental” was not a designation that would only or always reflect qualifications or products. The archival documents show that “oriental confectioners” at the time were a group of mainly Albanian-speaking Muslim migrants from the rural part of the Polog basin, between the majority-Albanian towns Tetovo and Gostivar in today’s North Macedonia. The two villages most prominently featured as the places of origin are Pirok and Dobridol.
Private entrepreneurs from these villages still dominate the ice cream and fast-food business in Slovenia today. During socialism, Albanian craftsmen tended to migrate to Slovenia alone, while women and children usually stayed behind. This was predominantly the case even among second, and sometimes third and- fourth-generation craftsmen, which indicates that the pattern of labor mobility was a continuation of the practice of Kurbet/Pečalba (Pichler Reference Pichler, Horstein-Tomić, Pichler and Scholl-Schneider2018). Women, children, and remaining family members were thus taking care of the agricultural part of a transterritorial family economy (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2004), relying on human resources of comparatively large extended and patriarchally organized families. The socialist-era Kurbet migration would later prove similar to the Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration to Western Europe (Pichler Reference Pichler, Horstein-Tomić, Pichler and Scholl-Schneider2018, 243–44). Moreover, the two migration practices were often occurring side-by-side. For instance, savings from wage labor in the West were used for financing a business in Yugoslavia (Archer Reference Archer2023, 6).
Even though Albanian migration within Yugoslavia later included goldsmiths (filigrani) from Gjakova and Peja and bakers from the Has region (Kosovo), the Polog craftsmen remained the most prominent group of Albanian migrant craftsmen during socialism. Their presence became so ubiquitous that the image of Albanian ice cream vendors became a cultural marker for all Albanians. For instance, the 1988 TV commercial for Radenska mineral water featured eight short scenes of people praising the beverage in each of the eight federal units of Yugoslavia. In most of the scenes, the dominant nationality was represented by a folkloristic element, but Albanians were represented by a profession — the ice cream makers of Polog.Footnote 5 Oriental sweets (halva, boza, baklava) and ice cream were the most common products sold in the early socialist period. As the Yugoslav economy grew, so did the success of the Polog migrant businesses, which started to expand into cafés, restaurants, and fast-food kiosks,Footnote 6 increasingly selling grilled meat and burek. Despite the eventual success of some individuals and families, the majority started as impoverished itinerant workers. An oral history narrator from Polog, for instance, explained how his grandfather started in the 1930s. He would spend three or four days traveling on foot with a tricycle through the villages of Notranjska in Central Slovenia, sleeping covertly in barns and buying ice from restaurants and inns along the route to make and sell ice cream on the go. On his weekly journey, he visited different towns and villages, timing the best opportunities to coincide with crowds leaving Sunday sermons.
According to many interlocuters and based on archival material, I noticed that during the early socialist period, most craftsmen were still itinerant, frequently changing places according to opportunities. Mobile vending, however, was problematized by the authorities for supposed sanitary reasons, often citing the presence of dust on the streets as problematic.Footnote 7 Archival material and oral history accounts together show that early decades of socialism were marked by a shift in offer from “oriental” products (boza, halva) to products of a central-European origin (kremšnita, šamrola, torta). This change was parallel to the number of businesses growing considerably, and more businesses becoming stationary. Some were financially rather successful. This makes the focus of the article on the early socialist period important: how was it possible for some members of a discriminated minority to achieve eventual economic success despite facing many disadvantages and obstacles?
Culturally, sanitarily, and morally “suspicious”? Unpacking socialist orientalism
To understand how Albanian craftsmen were able to navigate socialist bureaucracy and negotiate inclusion in early socialist Slovenia, it is first vital to unveil the dynamics of exclusion. By focusing on the perspective of local officials, this section shows that “oriental confectioners” were discriminated against on the basis of deeply ingrained local orientalism that cast Albanian craftsmen as “oriental,” “suspicious,” and “culturally foreign.” These perceptions merged with the socialist mistrust of private initiative.
Private businesses were an ambiguous category in Yugoslav socialism. While at first understood as an “unnecessary mediator between the producer and the consumer” (Prinčič Reference Prinčič2015, 70), communists did not seriously consider their abolition due to the role that small private enterprises played for the undeveloped Yugoslav economy. In the economic development of socialist Yugoslavia, there were gradual, although non-linear, shifts from stricter to looser regulation, but private businesses were never officially allowed to expand beyond 5–10 employees (Prinčič Reference Prinčič, Fikfak, Prinčič and Turk2008, 40–42). Unsurprisingly, in early socialism private businessmen and craftsmen were met with especially strong suspicion due to perceived inherent capitalist tendencies and, therefore, antisocialist potential (Prinčič Reference Prinčič2015, 79). In the case of Albanian migrants, however, suspicion went further.
A decade after World War II, authorities in Slovenia were still using the pre-war administrative distinction between “regular” and “oriental confectioners”Footnote 8 (orijentalski slaščičarji). Despite both groups suffering from the 1948 silent nationalizationFootnote 9 of craft businesses, “oriental confectioners” were not treated as equals. The emerging socialist bureaucracy met them with additional suspicion, which went beyond the difficulties that “regular” (Slovene) confectioners experienced. “Oriental confectioners” were considered suspicious as entrepreneurs, but also as subjects whose assigned administrative prefix “oriental” came to be associated with “oriental” products (halva, boza, baklava), and with their potentially conflicting position vis-à-vis (socialist) modernity.
Local authorities’ ambivalent attitude towards “oriental confectioners” is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Zenun Memedovič.Footnote 10 Born in Pirok in 1915, Memedović sold ice cream at least as early as 1940 in Lesce in the north of Slovenia before moving to Ljubljana in 1941.Footnote 11 His confectionary license was revoked by the municipality on the initiative of the Peoples’ Neighborhood Council of Vič (Četrtni ljudski odbor, hereafter ČLO) in January 1946, the official reason being that his premises were “highly inappropriate in terms of sanitation and hygiene.”Footnote 12 Memedovič complained against the revocation in April 1946, stating that market and sanitary inspections of Peoples’ City Council (Mestni ljudski odbor, hereafter MLO) have regularly visited the place, not finding any problems on the spot. He additionally argued that he needed the license to provide for his family. In June 1946, Memedovič sent another statement to MLO, this time with a support letter from ČLO Vič, which confirmed he “supports our new socialist institutions and participates in shock work [udarniška dela].”Footnote 13 Additionally, ČLO Vič echoed the craftsman’s arguments about the need to provide for his (five-member) family. After this intervention, Memedovič was allowed to reopen his confectionary business. Since there were no additional sanitary checks in the meantime; being allowed to continue can be understood in two ways: either political appropriateness (supporting socialist institutions, participating in shock work) became more important than hygiene, or, alternatively, the unsatisfactory hygiene was just an excuse to deny a license to politically unfamiliar and potentially disloyal subject.
Memedovič was at the time lucky enough to be allowed to continue with work. His example, however, is indicative of the weaponization of hygiene in the case of “oriental confectioners,” which “regular” confectioners did not experience. Occasionally, decisions on the grounds of hygiene were backed up by sanitary inspection visits, but more often they were established post-festum by an unqualified official from the municipality. The accusation of unsatisfactory hygiene was used frequently and superficially to deny licenses to Albanian craftsmen, to the point that it was occasionally employed preemptively as an argument to restrict “oriental confectioners” before they even started working. References to problematic hygiene are therefore more illustrative of the local authorities’ orientalist perceptions than of the actual sanitary state of the shops, thus echoing the Western European interpretation of “oriental” and “Balkan” as “intrinsically diseased” (Promitzer, Trubeta, and Turda Reference Promitzer, Trubeta and Turda2011, 4) and unhygienic (Jezernik Reference Jezernik2011, 44–45).
It is worth noting that sometimes complaints of poor hygiene were of secondary importance when judged against the criteria of loyalty. For instance, archival sources show that immediately following the war, some “oriental confectioners” gained advantages from the local authorities due to their links with the Partisan movement.Footnote 14 During the war, they either provided material support such as sugar or flour to the underground resistance, or they or their family members fought in the Partisans. After the nationalization of private crafts in May 1948, however, war-time contributions ceased to play any visible role in gaining licenses. Instead, the advantages of “regular” (Slovene) compared to “oriental confectioners” (Albanians) became central.
I find further evidence of balkanist and orientalist tropes in the case of Halil Muharemovič. His craft business was closed during the nationalization campaign in May 1948, when all private confectioners lost their licenses.Footnote 15 A copy of his complaint received by the MLO contained a handwritten remark intended for internal communication within the municipality and signed by Milan Šter, the head of the craft department at MLO. This remark echoed a discriminatory rationale commonly directed at “oriental confectioners” but never applied to local, “regular confectioners.” It once again invoked the contentious issue of hygiene standards, suggesting that
… in general, we have observed poor hygiene in oriental pastry shops and [financial] speculation. Such establishments do not actually produce oriental pastries but rather some mishmash [pacarija] that is neither of our nor of oriental character. We believe that the state-owned company will manage this network well and recommend rejecting the appeal.Footnote 16
Familiar and unsurprising socialist antipathy for the private initiative is here coupled with the implicit cultural downgrading of “oriental” craftsmen and their products as not even properly “oriental.” Despite this, a dichotomy is construed between socialist and “of good quality” on the one side and unhygienic and “oriental” on the other. This became even clearer in 1950 when Yugoslavia was taking the first steps towards the establishment of self-management. In December 1950 MLO confessed that the treatment of confectioners during nationalization in 1948 was exaggeratedFootnote 17 and private business restrictions were gradually loosened in the following year. Still, a similar dichotomy between “oriental” and “non-oriental” persisted, now between the “regular” and “oriental confectioners,” both working in the private sector. For instance, Aleksa Aleksič,Footnote 18 an “oriental confectioner” born in 1895 in Gostivar, North Macedonia, was denied a license in December 1951 with the argument that “the existing regular pastry shops provide quality products in sufficient quantities and meet the cultural needs of our city.”Footnote 19 The implicit premise was that “oriental” pastry shops provide products that are of lesser quality and do not necessarily meet the local “cultural needs.” I will focus more closely on the notion of “culture” in the next section. For now, it suffices to note that the importance of “culture” was reflected by the craftsmen themselves. In their requests and complaints, some argued that they chose to settle in Slovenia because “in other republics, there is less culturedness [kulturnost] and education,”Footnote 20 while others assured the authorities that they have “settled in Ljubljana,” provide esteemed products and that their “premises met hygiene and cultural requirements in every aspect.”Footnote 21 The statements of “oriental confectioners” do not aim to address some abstract notion of culture. By emphasizing “settledness,” “culturedness,” and education, they challenge the orientalist depiction of the Orient as nomadic and backward, a mental scheme familiar from the literature (Todorova Reference Todorova2009, 162). I argue that using such discourse, “oriental confectioners” sought to signal to the authorities that they embraced (socialist) modernity and affirm the idea that Slovenia was more “cultured” than other parts of the country.
Unsatisfactory hygiene was the most common, but not the only prejudice against the “oriental confectioners.” Some examples included vague references to suspicious behavior. In a trade inspection of Ilmi Rufatovič’s premises in March 1952, an inspection paraphrased the statement given by an employee stating that “in the upper parts of the premises, people of unknown residence and origin often gather, primarily from other republics. They frequently store various items with the owner of this pastry shop.”Footnote 22 The report concluded without concrete findings, but stated that people in the premises “facilitate the gathering of various elements [of people].”Footnote 23
Suspicion and derived conclusions were not always that vague and tentative. In the Grosuplje area southeast of Ljubljana, there were two “oriental confectioners,” Nezir Durmiš and Ferad Mustafa. The former operated in the village of Stična and the latter in the town of Grosuplje proper.Footnote 24 The executive committee of the Peoples’ District Council (Okrajni ljudski odbor, hereafter OLO) advocated for the revocation of licenses. It produced two almost identical documents for each craftsman, arguing that the license holder is still young, with no family in Slovenia, and could be more gainfully employed somewhere else. “Unlike the locals that are engaged in socially useful work [družbi koristno delo],” the statement continued “the craftsman is wandering around, having nothing to do although being healthy and able, and is thereby setting a bad example for the rest of the working population in Stična [Grosuplje].”Footnote 25 The statement effectively served to draw a distinction between the locals and outsiders. The locals are implicitly perceived as hardworking, but at the same time at risk of corruption by the “wandering oriental confectioners” that are implicitly deemed “lazy.” This statement mirrors the perception of “oriental confectioners” as “social deviants,” and thereby echoes the interwar legacy of distinguishing between “proper” and “deviant” jobs, where having the former was regarded as a moral and social duty (Petrungaro Reference Petrungaro2022).
Interestingly, even the municipal authorities challenged this differentiation. The Ljubljana commissioner for industry did not accept the suggested revocation of licenses, arguing that the stated reasons are legally insufficient for the revocation. Additionally, he suggested to OLO Grosuplje officials: “In the future, please better consider who you will issue a license to, so that you will not regret it later.”Footnote 26 The commissioner’s warning is not a call for upholding the rules, rather, it is practical advice on how to apply the law in a way to legally achieve the goal of removing the craftsmen from the two towns. This is clearly visible as he then suggests applying the law on residential and commercial premisesFootnote 27 to justify revoking their licenses. Similarly, one can easily imagine that hygiene, too, could serve as a useful category for the administration when searching for a legal excuse to revoke or deny a license to unwelcomed “oriental confectioners” regardless of the actual hygienic conditions.
The article has so far mostly dealt with the perspective of local officials. I have shown multiple ways in which “oriental confectioners” were discriminated against. I linked their treatment to the preexisting orientalist tropes which formed the authorities’ perceptions of the migrant craftsmen as “oriental” and thus “suspicious” and “unreliable.” In the following section, the focus will broaden to include the voices of migrants themselves, showing that they were not without agency.
Leveraging socialist morality to negotiate “Brotherhood and Unity”
During archival research, I uncovered numerous other examples of the same exclusionary practices not only in Ljubljana but in other parts of Slovenia as well. To merely continue with showcasing examples of injustice, however, would risk “reinforcing otherness” and re-othering oriental craftsmen as “victims of circumstance” (Schenk Reference Schenk2021, 403). In the (post) Yugoslav context, a postcolonial perspective has facilitated the social history of Yugoslavia to move away from what Archer termed “methodological Yugonostalgia” (Archer Reference Archer, Bieber, Galijaš and Archer2014, 145). Maria Todorova has warned, however, that “the emancipatory mantle of postcolonialism all too often serves as a cover for the perpetual lament of self-victimization” (Todorova Reference Todorova, Bradatan and Oushakine2010, 181).
With this in mind, the present section argues that the relationship between the state and the craftsmen was not unidirectional and one of mere discrimination. Rather, I seek to show how craftsmen could in fact negotiate better conditions by articulating why they should be entitled to a license. With this struggle, “oriental confectioners” were negotiating inclusion into socialist modernity by addressing what they understood were the foundational socialist values or socialist morality. New social and political circumstances brought about by the advent of socialism were reflected by the craftsmen when (re)applying for a craft license. The new emerging order had its specific morality. In order to negotiate their inclusion into the urban economy, I argue, craftsmen engaged in what they perceived to be the postulates of such socialist morality in the Slovenian context.
The concept of socialist morality, while mentioned in discussions of Yugoslav state socialism (Archer Reference Archer2013), has not yet been thoroughly conceptualized in existing literature. This article delves into the four predominant types of arguments made by “oriental confectioners” to identify foundational postulates of socialist morality for this specific case study. These postulates highlight the perceived essential values that form the basis of the emerging socialist society: universal material well-being, socialist labor, cultural compatibility, and equal citizenship. I will now present how adhering to each of these values was invoked during the oriental craftsmen’s negotiation of inclusion into the Yugoslav urban environment.
Material welfare
When (re)applying for a craft license, “oriental confectioners” would often stress the importance of the possibility of working as craftsmen for the material survival of their families. One craftsman for instance argued:
I must care for a large family, including my wife, sister-in-law, [and] mother-in-law. Four underage siblings’ children, whose mother has died, are also living with me […] All of them would be left without my support, and subjected to poverty and left to fend for themselves, which makes the rejection of my request unfounded also from a social perspective [socialnega vidika].Footnote 28
By pleading for a license, craftsmen were thus not asking for almsgiving but were seeking the means to take care of themselves and their families with their labor. For instance, Kasan Arslanovič, in June 1953, stated: “The social position [socialni položaj] of my family, which is now frankly threatened due to a modest income, directly dictates that I again take up my craft and earn an honest livelihood.”Footnote 29
One might argue that alluding to poor material conditions does not yet constitute an appeal to socialist values. Certainly, such allusions existed before socialism, but I claim that now, they could be tied more explicitly to the raison d’être of the new society. For instance, when applying for a license in 1955, Murat Ali argued: “With the approval of this request, not only will my family and I be relieved of a difficult situation, but I will also, with love for the mentioned work, contribute my share to the socialist development of our beautiful homeland.”Footnote 30
The example shows that the interests of craftsmen were sometimes tied to the broader interests of the socialist society as a whole. The material well-being of all working persons, be they factory workers or independent craftsmen, is here framed as an important element of socialist morality. Similarly, the next segment will present how “oriental confectioners” argued that their work benefited not only their personal well-being but also other working people more broadly.
Socialist labor
Looking at the first successful craft reapplications after the nationalization of 1948, I noticed that the gradual loosening of restrictions only began in early 1951. In the following years, it was important for craftsmen to justify how their craft would fit into the socialist economy and society. For “oriental confectioners,” this meant distinguishing their products from competitors by stressing their affordability. Redžep Redžepovič, who worked in Kamnik, argued in 1954 that, unlike the high-end socialist confectionary, his company “aims at the less wealthy sections of society which are forced to act frugally.”Footnote 31 Milaim Fetahi in Ljubljana went even further and tried to explicitly align his business with the anticipated socialist postwar modernization, arguing that his products are affordable and an especially “important aspect of the working people’s diet [važen prehranski moment delovnega ljudstva],” adding that socialist progress will increase demand for them.Footnote 32 Interestingly, he argued that the “products are cheaper primarily because they [“oriental confectioners”] use their own [family] workforce and regularly work overtime.”Footnote 33
In essence, Fetahi argued that private business does not contradict the socialist sector but supplements it. A study of Albanian (fast-food) kiosk culture in socialist Velenje affirmed this very dynamic by showing that Albanian businesses supplemented the social sector when its catering facilities lagged behind the scale of urbanization (Kladnik Reference Kladnik, Fotiadis, Ivanović and Vučetić2019, 227). Similarly, I noticed during oral history research that Albanian fast-food kiosks and cafés during socialism were often located close to factories, military barracks, or workers’ accommodation (samski dom). This affirms that Albanian businesses indeed supplemented the social sector by providing cheaper products to a specific segment of the population with lower purchasing power. The mediatory role of ethnic businesses in allocating products to the poorer strata of society was explored within the middleman minority theory (Bonacich Reference Bonacich1973). In that context, Fetahi’s reference to cheap products due to family and overtime labor is not surprising. Proponents of the middleman minority theory have argued that such business models usually rely on self-exploitation (Bonacich Reference Bonacich1993). What is different in the present case is that apart from weighing market forces, the task of “oriental confectioners” was also to align themselves with the emerging socialist morality. Having so far discussed the material aspects of socialist morality, I will now present its cultural dimension.
Cultural compatibility
Socialist morality did not stand alone, it was anchored in a wider perception of the cultural values of the host society. The terms kultura and kulturnost denote a type of civility but are not easily translatable to English. “Having culture” (imeti kulturo) or “being of culture” (biti kulturen) relates to Norbert Elias’s (Reference Elias1978) conception of the civilizing process.Footnote 34 The arguments against “oriental craftsmen” used by the authorities, implicitly differentiated between the “culturally appropriate” “regular confectioners,” and “culturally inappropriate” “oriental confectioners.”
In December 1951, a license was denied to Berzat Beadinovič, after whom a confectionary shop was later named and still stands in Vrhnika today (called Berzo). The justification of the MLO stated no need for new oriental sweet shops, adding that “the existing regular confectioner’s shops provide a sufficient amount of quality products and meet the cultural needs of our town.”Footnote 35 Similarly, Nezim Gafur Zečirovič, born in Pirok, North Macedonia, was denied a license by MLO in August 1954, on the grounds that:
… since the city of Ljubljana is the center of all economic and cultural life [in the People’s Republic of Slovenia] […] issuing confectionery craft licenses to private individuals would not provide sufficient assurance for operations in accordance with strict sanitary service regulations and for the exemplary appearance of business premises.Footnote 36
In this case, it is important to note that despite the lack of explicit mention of “oriental confectioners,” the extensive analysis of numerous documents from both “regular” and “oriental” confectioners showed that sanitary considerations were referenced only in the case of “oriental confectioners,” and never in the case of “regular” confectioners. In the case of Zečirovič, these considerations were mentioned as a preventative measure for denying a license in advance.
The hierarchies applied by the authorities with the “cultured/uncultured” dichotomy were so pervasive that even the craftsmen themselves discursively reproduced it. When “oriental confectioners” speak of themselves as “being cultured” or “meeting cultural standards,” they do not only refer to their awareness of the local customs but also signal atonement to socialist morality and recognition of the constructed socio-cultural hierarchies in Slovenia, for instance, balkanism. Nezim Kasamovič, working in the trade for over 20 years, argued for a license on the grounds of being experienced and “fully settled” in Ljubljana, adding that his “products were appreciated, and the premises met hygiene and cultural requirements in every aspect.”Footnote 37 He concludes by stressing “culture” once again: “I will run the establishment in a way that will fully match the reputation of our city with quality products and cultural service.”Footnote 38
While accusations of poor hygiene are the most obvious iteration of the “cultured/uncultured” dichotomy, Kasamovič’s example offers insight into another topic: the importance of being settled in Slovenia as opposed to having strong ties to the place of origin. Emphasis on being “fully settled” is a reaction to the orientalist understanding of the Muslim/oriental other as problematically “nomadic” (Todorova Reference Todorova2009, 49). It is then of no surprise that Berzat Beadinovič argued:
I am not one of those who recently moved here from Macedonia with a desire for fast and abundant profit. Rather, I am an honest craftsman who has lived in Slovenia for the last 12 years. I have become completely accustomed [aklimatiziran] to life here and have no intentions of returning to Macedonia.Footnote 39
While the municipal authorities regarded “oriental confectioners” as culturally incompatible with the local environment, the abovementioned examples show that craftsmen were not without agency. They attempted to negotiate inclusion by alluding to sameness — presenting themselves as well-integrated and respected members of the community with all the necessary “cultural requirements” needed for their inclusion into the emerging version of Yugoslav socialist modernity. The next section, however, will show that it was possible to negotiate inclusion by not only showcasing sameness but also by invoking difference.
Equal citizenship
Socialist Yugoslavia’s inter-ethnic policy was based on the idea of national and republican equality. The principle of equality, summarized by the official slogan ‘Brotherhood and Unity,’ made national difference a constitutive element of Yugoslav unity under socialism. It was eventually operationalized as national and republican proportionality (ključ) in government employment (Woodward Reference Woodward1995, 101). Despite not standing at the center of their arguments, equality along national lines was one aspect of equality that “oriental confectioners” demanded. While the place of origin of “oriental” craftsmen was a geographically very small and contained area, the diversity of identities with which they called for equality was surprisingly extensive. As a reaction to disadvantageous treatment, oriental craftsmen were demanding to be treated as equals regardless of their ethnic (Albanian), republican (Macedonian), religious (Muslim), or administrative (oriental) identity. Ethnic and national identities of Muslims in the post-Ottoman Balkans developed with a “delay” (Bieber Reference Bieber2000; Neuburger Reference Neuburger2004). This trend was particularly evident in early socialist Macedonia where the identities of Muslims were not fully settled even several decades into socialism (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2004, 568). This is also reflected in the viewpoints expressed by craftsmen.
Upon unsuccessful application for a license in March 1954, Zečirovič complained to the authorities with the following argument:
By nationality, I belong to the Albanian minority [šiptarskaFootnote 40 narodna manjšina] in Macedonia. As such, I was marginalized [zapostavljen] under all regimes. It is therefore appropriate that in the current social system, for which I fought [in the Partisans] for years with arms in [my] hands, I obtain employment that corresponds to my professional qualifications.Footnote 41
Similarly, Kasan Arslanovič from the Albanian-speaking village Dobri Dol emphasized his Macedonian identity:
I was imprisoned [during WW2] for the sake of my nationality [narodnosti] as a Macedonian […]. I completely adapted to Slovenian customs and habits [običajem in navadam], and life in Slovenia came into my blood. Now, after 25 years, I should not be deprived of the possibility of further craftsmanship, especially given the fact that I fulfilled all duties as a citizen of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and also as a citizen of the People’s Republic of Slovenia.Footnote 42
Here, Arslanovič is clearly complaining that he was a loyal and “unproblematic” Slovenian and Yugoslav citizen. Next, he broadens the problem by warning against the disadvantageous treatment of “oriental” compared to “regular” confectioners:
As I noticed, four craftsmen have already been awarded a craft license, but none of us Macedonians. Why this neglect [zapostavljanje], when we were fulfilling the same duties as others in the People’s Republic of Slovenia? Are we perhaps a less valuable nation [manj vredna nacija] in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, where full equality must prevail? There is inconsistency [nelogičnost] here, and I think that this inconsistency points to some illegitimate bias [nedovoljena pristranost] and belittles [omalovažuje] us southerners [južnjaki].Footnote 43
Even today, the label “southerners” (južnjaki) continues to be employed in Slovenia as a geographical derogatory term aimed at migrants from other (post)Yugoslav republics (Stanković and Zevnik Reference Stanković and Zevnik2011, 354). Moreover, bureaucratic actions against those regarded as “non-Slovene” drastically escalated in 1992 when newly independent Slovenia administratively erased 25,671 previously Yugoslav citizens with a permanent residence in Slovenia, basically making them undocumented migrants overnight without their knowledge (Kogovšek and Petković Reference Kogovšek and Petković2010).
Before continuing with the last section of Arslanovič’s letter, I want to briefly investigate the implications of the four postulates of socialist morality discussed above. While the cases do not provide an exact and definitive answer to the nature of othering and the precise reasoning behind the discrimination, they do offer insight into a set of characteristics that the craftsmen themselves perceived as potentially undesirable for the authorities. Quite possibly, in the eyes of the local officials, “oriental” blended with “Albanian,” “Macedonian,” “Muslim,” and “southern.” The intersection of these identities, however, made Albanians particularly susceptible to orientalist and balkanist othering.
Arslanovič’s letter was concluded with a warning to the local authorities:
[I]n case that my appeal is not considered [neuvidevnost], I will be compelled to submit an application to the relevant higher authorities and present to them the situation regarding us Macedonians in the light of the true factual state, as I feel disadvantaged [prikrajšan] and harmed [oškodovan] due to such a blanket explanation.Footnote 44
Consequently, the republican minister for industry, Tomo Brejc, got involved. He rejected claims of national discrimination citing the constitution which guaranteed equal treatment. Even though Arslanovič’s complaint was unsuccessful, it shows that he was testing out different arguments. Additionally, his threat to go to superior authorities was not coincidental. It was precisely by appealing to the republican institutions that many other “oriental confectioners” were indeed successful. Oral history accounts confirmed that negotiations of a similar kind took place in later decades as well. Describing his father’s approach to bureaucratic obstacles, an interlocuter from Ljubljana said that Albanian craftsmen would “many times play the card of ‘Brotherhood and Unity.’ If they wanted to open a business, but were denied for whatever reason […] Albanians would often say: ‘So, no Brotherhood and Unity for Albanians? I will have to escalate this issue with Belgrade. [Aha, znači za nas Albance nema bratstva i jedinstva, sad ću ja za Beograd]’.”Footnote 45
In the final part of the article, I connect my findings to the discussion about race in socialist Yugoslavia. Although we can interpret the discrimination by local authorities as a form of (cultural) racism, I will make the case that complaints of “oriental confectioners” encouraged the republican authorities to resist racialized othering by sticking to socialist principles.
“Oriental others” or “Yugoslav brothers”? Racial and oriental thinking between policy and legacy
So far, the article has laid out a clear picture of how authorities in early socialist Slovenia orientalized Albanian craftsmen. In this section, I will discuss the implications of the findings for the debate on the construction of difference and othering in the Balkans. This debate has recently seen a surge in postcolonial applications of race to the region. I want to explore if the established concepts of orientalism and balkanism employed in this article can be complemented with race as an analytical tool to help us better understand the experience of Albanian migrants in the role of “oriental confectioners.” Was the treatment of Albanians in early socialist Slovenia informed by racialized thinking and did Albanians at the time experience (cultural) racism? To answer these questions, I first look into the locations within the state apparatus where exclusionary tendencies were occurring, however, I also account for instances of inclusionary treatment. Firstly, I show how the emerging socialist state was split between two opposing tendencies, and, secondly, I argue that any use of race and racism in accounting for the Albanian experience in Slovenia must be attentive to nuance in order for its application to benefit the aforementioned discussion without oversimplifying it.
In accounting for the discriminating treatment experienced by Albanians, the article avoided the simplistic scheme of the oppressive state and its helpless victim. Rather, by focusing on the agency of the craftsmen, I argued that despite exclusionary practices of the local state, “oriental confectioners” were negotiating their inclusion by aligning themselves with the perceived postulates of socialist morality. I now want to show that (successful) negotiation was possible first and foremost due to different dynamics between different levels of administration. Discrimination, I argue, was mainly occurring in the domain of the local, municipal state. When escalation involved republican authorities, however, the chances of a successful outcome increased.
By highlighting the nonuniform nature of the nascent socialist state, I am addressing not only the racialized and orientalizing workings of the Yugoslav state but setting the terrain for a broader inquiry into its internal limits to racial or orientalist othering. Similar to Wright’s (Reference Wright2022) argument on Yugoslavia’s reflexive attitude towards Yugoslav racism when confronted by the grievances of black students, I want to highlight the importance of questioning how and when the Yugoslav state reflected or acted against its own racializing or orientalizing of Albanians as “oriental confectioners.” Following Tanja Petrović’s call to incorporate ambiguities into writing the histories of Yugoslav socialism (Petrović Reference Petrović2016), I find it crucial to explore how opposing tendencies coexisted, and which institutions they inhabited.
Exclusionary municipality and inclusionary republic
Unlike with municipal authorities, my analysis of the republican level does not find evidence of the use of orientalist tropes. On the contrary, as I show, republican bodies occasionally even remarked that the municipal treatment of “oriental confectioners” was unacceptable. It is thus insufficient to think that the only agency “oriental confectioners” exerted was deploying this or that argument in line with socialist morality. Some of them must have realized the differences between the ways municipal and republican authorities operated, and, in turn, strategically leveraged this discrepancy to increase their chances of (re)gaining the right to operate a private business.
That municipal authorities were not always on the same page with the higher (republican or federal) bodies is visible in a report from January 1952 during a financial revision ordered by the municipal authorities for Ilmi Rufatovič’s business. The report stated that Rufatovič “received preferential treatment in the allocation of this premises based on recommendations from the federal and republic ministries.”Footnote 46 Why Rufatovič received preferential treatment is unclear. His example shows, however, that municipal authorities sometimes had to bend to decisions of higher instances when it came to “oriental confectioners.” Milaim Fetahi’s case is an even clearer example of this. He was a middle-aged confectioner from Pirok. Unsatisfied with the competition, “regular” (Slovene) confectioners Ivan Režek and Rudolf Steine filed a complaint against Fetahi, against which he protested.Footnote 47 This was not the only complaint of “regular” against “oriental confectioners.” Most of them, however, mirrored the language used by MLO and did not reach any higher instances of power. In this case, a response came from the Control Commission of the Bureau for Proposals and Complaints in the People’s Republic of Slovenia.Footnote 48 The commission supported Fetahi by arguing that “there is no oriental pastry shop close to the establishment which he is requesting a craft license for. In Ljubljana, there are many people from various parts of our country who are accustomed [navajeni] to the pastries made by the applicant.”Footnote 49 The republican authorities thus recognized the value of the “oriental pastries” for the capital city, since they were a sought-out commodity, especially for a part of the non-Slovene population. Fetahi’s example thus shows that, in certain contexts, being “oriental” could actually serve as an advantage. In the case of “oriental confectioners,” Slovene republican authorities, therefore, applied a more inclusionary approach. Moreover, they occasionally even directly criticized the arguments used by the municipality, as in the following case. In denying licenses, the MLO would occasionally rely on the supposedly professional opinions of the local Chamber of Crafts. In one such example, Bari Nezirovič was denied a license with MLO echoing the Chamber’s opinion on his business’ unsatisfactory hygiene.Footnote 50 The Republican Bureau for Complaints intervened to Nezirovič’s benefit by criticizing the decision as being:
… a guild-like position [cehovsko stališče], because it denies licenses to ‘oriental confectioners’ with the justification of being unhygienic. If he [Nezirovič] will keep the premises unhygienic, he can be penalised later or warned through sanitary inspection. Buyers are also attentive to this issue, and he will have to deregister the craft if he loses customers.Footnote 51
This example illuminates a clear difference in terms of how hygiene was deployed by different levels of the state. Numerous examples in the previous sections show that local authorities weaponized hygiene against “oriental confectioners” in a manner easily described as racializing, especially when accusations of unsatisfactory hygiene were used preemptively for the entire group. Nezirović’s example, however, illustrates that republican authorities moved the issue of hygiene into the realm of universalism, where unsatisfactory hygiene is not assumed but established by a clear protocol and rules, and, interestingly, affirmed by customers.
Rather than reproducing the us/others, cultured/uncultured, hygienic/unhygienic dichotomies to distinguish between “regular” and “oriental” confectioners, republican authorities produced an argument that made both groups two sides of the same Yugoslav body, thereby creating space for practicing Yugoslavism in everyday life (Mlekuž Reference Mlekuž2023; Spaskovska Reference Spaskovska2014, 249). What is reflected in this example is relevant beyond Albanians in socialist Slovenia. Despite the lack of parliamentary democracy, Yugoslav citizens found avenues to address their grievances. The strategy of voicing them by appealing to higher instances was already showcased by scholars in the case of workers’ complaints against social inequalities (Mihaljević Reference Mihaljević2019) or in letters to Tito (Jović Reference Jović2020). It is thereby unsurprising that othering and discrimination could also be resisted by prompting the state into a reflexive attitude towards its internal othering tendencies. Considerations of the republican bodies paid more attention to the “Yugoslav” dimension of the new state and were more amenable than the municipalities whose interests were more localized. Even though the strategy to appeal to the republican authorities was by no means automatically successful, it offered a framework within which agency was exercised.
To summarize, Albanian confectioners were not only passive recipients of disadvantageous treatment. Further, upholding socialist morality was not the only avenue to improve their chance of success. Rather, they could also maneuver through different levels of decision-making, escalating their grievances with the republican authorities when deemed beneficial. Moreover, they tried to negotiate better prospects by switching between different registers of arguments familiar from the previous section: from the rights to material well-being and equality to the compatibility of their businesses with both Slovenian culture and the socialist economy. Oral history research has hinted that some of these arguments, especially calls for “Brotherhood and Unity,” proved more successful over time.
Racialized confectioners? Possibilities and limits of race as a concept
Considering the finding that inclinations to discriminating treatment were expressed but also criticized from within the Yugoslav state, what does this reveal about the sources of perpetual discrimination and orientalist attitudes towards Albanians in socialist Yugoslavia? The socialist period as a whole enabled a segment of Yugoslav Albanians to escape poverty and achieve upward social mobility. Yet, discrimination and suspicion towards Albanians continued. Possible sources of the Yugoslav state’s suspicion towards the “oriental confectioners” were numerous and ever-changing. The limitation of the craft-related archival material is that it offers insight only into the early socialist period when the “oriental” character of the trade seemed most suspicious. Rory Archer’s (Reference Archer2023) exploration of Croatia, however, showed that the Yugoslav secret police in the 1980s saw the same category of craftsmen and businessmen as a security threat, mainly due to the potential nationalism and irredentism of the craftsmen as specifically Albanian subjects. This stands in contrast to the case of “oriental confectioners” where “oriental” intersected with “Albanian,” but also with “Macedonian,” “Muslim,” and “southern.” While it seems that the perception of Albanians in Yugoslavia was shifting from “oriental” others to Albanian others, is it possible to meaningfully add race as a category of future inquiry that will help us explain Slovenian discrimination toward Albanians during socialism?
For nearly a decade after World War II, confectioners in Slovenia remained administratively categorized as “regular” and “oriental.” This underscores the analytical relevance of orientalist rather than “national” and “nationalist” categories in the early socialist period. Slovenia has been continuously under Hapsburg rule for centuries. “Oriental confectioners,” however, were Muslims from post-Ottoman territory. The treatment of Albanian confectioners in Slovenia — particularly the alleged cultural and hygienic deficiencies — mirrored a balkanist historical legacy of the Hapsburg Empire. Introducing the idea of “frontier orientalism,” as a specifically Hapsburg phenomenon, Andre Gingrich stressed how orientalism “is not only the product of imperial elites, but also simultaneously a deeply rooted component of folk culture” (Gingrich Reference Gingrich2013, 62). Taking an even broader perspective, not only did the Balkans not escape the broader, European developments caused by the rise of global colonialism, but the region also produced its own interest in race and eugenics (Promitzer, Trubeta, and Turda Reference Promitzer, Trubeta and Turda2011), to which the notion of hygiene was integral.Footnote 52 Arguing for the centrality of race in understanding the Balkans, Bjelić (Reference Bjelić2018) showed how eugenicist and racial discourses entered the Yugoslav/Balkan region in the interwar period. By focusing on Albanians, other authors already thematized Yugoslavia’s attitudes towards Albanians as an instance of (cultural) racism (Krasniqi Reference Krasniqi2021; Rexhepi Reference Rexhepi2023), often seeing Albanians as the most racialized group in socialist Yugoslavia, alongside the Roma (Baker Reference Baker2018, 73). Is it accurate and productive to understand the experience of “oriental confectioners” in a similar vein?
The introduction of race and postcolonial theory is valuable since it positions the othering practices and repressive policies of Yugoslavia against Albanians in a wider, global context. What complicates the picture in this article, however, is thinking about potentially racializing practices together with successful attempts of negotiating “Brotherhood and Unity.” The archival sources analyzed above lead me to distinguish the positions and actions of different levels of power, which allows the analysis to uncover instances of racialized thinking, but also cases of antiracist tendencies. Without accounting for both, there is a danger of cherry-picking examples that will either confirm or deny Yugoslavia’s racism or antiracism, and there are certainly enough examples to claim one or the other. Additionally, caution is vital not to conflate heterogenous trends when it comes to race. For instance, despite Bjelić’s (Reference Bjelić2018) contribution to racial and eugenicist discourses in the Balkans, Ana Cergol Paradiž’s (Reference Paradiž2016) historical analysis of the interwar eugenics movement in Slovenia reveals that, unlike in the West, debates among Slovene eugenicists did not extensively concern racial differences. Similarly, Petrović warned about the limits of applying race as an analytical category in the context where locally-produced hierarchies might be analytically more valuable and intellectually more productive (Reference Petrović, Gruber, Jesner, Krasniqi, Pichler, Promitzer and Jesner2021a, 89–99). While these warnings do not definitively foreclose the application of race in this article’s case, it is important to note that scholarship dealing with the Yugoslav antagonisms towards Albanians (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2004; Ströhle Reference Ströhle, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016) focused more on the inability of Yugoslav socialist modernization to offer a viable and attractive vision of inclusion for Albanians (Pichler Reference Pichler2021). Both perspectives have merit and are not mutually exclusive. Based on the exploration of the exclusion of “oriental craftsmen,” I too argue that socialist authorities diminished Albanians as “oriental” and “Balkan” others, which indeed “resembled Western European cultural racism” (Baker Reference Baker2018, 73). Having avenues to resist these practices within the framework of Yugoslav socialist morality, however, leads me to draw a parallel between the Yugoslav approach to modernization with developmentalist thinking more generally. Both were exacerbating differences and perpetuating oppression at one end while offering itself as a framework and language to be appropriated by the oppressed at the other end (Cooper and Packard Reference Cooper, Packard, Cooper and Packard1997). This parallel is all the more important considering how often Yugoslavia approached Albanians and Albanian-populated regions through paternalistic developmentalist thinking as if being on a “modernizing mission.” Despite this ambivalent conclusion, it is worth stressing that on so many occasions, as history has shown, Yugoslav modernization ultimately failed to include Albanians as equals. For many Albanians, the idea of Brotherhood and Unity ultimately lost its substance during the growing repression in SAP Kosovo and SR Macedonia during the 1980s.
To summarize, bringing the agency of the craftsmen into the equation and focusing on the negotiation process rather than merely on the discrimination highlighted the importance of the institutional context within which the othering occurred. The analysis of the negotiation thus uncovered the factors that limited the disadvantageous and potentially racializing othering. In the case of “oriental confectioners” in early socialist Slovenia, republican authorities acted as such a limiting factor. These findings are thus as much about Albanians as they are about (early) socialist Yugoslavia.
Conclusion
This article argued that the exclusion of “oriental confectioners” in early socialist Slovenia went beyond the communist antipathy towards private initiatives that were perceived as potentially antisocialist. Accusations of unsatisfactory hygiene, cultural and economic incompatibility of craftsmen and their products with the local environment, as well as general suspiciousness towards “southerners” resulted in numerous discriminatory measures that stripped Albanian migrants of the means to sustain themselves and their families. Albanian migrants were treated disadvantageously not only as private craftsmen but also as “oriental” others within the framework of orientalist and balkanist perceptions inherited from the past and deeply ingrained in the nascent socialist authorities’ thinking. Despite discrimination, however, evidence shows that the state’s treatment was not uniformly discriminatory. “Oriental” craftsmen were occasionally able to negotiate inclusion into the Slovene urban economy if they resorted to arguments in line with the dominant understanding of socialist morality. In spite of top-down Yugoslav policies against private businesses and crafts, the republican authorities were amenable to craftsmen’s arguments referring to the right to material well-being and equality, as well as arguments for cultural and economic compatibility with the Yugoslav socialist state-building project. By focusing on the reactions to discriminatory treatment, I argued that “oriental confectioners” were not without agency. On the contrary, many resisted the exclusion and continuously attempted to negotiate inclusion into the urban economy by switching between different arguments and strategically distinguishing between different levels of administration. Frequent successful outcomes of such resistance show that republican authorities were less orientalizing and keener on upholding socialist principles. Aligning with the values of socialist morality allowed the “oriental confectioners” to effectively argue for their inclusion. In the concluding discussion on the nature of othering, I argued that concepts of race and (cultural) racism might be analytically valuable in understanding the Albanian experience of Yugoslavia but only if the analysis takes into account the nonuniform character of the state and contradictory tendencies that both allowed for, but also resisted, (racial or oriental) othering of Albanians.
By providing an account of how Albanian “oriental confectioners” negotiated inclusion in early socialist Slovenia, the article has advanced the nascent scholarship on the social history of Albanians in socialist Yugoslavia. It contributed to the otherwise understudied subject of lived experiences of “ordinary” Albanians outside Kosovo and North Macedonia, and beyond the frames of political crisis and ethnic division. Additionally, the article analyzed discriminatory practices of socialist authorities in tandem with the “oriental confectioners’” resistance to these practices. It thereby built upon the rich scholarship on othering in the Balkans, advancing the literature with an account of practices of resistance that were unfolding within the framework of socialist modernization rather than against it. Going beyond the national and ethnic antagonisms in the Yugoslav Southeast, the evidence presented in this article affirms that the marginalization of Albanians in socialist Yugoslavia extended to the northwest as well. By presenting cases of negotiated inclusion, however, the article transcends frequently simplistic accounts of Albanians as complete outsiders to Yugoslav socialism and its project of socialist modernity.
Although this study is focused on Slovenia, it also opens further questions about the similarities with the lived experiences of Albanian migrants elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Were Albanians, for instance, experiencing similar patterns of exclusion in the Muslim-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina, or, conversely, in former Hapsburg Vojvodina? Both places were common destinations for Albanian migrants from Polog but had different historical legacies. Future research therefore has the potential to explore how Albanians understood socialist morality and to which extent they were able to negotiate inclusion into Yugoslav socialist modernity outside the geographical scope of this article.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2025.16.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the support and feedback from Rory Archer, Robert Pichler, Lana Jurman, and Aleks Ranković.
Financial support
Research for this article was generously supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P32345.
Disclosure
None.
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