Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)
Damir Jelic: “Living in the neighbourhood” - Economic Relations between Capitalist Austria and Socialist Croatia in Historical Perspective
"Living in the neighbourhood” In 1971, there were almost 260,000 citizens of socialist Croatia working outside Yugoslavia. 201,000 found a job in Europe while 57,000 emigrated to the USA, Australia, Canada and other countries outside Europe. However, only 5.6 percent - or 13,760 - went to Austria where there was a high demand on the Austrian labour market. There is no doubt that Austria could be a perfect country for temporary emigrants as it was not far away from Croatia. Surprisingly, migrants from Croatia and even from northern Croatian counties mostly avoided emigrating to nearby Austria.27 Compared to Germany and Switzerland, Austria offered much lower salaries, though the quality of jobs was also lower (not only the industrial sector but also in agriculture and in tourism people were needed — sectors which were not really attractive to Croatian workers). In addition, it is important to note that the Austrian labour market was very much ethnically segregated, thus offering foreign workers often only little possibilities for personal development.2* The economic relationship with the Austrian market was strongly influenced by Croatian temporary emigrants. Almost 170,000 Croatians worked in Germany and travelled frequently through Austria. There were also 25,000 workers from Bosnia in Austria. A significant number of them travelled through Croatia and often, especially those of Croatian nationality and origin, bought houses somewhere in Croatia. All those emigrants started to adopt western European consumption and lifestyle habits. They also spread these habits throughout their neighbourhoods, thus influencing many relatives and friends in Croatia. Taking into account that Germany was much further away than Austria, most of the “hunger for western goods and services” was satisfied in Austria. Flirting across the Iron Curtain There are some forms of small-scale economic relationships between Croatia and Austria that cannot be left unattended. In general, they cannot be found in statistical material but they are worth analysing because they, too, had significant financial and cultural effects. Shopping During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, some Austrian towns near the border of socialist Yugoslavia flourished because of “cross-border shoppers”. The shopping sprees of Croatian citizens in the borderland towns of capitalist countries had already started in the late 1960s. In the first decade of cross-border In those counties the ratio between temporary emigrants to Austria and all temporary emigrants was 26.5 percent for Cakovec, 16.5 for Varazdin, 20.2 for Ivanec, 20.7 Ludbreg and 11.3 Novi Marof. zs See Fass man , Heinz: Arbeitsmarkt Mitteleuropa - Die Rückkehr historischer Migrationsmuster. (Wien, 1999). 261
