Introduction: Talking Past Each Other and Other Catch-22 Situations: States, Emigration, and “Diasporas”

Abstract

Neither migrants nor minorities always behave the way their governments want them to. This reality is a lesson that Yugoslavia, in both its embodiments, frequently made—amplified by the fact that both the interwar kingdom and the post-war communist regime pursued ambitious nation-building projects. These projects addressed not only the domestic population but also emigrants coming from its territory. In a region where minority issues and migration intersected in complex ways, such projects could go only wrong, one might have predicted. And they often did when policymakers and local bureaucrats struggled with inherently contradictory agendas.