This book challenges conventional wisdom about labor migration during the Cold War era, revealing a complex landscape of mobility that transcended the supposed rigid boundaries between socialist and capitalist worlds.
Drawing on rich case studies from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Yugoslavia, the contributors demonstrate how the Cold War’s unique socioeconomic and political context fostered unexpected experimentation and adaptation in labor mobility policies and practices. Rather than a simple story of restriction versus freedom, this collection reveals how institutional actors across both blocs functioned as agents of globalization, navigating a terrain where competition and collaboration often coexisted.
By examining labor migration as both lived experience and state- regulated phenomenon, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how Cold War rivalries shaped human mobility within and across ideological divides. The research presented here underscores the importance of integrating both Western and non- Western perspectives when assessing the history and enduring legacy of international labor migration during this pivotal period. This book is an essential resource for scholars of migration studies, Cold War history, labor economics, and global politics.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Labor History.
Table of Contents: Introduction: The Cold War of labor migrants—Opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond 1. The regulation of international migration in the Cold War: A synthesis and review of the literature 2. Gendering migration in a patriarchal society: Assisted female migration from Greece during the early post-war period 3. Mapping the mobility of Azerbaijani Soviet engineers: Linking West and East? 4. On the forest front: Labor relations and seasonal migration in 1960s-80s 5. From anti-imperialism to multiculturalism. (Post)-migrant media in postcolonial France 6. ‘They were like soldiers’: The case of the Polish builders in Czechoslovakia and their perception by Czechs (1967–1990) 7. Theory and process of socialist migration: Local enmities and international friendships in the Vietnam-Bulgaria relations (1975–1985) 8. Albanian labor migration, the Yugoslav private sector and its Cold War context 9. The export of know-how at the (semi-)peripheries: the case of Yugoslav–Iranian industrial collaboration and labor mobility (1980–1991) Afterword
