Albanian labor migration, the Yugoslav private sector and its Cold War context

ABSTRACT This contribution explores the case of Yugoslav Albanians working in the private sector in late socialist Croatia and the ways in which their involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast was shaped by Yugoslavia’s position in the Cold War context as well as domestic political dynamics. Such dynamics include the securitization of Albanians across the country following the violently quelled 1981 student demonstrations in Kosovo and the perennial suspicion held by the authorities towards private business in general, and Albanian owned private businesses in particular. The key argument advanced is that Albanian involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast, as well connections to diaspora communities in Western Europe, facilitated (micro)economic activity and mobility between nonaligned Yugoslavia, capitalist liberal democracies of Western Europe and, increasingly, by the 1980s, neighboring Warsaw Pact states. Methodologically, the research is based on the triangulation of archival documents, regional printed press and oral history interviews to demonstrate how Yugoslavia’s liminal non-aligned position and market socialist economy offered opportunity (as well as notable constraints) to Albanian private business owners and their workforces in the Cold War era and its immediate aftermath.


Introduction
In the last decade of Yugoslav socialism, one of the most significant patterns of internal labor migration was that of Albanians from the country's southeast (Kosovo and Macedonia) to the more developed republics in the northwest of the country (Croatia and Slovenia). By the late 1980s, tens of thousands of Albanians had migrated to the Yugoslav northwest and were proportionally over-represented in the nascent private sector, including in hospitality, crafts and construction. While legal, private business was anathema to Yugoslav socialist morality. Consequently, Albanian business owners and their workforces, largely made up of kin networks, were mostly excluded from political participation in the League of Communists and other institutions of selfmanaging socialism centered on workplaces in the social sector (analogous to the state sector in other socialist countries).
This paper examines the case of Yugoslav Albanians employed in the private sector in late socialist Croatia and the ways in which their involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast was shaped by Yugoslavia's position in the Cold War context as well as domestic political dynamics -chiefly, the securitization of Yugoslav Albanians throughout the country following the violently quashed student demonstrations of 1981. Albanian private businesses were a frequent target of the Croatian security services in search of Albanian 'irredentists and counterrevolutionaries' (most often imagined rather than real) throughout the 1980s. Yugoslav Albanian communities in Croatia also served as nodes between the homelands of Kosovo and Macedonia and 'guestworker' and émigré communities in capitalist Western Europe, blurring the demarcation between international and domestic migration. Furthermore, as Yugoslav passport holders, some Albanians were able to act as 'go betweens' in cross-bloc economic activity. With many Albanians working in customer-facing roles in the tourist industry in Yugoslavia, connections were made with individual foreign tourists from both sides of the Cold War divide.
This study of Yugoslav Albanians in the private sector and its Cold War context engages with three blind spots in the labor history of socialist Yugoslavia, a subfield which has burgeoned in the last decade. Researchers are revisiting the literature on the Yugoslav experiment of self-managing socialism and linking it to the agenda of Global Labor History (Brunnbauer, 2016(Brunnbauer, , 2016Rutar, 2014;Siefert, 2020), new methodological approaches and considerations (Archer & Musić, 2017;Vukliš, 2020) and contextualizing labor in Yugoslavia through comparison to the broader (post-) socialist Eastern European neighborhood according to the logic that the creation of a modern industrial working class was a prerequisite of socialism (Archer & Musić, 2020, 20). A new cohort of scholars has conducted extensive archival and oral history research mapping out the role of labor in Yugoslav socialism and its demise with a particular emphasis on the factory as the locus of not only economic life but also with significant political and social functions (Bonfiglioli, 2020;Borovo Group et al., 2018;Musić, 2021;Schult, 2017;Troch, 2022) and as a site where the gendered nature of labor is visible (Kirin & Blagaić, 2013;Matošević, 2010Matošević, , 2019. Other scholars focus on Yugoslav labor outside the country, revisiting and expanding on the 'Gastarbeiter' labor migration to capitalist Western Europe and North America (Bernard, 2019;Brunnbauer, 2016;Le Normande, 2021). In line with the problematization of East-South connections and alternative forms of globalization (see, e.g., Calori et al., 2018;Calori, 2020;Mark & Betts, 2022;Mark et al., 2020), scholars have also began to tackle issues like Yugoslav economic engagement with the Global South and the bidirectional flow of labor in the Non-aligned states (Spaskovska & Calori, 2021;Spaskovska, 2018;Stubbs, 2023).
With the development of an increasingly robust historiography of Yugoslav labor, some blind spots remain. One underexplored constituency is that of workers in the private sector. Unlike Warsaw Pact states, comparatively liberal socialist Yugoslavia facilitated the development of a modest private sector. In 1983, 315,669 Yugoslavs were employed in these small businesses. 1 Many more women and men worked informally in the private sector without ever being registered -including quite a few of the over 1.2 million unemployed workers who were seeking employment by 1989 (Statistički godišnjak Jugoslavije, 1990, p. 149). A second blind spot is that of labor and social history of Yugoslav peripheries. With some exceptions (e.g. Troch, 2022) there is a strong emphasis on reconstructing the history of work in larger, Serbo-Croatian (and Slovene) speaking industrial heartlands at the expense of Yugoslavia's peripheries and non-Serbo-Croatian speaking lands, namely Macedonia and Kosovo. In the expansive literature examining the social and everyday history of Yugoslav socialism published in the last 10 or 15 years (cf. Grandits & Taylor, 2010;Luthar & Pušnik, 2010;Patterson, 2011) an emphasis is placed disproportionately on the beneficiaries of socialism in the Serbo-Croatian (and Slovene) speaking Yugoslav core, at the expense of accounting for more ambivalent state-society relations in Yugoslav peripheries and among its non-Slav population. Lastly, a third blind spot relates to the history of border crossing and consumption between Yugoslavia and its Warsaw Pact neighbors. Despite a robust historiography of tourism and cross-border consumption (Duda, 2010;Grandits & Taylor, 2010;Patterson, 2011) and in particular the phenomenon of Yugoslav shopping and small-scale smuggling across the Italian border in Trieste (Luthar, 2021;Mikula, 2010), cross border interactions between Yugoslavs and tourists from Warsaw Pact countries are largely unexplored. This paper seeks insight into these three blind spots through the case study of Albanian private business owners and their workforces in Croatia. The key argument is that Albanian involvement in tourism and private business on the Adriatic coast, as well connections to diaspora communities in Western Europe, facilitated (micro)economic activity and mobility between non-aligned Yugoslavia, capitalist liberal democracies of Western Europe and, increasingly, by the 1980s, neighboring Warsaw Pact states. Yugoslavia's liminal non-aligned position and market socialist economy offered opportunity (as well as notable constraints) to Albanian private business owners and their workforces in the Cold War era and its immediate aftermath. The article also gives voice to Albanian business owners and their workforce who tend to emphasize a culture of hard work contrasted with an allegedly lethargic social sector (and later public sector) and often facing uncooperative local authorities who deemed private business to be a legal but problematic category according to the dominant morality of Yugoslav self-managing socialism.
This work is part of a larger research project investigating intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration. 2 Methodologically, the article is based on the triangulation of archival documents (at the federal, republican and regional levels), print media accounts and oral history interviews narrators conducted in Croatia and Kosovo between 2019 and 2022 involving 30 biographical accounts of individuals who lived and worked in Croatia in late socialism. 3

Albanian migration to Croatia from the Yugoslav Southeast
Albanians were the largest non-Slavic national community in Yugoslavia, reaching up to 8% of the population by the 1980s (Statistički godišnjak Jugoslavije 1990, p. 129). This means that in the final years of Yugoslav socialism, Yugoslavia's Albanian population was larger than the national categories of Montenegrins, Yugoslavs and possibly Slovenes and Muslims (Bosniaks) to become the third or fourth national group in the country on the eve of the Yugoslav collapse. 4 Unlike the other national communities of Yugoslavia mentioned above, Albanians were not constitutionally categorized as a nation (narod) whose homeland was inside Yugoslavia but as a nationality (narodnost) who, like Hungarians, Italians or Turks, had an external homeland.
Predominantly rural in origin, Albanian labor migrants gravitated to industrial centers around the country in search of work, particularly from the early 1950s when a liberalization of residence registration coincided with industrial expansion across Yugoslavia (and nascent tourism along the Adriatic coast). Albanian migration to the Yugoslav northwest occurred in tandem with Albanian participation in Gastarbeiter migration to Western European countries from the late 1960s. Croatia was an important node in these transnational migration flows. Like Slovenia, its location near the Italian and Austrian borders with Yugoslavia ensured that many Albanians would temporarily stay in Croatia while travelling between Kosovo or Macedonia and Western Europe. Internal and international migration processes transformed the traditional model of male labor mobility (gurbet/ pečalbarstvo) which dominated much of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century in Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans (Hristov et al., 2012, p. 11).
In the European history of migration, Ulf Brunnbauer (2016, p. 7) notes that the Balkan region stands out since the 19th century -'no other part of Europe has displayed such a high level of migration activity'. Holm Sundhausen (2006) sees the history of the region as a history of migration. A considerable body of scholarship examines Albanian migration patterns, both from Albania proper as well as from Albanian inhabited areas of Yugoslavia and successor states (Kosovo, Macedonia) to Western Europe, North America and Turkey (e.g. King & Mai, 2008;King et al., 2005;Mai & Schwandner-Sievers, 2003;Pezo, 2013;Vullnetari & King, 2011). What remains unexplored, is the widespread intra-Yugoslav migration of Albanians during socialism. While certain occupations were stereotyped as Albanian in Yugoslavia, such as jewelers, bakers and pâtissiers (Kladnik et al., 2019;Nikolić-Đerić & Orlić, 2014;Rajković & Geci, 2017), Albanians were of course active in many other professions, contributing to the post-war reconstruction and industrialization of the country (Škiljan, 2021).
A rough periodization of the migration of Yugoslav Albanians to Croatia post-1945 takes the following shape. In the 1950s and 1960s, Albanian craftspeople, small business owners and workers moved to the republic in modest numbers, largely through informal kin networks and chain migration running external to the institutions of the party state and self-management. Under Yugoslav interior minister Aleksandar Ranković (the third most powerful man in the country after Tito and Edvard Kardelj), Kosovo was run as a police state under Serbian minority control and the (forced) migration of Albanians to Turkey was encouraged in the 1950s (Pezo, 2013;Vickers, 1998 p. 149). Many Catholic Albanians in Croatia today describe their migration to Croatia in this period as a corollary of this coercive migration policy. With Muslim neighbors migrating en masse to Anatolia, where were Catholic Albanians to depart for? With channels to Western Europe limited until the roll out of 'guestworker' schemes in the late-1960s, migration to Croatia served as a desirable compromise according to many contemporary Catholic Albanian oral history narrators.
The rapid development of industry and tourism in Croatia in the 1960s and 1970s, and a rise of living standards in Kosovo coincided with the dismissal of Ranković in 1966, immediately leading to wider freedoms for Yugoslav Albanians. Word spread in towns and villages in Kosovo and Macedonia about opportunities on the Adriatic coast and in larger urban centers. Young men could find seasonal work in hospitality or construction with relative ease. Families might decide to sell agricultural land, and male family members could try their luck in opening a business, funded by the proceeds of land sales. In most cases, their families would remain in Kosovo and Macedonia, visiting during school holidays which coincided with the summer tourist season. Craftsmen whose businesses were flourishing on the coast, in Zagreb and the larger continental towns of Croatia, integrated workshops in Kosovar cities like Peja, Gjakova and Prizren to their business operations. Wealthier families could operate premises on the coast and also in Kosovo or Macedonia with a near seamless transfer of materials and labor between the Southeast and the Northwest of the country now that the repressive political atmosphere in Kosovo had eased. Yet, this process of labor migration was occurring largely without any party-state institutional oversight.
Writing about Albanian labor migration to Western Europe in the post-WWII era, Isa Blumi (2003, pp. 952-3) argues that Kosovar Albanian labor migrants were rendered institutionally invisible by processes of 'second-tier migration' which saw them recast as Turkish or Yugoslav labor migrants. Only by the 1980s, did their accumulation of economic capital in Western Europe combined with a politicization of the post-Ranković generation in the wake of the violence experienced by protesters in Pristina during 1981, lead to the articulation of an Albanian identity, a rise of political activism and organization in the diaspora (ibid. pp. 960-2). Within Yugoslavia, the migration of Albanians to Croatia was also largely invisible in an institutional sense. It became an issue to be addressed by republican and municipal organs of the party-state only after the brutally quashed 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo (Hetemi, 2020 p.142-152;Vickers, 1998 p.197-202) elevated Albanian dissatisfaction with the political status quo to one of the most pertinent Yugoslav political issues inthe post-Tito era. The extensive studies of both internal Yugoslav migration patterns and Yugoslav migration to Western Europe from the 1960s onwards, did not meaningfully account for Albanian participation. For example, in a detailed annotated bibliography compiled by the sociologist of migration Silva Mežnarić (1984) in which she annotates 171 scholarly works on migration (both within Yugoslavia and to Western Europe), not a single publication directly addresses Albanian migration.
From biographical details contained in archival documents and revealed through oral history interviews conducted by the author in recent years, no single trajectory of Albanian migration from the Yugoslav Southeast to Croatia dominates. My initial assumption was that many Albanians would have found employment in the social sector and worked in industrial centers of Croatia with some then raising capital to start a private business. However, what appears to be more common was the practice of selling off a limited amount of highly priced agricultural land in Macedonia or Kosovo and using these funds to start a business in Croatia while maintaining the extended household working in agriculture in the homeland. As one narrator, Safet Kadri, owner of a hospitality business in Medulin near Pula, recalls 'in the 1970s and 1980s land was highly priced in Macedonia . . . I remember in the 1980s the sale of a 2,500 m2 piece of land [in the Tetovo region] was enough to buy an old ruin [štala -stable] on the Adriatic for 50, 70 or 100,000 Deutsch Marks and turn it into a business premises.' 5 The third-generation owner of a family café in Poreč cited a similar processscarce agricultural land in Western Macedonia was quite expensive so by selling part of it, a family could buy a modest property on the Croatian coast and launch their business. 6 Alternatively, other Albanian business owners first lived and worked in Western Europe, raised capital, returning to Yugoslavia to open family businesses on the Adriatic coast or continental Croatian towns while maintaining a household in Kosovo or Macedonia. Kadri explains: 'After 1969 when more people went to Germany, they would send money back. One son might work there (in West Germany) and send money home while others opened a business on the Adriatic'. 7 By the 1970s and especially during 1980s, more male relations and even entire families would move permanently to Croatia.
I consider that the 1981 student demonstrations in Kosovo impacted upon Albanian migration to Croatia in two significant ways. Firstly, the deteriorating political and socioeconomic conditions in Kosovo (and Macedonia) prompted migration in ever greater numbers. Families who had previously maintained their primary base in the Yugoslav southeast and operated a business in Croatia on a seasonal basis had a greater motivation to move permanently. Secondly, with the official (federative) Yugoslav interpretation that the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo were 'counterrevolutionary' and an illegitimate expression of nationalist excesses, anti-Albanian sentiment across the country grew and security services followed the activities of potential 'irredentists' closely, including in Croatia. Several state-wide security operations tackled nationalist Albanian groups during the 1980s focusing on Yugoslav-based illegal movements and Albanian émigrés in Western Europe and North America who had (alleged) links to the People's Republic of Albania and other anti-Yugoslav émigré organizations, namely Croatian ultra-nationalists and fascists. As part of the Yugoslav wide clampdown on alleged Albanian nationalism, the previously laissez-faire approach on the part of the Croatian authorities towards Albanian migrants changed virtually overnight and private business owners found themselves to be of particular interest to the security services who explicitly linked private businesses to alleged Albanian 'irredentism and counterrevolutionary activities' to use the authorities' parlance of the day.

Northwest Croatia: between the homeland and Western Europe
As the security services in Istria frequently stated after 1981, the region was a waypoint for Albanians travelling between their homeland in Kosovo and Macedonia and the diaspora communities of Western Europe. Istrian towns like Poreč, Rovinj and Pula were 2 hours by car from the Italian border near Trieste and a few more hours to the Austrian border in the vicinity of Graz and Klagenfurt. Though Istria was part of the same Yugoslav state as Kosovo and Macedonia, with citizens having the right to move freely within its borders from the 1950s, the economic and political climate was notably different in late socialism. Istria was one of the wealthiest regions of Yugoslavia reaping the profits of mass tourism, while Kosovo was the poorest part of the country and under martial law from 1981. Political problems in Kosovo also negatively impacted state-society relations for Albanians in Macedonia (Pichler, 2021 pp. 303-306) so there was a notable disjuncture between the coercive conditions in the southeast and relative prosperity of more liberal northwest Yugoslavia.
The region of Istria was a prime stopover location for extended networks of Albanian friends and family who found themselves en route to the United States and closer European destinations like West Germany. In some cases, the initial goal would be a stay in a refugee camp in Italy or Austria. A Poreč jeweler recalled that his father had once considered taking the family to such a camp in Italy with the plan to continue to West Germany, Sweden or the United States which he believed was an option for Albanians in the immediate decades after World War II. When tourism developed however, 'things were no longer so bad, so we stayed here.' Nevertheless, as a child in the early 1960s he has vague memories of many people staying in his family house as guests on their way from Kosovo to America. 8 In fact, the delineation of the categories of refugee, international migrant, domestic migrant and private business owner were frequently enmeshed in practice with individuals moving between these roles during their lives. A 1988 report from the Republican Secretariat for Internal Affairs of Croatia illustrates this well. Ali Hasan, one of the protagonists of the report, was born in 1934 in Tenovo village near Tetovo, Macedonia. By 1988, he was living and working in France where he ran an ice-cream shop and was married to an Albanian woman with whom he had three children and owned a modest family house in the suburbs of Paris. That year, he was a guest of a prominent Albanian business owner in Poreč and reported his passport as lost or stolen during the visit. The speed at which the French Embassy in Yugoslavia rectified the situation was interpreted by the security services as evidence that he must have connections with French intelligence services. Hasan had lived in Istria until 1960. In the village of Vodnjan, near Pula, he ran an ice-cream parlor with his brother until he departed 'for unknown reasons' to Italy where he spent a few months in a refugee camp near Trieste before moving to France. In Macedonia, another brother of his remained, while his sister lived in the vicinity of Zagreb. Despite having a business in France, Hasan was interested in opening another ice-cream shop in Istria even casually suggesting going into business with the very individual who was informing the Yugoslav security services of the activities of Albanians in Poreč (himself an ice-cream maker from Macedonia. 9 Returned migrants from Western Europe certainly had an advantage when opening a business in Istria or building a family home in that hard currency savings from their work could be used to buy a premises and outfit the business. As part of an investigation into Albanian nationalism in Croatia in the mid-1980s, the security services scrutinized thousands of Albanians. The Pula branch of the security services reported on 'K.V', born in 1947, near Kumanovo, Macedonia. He left Macedonia in 1972 and moved to Austria where he found work at a glass-making factory in Vienna. He met a woman from Croatia, employed at the same factory, and the pair soon married and had two children. In 1980, the family bought a plot of land in a village outside Pula and by 1983 the house was completed. His wife lived there and took care of the house and children, while 'K.V.' remained in Vienna. He owned a flat and a car, spoke German well and the security services possessed no 'negative knowledge' about him nor his family. 10 Ultimately, 'K.V.' was not deemed to be a security threat, but his trajectory was not uncommon -leaving the Yugoslav southeast for Western Europe only to return to Istria to buy property and set up a family life there while remaining on the radar of the zealous security services by virtue of this ethnicity.
For other individuals, a return to Yugoslavia might have come following deportation from a Western European country. Instead of returning to Kosovo or Macedonia, temporary work in Istria could serve as a more desirable alternative. For example, 'U. Sh.', a man in his early twenties from Tenovo near Tetovo, reportedly moved Poreč to work as a waiter after being deported from Switzerland in the summer of 1988. 11 In his case, mobility was not considered by the security services as a priori suspicious but rather as a potential asset. Having deemed 'U. Sh.' to be 'a very intelligent and stable individual', the Macedonian branch of the Yugoslav security services was considering recruiting him as an informant who could cooperate on the Albanian community's political activities.
Two restauranteurs in the Istrian town of Rovinj detailed how they entered the hospitality business upon their families' return to Yugoslavia after working in West Germany. The parents of one business owner from near Gjakova in Kosovo worked in an Opel factory but wished to be closer to their homeland. In 1975, they bought a modest single-story house near the waterfront in Rovinj from the savings made in Germany and started a pizzeria, helped by a cousin then living in New York City who owned a pizzeria there and could provide the 'know how' for a family without previous experience in hospitality. The first customers were a mix of curious locals and foreign tourists with 'T.G.' declaring that Gastarbeiter like his parents were 'ambassadors of Yugoslav tourism' encouraging Germans to holiday on the Adriatic. Unusually for a restaurant in the North Adriatic, it is named Pashtrik -a large mountain on the Kosovo-Albanian border. The narrator explained how his parents wished for a name which was 'autochthonous for the restaurant, like the names "Restoran Zagreb" or "Restoran Jugoslavija" in Germany . . .. And Pashtrik is where we are from, so why not name it after that!' 12 The name of the restaurant was conditioned by the family's Gastarbeiter experience in Germany, adhering to a practice of naming business premises after toponyms from their place of origin.
Another Rovinj restauranteur from Kosovo had worked in Germany for a decade before visiting Istria as a tourist and deciding to settle down there in 1973. As a Catholic, 'R.N' felt he was in a double bind when it came to seeking employment in his hometown of Gjakova. Although Gjakova was a budding industrial center with '36 factories for 40,000 people', he could not find work. 'All those in power were Serbs and Muslims . . . for a Serb you are an Albanian, for an Albanian Muslim you are a Catholic.' 13 The narrator instead moved to Germany working in a variety of fields, including hospitality. Upon moving to Rovinj it took him nearly 2 years to build the premises up as a restaurant and arrange the necessary permits to start operating in 1975.
What kind of impressions did Albanians from Kosovo and Macedonia have of the land they moved to? Interviews in the newspaper Nedjeljna Dalmacija provide a rare insight into the views of young Albanians on the Adriatic coast and their attitudes towards Croatia. In many cases, respondents are positive and affirm their experience in the republic. Twenty-one-year-old Riza Haliti, having tried to seek work everywhere across the country, claimed that Croatia was the best place for Albanians in Yugoslavia.
You know in Slovenia . . . yes there are better wages, but they look at you like you are infectious [zaražen]. In Belgrade and Niš [in Serbia] the pay is weaker, and someone always provokes you and looks at you strangely. We are at peace only here [in Croatia], even with the police with whom I really have no problems. 14 For others, Croatia was a steppingstone to capitalist Western Europe. An anonymous worker at the green market in Split described how he had no interest in 'keeping to tradition' and returning to Kosovo to marry, but neither did he wish to remain in Croatia. His plan was to depart for Western Europe as soon as possible and he was saving and attempting to arrange his paperwork from Croatia. 'We all say that we are getting on well here. And that is true. But listen, here I am still a foreigner. I just work and sleep. In some foreign country it cannot be any different, but I would be able to earn a lot more.' 15 Pula-based silversmith 'A.F' indicates the interconnected nature of migration between Western Europe, Croatia and the Albanian homelands in Kosovo and Macedonia, again emphasizing an inherent work ethic. While Istria (and Croatia generally) as a site for Albanian private businesses benefited from the unfettered flow of cheap seasonal labor from Kosovo and Macedonia, many such businesses also relied on capital from the Albanian diaspora in Western Europe. For some business owners, the relative wealth of Croatia and the proximity to both the homeland and Western Europe rendered it a desirable location. In Istria and Kvarner one could remain formally in Yugoslavia but under far better economic and political conditions than in Kosovo or Macedonia.

Albanian private business owners on the Croatian Adriatic coast
Most Yugoslavs found work in the social sector [društveni sektor], the equivalent of the state sector in other state-socialist countries. Yet unlike its Warsaw Pact neighbors, the private sector in Yugoslavia was a legal form of employment. As the author of a semi-official guide to operating small businesses states in the volume's introduction, this sector should be considered as legitimately within the bounds of Yugoslav self-managing socialism: If workers in small businesses, working with increased efforts, create wages [ostvaruju lične dohotke] which provides them with higher living standards, then that should be supported as a positive tendency and not criticized or qualified as a danger of enrichment because with richer workers our socialist society is also richer (Andrejević, 1984: 23).
In practice, however, the authorities viewed the private sector with skepticism. Albanians in Istria and Kvarner, the regions of Northwest coastal Croatia with per capita the highest number of Albanians in the socialist republic, tended to be disproportionately employed as private workers [privatnici]. The proportion of Albanians employed in the social sector was reportedly 'negligible' in Pula, Istria's largest city, something both archival documents and oral history accounts concur with. 17 Most Albanians found employment in private businesses specializing in hospitality and crafts. Gold and silversmiths and ice-cream parlours are mentioned as are sellers of fruit and vegetables and informal labor in construction. Both Yugoslav security services and print media produced by and for Albanian migrants in Croatia attest to such trends. 18 Muslim Albanians from the Macedonian region of Polog, a conurbation of villages between Tetovo and Gostivar, specialized in confectionary, ice-cream and general hospitality businesses like cafes and grills. Gold and silversmiths tended to be Catholic Albanians from the towns and villages of the Dukagjini region (Metohija in Serbo-Croatian) like Prizren, Gjakova and Peja. Bakers were most commonly from the Has region of Kosovo, Catholic and Muslims alike. Construction workers and those working in other professions came from across Kosovo and Macedonia.
In the north Istrian municipality of Buje encompassing the tourist center of Umag, local authorities reported in 1988: 'Most members of the Albanian nationality work in particular areas outside of the social sector. According to our operative estimates, 90% of the nationality is either in possession of a private business or is employed in one. ' 19 Figures suggested that at least 54 small businesses were owned by Albanians in the area. 20 In Poreč, the Croatian tourist town with the largest proportion of Albanians relative to its population, the few Albanians working in the social sector were officially registered, while the majority of Albanians who worked in the private sector were not registered at all, 'and in fact avoided registration' according to the local communists. 21 Of 44 Albanians who registered a private business in Poreč, there were 22 ice-cream parlors, 17 jewelers, two leather shops and three souvenir shops. No exact figures were available for informal seasonal stands selling fruit, trinkets, portrait drawings and other various items, but many were reportedly run by Albanians. 22 Construction was another sector employing Albanians in the Yugoslav northwest. Some construction firms were registered in Kosovo but operated in Istria and employed unskilled Albanian workers who were not reported to the authorities and whose presence was cited as representing 'a meaningful security problem' according to the security services in Pula during 1988. 23 A high number of labor migrants would find accommodation privately, often in large groups of which only few would register their presence. Such accommodation served, according to authorities, to facilitate transient co-ethnics. 'In this category most often appear law breakers, particularly during the tourist season.' 24 Local authorities in Croatia made a direct link between the suspect category of private business owners and employees, and (alleged) networks of Albanian nationalists and more general criminality. In Poreč, the municipal authorities claimed bombastically: We have information, though it is difficult to prove, that they abuse workspaces [poslovni prostori] wherever it is possible, they are prepared and do not chose the method and means by which they achieve their goal. This can be giving bribes, selling hard currency, smuggling and connections to the extreme émigré groups. 25 Security services in Pula, reporting on the so-called 'Albanian complex' in Istria in 1988, very clearly reveal a cognitive link on the part of the authorities between Albanian-owned private businesses, criminality, tourism and the proximity of Yugoslavia's borders to Western European states: The most interesting group are those owners of private businesses (ice-cream parlors, jewelers) due to their exceptional[ly high] material status. It is indisputable that such a status is partly the consequence of one's own work in combination with favorable conditions of a touristed region which enables the gaining of an enviable financial result. However, information received also suggests that a meaningful number of Albanian owners of private businesses gain huge earnings on the basis of malversations, illegal currency exchange, bypassing regulations and especially through smuggling. The problem of smuggling various goods is widespread, including smuggling in weapons. For these businesses, further opportunities are offered by fact that it is a border region, the large frequency of foreigners and the possibilities enabled by local border traffic [malogranični promet]. 26 Municipal authorities in Buje and Umag similarly stressed the alleged connection between Albanian private businesses, criminality and nearby state borders: A number of members of the Albanian nationality are prone to bribes and corruption. Here especially to be mentioned are owners of craft and hospitality businesses . . . . Most often they are inclined to giving bribes and goods and money, through small gifts to inspection, administrative and other authorities. Everyone is overwhelmingly more inclined towards illegal trade, particularly members of the Albanian nationality born in Macedonia (Tetovo, Gostivar and other places). Most often they engage in illegal trade between Italy and Yugoslavia in goods like household machines, musical and other instruments -goods lacking on our market. They bring in the goods through illegal channels by sea and by land, in collusion with the customs authorities. The received goods are then sold on across Yugoslavia. We also confirmed that some individual Albanians resell hard currency or bring in illegal dinar amounts to Italy, exchanging dinars to hard currency and coming to a high profit. 27 Albanian disinterest in participating in the public life of their local communities was a perennial bone of contention. Very few were members of the League of Communists and generally they did not participate in party-state institutions and self-management institutions. One Istrian local authority report on Albanians in the 1980s stated: The alleged inwardness of the group was a problem for security operatives who tracked their activities in Croatia closely after 1981. In addition to the problem of not understanding the Albanian language, security operatives in Pula complained of 'isolation, distrust and closedness of the group and, as a rule, their non-participation in any kind of social activities in their places of residence.' 29 Municipal authorities and security services regarded Albanians as insular and believed that since the 1981 'outbreak of the counterrevolution in Kosovo' informal but suspicious gatherings of Albanians in Istria were observed. Albanians were allegedly exchanging their views, commenting to one another about the situation and 'distancing themselves from the non-Albanian population.' 30 With regard to the views of the Istrian population towards Albanians, 'Various comments and revolts from the non-Albanian population relating to the dominant characteristic of the behavior of members of the Albanian community are present. They relate to the intensive buying of property, regardless of the price, and enormous enrichment.' 31 Historian of the Northern Adriatic, Pamela Ballinger, writes about how Rovinj's 'natives' lambasted the increasingly visible of presence of Bosnians and Albanians in the old town during socialism and in the postsocialist era. 'Loose talk in the town about supposedly illegal building or additions without permits often centers on wealthy Albanians (Shiptari), whose wealth -like their residences -appears suspect' (Ballinger, 2004 p. 44).
Two contradictory stereotypes of Albanians seemed to emerge in parallel. On the one hand, there was an influx of unskilled workers 'taking the hardest jobs (digging canals, collecting rubbish, physical work . . .)'. 32 They were seen as cultural outsiders, socially and politically disconnected to the area they moved to and largely invisible in public life and usually undocumented and not necessarily speaking the Serbo-Croatian language proficiently. On the other hand, there was also a stereotype of shrewd, very wealthy and connected Albanians who helped one another advance in private businesses and property speculation and maintained strong links with both émigré groups in Western Europe and their extended kin-networks in Kosovo and Macedonia whose mobility and wealth was a source of suspicion, inherent in the accounts of the security services in Istria cited above.
But how did Albanians themselves view their position in Croatia as private business owners or private sector workers, and their relationship to the state and institutions of self-managing socialism? Albanian voices and perspectives in documents produced in Croatia at the time are far and few between. Despite the comparatively liberal nature of socialist Yugoslavia's media landscape, virtually no print media reports give voice to Albanians in Croatia until the very end of the 1980s. Albanian oral history narrators in conversion with the author overwhelmingly emphasized a disinterest in the politics of 1980s Croatia which radiated from the League of Communists and larger enterprises in the social sector and their self-management institutions. Responding to questions of political engagement, most Albanian narrators stress that a strong work ethic and familial entrepreneurial spirit were not conducive to engaging with the staid political structures of Yugoslavia. From socialist times to the current day, getting up early and staying late at the family business is juxtaposed by Albanians against the more predictable and shorter hours of workers in the Croatian public sector (or the former social sector in socialism).
Because of long working hours and the chief goal of maximizing the profit of their private businesses, the owners and their workforce did not have the time or motivation to participate in the organized politics of the time with its convoluted practices wedded to the social-sector workplace. A Medulin-based pâtissier whose family business was in operation in the Istrian village since the 1960s stressed 'we worked 25 hours a day! We worked a lot, really . . . We worked abnormally, especially in the 1980s, until the war [in 1991].' The self-sufficient nature of the Albanian community is also emphasized. Albanian business owners argue that because they were not seeking resources from the party-state (such as social support, housing, or other benefits-in-kind) there was little motivation to participate in politics.
Given the legal but marginalized status of private business in Yugoslav socialism, Albanian accounts of running a business in the 1970s and 1980s in Croatia are ambivalent. On the one hand, oral history narrators recall a strong work ethic paired with bumper tourist numbers which could lead to a deserved accumulation of profit for their family business. Most narrators are cognizant that although Yugoslav self-managing socialism set limits for private entrepreneurs operating in an economy of shortage, the system was nevertheless more enabling than in any other socialist state. As Zef Kajtazi, a baker from the Has region of Kosovo who worked in Croatia since the early 1980s, recalled: 'I'm not saying our communism was like in Russia, Romania, or Albania -no. It was more liberal, you could take your passport and leave if it did not suit you, but it was limiting, definitely'. He further details: 'You as a privatnik were seen as being against communism . . . you were exploiting the workforce . . . . You earn from the sweat of others.' 33 Others recall being targeted by municipal authorities, particularly after 1981, and taken advantage of -both as private business owners and ethnic Albanians.
A Pula-based silversmith claims 'They [the municipal authorities] wanted to destroy us . . . we had controls non-stop. But we battled and got by . . . that was the system . . . . Stamps . . . control, control. Counting items . . . . '. 34 He alleges that such officials were corrupt contrasting himself and other Albanian private business owners as honest and hardworking: They stole from the state while I stole my own sweat" [Oni su krali od države ali ja sam svoj znoj krao]. I worked 12-15 hours most of the time . . . . but those in the municipality -bribes and corruption -they had houses, cars . . . it was a battle, but we [Albanian business owners] succeeded. 35 The metaphor of 'sweat' emerges frequently in such discussions. As A Rovinj restaurateur stated: 'We live from our own wealth and sweat, we never look for anything like a flat, nothing, from the municipality. We help one another or help ourselves with our own sweat.' 36 For those private owners of gold and silversmiths (zlatari, filigrani), the conspicuous value of their product was problematic for the socialist authorities and legal routes to obtain enough materials were a perennial sticking point. One Pula-based filigran, originally from Peja, Kosovo, described the situation as 'very difficult -they give you permission to work but they do not allow you to acquire the raw material' -i.e. the precious metals necessary to fashion jewelry. 37 He described how the filigrani got by in the 1970s and 1980s through a combination of melting down old coins and other valuables acquired through family networks, sourcing precious metal through the Trepça mine in Kosovo under dubious circumstances (leading to a full scale police operation and multiple arrests and confiscation of gold and silver on the Adriatic coast and in Kosovo in the mid-1980s), and later travelling to Turkey to purchase materials. The display of gold and silver in the windows of business premises could also be a bone of contention. A jeweler recalls how in the 1970s, his father's lavish selection of silver goods crafted in Kosovo and put on display in his new shop in Poreč's old town, irked the local communists.
The local communists came by, and they told us we must reduce the size of the display window because it was creating too big social differences. You had the equivalent of 100 salaries of workers in the display case. There was fish canning factory nearby, the workers might afford two chains (with their monthly salary) but here was 100. When they came by you had to follow their instructions. 38 The entrepreneurial spirit of Albanian privatnici was not entirely lost on the communists of Istria during the 1980s. A few voices even expressly wished that the Albanian work ethic could be applied to the more inert social sector. The authorities in Poreč, a town which had the self-understanding as being the leading center of mass tourism in the country, noted the gap between the sometimescavalier attitude of tourism workers in the social sector and the more agile Albanian-owned private businesses on the main street in the old town, Dekumanova. A journalist for the official newspaper of the municipality, Porečki glasnik wrote in 1984: Walking along Dekumanova street after 21 h should give Poreč residents something to think about. Thousands of tourists pace the streets but other than the [Albanian owned] jewelers and sweet shops and a few souvenir stands, all other premises are closed.
Silversmiths and sweet shops open up at 6 h or 7 h and close at 23 h while the sellers in the social sector in the center in the height of the season of the leading tourist town of Yugoslavia work 7 or 9 hours per day. Most of them close their doors at the time when the most people are on Dekumanova street If the responsible people at "Plava laguna" and "Riviera" [the social sector firms employing the lion's share of tourism workers] think that these working hours are acceptable they are deceiving themselves. I would instruct some of them to walk the street in the evening.
Does everything need to close by 21 h? The season is short, it has to be used well. At the same time, workers in the social sector have interesting behaviors and habits. They pay pedantic attention to every working minute but when we look at the private sector, for them the working hours are not important, in fact, they work longer so as to earn more! What can the same system not be applied to the social sector workplaces? 39 With the political climate becoming more liberal in the late 1980s, Croatian knowledge production became more critical of Serb-led interpretations of the Kosovo crises (Janković, 2008). The Croatian print media landscape began to assess the situation more independently (sending Croatian reporters to Kosovo instead of relying on Belgrade-based outlets for example) and began to feature ordinary Albanians living in Croatia. In contrast to the racist internal reports of the League of Communists and security services, journalists from 1988 onwards began to engage with Albanian communities in Croatia in more sympathetic terms, albeit from the perspective of an outsider's gaze upon an exoticized group that needed to be 'discovered and explained' to the readership.
For example, the Sunday edition of Dalmatia's main newspaper, Nedjeljna Dalmacija, provided a series of detailed accounts of Albanians in Dalmatia in the late 1980s under the title 'Albanians in Dalmatia: What they work at and how they live.' 40 The series of articles stressed the internal heterogeneity of Albanians in Croatia noting divisions between Catholics and Muslims, those of a more Turkish orientation and others with a more explicitly Albanian outlook as well as professional networks -communities of jewelers, bakers, construction workers and so forth. Rather than interpreting the lack of interest in participation in self-management and the party-state as a priori negative and evidence of potential subversion, the series of articles gave voice to Albanians like Pavle Paljuši, a second-generation filigran who stated: 'We are interested in who will have more [money], we are interested in economics and not politics.' 41 The reports stressed a combination of entrepreneurial and patriarchal values almost as a badge of honor and evidence of self-help: 'Albanians, both Catholics and Muslims equally, are not inclined to seek help from society, particularly not in financial affairs and they have a developed system of credit and loans in which there do not exist interest but the obligation to spend the funds wisely and in a suitable way return it.' 42

Private business owners and Cold War border crossing
Not all private businesses owned by Albanians were necessarily dependent on cross-border mobility and tourism. As Ana Kladnik (2019) observes in the case of Slovenia, many businesses served to fill in the gaps in the provision of services in newly urbanized areas after World War Two. Albanian-owned cafes and ice-cream parlors in newly built socialist suburbs in Pula, for example, relied on a local clientele and did not greatly depend on the growing tourist numbers of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, most ice-cream parlor owners recall the years before mass tourism when their forefathers sold icecream to locals from canisters on bicycles in the late 1940s and 1950s. They would travel through villages and towns when there were local fairs and arrive at closing time in front of dancehalls and cinemas as the venues emptied of customers who might be seeking ice cream and other sweets.
Safet Kadri, the owner of a large ice-cream parlor in the tourist settlement of Medulin near Pula, describes how initially, when his late father and uncle started their business in 1959, the first customers were Istrians. Only with the asphalting of a direct road to Pula and the construction of the first hotel in 1969, did tourism truly take off in the village and by the 1970s the business oriented itself more robustly towards visiting tourists -Yugoslavs and international guests from both sides of the iron curtain. These customers were to become instrumental not only in terms of providing the Kadri family with income through their custom but also as sources for goods in short supply. While an uneven supply of materials was a longstanding problem affecting most private businesses in Yugoslavia, the economic crises of the 1980s accentuated it. As a child in the 1960s, Kadri recalls that most of the raw materials could be bought or bartered for locally -for example, purchasing quantities of milk from local villagers to make ice-cream. By the late 1970s and 1980s, as the business grew it was sometimes difficult to procure such items on a larger scale. Coffee was in regular shortage. 'You needed to know the boss of a warehouse in Pula to keep some coffee aside for you . . . In the time of (Yugoslav Premier) Milka Planinc, 1983, tourists -our regular guests -would bring me coffee, 5-10 kilos, mostly Italians.' Kadri had a friend, an Austrian tourist, who worked in a coffee processing plant and taught him how best to mix different blends of coffee.
With the Italian border just a few hours' drive from Pula, Kadri would regularly travel to Italy to buy necessary items for the business (such as bananas and kiwis which he would purchase in Trieste) and keep himself informed of industry developments at events like annual ice-cream culinary fairs in Rimini. He showed examples of the first menu cards with pictures of fruit cups which he procured in Treviso in 1981. Yet it was not only tourists from Italy or Austria who would help in mitigating the economy of shortage in the 1980s -tourists from the other side of the iron curtain also played a role. 'You could not buy citric acid in Yugoslavia -We got by in some way though, a Czechoslovak would come and offer me half a kilo and I would buy it from him.' 43 On occasion, Albanian businesspeople acted as go-betweens for small-scale transactions across 'Iron Curtain' borders, making use of Yugoslavia's 'third way' status. In 1984, for example, a Zagrebbased Albanian businessman 'R.R.' was visited by an informant of the security services who congratulated him on opening a new business unit at the main train station in Zagreb and for buying a large house in the city. According to the informant, the loan for the house was received from 'A.Sh' who was living in the town of Malacky near Bratislava in Czechoslovakia. The same actors brought currency from Czechoslovakia to Zagreb to be sent on to Italy and Austria. 'A.Sh' gave 'R.R' dinars which he exchanged in Zagreb to Deutsch Marks because upon coming to Yugoslavia, 'A.Sh' departed for Italy and Austria where the hard currency was needed for purchasing equipment for his sweetshop in Czechoslovakia. 44 As historian Igor Duda observes in his study of tourism, Yugoslavia for the rest of Eastern Europe left the impression of being the most western-like state that citizens of Warsaw Pact countries could 'more or less freely enter' and a site where they could engage in the consumption of 'Western' imports and other consumer goods unavailable in their home countries (Duda, 2010, p. 87), such as the jewelry made by Albanian gold and silversmiths. Indeed, a symbiotic relationship of exchange emerges in the 1980s and 1990s between some Albanian business owners and Czechoslovak customers which is particularly visible among the filigrani. Prizren and the surrounding area were the center for goldsmiths in Kosovo with precious metals sourced from the Trepça mining complex. In the decades after World War Two, many goldsmiths left to try their luck in cities in Croatia and Bosnia. According to older filigrani like Augustin Butući whose son now runs their business in the center of Rovinj, their initial customers in the years before mass tourism transformed Istria tended to be locals buying jewelry for special events such as wedding rings. From the 1960s, business began to grow and the 1970s are remembered as boom years for the filigrani. Of particular importance were tourists from behind the iron curtain -Czechoslovaks and Hungarians in particular, who Butući claims were 'thirsty for jewelry' given the paltry selection on offer in their home countries. 45 A Poreč filigran explained how goldsmiths in Czechoslovakia were very limited during socialism 'You could not simply buy a wedding ring in Czechoslovakia, you had to announce it to the municipality and it would take six months for them to order it whereas we could sell them one immediately. It was the best market in Europe for our craft.' 46 The 1980s are remembered by filigrani like Augustin Butući as less favorable than the previous decade but a time when it was nevertheless possible to make a decent living from the craft. However, with the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, some of the most important customer base could now buy gold and silver in their home countries. 'When the Berlin Wall fell, then we could really feel the crisis. With Countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary open, we lost that market.' The end of socialism in Eastern Europe was quickly followed by more crises within Yugoslaviaa deterioration of the already tense situation in Kosovo in 1989 and1990 and the collapse of the Yugoslav state and outbreak of the Croatian War of independence in 1991.
Not only did the war result in the overnight collapse of the tourist industry, but for many Albanians from Kosovo it meant that they were now foreign citizens in independent Croatia holding papers from an enemy state -Serbia -with which all lines of communication and transportation were broken. A business model based on the unrestricted mobility of labor and raw materials from Kosovo and Macedonia serving to accommodate the needs and desires of tourists, collapsed by the summer of 1991. From this period, war in Croatia (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995) and the repressive Serbian control of Kosovo which descended into armed conflict by 1998 meant that many Albanians in Croatia were unable to travel to Kosovo (or Serbia) for much of the 1990s. Postsocialist Hungary became an important location to meet family and friends and through which to arrange phone calls and route small economic exchanges between Croatia and Kosovo. 47 In postsocialist Croatia, the most crucial document for regulating one's status in Croatia was the domovnica -proof of citizenship. While for some registered Albanians this did not represent a difficulty, for many others who were not able to access it in the early 1990s it caused a huge amount of worry. One businessowner from Poreč described the prospect of not receiving the domovnica kept him 'up at night with fear.' 48 Mixed with fear was anger -at the possibility of being rejected by a country where one had lived since early childhood. Insecurity was further heightened for business owners who rented their premises rather than owning them and felt more exposed to the whims of the local authorities.
For goldsmiths, one strategy when faced with the double whammy of uncertain immigration status and the collapse of their craft in the absence of customers was to travel to what had been one of their most loyal markets -Czechoslovakia. As filigran 'B.T.' describes: We were very connected to Czechia, we knew people there. We went there from the 1980s as tourists, it was cheap . . . Language was never a problem, we are always in contact with Czechs, they were good tourists for us, good customers . . . . They were hungry for everything after communism! In 1991 with elderly parents and young children to support, he recalls 'I was forced to earn so I went to Czechia, temporarily, like I would go for six months and return but in the end, I remained there, with my family coming later.' He was not the only Istrian-based filigran to make the journey to Czechia -many other narrators reported working there in the early 1990s. Augustin Butući remarked 'The first ones who left Croatia for Czechoslovakia landed with a bang [pravili bum], they got very rich.' According to him, the Czechoslovak state enabled this allowing them to work without difficulty provided they employed some Czech workers in their shops.
In Yugoslav socialism, Albanian migration to Croatia from Kosovo and Macedonia took place within one single country yet often resembled international migration. Municipal authorities and security services frequently invoked tropes of cultural outsiderhood, social deviancy and problems with language acquisition. Furthermore, the 'domestic migrants' were often connected to Yugoslav Albanians in the diaspora through kin networks and the frequent visitors from abroad who piqued the interest of the zealous security services. With the declaration independence of Croatia in 1991 and the ensuing war, Yugoslav Albanian migration to Croatia was recast almost overnight as international migration -most intra-Yugoslav Albanian migrants were now foreign citizens of the Republic of Macedonia and in the case of Kosovo, citizens of Serbia. With some Albanian business owners facing insecurity in Croatia, symbiotic Cold War era experiences of economic exchange with Czechs could be drawn upon by some to mitigate the multipronged crises following the collapse of state-socialism and the Yugoslav state as the case of silver and goldsmiths illustrates.

Conclusion
This contribution has engaged with the case of Albanian labor migration and private business activities in socialist Croatia as a means to advance the state-of-the-art with regard to the Yugoslav private sector, the experiences of workers from more peripheral parts of the country, and Cold War-era mobilities and of course, to give voice to the experiences of some Albanian business owners and their families and workforce. Considering the proximity of places like Istria and Kvarner (coastal Northwest Croatia) to Yugoslav land borders with Italy and Austria these regions, and the Albanian businesses located in them, were nodes in migration routes between Kosovo, Macedonia and Western Europe. Northwest Croatia was one of the most economically developed areas in the country with a significant tourist industry and thus an attractive destination to open a business for quite a few of Yugoslavia's Albanians, a group overrepresented in the nascent private sector. Some Albanian-owned businesses were founded by capital earned from work in Western Europe with migrants opting not to return to Kosovo or Macedonia but to instead launch a family business in Croatia.
Being in the same federative state, labor and goods could flow freely between Kosovo and Macedonia and Croatia. The proximity of Croatia to Italy and Austria and the presence of large numbers of tourists offered significant economic opportunities. Albanians provided goods and services to visitors, being particularly dominant in certain hospitality segments (such as ice-cream and patisseries, goldsmiths and silversmiths). Albanian business owners served tourists from both sides of the Cold War divide and explained how tourists from some Warsaw Pact states like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, were important consumers of products unavailable in their home countries like silver and gold jewelry. At the same time, in the Yugoslav economy of shortage, tourists engaged in small-scale business deals with Albanian business owners providing products which were unreliably available in Yugoslavia, like coffee and citric acid, demonstrating how Albanian private workers and tourists might engage in the symbiotic economic exchange of goods and hard currency.
Unlike the social sector, Albanian family businesses in the private sector were operated without clear oversight from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and institutions of self-management and so were a source of suspicion for the authorities, particularly after the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo when Albanians experienced blanket accusations of nationalist behavior across the country, including in Croatia. Albanians were targeted by the secret police in Croatia, and their businesses were portrayed by the authorities as hotbeds of nationalist agitation and sources of funds for 'irredentist' behavior. In most cases, such claims were overblown with little supporting evidence ever manifesting. Albanians tended to stress their hard work with many private sector workers contrasting their long hours and entrepreneurial spirit to what they claim as idleness and inertia on the part of many social-sector workers. In the last years of the Yugoslav state, positively framed representations of Albanian entrepreneurship began to circulate in the Croatian media landscape and Albanians were well poised to take a more active role in public life following the restoration of capitalism Croatia during the 1990s and 2000s.