The Cold War and Return Migration: The West German Response to Yugoslavia's Efforts to Influence its Workers Abroad

Abstract

Every state that signed a labour-recruitment agreement with West Germany attempted to exert influence over their citizens who lived in West Germany. But because most of the states with which West Germany signed agreements – with the exception of Italy – were ruled, at least for a time, by dictators or military juntas, the efforts by sending states to influence their citizens abroad at times proved problematic for the democratic and liberalizing West German state. This article examines West Germany's response to Yugoslavia's efforts to ‘govern the seventh republic’, that is, to exert a profound influence upon its citizens in West Germany. It focuses on the establishment, operation, and West German response to Yugo Clubs, institutions with which Yugoslav officials sought to bind their citizens more tightly to the Yugoslav state. This history represents, in some ways, a distinctive case, because Yugoslavia was the only communist state with which West Germany signed a labour-recruitment agreement. Shifts in the Cold War context, and especially the rise of détente and Willy Brandt's new Ostpolitik during the late 1960s, are thus critical to understanding West Germany's response to Yugoslavia's efforts to influence its citizens abroad. During the 1960s, West German officials, fearing a communist infiltration, resisted Yugoslavia's efforts to assert influence over Yugoslav labour migrants. But with the emergence of détente in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, West German officials supported Yugoslavia's attempts to influence Yugoslav guest workers, even when some troubling aspects of these efforts came to light. Finally, some German officials supported the clubs because they believed they would keep Yugoslav guest workers closely linked to their homeland, thereby increasing the likelihood that they would eventually return home. This belief, in turn, supported the West German fiction that it was not a land of immigration.