PAPER FOR THE 2003 ASN CONVENTION

SLOVENIANS, NON-SLOVENIANS: IMAGINING THE NATION THROUGH HISTORIC MEMORY IN

SLOVENIA

IRENA SUMI
INSTITUTE OF ETHNIC STUDIES
LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA
E-MAIL: irena.sumi@guest.arnes.si

This piece proposes to examine the notion of historic Slovenianess through two case studies of
authoritative discourse. The first is embodied in the so-called “Slovenian national question”,
a syntagmatic designation for a pseudo-academic, interdisciplinary problem field that is
universally translated into English as “(Slovenian) ethnic studies” and boasts a tradition of
no less than nearly 80 years. All its central premises also directly translate into public
discourses of all kinds, notably the compulsory school system. The second case pertains to
Slovenianess within the legal, political and administrative discourse in early to mid-1990s
when the Slovenian state, in an attempt to salvage Slovenians from warring Bosnia,
discovered that they have done the impossible: that they imported several hundred people
who, in terms of what was perceived as legality, simply could not exist in Slovenia. The
crucial problem was their “Slovenianess” – a property that everyone assumed clearly existed
but nobody could either meaningfully define or legally encode. The underlying historic, legal,
and administrative discourses were brought together to face the phenomenon of the evacuees,
and resulted in a cacophony of extraordinary confusion in which the underlying basic
premises of the protagonists were found to be utterly lacking, if at the same time structurally
identical.

SLOVENIANESS AS HISTORY IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: A BRIEF RECOUNT

Within different public spheres in Slovenia, notably within the political discourse, one of the
more salient (re)presentations of the so-called ethnic minorities is the notion of their
unproblematic existence. Routinely, there is boasting about the high level (“above the
European standards”) of legal protection that the minorities enjoy; quite universal is the
conviction that with regard to minorities, the adherence to democratic principles, and their
implementation are exemplary. In the sphere of scientific discourse, however, these same
convictions, equally strongly held, mark off a realm of deficiency and restriction: it remains
unclear whether the monopolist historic and otherwise academic discourse of the so-called
“Slovenian national question” is merely a corroborative, or indeed the generative factor in the
production of the political discourse. The academic tradition of the “Slovenian national
question” is shielded by formidable political power. During the last few decades, the
discourse on the so-called national or ethnic minorities, which are very nearly the sole object
of interest in this specialized field of knowledge, has been so radically essentialised that it
should rightly be treated as a phenomenon per se, and itself subjected to analysis.

The persistent co-production of the two discourses – the political and the academic – can first
be examined in the light of their intertwined histories that go back to the end of WWI. Stergar
(1995:4), for example, identifies earlier still generative layers of contemporary academic
discourse in the products of early nationalism such as Manifesto of a Unified Slovenia
(Program Zedinjene Slovenije, 1848) or The Kozler Map (Kozlerjev zemljevid, 1853). At the
very beginning of the 20th century, in 1905, following the example of the Czech nationalist
movement, a circle of Slovenian students, radical nationalists studying in Prague, was formed.
Their political activism turned the public’s attention to the “ethnically endangered” segments

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of the Slovenian nation (ibid.) Two members of this student club, Lavo Čermelj and Vinko
Zorman, were the principal instigators and members of the Minority Institute (Manjšinski
institut), founded in 1925, which based its scientific research on the conviction that

after World War I… one third of Slovenians were left outside the borders of Slovenia. The
Minority institute in Ljubljana conducted research on the position of the Slovenians in the
neighbouring countries (Italy, Austria, and Hungary) and on the German and Hungarian
minorities in Slovenia. It also gathered documentation and literature on the minority issues
(Stergar 1995:ibid.)

The symbiosis between the scientific programme and the interests of the nationalist politics
was also clearly spelled out in the working programme of the institute. The priority was to
study and map the “ethnic situation in the broader Slovenian territory” in Yugoslavia and
outside its borders “for scientific, informative and propagandistic purposes” (Stergar 1995:5).
The Institute closed down in April 1941, following the occupation. In 1944, the Executive
Committee of the Liberation Front (Izvršni odbor Osvobodilne fronte) founded the Partisan
Liberation Army’s Science Institute (Znanstveni inštitut) in the Liberated territories where,
shortly thereafter, the Department for Border Issues (Oddelek za mejna vprašanja) was
founded. When the institute was dissolved in 1948, the present-day Institute of Ethnic Studies
(Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja) was founded in its stead. This institute is to this day one
of the main producers of knowledge in the specific tradition of Slovenian ethnic studies.

Throughout its existence and that of its predecessors, the arch criterion for determining the
range of activities has constantly been rooted in nationalist interests (and from 1991 onwards,
to use a legalist formulation, national interest). The primary, if not the exclusive object of
study have always been, and still are on one hand the “autochthonous” Hungarian and Italian
national minorities in Slovenia, and on the other, the Slovenian minority populations in Italy,
Austria, and Hungary. More recently, in 1991, the status of the Slovenians in the successor
states of former Yugoslavia was also defined as an object of study. Occasionally, the Romany
issues, and the recently politically acute question of the “Old-Austrian minority” are also
touched upon. Only very recently did the so-called “new minorities” entered this repertoire,
the syntagm standing for people originating from various republics of ex-Yugoslavia,
members and offspring of a working immigration that begun during the 1960s. These people,
while citizens of Slovenia, are now perceived as sufficiently culturally different, numerous
and organised as groups to fit the constitutional provision (articles 61 and 62) according to
which “everybody is free to articulate their belonging to their nation or national group, and to
maintain and use its culture, language and writing”. The steadily growing transient and
permanent immigration from Far and Near East, Africa, ex-Socialist countries of Europe etc.
is summarily ignored as ephemeral precisely because it is felt that there is no constitutional or
legal compartment befitting them.1 It is clear from this repertoire that in the research on the
“Slovenian national and nationalities’ (= national minorities) issues”, only those groups which
are firmly established, historical, indigenous, not to say primordial, qualify as relevant –
following closely those that are the same time legally recognised by the Slovenian state in its
founding legal documents.2 Both the academic, and the political discourses thus equate the

1
People from among these immigrant groups, however, are routinely the victims of most extreme racist and
xenophobic agitations. A recent court trial of a Skinhead attack on a group of Africans failed to recognise the
assault as hate crime; public expressions of racism against Moslems, Chinese, Jews, etc. have yet to come to the
attention of Attorney General’s office (ref.).
2
The constitution of the Republic of Slovenia describes “autochthonous” Hungarian and Italian minorities as
constituent populations of Slovenia, while the Resolution of the Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia from

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scientific problem field of ethnic studies with that of legally recognised national (ethnic)
minorities.

Traditonally, special attention is given to “our minorities” outside Slovenian state borders.
However, the definitions of the “our minority” historically shifted from very broad categories
to more and more narrow ones: Čermelj (1939:10), for example, commenting on the unjust
and misleading data of the 1931-1936 censuses in the Italian Venezia-Guilia region with
regard to professed of nationality, wrote: “In spite of all the attempts at assimilation, we can
still claim that there are still living in Italy at least 600.000 Slovenians and Croats who are
nationally conscious Yugoslavs”.

The very category of “nationally conscious Yugoslavs” in the literature of Slovenian ethnic
studies prior to 1945 coupled the Slovenians and the Croats as Yugoslavs, or more broadly
still, as Slavs. In 1933, the syntagm “our people” included also the Croats from the
Gradiščansko region who were expected to act, together with Slovenians from the Porabje
region, as a “bridge between us and the Slovaks, between Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia”.
As Čermelj himself (1933:102) wrote, what was called for was the creation of “strong links
among the Slavs” which should become “the dividing wall between the Germans and the
Hungarians”; it was necessary to

… follow with greater interest the cultural and the national development of our
countrymen in the North, and to support and encourage them in their work. Especially the
young must be acquainted with the life and destiny of our brothers living abroad. The final
goal should be the union of all Yugoslavs, and the following slogan should lead to that
goal: “Where there is a Yugoslav, there is Yugoslavia” (emphasis original).

Inevitably, such pan-Slavic visions faded away swiftly after the war, “our people” branching
out into several exclusive groups: the Slovenians, the Croats, the Croats etc. With the fading
of the notion of a unitary Yugoslav nationality, another accent, already implicit in the above
writing of Čermelj, came to the fore: the problem of “cultural and national development” and
in particular, the growth and development of “national and political consciousness” (cf. e.g.
Pleterski 1965) of the Slovenian minorities in the neighbouring countries.

During 1960s and 1970s, studies on national minorities were largely historic, socio-
geographic, demographic and folkloristic. It was not until early 1980s that the studies on
(normative) bilingual schooling, sociolinguistic reports, sociometric studies using quantitative
methods (opinion polls, questionnaires) and studies of politics (the electoral systems and
results, the political culture among the elites, the history of the political parties, movements
and other institutions etc.) appeared. From the early 1920s onwards however, an interlinking
branch of investigation concerned itself with the legal and political documentation on national
minorities, the history and endeavours of political and cultural organisations of the minorities,
and legal issues concerning individual minority populations. This research, coupled as it was
with sociometric studies, was predominantly synchronous, while others remained
historiographic. However, all shared the unproblematic basic view which deemed the national
minorities to be natural population facts, parts of nations living outside their motherlands: all
academic production of the period assumed these features to be the general, diagnostic (if
indeed not the only) parameters of the ethnic phenomenon.

1996 explicitly describes the Slovenians in Croatia, “especially those in the regions of Istria, Gorski Kotar and
Međimurje”, as a Slovenian minority (see above; cf. Jevnikar 1998:21;74).

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While belonging to a minority can no doubt be an actor’s self-ascription, the purpose of

research is lost the moment the researcher assumes this status to be the “natural” property of
the actors, their “objective” trait. This, however, was and remains the central, essentialising,
ideological postulate of Slovenian ethnic studies; members of minorities were, and still are
seen as an agglomerate of individuals who, detached from the mother nation, are lagging
behind in the universal historic march of “national progress”, on a path which inevitably leads
to a developed nationalism, a fully ripened “national and political consciousness” such as the
members of the mother nation possess. It is the very lack of such consciousness that defines a
minority.

As early as in 1946, Fran Zwitter, another renowned scholar in the Department for Border
Issues at the Science Institute, identified the reasons for such nationalist aphasia on the
example of Slovenian speakers in “Venetian Slovenia” (i.e. the southern part of Friuli-
Venezia Giulia in Italy). Stating that the area is notoriously “naturally and socially”
underdeveloped, a state of affairs further aggravated by the fact that “culture is not offered
them in their natural language”, Zwitter (1946:11) asserts:

During the [Second World] war, Slovenian partisans reached this backward people. […]
The Venetian Slovenians who spoke only their primitive Slovenian dialect knew nothing
about the Slovenian culture and the life of the Slovenian nation, were suddenly introduced
to the movement which stirred their national consciousness, their political inactivity and
resignation; hey were introduced to the Slovenian literature, songs and gatherings.3 […]
Yugoslavia... demanded the territories where the Venetian Slovenians live at the London
Conference, wanting them to be annexed on the basis of the ethnic principle, because the
area is purely Slovenian and because Yugoslavia cannot allow them to be left without any
advantages of the national culture, remaining within the system of national oppression,
and social and cultural backwardness.

The above argumentation employs, at first sight, the logic of two seemingly disparate,
restrictive premises. The first restriction is primordialist as it classifies persons according to
an “objective”, pseudo-biological criterion as Slovenians, despite the fact that they do not
possess any cultural signs of Slovenianess (i.e., they know nothing about the “culture and life
of the Slovenian nation”). The second restriction is a consequence of the first one and is
seemingly complicit to it: only a person with primordial ethnic characteristics can be a
Slovenian (although he or she does not know the culture and the life of his/her nation, and
speaks a “primitive” variety of its language). In a sense, the second premise is a travesty of
the first one, but it is not redundant to the point of tautology; rather, the two premises co-exist
in the form of an exuberance. A Slovenian can only be a person who has been a Slovenian
“from the beginning”, whether or not he or she is competent in Slovenian cultural and
linguistic repertoires. Conversely, possessing only this competence cannot in itself make a
person a Slovenian: the final arbiter of Slovenianess is thus invariably the political power
which projects into “origins”.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a much more temperate attitude pervaded the political arena
towards the neighbouring states, not in the least so because of the theoretically very
composite, libertarian theoretisations of “nations and nationalities (=minorities)” within the
theory of Socialist self-management:

3
The word used here is “meetings” (miting) and denotes the Socialist-type mass gathering with a political and
cultural agenda. The term was also used for the pro-Milošević rallies in Serbia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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The development of the relationship among the nations and nationalities in Yugoslavia on
the basis of self-management is one of the head postulates of the development of the
socialist self-management. This means that the equality of nations and nationalities is not
based only on the regard for basic human rights. The recognition of the national equality,
and the achievement of equality in reality, are parallel processes that are in accordance
with the intense endeavours of the society to liberate the work from any kind of
estrangement, exploitation or subordination. In this framework, the nationalities are
subjects with equal rights who, with the help of the broader social community, exercise
the right to develop their own ethnic particularities, language and culture (Lük 1980:28).

The view as promoted by the chief theoretician of self-management, Edvard Kardelj, equated
the right to cultural idiosyncrasy and affirmation of (primordialist) ethnic diversity with the
basic human rights on the one hand, and with the essence of the historical process of the rise
and spread of democratic liberties on the other. Compared to some contemporary polarisations
between the so-called multiculturalists and the post-modern views of, say, Richard Rorty, the
Kardelian belief is less a relict of sociological naïveté than an anticipation of certain very
fashionable theoretisations (cf. e.g. Billig 1995:154ff; Goldberg 1997).

Within the tradition of Slovenian ethnic studies, it was Miran Komac who developed an
elaborate political theory about the minorities’ collective identity (1990, 1990a) that sums up
what goes as a more refined coneptualisation of ethnicity within Slovenian ethnic studies of
the present. The core point is the postulate that the national minorities are

…a sort of idiosyncratic ethnic organism, the development of which… is determined by

both outer and inner laws, and are formed in the process of double-lane socialisation
(Komac 1990:3; 1990a:256).

A national minority, Komac goes on to say, is marked by a specific political (sub)culture

which, in turn, is determined by

the mingling… or else, the merging of two mutually independent variables – the unified
political system, and of at least two different national identities, that of the majority and
the minority (Komac 1990a:250).

These two very mechanically concieved variables also generate the circumstances of the
double-lane socialisation on the level of the individual. – Furthermore, as a national minority
is a “specific social group”, it is also a historical category, developing through the course of
history, on the collision point of three factors: the influence of its immediate cultural and
political (majority) environment; the relations between the minority and the mother nation;
and its own, internal development (Komac 1990:3ff). The ethnic minority (sub)culture was
thus defined as

...such a form of political behaviour of the members of the minority within which the
national identity emerges as a double-sensed, permanent syndrome: (a) the struggle for
survival and continuity of the national identity is the principal instigation and motivation
for the political activity of the minority; (b) on the other hand, the national identity
(especially those elements which derive from the historical memory, and the relations
between the majority and the minority) levels, shapes and channels the directions and
forms of the political activity – it determines the psychological aspects of political

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behaviour, influences the political orientation and shapes the political style (Komac
1990a:250).

Komac concluded that

National minorities are indeed parts of larger nations in the neighbouring countries. But
because their ethnic characteristics intertwine with the influences/pressures from the part
of the majority, and the mother nation (the influences being economic, social, political,
ideological and cultural), the minorities are turned into relatively independent ethnic
entities (1990:256).

The core element of the deviation from the established developmental linearism was clearly
the implied recognition that the simple causality of “historical injustices” cannot explain any
aspect of the social lives of the minorities’ members: the interpretive sterility of the discourse
on the “historical injustices”, by which token the minorities became “severed limbs of the
national body”, was recognised to a degree.

As recently as 1996, the Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia passed the Resolution o the
Status of Autochthonous Slovenian Minorities in the Neighbouring Countries and the
Obligations of the State and Other Organizations Arising from It.4 The resolution’s wording
uses all of the above mentioned terms: in the first chapter, it is stated that “the regions of the
neighbouring countries where the minorities live comprise, together with the Republic of
Slovenia, the common Slovenian cultural space”; further, that “the members of the
autochthonous minorities represent a bridge of the cooperation and good neighbourly relations
between the Republic of Slovenia and its neighbours”; in the second chapter, it is stated that
“the Republic of Slovenia acknowledges the autonomy and political subjectivity of
autochthonous minorities in the neighbouring countries.”

This change in thought, however, failed to decisively impact the analytical discourse of
Slovenian ethnic studies. Even though the postulate about the subjectivity, and the social and
cultural idiosyncrasy of the “minorities” could, despite its rather mechanically envisioned
collisions of agents, prove of value for social research, it failed to produce a decisive increase
of empirical studies. This being the case, the mainstream production within Slovenian ethnic
studies insists to this day on an actors-free perspective on the “minorities”, barely implying
their existence through evaluations of things such as the minority press, the ratings of the
media from the “motherland”, and the descriptions of minority cultural institutions (whose
activities are invariably folkloristic); further, these studies concentrate on the enactment of
normative bilingualism, and on documenting the political view of minority political elites,
more often than not simply equating these with the views of the entire “minority”, of the but
implied, inhibited, homogenous mass of its membership. Furthermore, even in the extremely
rare studies that include and quote the opinions of the informants, the latter are invariably
treated merely as “members of the minority”, as if this were the realistic property of the
individuals - and the only analytically relevant at that.

Likewise, the predominant analytical discourse, particularly the Anglo-American sociological,

historical, sociolinguistic and social anthropological discourse on ethnicity and nationalism
(whose emergence goes back to the late 1960s), failed to impact the Slovenian ethnic studies
in any significant way. However, assimilated were its symptoms: in a manner akin to a
caricature, the terminology of the Western discourse was made synonymous with the extant

4
Official Gazette of the RS 1996, VI/7, pp. 2946-2948.

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glossary. Thus for instance, the “ethnic group” (or even “ethnos/ethnie”); “ethnic borders”;
and “ethnic identity” got to mean “national minority”, “(unjust) state border” and “national
consciousness”, and are extensively used synonymously. In the same vain, the entire
problematic under study, the national and minority question, is equated with the problem field
of ethnicity.

Given such domestication of the analytical paradigm in studies of ethnicity and nationalism,
there persists in the Slovenian ethnic studies a basic, universal problem: unwilling to identify
the actors in such a way as would prevent the categorisation beforehand, the phenomena
supposedly under investigation are irretrievably reified. The very mimicking of the analytical
discourse without the assimilation of its theoretical contents is the key diagnostic sign of a
perpetuated essentialist understanding of ethnicity and “national minorities” even after 1991 –
if one is indeed justified, not without certain sociological naïveté, to regard that date as
marking off the formal annihilation of the ideological discourse constraints.

Such monolithic continuity is seemingly paradoxical also because the public, including the
academia, has been for decades permeated with warnings against everything ethnic and
nationalist. In the times of the Socialist regime, (ethnic) nationalism was regarded as hostile to
both “brotherhood and unity” and “proletarian internationalism”, thus twice the arch enemy of
the “power of the working people”; after 1990, warnings proliferated especially in the context
of the situation in the Central and Southern Balkans (the “interethnic conflict”, and “ethnic
cleansing”). The very emergence of the Slovenian national state brought about, at home and
abroad, complex political and academic scepticism directed at establishing a state based on a
“retrograde”, ethnic principle in a time of vigorous integration processes in Europe. Added to
that were strong indications of a widespread xenophobia in Slovenia, based in the traditionally
isolated, introvert life, and an exceptionally low rate of immigration from culturally and
linguistically alien spaces.5 This xenophobia is multi-layered: using Billig’s (1995)
systematisation of foreign-ness, one could say that the minorities which are acknowledged
and politically protected are the “You” in the discourse, while all other categories of “ethnic”
foreigners are “Them”: the trichotomy We-You-Them is thus a radical essentialisation rather
than liberalisation of the discourse.

Persistent negative connotations of everything “ethnic” and “nationalist” in various sectors of

the public sphere notwithstanding, the affirmative positivism in the academic thinking about
the legally recognised national minorities (which are universally thought of as model “ethnic
groups”) is deeply rooted in the popular as well as academic views. Needless to say, these
views thoroughly permeat the sphere of public education. The Slovenian nation is seen as the
result of a continuous, organic historic process. There is an explicit ethic investment there as
well. The Slovenian nation-state is thought of as the actualisation of the universal, “natural”

5
Generally known are the results of the representative surveys entitled Slovenian Public Opinion of the Institute
of Social Sciences at the Faculty of Social Sciences. One of the periodically examined concerns the acceptability
of different social (judicially prosecuted people, alcoholics, drug-addicts, political extremists, homosexuals) and
ethnic categories (people of different “race”, Jews, Gypsies) through the following question: “Who would you
prefer not to have as your neighbour?” The social categories which were on the highest increase between 1992
and 1994, and between 1995 and 1998, include drug-addicts, alcoholics, homosexuals and political extremists,
who occasionally add up to 70%. The results relating to ethnic categories are as follows: people of different races
39.5% in 1992, 28.3% in 1994, 17.2% in 1995 and 21.1% in 1998; Gypsies 41.9% in 1992, 54.8% in 1994, 48.7
% in 1995 and 53.5% in 1998; Jews 37.2% in 1992, 20.7% in 1994, 22.0% in 1995 and 24.8% in 1998. Although
all data can compare in view of different factors, including, for example, the perception of acuteness or the
relevance of the implied issues, one piece of information rose to fame: of all the people that would not have a
Jew as their neighbour, only a tiny percentage ever actually saw one. Cf. Toš et al., 1998.

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principle of justice. It was precisely this latter element that was severely tested in an early
1990s political episode in which Slovenians and Slovenianess were assumed to exist, but were
never found to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

SLOVENIANESS IN POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF BOSNIAN SLOVENIANS

In late Spring of 1992, the Slovenian government, according to the then high employee of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Peter Toš6 (Brilej 1992:41), began to collect data on Slovenians
living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war in this ex-Yugoslav republic was at that time
several months old if we are to place its beginning between the declaration of independence
on March 3, 1992, and the presidential order to mobilise Territorial Defence on April 4
(Lampe 1996:355). Data were gathered from various sources: the census and other statistics,
journalist reports, interviews with various knowledgeable individuals. By end of September
1992, “a list of round 780 Slovenians living in Bosnia and Herzegovina was compiled” (Toš,
in Brilej, ibid.). An expert team composed of two persons from the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, one person from the Ministry of Defence, and one from Ministry of Interior prepared
a plan of evacuation “based on the analysis of the experience of the Children’s Embassy and
the Sarajevo Jewish Community” (Toš, in: Brilej, ibid.). Of substantial help was the
Association of Slovenians in Sarajevo. However, says Toš,

We were obliged to stick to the criteria set in Ljubljana, namely, that we shall evacuate
only Slovenians by ethnicity or by citizenship. Many people approached us, mothers
begged us to at least save the children… This was my worst experience, to listen to the
pleas and stories of these people… (Toš, in: Brilej, ibid.).

After much diplomatic action primarily with the Serbian military authorities, the first convoy
was granted safe passage through Serbian territories, as the negotiations with Croatian
authorities were initially less successful. It arrived to Ljubljana on November 18, 1992; the
second convoy, negotiated with Croatian authorities, arrived two days later. Toš concluded his
narration:

The Republic of Slovenia as a young state clearly proved that each of its countrymen is as
protected as those people that are backed by a superpower like the USA. Slovenia proved
it is capable of granting safety to its citizens.

Only months later, these triumphant tones gave way to confusion. The media reported on
intolerable situation of the evacuees: they left Bosnia and Herzegovina with a group
Slovenian passport; now, however, their legal status is moot and complications endless. The
whole action was called a trick in the then Parliamentary elections campaign. A hundred odd
evacuees who did not have relatives in Slovenia to lodge with were placed into a maritime
pension. It also turned out that the majority of the evacuees, more than 90 percent, did not
have Slovenian citizenship. A year after the evacuation, the governmental Office of
Immigration and Refugees informed the public that the statistics on the evacuees are
somewhat unclear7; however, the picture did clear somewhat in April 1994 when the daily
Slovenec cited Miloš Šuštar, then director of the Office of Immigration and Refugees, as

6
Mr. Peter Toš is presently Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia to Israel.
7
The Ministry of Interior counted 379 evacuees, from them 36 Slovenian citizens; The Red Cross of Slovenia
had a sum total of 266; The ministry of Interior itself counted 320 and 32 citizens of Slovenia from among them.
– Government of the Republic of Slovenia, Office of Immigration and Refugees, September 9, 1993, No. SP1-
13/9-74/93, signed: Renato Kranjc, director.

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saying that there were 320 evacuees of whom 180 were still without Slovenian citizenship
(Karneža 1994). In October 1995, Danica Simšič, MP of the Democratic Party, received word
from the government in response to her query8 that from among round 300 evacuees, 117
applied for citizenship according to Article 13 of the Citizenship Bill; 85 had their
applications granted, 32 applications were still considered.

Governmental offices initially concerned themselves primarily with appropriate terminology.

Governmental decree form 16 December 1993 shifted from “evacuated persons” to
“temporary refugees”.9 Legal consequences of this terminological shift were explained at
length in several expert opinions, among them one issued by the Ministry of Interior in
September 199310, which commented on an earlier material issued by the Office of
Immigration and Refugees entitled Reševanje problematike evakuiranih oseb (Solving the
problematic of evacuated persons). The Ministry proposed that the term “evacuees” be used
for “citizens of other [Yugoslav] republics”, and voiced concern with regard to anticipatory
designation “persons eligible for citizenship by descent”, stating that persons of foreign
citizenship are, according to the Citizenship Act,

not entitled to recognition as permanent residents, as permanent residency requires a

permit to reside permanently in the first place, which can only be issued after a minimum
of three years of continuous living on the territory of the Republic of Slovenia at a
registered address. That [recognising the evacuees as permanent residents as a
requirement for citizenship] would have constituted a precedent (emphasis original).

Further, the opinion stated that these persons could have been issued permits for temporary
residence only on explicit request, upon relinquishing the status of foreigners, and given a
“demonstrated justifiable reason (e.g. employment) and demonstrated ability of sustenance
means.” With this opinion, the status of the evacuees became somewhat of an impossibility:
the possible legal consequences of the fact that the Slovenian state brought them into Slovenia
with a group passport issued on basis of the assumption of eligibility for citizenship was
totally ignored. They became foreigners whose coming to Slovenia was legally not only
unclear, but impossible. The paradox, seemingly unawares, was fully exposed by Vinko
Poličnik, Head of the Department of Public Peace and Order at the Ministry of (in: Guzej-
Sabadin 1994):

The Government of the Republic of Slovenia has, on its session on November 26, 1992,
decided not to resort to naturalisation by special procedure11 in solving the status of the
refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Instead, the Republic of Slovenia grants them
assistance in the process of gradual integration in Slovenia. This means that acquiring
citizenship according to Article 13 of the Citizenship Act is not an option. Given that it is
a year after the evacuation in November 1993, all evacuees of Slovenian ethnicity and
their offspring could have obtained citizenship based on regular naturalisation (Article

8
Poročevalec, State Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, RS, XXII/27, p. 53-4, 17 July. 1996.
9
Government of the Republic of Slovenia, December 28, No. 260-05/93-1/19-8, signed: Mirko Bandelj,
Secretary General.
10
Government of the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Interior, September 30, 1993, No. 0016/12-S-26/57-93,
signed: Slavko Debelak, Director of the Office of Legal and Administrative Matters.
11
Article 12 (in its present form) of the Citizenship Act states that “competent state organs can, excercising free
judgement, accept into citizenship, according to national interest, a person who is a Slovenian emigree or his/her
descendant up to third generation in straight line” given that rather dire conditions are met. Article 13 provides
that a person can be naturalised into Slovenian citizenship for “scientific, economic, cultural, national or similar
reasons”, also provided that several conditions are met.

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12), were they to meet all the criteria as prescribed by the law (regular employment,
permanent residence, knowledge of Slovenian language, proof of impunity, etc.).

In other words, the evacuees were faced with the demand to acquire citizenship in a regular
procedure just as any other interested party; however, precisely because of the way they were
brought to Slovenia, they could not meet the legal requirements (especially regular
employment and permanent address). The absurdity of this reasoning that was exposed,
among other, by a lawyer that the evacuees engaged, was finally recognised by the
government and overcome at its 88th session on June 2, 1994. The Government decreed that,
“in accord with the national interest”, the evacuees are to be given citizenship based on
Article 13 (naturalisation) of the Citizenship Act; the previous decision was revoked with a
formulation that explained the decision taken “…regardless of the requirements that the
Ministry of Interior put forward in the process of determining the policy of treating the
applications for extraordinary naturalisation”.12 This seminal decision was taken only weeks
before the long-anticipated third convoy of evacuees from Bosnia and Herzegovina arrived to
Slovenia.

SLOVENIAN CITIZENSHIP: A MATTER OF BLOOD

The decision itself was crucially informed by a protest of the Office of Immigration and
Refugees which, on March 2, 1994, in a lengthier communiqué entitled Evakuirane osebe iz
Sarajeva (Evacuated persons from Sarajevo)13 severely critiqued the legality of the term
“temporary refugee”. The Office stressed that the problem of the evacuees calls for “package
solution” and grounded this opinion on a meticulous description of the problems these people
were encountering: they are losing whatever jobs they can get as they cannot, as foreigners, be
permanently employed; they cannot leave the country as they have no passports; they cannot
claim pensions after their spouses, Slovenian citizens, as they are not citizens themselves;
they cannot operate their bank accounts as they have no identification papers; they cannot
register their cars for the same reasons, nor enrol their children into schools outside the
compulsory primary schooling. The document concludes with a disheartening datum: many
among the evacuees, upon obtaining citizenship, left Slovenia for good: the Office speculated
that they have foreseen further grave complications of their lives as citizens of Slovenia:

Once they become citizens of Slovenia, they will be required to provide for place of
residence on their own. This will reduce the expenses that we currently have with
providing lodging and support. It is anticipated that many will emigrate to other states.14

The communiqué has a final note concerning “the eventual future evacuation of Slovenians
from endangered parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina” (emphases original). This confusingly
broad category of “Slovenians” is nevertheless clarified with a demand that in view of a
possible another evacuation,

12
Government of the Republic of Slovenia, June 2, 1994, No. 260-05/93-1/35-8, signed: Mirko Bandelj,
Secretary General.
13
This document was acquired in photocopy without any marks of identification (date, signature, number),
obviously deemed by the donor as sensitive.
14
My informants from among the evacuees believed that such exodus indeed happened. The preferred
destination was Canada. At least two informants judged the number to be “at least a half of total” or even “the
majority” of the evacuees from the first two convoys. Another informant stated that especially families of
“mixed marriage” decided to leave Slovenia, and those who had relatives abroad.

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…the possibility of existence of the evacuated Slovenian citizens in the Republic of

Slovenia be thoroughly studied. Strategies need be prepared ahead of time that will result
in a programme of solving the existential problems of Slovenian citizens from Bosnia and
Herzegovina; […] A plan of dealing with their presence in Slovenia must be prepared…

The fact that Slovenia was named “new homeland” of its citizens, and the fact that
“Slovenians” were initially mentioned as the group in question notwithstanding, the document
consistently spoke of “Slovenian citizens from Bosnia and Herzegovina”. No doubt a
programmatic insistency: the criteria for the third convoy that arrived to Ljubljana on June 29,
1994, were set well in advance. Eligible for evacuation were Slovenian citizens and their
minor offspring exclusively.

Such a restrictive decision had consequences (among other, recurrent reproaches about fascist
orientation of Slovenian authorities), but also a discernible genesis. By mid-1993, the
Association of Slovenians in Bosnia and Herzegovina already had a well-developed strategy
of communication with Slovenian authorities. They addressed their letters to the Cabinet of
the Prime Minister and/or Secretary General of the Government, but have also been sending
them cc to a number of prominent political bodies as well: to the president of the Republic, to
a number of ministries, to the president of the Parliament, etc. A letter with such a broad
circle of addresses was sent on June 17, 1993;15 its structure, exhaustive factography, a
specific style of argumentation, and its tone very likely betrays certain permanent features16 of
all manners of exchange between the Association and the Slovenian officials:

Our association tries hard to solve the problems that are, everywhere else in the world, the
business of state organs (embassies, consulates). Not because we would want to, but
because we have to. According to our evidence, more than 250 citizens of the Republic of
Slovenia still reside in Sarajevo; more than 350 persons who are eligible for Slovenian
citizenship according to the Citizenship Act of Slovenia, more than 600 Slovenians and
their families who are offspring of Slovenians in straight line, first generation; and more
than 1000 people who are offspring of Slovenians in straight line, second and third
generation. Each day, more and more people come to us who are able to document their
Slovenian origin (before the war, there were more than 6000 such persons in Sarajevo
alone).

These estimates are accompanied by a lengthier historical summary of Slovenian immigration

to Bosnia in the past hundred years, especially after the Austro-Hungarian annexation of
Bosnia. This historical essay is written as an introduction to a key explanation that may have
been given for the first time in this correspondence: that in present circumstances of war, such
family genealogies are all but fond family memories and cherished parts of family histories.
Rather, they are the precise reason why the external categorisation denies the offspring of
Slovenian immigrants to Bosnia any acceptable identity:

15
Zveza Slovencev v Bosni in Hercegovini – Savez Slovenaca u Bosni i Hercegovini Vladi republike Slovenije
(Association of Slovenians in Bosnia and Herzegovina), to the Secretary General Mirko Bandelj, for the Prime
Minister of the Republic of Slovenia; cc to many addressees. June 17, 1993, code: KM/SN, signed: Aleksander
Novak, President; Metka Kraigher, Secretary General.
16
The informants from among the evacuees remembered a constant, futile cycle of negotiations for the convoys:
“We would come to Ljubljana, they would come to us, there was much writing to and fro, talks, and all, we
thought we reached a decision, and then nothing happened. Again we would come to Ljubljana, have talks, have
agreements, and then again, nothing…”

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The constitutive nations [of Bosnia and Herzegovina] – the Serbs, Croats, and Moslems –
each have their own political and every other kind of protection; the rest are (except the
Jews who were very well organised, thanks to the care of the state of Israel) on their own.
[…] Currently, Serbs, Croats and Moslems are quoted as constitutive nations in Bosnia
and Herzegovina; relatively affirmative also the Jews and even the Romany. All others are
“the rest”, Slovenians among them. So now all offspring of Slovenians are digging for
their roots, as they are not permitted to be anything else but Slovenians.

In continuation, the letter brings a detailed report of the Association’s activities within its
member Societies. Meticulous is the report on various cultural manifestations and quite
fervent future plans, clearly intentioned as a proof of the members’ eminent Slovenianess
even in most dramatic of circumstances (“The choir ‘Prijatelji’ [‘Friends’] sang Zdravljica
[Slovenian national anthem] in Slovenian language while the bombs roared.”).

Given the media representations of the evacuees from Bosnia at that time, the last paragraph
of the cited letter is especially interesting. The letter found its addressees precisely in a time of
especially frequent media reports on the fate of the 1992 evacuees who were temporarily
settled in two coastal towns. The evacuees were presented as victims of the 1992
parliamentary elections campaign and a series of broken promises of the government. Many
reporters opined that the emotionally charged action of “salvaging Slovenian compatriots
from the war in Bosnia” was first and foremost the trickery of the ruling Liberal democracy.
The cited letter, initially designated as a response to a letter of the Slovenian government of
May 31, 1993, seems to defend against an earlier reproach, stating that:

It is imperative that the situation of the people in the first two convoys of November 1992
be resolved. All members of these convoys affirmed that they do have lodging in
Slovenia, but have, after their arrival to Slovenia, taken advantage of the elections
campaign […] for which our Association cannot be held responsible.17

By end of July, 1993, the then president of the Republic, Milan Kučan, directed a letter to the
Prime Minister 18 in which he urgently recommended that the government devise “necessary
means to protect Slovenians in Bosnia and Herzegovina” including the “eventual evacuation
of Slovenians from Bosnia and Herzegovina”. The term “Slovenians in Bosnia and
Herzegovina” was employed as a cover category; “formal citizens of Slovenia” were
mentioned as part of this broader eligible category. The President gave a summary of talks he
had conducted that same day with the delegation of Slovenians from Bosnia and Herzegovina:

[The delegation] stressed their expectancies that Slovenia will do everything in its power
to protect Slovenians living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and will organise another convoy
to evacuate the citizens of Slovenia and Slovenians respectively. They spoke of increasing
discontent, even disappointment, among Slovenians, because the evacuations in
November 1992 were not followed by further concrete actions as promised.

The problem that the President chose to designate as “extremely acute” and a matter of “more
than justified principles and practical reasons” was then addressed by the Sector of Migrations

17
One of the informants from among the evacuees confirms that the Slovenian government was wary of any
promises: “They came to Sarajevo to present the view of Ljubljana about the evacuation. […] They promised
nothing: no jobs, no flats, no nothing. It is not true what was then rumoured, and in the political struggles and
such. But there were local leaders of Slovenians who promised milk and honey in Slovenia”.
18
Republic of Slovenia, Office of the President, July 26, 1993, No. 26/7-1993, signed: Milan Kučan.

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at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The result was a document entitled Predlog za evakuacijo
Slovencev iz BiH (Plan of evacuation of Slovenians from Bosnia) that was issued by end of
November 1993.19 The first paragraph, item 1, summarily states that

The suggestion that evacuation should pertain exclusivelly to the citizens of the Republic of
Slovenia and their minor offspring was confirmed. As to the question of their spouses not
citizens of Slovenia, they are omitted from the evacuation plan given the restricted means
of the Republic of Slovenia, and given the method of evacuation in order to make it
feasible. It is planned that around 300 persons will be evacuated from Sarajevo, the Central
and other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The document goes on to define in detail the rights of the evacuees as regards social aid,
health insurance, and education. Somewhat contrary to the general spirit of the document,
item 5 introduces “evacuees without Slovenian citizenship” and defines them, in parenthesis,
as “temporary refugees with privileged status”.– The document specifically stresses that

…the majority of evacuees will reside with their relatives, on which matter we have no
data; therefore, lodging has to be provided in a different manner beforehand. Such lodging
capacities are at present non-existent. The Office of Immigration and Refugees opposes the
proposal that the evacuees with Slovenian citizenship be lodged in refugee centres.

The final item, no. 7, specifically requires that each of the evacuees

…submits a written confirmation to the effect that they agree with the conditions of their
residing, their rights and obligations in the territory of the Republic of Slovenia and that
they understand that their status is in no way privileged with regard to other citizens of the
Republic of Slovenia.

The documentation at our disposal does not detail how the main restriction – the evacuation of
Slovenian citizens and their minor children exclusively – was revoked after all, and spouses
and children of age were evacuated as well. The daily Dnevnik20 reported in June that

Drago Mirošič, Head of the Sector for Migrations at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, personally
escorted the convoy on its way from Sarajevo to Ljubljana. He was able to tell us that in the
past months, about 1000 applications for evacuation were reviewed; the final list in accord
with the accepted criteria encompassed only around 200 persons. This list was further
reduced to 127 upon arrival to Sarajevo, and after the talks with Bosnian authorities, only
94 remained. The actual evacuation encompassed 66 persons, 30 of whom are Slovenian
citizens, and the rest their immediate family members. Drago Krupnik, Assistant
Commander of Slovenian Police, told us that Slovenian citizens will be able to acquire
permanent residence at the addresses of their relatives in Slovenia. […] all others will be in
the status of temporary refugees.

One of the informants21 among the evacuees spoke of pseudo-racist criteria that the Slovenian
officials enforced among the evacuation candidates in Sarajevo. According to this informant,

19
Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sector for Migrations, November 29, 1993. No signature.
20
Dnevnik, 1 July. 1994.
21
For a detailed ethnography on evacuees see Šumi 2001. The research that this piece is based on was part of the
research project entitled “Slovenians in the space of ex-Yugoslavia”, head researcher dr. Vera Kržišnik Bukić,
Institute of ethnic studies, Ljubljana, 1996 – 2000.

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every family was obliged to name a person from among them to act as “head of the
evacuation”: preferably a person with Slovenian citizenship, or, failing this, the person closest
to a citizen in the family who featured “the fairest amount of Slovenian blood”:

We were even told that descent should be counted after the male line alone, not female.
Although I think counting kin on the female line is much more accurate, as the Jews have
it, for instance. If a Slovenian woman gives birth to a child, it is certain that the child is
Slovenian; if the father is Slovenian, than the child may or may not be a Slovenian That is
the natural order of things (laugh). My wife did not have the citizenship [of Slovenia] at
that time, so my daughter could not act as head of evacuation. Myself, I was tied in
Sarajevo and could not leave with the family, so I could not have acted as the head of
evacuation. The remaining candidate was my little son, but they told me, a minor child
cannot be the head of evacuation, so we will just erase you from the list. I totally flipped
out […] But then they did see that this was all nonsense. I am trying to say that so many
stupidities happened that it is hard to believe.

Another informant adds that in this situation, the Association of Slovenians of Bosnia and
Herzegovina “…wrote a very, very sharp letter [to Slovenian authorities]. I don’t know, I
guess it was never delivered …” - Upon arrival to Ljubljana, the evacuees were

…in for a reception, and then some, let me tell you. We were locked up in an old barracks,
the relatives could not come to visit us, we were all mixed together, men and women, they
said it was quarantine for medical reasons. We never got any results of any medical
examinations. In fact, nobody ever again showed any interest in us there. They gave us
some pocket money, and that was all.

The idea on the “quarantine” was initially very elaborate, according to another informant:

The expert group – the governmental group […] was brimming with ideas. I remember a
representative of the Ministry of Health who insisted on a 15 days quarantine. I told her,
excuse me, Madam, there was not one single epidemic in Sarajevo. True, she says, but
what about hygienic regime..? So I told her, the women in Sarajevo are as clean and clad
in their best clothes as are the women in Ljubljana, because they know they can die at any
moment. Then we said, OK, we will do these examinations here, in Sarajevo, before
departure, we will organise them ourselves. But they did not trust us. So we said, then
send in your own med team. And indeed, a doctor appeared […] It was a joke, really, a
very bitter joke. Then somebody came up with a brilliant idea: Slovenian citizens will be
allowed to go to their relatives in Slovenia; all the rest will stay in the barracks, also the
spouses who are not citizens. So we told them, wait a minute, what do you think this is,
Auschwitz, or what? […] I cannot tell you how bitter it all was for me.

CONCLUSION

Slovenian ethnic studies, and Slovenian history as taught in schools are, much like the
political and administrative factors that engaged in the episode with Bosnian evacuees, based
in a variant of belief in the primordial ethnos, and are informed by the discourse of a
nationalist history that is, in turn, informed rather than critiqued by Slovenian ethnic studies’
production. National history builds its credibility in a number of ways: by asynchronously
collecting the selected “cultural” emblems which are presumably characteristic of Slovenians

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(“in the course of history, Slovenians managed to survive due to their endemic culture”; “the
hayrack has for centuries been an exclusively Slovenian trait”); through the linguistic
argumentation which classifies the natural, spoken languages as variants of one “dominant”,
“true” language, the fair approximation of which is the artificial standard, and establishing the
latter as the criterion for the former “since ages past” (“from the times of the settlement of the
Slavs, the Slovenian language was developing through a series of dialects”); by means of a
curtailed “constitutional” history (“with the emergence of the independent Slovenian state, a
thousand-year old dream of the Slovenians came true”); by inventing an asynchronous group-
ness, e.g. by retro-activation of purpose of imagined and mythologized figures (“in the times
of Primož Trubar,22 us Slovenians had only two options: to become a nation, or else to
perish”). To briefly sum up current analytical thinking on nationalism, the fundamental,
notorious trick of nationalist history’s perspective is the classification of asynchronous and
contextually un-matching phenomena ex aequo, creating in this way the great mythical
monads: “Slovenian-ness”, “Slovenian language”, “Slovenian nation”. A multitude of
heterogeneous and diverse localised cultural and linguistic practices can in retrospect be
interpreted as homogeneous signs of such an entity, while historical data are sequenced and
presented as if the “nationally conscious Slovenian-ness”, or the “Slovenian state”, had
always been the inner purpose and the aim of the historical process of the mythical,
dramatically synchronized collective “us”. “Us” is the community of all Slovenians together
with their bloodlines down to ancient times. The mise-en-scene of these developments is the
territory of the “historic Slovenian settlement”, or, in a more universal term that fits into any
context, the “Slovenian ethnic territory”. The margins of this territory have been left outside
the Slovenian state in a series of unfortunate historic events – the natural national
development was denied to the Slovenians there: a situation that needs be permanently and
actively rectified.

The affirmative and positivist attitudes towards national minorities are therefore in the
political as well as academic discourse only seemingly permissive and libertarian. Actually,
they are formed along distinctly restrictive premises of the nationalistic perception of its own
constituent continuities, as it is only in this way that one can construct (“imagine”, in
Anderson’s famous word, 1983) a “national minority” collective. In other words: the
retrovision through which the national state legitimises its project is at the same time the
generative field of academic and political monopoly of the classical Slovenian ethnic studies.
In accordance with its central monads (Slovenian-ness, Slovenian language, nation, national
minority, Slovenian ethnic territory), the “ethnic” minorities are seen to have become, in a
series of “historical injustices”, the “severed limbs of the national body”. Because of the
injustices, the minority, which is unproblematically defined as objectively belonging to the
Slovenian nation, succumbs to “assimilation”, “the loss of language and culture”, and “the
lack of Slovenian national consciousness” – this last factor being at the same time the
consequence of, and the instigation for, “assimilation”. “With the help of the nationally
conscious elements within the minority”, the “mother nation” must overcome the aphasic
national identity and strive for the “growth of the Slovenian national consciousness”.

From the point of view of a commonsensical nationalist, academic or otherwise, the Bosnian
Slovenians were initially indeed seen as a severed limb of the national body, but one whose
replantation became all but easy or even desired. In this case, the decisive role was assigned
to those who can be seen as the last in the chain of hierarchy of power: the administrators and
bureaucrats who were obliged to interpret both the ideological, and the legal norms, and act

22
1508-1586, central personality of Protestantism among Slovenian speakers.

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on them. Their impasse was characteristic: the legal tools at their disposal were not seen as a
pragmatic base for action, but rather as sacrosanct encoding of the “natural”, “ethical”
principle. A good year and a half after the fait accompli of the 1992 evacuations, they were
this close to the conclusion that the evacuation could not have happened because it was
impossible to legally interpret it. Their concern, however, was not with legality per se: they
were defending that which they insisted to believe was a the unalterable “natural” principle of
Slovenianess, and they were sooner ready to alter reality than the law. The Citizenship Act
was seen not as a pragmatic legal base, but as a Covenant too sacred to be treated as law: it
embodied Slovenianess, not a practical political consensus that is subject to situational
interpretations. The solution pertaining to the 1994 evacuation which simply equated
Slovenianes with Slovenian citizenship was a logical consequence, a formalist solution to a
problem which was seen as a matter of faith, not legal norm, though a close inspection might
reveal that the whole reasoning, and acting, was directly unconstitutional: the rather curious
defining of the family “heads of evacuation”; the intended separation of families along the
line of citizenship; the very moot category of “temporary refugees”; and the fact that the
group passports they have issued were never again seen as documents with legal
consequences were never brought into question. In the words of one of the bureaucrats who
was directly involved in the 1994 evacuation:

“I know that the Constitution [Article 523] provides for special rights of Slovenians
without Slovenian citizenship. But that was intended for our people in Italy and Austria
and Hungary where our territories were lost in the past. In practice, we should be very
careful whom we take in. I met these people [the evacuees from Bosnia] – and I would not
say for very many of them that they are indeed Slovenians. They are different – they may
have had parents or grandparents who were Slovenians, but… these are difficult
questions. One thing I am certain of: we should do whatever we can to protect Slovenians.
True Slovenians. Many have wanted to exterminate us throughout our history. You leftist
and liberal intellectuals now want to deny it all – as in what, were they lying to us in
school? Or what? And then, you may give away citizenships like candy, and be liberal and
all, but in the end, that does not make Slovenians out of people. Never. They do not share
our culture, our language, our history. Law is one thing. Life is another. Law is just not
enough.”

When carefully questioned about this national history – features of which are outlined in the
first chapter of this paper - , nine out of ten interviewees were unable to reproduce with any
degree of accuracy this history that formed such a strong central point of their belief. History,
once turned into belief, obviously needs not be known anymore.

Perversely, this was also the standpoint of the evacuees themselves; it was this equal stand
that can be said to have created a good deal of misunderstanding between the evacuees and
their rescuers. Both were caught in a similarly essentialised position: as the Association of
Slovenians in Bosnia had said in its above quoted letter, the evacuees were faced with a
categorical demand to identify themselves “ethnically”, as all other actors were so defined and
23
This article’s integral text, in accord with the so-called “ethnic” constitutional principle, provides: “In its own
territory, the state shall protect human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall protect and guarantee the rights
of the autochthonous Italian and Hungarian national communities. It shall maintain concern for autochthonous
Slovene national minorities in neighbouring countries and for Slovene emigrants and workers abroad and shall
foster their contacts with the homeland. It shall provide for the preservation of the natural wealth and cultural
heritage and create opportunities for the harmonious development of society and culture in Slovenia. Slovenes
not holding Slovene citizenship may enjoy special rights and privileges in Slovenia. The nature and extent of
such rights and privileges shall be regulated by law.”

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seen as representing the norm in a situation of armed conflict. The “ethnic” everything but
nearly synonymous to “cultural” (cf. Eriksen 1993:87ff); as a (forced) profession of
belonging, it has hardened into a radical, intransigent difference (cf. Šumi 2000). In the words
of the Association, “.. all descendants of Slovenians now fervently dig for their roots, as they
cannot be anything else but Slovenians”. That is to say, not because they would think of
themselves as “in essence” Slovenian, but because all other options were systematically
withdrawn. This unconditional external categorisation (cf. Jenkins 1997:52ff) was quite on a
par to that of their rescuers, only that the tables here were turned: Slovenian administrators
sought to identify as little as possible of the same precious substance that the evacuees were
desperately clinging to. Their shared theory of blood and history, hardened through
authoritative discourses, was as uninform as it was unavoidable: this very sameness can be
said to have caused all the misunderstanding.

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 PAPER FOR THE 2003 ASN CONVENTION

ŠUMI, Irena. 2003. WHAT DO STATE BORDERS REALLY INTERSECT? THE CASE OF
VALCANALE, ITALY. Chapter in: Focaal, Special issue. Thomas Wilson in Hastings Donnan, eds. In
print.
TOŠ, Niko et al. 1998. VREDNOTE V PREHODU II. / VALUES IN TRASITION II. SJM 1990 – 1998.
Ljubljana: IDV DFV.

QUOTED NEWSPAPER SOURCES:

BRILEJ, Roman. 1992. Beg iz seraja. /Flight from the seraglio. In: Mladina, September 24, 1992, pp. 41-
43.
GUZEJ-SABADIN, Cveta. 1994. Begunec mon amour. / Refugee mon amour. In: Primorske novice,
January 28, 1994.
KARNEŽA; Biserka. 1994. Država vabi za prazno mizo nove goste. / The state invites new guests to empty
table. In: Slovenec, April 15, 1994.

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