Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late Nineteenth Century . By Ulf Brunnbauer

Abstract

During the great nineteenth-century labor migrations, over half of all Croats and Slovenes working in the United States eventually returned home. The figure was still higher for Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Turks. In his sweeping work, Globalizing Southeastern Europe, Ulf Brunnbauer assesses the impact of these returnees and the migration regimes that guided and monitored their behavior. Viewing this movement through the prism of sending countries, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the Ottoman Empire and the newly formed independent states in between, Brunnbauer traces the interplay of individual and familial decisions, state-building projects, and the fortunes of nationalist movements over a century of transatlantic interactions. He analyzes the migration patterns and popular memories that culminated in the resurgence of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter to North America in the 1960s. As Brunnbauer depicts it, migration from the village was neither exceptional nor traumatic for most peasant households but reflected individual and communal choice or rational reactions to moments of crisis. Travelers did not take to the road because of larger demographic or economic shifts, though such trends played a role, nor were they victims of nefarious migration agents hawking steamer tickets and false promises. Rather, networks of information and assistance from local priests, innkeepers, and notaries paved the way; letters and stories from migrants themselves communicated the lure of America. In the end, migrants “pushed and pulled on their own” (83), says Brunnbauer. Independent émigré activity continued in the founding of mutual aid and charitable societies to help keep migrants in touch with home villages and to maintain their status as a “constitutive part of the native household” (110). These associations (totaling over 1,100 separate bodies for Slovenes in the United States alone), Brunnbauer argues, were unlike anything workers had experienced before leaving home, reflecting a spirit of self-organization that belies “the notion that migrants are only victims of circumstances” (104).