Travel for ordinary comforts

Abstract

The article focuses on the co-constitution of political subjectivities, political regimes and global political economy by exploring experiences of international travel by ordinary Yugoslav citizens. Political non-players (Ashis Nandy (1998) The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press)) and their everyday practices are key protagonists in the narrative of border crossings, migrations, translocations and regime sustenance. Taking a cue from Peter Taylor's (Modernities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)) analysis of ‘ordinary modernity’, the article examines the ways in which foreign travel helped create ‘ordinary comfort’ for ‘ordinary citizens’ in the Yugoslav communist experiment. The temporal focus is on the 1970s—time of grave economic crisis in Western Europe and the United States—and, thanks to petro-dollar debt, the time of unprecedented prosperity and largesse in Yugoslavia. By looking at the variety of ways ordinary Yugoslavs travelled abroad and the representations of ‘abroad’ at home, the article explores the ways in which inostranstvo (the foreign world, the international) and its imaginary came to the rescue of the national, and how the liberty of travel (always contrasted to the ‘prison’ of other communist countries) obfuscated political and economic problems within.