Tracing Policy Discourses and Dreams of Mobility in Serbia

Serbia has one of the highest rates of “brain drain” in the world, an issue that has prompted a great deal of public discourse and state concern. In addition to subtexts of national values, identity, and the meaning of dignified work, such debates are colored by the “Yugoslav Dream” of prosperity in which mobility featured as a key marker of the country's unique position. In contrast to the relative ease with which citizens were able to travel abroad in the former Yugoslavia, the 1990s and 2000s ushered in immobilizing visa regimes and a national sense of humiliating entrapment (Jansen 2009). When Serbian citizens could once again travel visa-free through Europe’s Schengen zone, the change was widely narrated as a return to the “normal” mobility of socialist Yugoslavia (Greenberg 2011) and shifted the calculus of young people planning their futures. Nevertheless—in contrast to the Yugoslav experience—mobility is now most frequently discussed not in terms of travel, but of escape (Erdei 2010). This paper will draw on an analysis of policy documents and initiatives aimed at retaining Serbia’s best and brightest, and at coaxing well-educated migrants home. What kind of figure of the Serbian émigré is constructed? How do these policy initiatives articulate with national and international hierarchies of value around the meaning of work? And how is the lost “Yugoslav Dream” of prosperity recast in this context? This paper will consider policy as a vehicle for fashioning subjectivities (Shore and Wright 1997) as well as regulating populations.