Decolonization Models for America’s Last Colony: Puerto Rico

Slovenia

55 Slovenia A European country that achieved sovereignty in 1991. With half the population of Puerto Rico, it has one of the highest growth rates in the world. —Ángel Collado-Schwarz Slovenia in 2010 Population: 2 million Territory: 20,000 square kilometers Population density: 102 per square kilometer Gross domestic product (GDP): $46.9 billion Gross national income (GNI): $49.0 billion GNI per capita: $23,860 Unemployment rate: 5.9 percent (2006–2009) Internet users: 69.2 per 100 people Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011). Slovenia  57 Updated Comments The Slovenian economy grew at an excellent pace during 2004–7, averaging better than 5 percent. In 2007, before the financial crisis, real GDP increased 6.8 percent. It grew also in 2008, albeit at a reduced rate of 3.5 percent. The global recession’s impact was felt during 2009, when exports and output declined sharply. Real GDP declined 7.6 percent that year, and unemployment rose significantly, to more than 10 percent. There was a mild recovery in 2010 that did not improve the employment picture noticeably . Moderate growth of between 2 and 3 percent annually is projected for 2011–15. Some structural and fiscal reforms are expected to stimulate investment, especially foreign investment, which so far has played a limited role in Slovenia’s economy. Francisco Catalá-Oliveras Juan Lara Interview Interview aired on La Voz del Centro, Univision Radio Puerto Rico and New York, March 18, 2007. ÁNGEL COLLADO-SCHWARZ: Slovenia is one of the most recent countries to achieve sovereignty. Paco, let’s give our radio listeners some background on Slovenia. FRANCISCO CATALÁ-OLIVERAS: Certainly. Slovenia is not well known in Puerto Rico, though I believe a Puerto Rican played on the Slovenian basketball team. Now Puerto Ricans are playing basketball all over Europe. Slovenia is a country with only 2 million inhabitants. That is why its experiences turn out to be enlightening for Puerto Rico—because it is a small country. ACS: Two million is half of Puerto Rico’s population. FCO: However, Slovenia has more than twice our territory—nearly 20,000 square kilometers. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Croatia to the south and southwest, and Hungary to the northeast. 58  Interviews It is on the border of what I would call old western Europe and eastern Europe, referring not so much to its geographical position, but rather to a political one: this border divided capitalist Europe from socialist Europe. From the Second World War on, Slovenia was part of the Yugoslav Federation under the government of Josip Broz Tito, Marshal Tito. The federation was made up of Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, BosniaHerzegovina , and Serbia, in addition to the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. In 1990, [ten years] after Tito died, a referendum was held, and the Yugoslav Federation began to fall apart. Some 86 percent voted for the independence of Slovenia. ACS: Paco, before talking about Tito’s death, explain what happened with regard to the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. FCO: Yes, that is pertinent. First, we must distinguish Yugoslavia from the rest of the countries that made up Europe, socialist eastern Europe. Yugoslavia was the only country that liberated itself from the Nazis, through the actions of Tito’s Partisans and not through the intervention of the Soviet army, which never entered Yugoslavia. From the beginning, that gave Slovenia a certain degree of political independence, and major differences arose between Tito and Joseph Stalin. The first distinction we have to make is that from the very beginning Yugoslavia established less-strained political and economic relations with the West, with western Europe. The second distinction is that Yugoslavia was something of an artificial state, composed of a number of very different nations with different languages and even different alphabets. Some used the Latin alphabet, as we do, whereas others used the Cyrillic alphabet . Besides this, its peoples—the Serbians, the Croatians, the Slovenians, and so on—practiced different religions, and each of them had a strong national identity. These differences moved the country to remain relatively decentralized so that even though [it] had a central economic plan, [it] granted more prerogatives to the governments of these republics in the federation than was characteristic of other countries of eastern Europe or even of the Soviet Union. So [it] gradually...