Losing the global: (Re)building a Bosnian enterprise across transition

Abstract

This article charts the rise and fall of Yugoslavia’s global economic project through the case of Energoinvest, a large enterprise in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This company was the protagonist first of a ‘leap outwards’, embedded in Yugoslavia’s economic partnerships with the Global South. After a brief phase of reforms, its operations were halted abruptly by the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. Afterwards, the company was at the centre of two clashing visions of post-war economic development, and two different sets of notions about what the future configuration of Bosnia’s post-socialist economy should look like. Should the country rely on its previous socialist-global giants, or should it turn to SMEs development? This debate reveals a complex and long-term discussion about the prospects of post-socialist semi-peripheries in the global economy, about notions, visions, and expectations of ‘globality’, and about the legacies of socialist globalisation after the collapse of state socialism.