Introduction: the Cold War of labour migrants: opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond

Abstract

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue The Cold War of Labor Migrants: Opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond seeks to bring forward the conversation between the history of the Cold War and migration studies. It is the result of a workshop convened by the Working Group ‘Labor Migration History’, of the European Labor History Network. It maps out the academic debate on international labor migration and it critically engages with its western-centric approach. It introduces the seven contributions which, from different geographic and thematic perspectives, reassess the importance of non-Western experiences in shaping the entanglement between international labor migration and the Cold War. Two lines of inquiry feature prominently in this special issue. The first is a reassessment of the relevance of the regulation of international migration as a political terrain on which the Cold War divide was both constructed and deconstructed by different institutional actors, which, at various levels, were empowered by the existence of Cold War rivalry. The second, is the agency of migrants and aims to explore the fluidity, opportunism and creativity in the ways that migrants themselves experienced state control because of the particular Cold War socio-economic and political context.