From Socialism to the European Union: Business, Workers, and the Production of Meaning (on the Case of Shipbuilding)

Talk by Ulf Brunnbauer (IOS) as part of the ERC Synergy Grant Project "Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good".

This talk will be based on my most recent book In the Storms of Transformation: Two Shipyards between Socialism and the EU (Brunnbauer, U., P. Ther, P. Filipkowski, A. Hodges, S. Petrungaro and P. Wegenschimmel). University of Toronto Press, 2024. This books presents the fate of two shipyards, in Yugoslavia/Croatia and Poland respectively, during East Central Europe’s political and economic transformation since the 1970s. I will suggest a new time-line for transformation (which started already in the 1970s with the oil price shock and lasted until EU membership). I will present the role of globalization, evident in the case of shipbuilding in competition from producers in East Asia, and I will discuss the role of the state in managing this transformation (such as by privatizing the shipyards). I will also look at processes on the shopfloor and how workers remember these changes, pointing out the important role of the shipyards for local welfare and for the production of meaning. While challenging the pervasive notion of “decline”, the book also suggest an answer to the question why there is so much frustration about the results of transformation: can that be located in the dissolution of holistic life worlds?