Negotiating Veterans’ Welfare in the North Adriatic Borderlands, 1960s–1980s

This article examines how postwar border dynamics shaped social welfare provision for Partisan veterans in Istria after the Second World War. Conceptualizing welfare as a form of ‘border practice’, it shows how access to rights, benefits, and national belonging was structured through overlapping criteria of citizenship, residence, and wartime merit. Focusing on veterans of the People's Liberation War in socialist Yugoslavia and their organization SUBNOR, the article analyses local activism in the municipality of Buje between the 1960s and 1980s. Although Partisan veterans held a privileged position in socialist Yugoslavia, many in Istria were disadvantaged within the federal welfare system due to the timing of their wartime mobilization, which restricted access to higher pensions and benefits. Based on archival sources and local press materials, the article demonstrates how veterans used organizational networks and self-management institutions to challenge bureaucratic interpretations of merit and secure exceptions recognizing the specific circumstances of border regions. It further argues that cross-border welfare practices influenced domestic reform. The semi-official receipt of Italian pensions by some veterans in Buje exposed economic inequalities and generated political tensions, revealing welfare as a site of cross-border influence. Veterans framed these developments as both a challenge to Yugoslav sovereignty and evidence of insufficient state provision, prompting organized demands for reform. The study shows that welfare reform in Yugoslavia was not solely a top-down process but was co-produced through negotiations involving borderland actors whose experiences linked social rights, territory, identity and state legitimacy.