Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe author examines the Kosovo crisis in the context of the pluralisation and democratisation of Slovenian society in the 1980s and early 1990s. This issue became a catalyst not only for the repositioning of structures of party leadership in relation to Belgrade, but also with respect to general public debates. By charting individual stages of the critical decade of 1981–1991, the author presents Slovenian perceptions of Kosovo's political, economic, and social issues, first through the works of neo-Marxist critics and later through the activism of a group of left-liberal intellectuals, which included the provision of legal support and a high-profile social action related to the violations of Kosovar Albanian human rights. The author discusses the constraints encountered by this brief attempt to establish a pan-Yugoslav civil society initiative. At the same time, he shows how the complexities of the Kosovo crisis were used to coalesce the Slovenian nation into flight from Yugoslavia.

Once the diplomatic battle for Gorizia/Gorica was lost in the aftermath of World War II, the new communist authorities in Belgrade hastily decided in 1946 to build the «Ersatz» administrative, economic and cultural center of the Slovenian-populated region of northern Littoral (severna Primorska). Adopting principles of Western pre-war modern-ist urbanism (Le Corbusier's The Athens Charter), Nova Gorica, as the nascent town was called, intended to become an ideal environment for the «new working man», a showpiece of socialism vis-à-vis «crumbling» capitalist landscape on the other side of the newly settled border, conveying also the message of anti-fascism and national lib-eration struggle. However, after Tito's split with Moscow when new conflicts erupted along Yugoslavian eastern borders, the erection of the «lighthouse» of socialism on the western border became a task of secondary importance for the authorities in Ljubljana and even less in Belgrade. Using materials from archives in Nova Gorica, Ljubljana, and Belgrade, this article sheds light on the relationship between the authorities at local and republican level concerning this prominent project. It shows how the authoritative decision about radical modernization was imposed by the top communist decision-makers in close collaboration with the architects, who considered themselves the teachers of the new way of life. Eventually, this millenarian mission failed in a couple of years, leaving further development of the new urban center of the border region to the initiative of local political and economic elites, which shaped the town.

Self-management socialism displayed ambiguities and vagueness in handling social controversy and public life in general, giving rise to numerous peculiarities particular to this social phenomenon in Yugoslavia. While a Leninist interpretation of democracy in socialism constituted the background of Edvard Kardelj's recipe for "socially responsible criticism," Yugoslavia and Slovenia were at the same time under the influence of western liberal concepts. Considering the political and ideological contexts of late socialism, the article discusses the systemic way of dealing with social criticism between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, while trying to determine the impact of these circumstances on the subsequent evolvement of democratisation. Prior to the major social shifts of the second half of the 1980s, the "pluralism of self-management interests" could be articulated in practice primarily in a way that did not force it into competition with the Party. In those cases when this nevertheless occurred, the leading political establishment preferred to leave it to its "proxies" to deal with the transgressors, while itself taking on arbitrary positions that displayed some of the key features of the late-socialist regime in Slovenia.