Negotiating Brotherhood and Unity: “Oriental Confectioners” and Socialist Morality in Postwar Slovenia

Abstract “Oriental confectioners” were a separate administrative category of craftsmen in early socialist Slovenia. The group of mainly Albanian-speaking seasonal craftsmen came from the rural Polog basin in North Macedonia during the interwar period and continued migrating to Slovenia in the profoundly changed postwar context. The emerging socialist authorities cast private craft businesses as potentially antisocialist. Employing a textual analysis of craft-related archival documents from the period (1945–1955), the article explores the treatment of Albanian migrants by the nascent bureaucracy in the People’s Republic of Slovenia. The key argument posited is two-fold. Firstly, the economic exclusion of Albanian migrant craftsmen extended beyond socialist distrust towards private enterprise. Exclusion was deeply intertwined with Slovenia’s orientalist, balkanist, and possibly racist perceptions, which culturally diminished craftsmen’s origins and products, and placed Albanian migrants in a conflicting position with socialist modernization. Secondly, and in contrast to the first point, the state’s treatment was not uniformly discriminatory. Albanian migrants were often able to negotiate their inclusion into the urban economy by appealing to socialist morality, to which socialist authorities at the republican level were particularly receptive.