A Bridge to the West: Yugoslavia as a Transit Country for Czechoslovak Emigrants from the 1960s to 1980s

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F19%3A10421451" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/19:10421451 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=7HzZfqFtZj" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=7HzZfqFtZj</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

A Bridge to the West: Yugoslavia as a Transit Country for Czechoslovak Emigrants from the 1960s to 1980s

Original language description

Based on the analysis of documents from the archive collections of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav government and party institutions, this research paper deals with the phenomenon of the Czechoslovak citizens&apos; emigration to the West through the territory of socialist Yugoslavia. The chronological focus lies in the 1970s and 1980s, in the period of Czechoslovak normalisation. At the beginning, the normalisation authorities limited the travel to Yugoslavia for economic and political reasons. One of the political reasons was the attempt to stop Czechoslovak citizens from using tourist stays in Yugoslavia to emigrate to the West. The Communists considered the emigration of ČSSR citizens to be a negative phenomenon. From their point of view, emigration was a workforce drain and damaged the national economy. It also undermined the legitimacy of the socialist system and the current establishment, whose own citizens preferred to live in the capitalist countries. But during the 1970s, the political leadership, headed by Gustáv Husák, revised their attitude towards travel to Yugoslavia. Czechoslovak tourism was important for the economic relations with Yugoslavia, which was one of the most important partners of ČSSR in foreign trade. Giving the citizens an opportunity to spend a holiday on the Adriatic Sea was also an important gesture and aimed to support the population&apos;s positive attitude towards the Communist Party and the socialist system. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Czechoslovak leadership put a lot of effort into getting their Yugoslav partners to promise that they will prevent the illegal emigration of Czechoslovaks through Yugoslavia. However, the 1981 agreement was ineffective. The Yugoslav path in the 1980s and before was one of the important means of Czechoslovak emigration to the West. Regardless of this fact, the number of Czechoslovak tourists in Yugoslavia increased all the time and in the mid-1980s tourists from Czechoslovakia were one of the five biggest groups of foreign visitors to Yugoslavia. The research paper follows different ways of crossing the Yugoslav borders by Czechoslovak tourists, the changes in the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav policy in dealing with this phenomenon, and the work of the Belgrade UNHCR office.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA17-26471S" target="_blank" >GA17-26471S: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 80s. Political, Social and Cultural Interactions and Mutual Reflections in the Period of Late Socialism</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Střed

ISSN

1803-9243

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

11

Issue of the periodical within the volume

2

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

26

Pages from-to

61-86

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85083217011