Uncertain Path: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Slovenia

Foreword

Foreword Sabrina P. Ramet I first met Rudi Rizman in 1987, when he was already an internationally recognized authority on nationalism and related problems. In fact, I had looked him up during one of my many visits to Ljubljana so that we could talk about the emerging civil society in Slovenia. Those were different times—more exciting, in many ways, than today. In those days, the challenge in his part of the world was how to push back the constraints on freedom imposed by the Communist system and, at the individual level, how to preserve one’s integrity. This book, a significant contribution to the social history of Slovenia, is at the same time a personal document in which the reader will easily detect evidence of the personal courage that Rizman displayed in confronting these two challenges. However—in what may have come as a surprise to him—he, like other Slovenes, has also had to face these same two challenges in post-Communist Slovenia. The difference, as this volume amply documents, is that the threat to tolerance, equality, and freedom today comes above all from the right, rather than from the left, of the political spectrum. It has often been remarked that stable democratic life presumes the existence of networks of community associations such as civic groups, journalists’ associations, trade unions, socially active religious associations , ladies’ guilds, and men’s lodges. The presence of such networks has come to be associated with the term “civil society” (though this was not the meaning associated with this term when it first began circulating in philosophical circles in the seventeenth century). Using the term in its modern sense, one thus may say that the institutions of representative democracy will function completely differently depending on the spirit of civil society. Tomaž Mastnak explained the dilemma some years ago when he pointed out that Slobodan Milošević rose to power not in spite of civil society but rather because civil society in Serbia was XII | Foreword permeated by a self-pitying nationalism that could be exploited for aggression .1 Even those who choose to call the Slovenian opposition of the late 1980s “nationalistic” recognize that it was not nationalistic in the same sense as Serbian society was. Even if one accepts a distinction between offensive nationalism and defensive nationalism, it is not clear that either of these labels really fits the Slovenian case—which in the early 1980s and beginning of the 1990s came across rather as a case of civic-mindedness or, at most, self-engrossed nationalism. Decaying communism (or, if one prefers, socialism) proved to be a fertile seedbed for the emergence of civil society, for collective action inspired by feelings of solidarity.2 Fed up with the organizational monopoly imposed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, by censorship (albeit variable), by violations of individual rights (documented by Rizman using his own case as evidence), by the regime’s endeavors to orchestrate religious life according to its own formula, and by an ideology of equality that supported a system in which, to use Orwell’s memorable phrase, some people were more equal than others, Slovenes, like people in other Communist countries in East-Central Europe, simply set about building an alternative structure, brick by brick. Among the first such bricks, Rizman notes, were the punk scene, the annual gay festival, and the Lilith lesbian group—which managed to obtain permission to function as an “activity” of the League of Socialist Youth. One could also mention Radio Student, an independent broadcasting voice operating without censorship, the freewheeling youth magazine Mladina, and Laibach, an alternative music group that openly mocked the Communist system as comparable to Nazism. The mere presence of these phenomena was an obvious sign that the “old” Communist system no longer existed and that even the reformed Communist system, the local branches of which were shutting down one by one for “lack of interest”—as Ciril Ribičič, a high-ranking Slovenian Communist, admitted to me in 1989—was losing power the way that a leaky canteen loses water. As power drained away from the Communist apparatus, it accumulated in the emerging civil society. No one could be sure, in the late 1980s, just how long this process might take. However, as Niko Toš has noted, there could be no doubt of its direction.3 It would be easy for an outsider to forget just how autonomous the sources of social and political change in Slovenia were, and Rizman...