Containing Conflict and Enforcing Consent in Titoist Yugoslavia: The 1970 Dockworkers' Strike in Koper (Slovenia)

Abstract

The port of Koper (It. Capodistria) in the Slovenian part of the Istrian peninsula was built in the second half of the 1950s as a socialist modernization project. In 1970, it witnessed the only violently escalating dockers’ unrest in its socialist history. Using the personal archive of Danilo Petrinja, the port’s second director, which has been pre-served in the Regional Archive of Koper, the author takes a micro-historical approach to this incident, and views it at the historical moment in Yugoslavia between the student protests of 1968 and the ‘Croatian spring’ of 1971. She adds a perspective on the interconnectedness of the early 1970s and the late 1980s, when social unrest was an integral part of Yugoslavia’s demise. The episode of public violence in the Yugoslav border city of Koper offers proof of the multi-layered nature of explanatory tropes: the border perspective from Koper is interwoven with the perspective of Yugoslavia as a whole, and a comparison with workers’ violence in neighbouring Trieste during the same years adds yet another twist to a reassessment of the applicability of the Cold War framework to an examination of labour relations and violence.