ARTICLE Austria and the Czech Republic as Immigration Countries: Transnational Labor Migration in Historical Comparison Mojmír Stránský 1 and Philipp Ther 2 1 Institute of East European History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria and 2 University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Corresponding author: Mojmír Stránský; Email: mojmir.stransky@univie.ac.at Abstract This article is an introduction to the forum that compares Austria and today’s Czech Republic as immigration countries. Keywords: migration Austria and the Czech Republic share a common history and many commonalities in their size, social structures, and culture. This forum deals with a much less observed and discussed commonality: Austria and the Czech Republic have both been countries of immigration for more than half a century, but unlike classic immigration countries, neither of them embraces that fact as a part of their own iden- tity. This forum will provide an overview of immigration to Austria and the Czech part of Czechoslovakia after 1918 and some selected case studies. 1 The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire interrupted or reverted previous itineraries of migration, but the new nation state boundaries did not stop migration altogether. The same is true for the Cold War period, which did not seal off East and West from labor migration as is commonly perceived. What makes the comparison particularly interesting is the different political developments of the two countries. Austria regained its sovereignty after the signing of the State Treaty and declared its neutrality, which was rather understood as non-alignment. Following the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the present-day Czech Republic was part of the Eastern bloc (for matters of simplicity, we will refer to Czechoslovakia only when specifically talking about that state). During the Cold War period, there were well-known and well-studied bouts of refugee movement to Austria in 1956 and 1968, the latter also re-connecting Czechoslovakia and Austria on a societal level. What gives these cases pertinence beyond Central Europe is the way flight and labor migration were interconnected. Since the histories of mass flight and labor migration are usually dealt with © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Regents of the University of Minnesota. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. 1 There is generally much more literature on emigration from the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. See e.g., the semi- nal book by Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York, 2016); Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire (West Lafayette, 2021); Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James W. Oberly, From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 (Innsbruck, 2017); Traude Horvath, ed., Auswanderungen aus Österreich von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1996); Heinz Faßmann, Auswanderung aus der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie (Vienna, 1996); Jaroslav Vaculík, České menšíny v Evropě a ve světě [Czech Minority in Europe and the World] (Prague, 2009); Dagmar Hájková, Naše česká věc: Češi v Americe za první světové války, [Our Czech Cause: The Czech in America during the First World War] (Prague, 2011). The work for this forum, beginning with a selection of the following texts, is based on the conference organized by the bilateral Austrian and Czech Historians Commission (Ständige Konferenz österreichischer und tschechischer Historiker zum gemeinsamen kulturellen Erbe, SKÖTH) with the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) in Vienna in the autumn of 2021. The organizers then selected five especially out- standing contributions which had not been published before and submitted them as a forum to the AHY. Austrian History Yearbook (2024), 1–7 doi:10.1017/S006723782400033X https://doi.org/10.1017/S006723782400033X Published online by Cambridge University Press