Dissertation
Self-Managed Tuzla: The Development of a Working Class City
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2015
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/117168
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to analyze the workers’ movement in socialist Yugoslavia. The target area is the urban center of Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia. Tuzla was perhaps the “most” socialist city in the country of Yugoslavia, as evidenced by the fact that secularism flourished and cooperation between many ethno-religious groups persevered, while other large urban centers and regions of Bosnia disintegrated into a destructive civil war in the 1990s. World War II caused enormous damage in Yugoslavia, with millions of casualties and the disappearance of much of its industrial base. Industrialization and urbanization followed and reached their peak in 1980, under the ideological guidance of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The city of Tuzla, with its ethnic, religious, and geographic diversity, not only recovered from WWII, but also developed perhaps the strongest socialist political base in the entire country. When Yugoslavia implemented workers’ self-management in 1950, the working class assumed official sovereignty, in contrast to the statist, centralized form of socialism in the Soviet Union. This project thus seeks to explore the workers’ movement in Tuzla between the late 1800s and the early 1960s, which oversaw the appearance of an industrial working class, the politicization of that working class, World War II, the reconstruction of the region, the nationalization of industry, the introduction of workers’ self-management, the emergence of the working class as an official social class with governing power, and the development of socialism as source of collective identity. It also seeks to understand how Tuzla reacted to events that led to the breakup of the country of Yugoslavia.
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Details
- Title
- Self-Managed Tuzla: The Development of a Working Class City
- Creators
- Amir Selmanovic
- Contributors
- Brigit Farley (Advisor)Raymond Sun (Committee Member)Steven Kale (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- History, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 220
- Identifiers
- 99900581524401842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation