Slovenia

Evolving Loyalties

John K. Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415274319
• eBook ISBN: 9781134478972
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

A clear and concise introduction to contemporary Slovenia. It examines the country's rapid transition from a collection of provinces in the southern part of the Habsburg Empire, to a republic within Yugoslavia, to an independent state and analyzes the major political and economic developments since 1991. The perfect introduction to one of Europe's most fascinating nations.

1 The Slovene lands and people to 1918

Introduction

The Slovenes were one of the first Slavic groups to be incorporated into the domains of the famous Habsburg Empire, and they were also one of the smallest. They were fairly slow to develop a national consciousness and clear political demands. This is partly due to their important strategic position in the Habsburg Erblande, or hereditary lands; historically, most Slovenes worked the land and were exposed to a great deal of Germanization. In addition, the Slovenes had little historical basis upon which to construct a modern people and state; thus, they moved much more slowly than, for instance, the Czechs, Italians, Hungarians, and Croats towards self-determination. But by the time of World War I, the Slovenes had produced several generations of renowned scholars who had cemented a national consciousness and begun to formulate political demands in the name of all Slovenes. The shape, extent, and success of the development of the Slovene national program are keys to the background of the first Yugoslavia.

Early Slovene history

The term “Slav” today refers to speakers of one of the Slavic languages. This branch of the Indo-European language family includes the sub-groupings East Slavic (including Russian), West Slavic (including Czech and Polish), and South Slavic (today’s Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and other tongues). The original Slavic tribes, numbering among themselves the predecessors of today’s Slovenes, arrived in the Alpine–Adriatic region in the sixth century AD. Although the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Bulgarians would all develop independent state structures and recognizable high cultures in the Middle Ages, Slovenes did not. They were, however, part of two limited political undertakings in capacities other than as merely subjects. From 627 to 658 they were part of a loose Slavic political entity under a partly mythological prince named Samo; this state, such as it was, extended from Saxony to the Adriatic. The main political fact of the time, though, was Bavarian and then Frankish sovereignty over the core Slovene lands. These lands, where Slovenes were numerous but not politically dominant, included the provinces known today as Carinthia, Carniola, and Styria, as well as the coastline along the northern Adriatic, the northeast corner of Italy. Christianization occurred around 800, and much power was wielded over Slovene lands from that point on by the Roman Catholic archbishoprics in Salzburg and Aquileia. German feudal lords moved in and Slovenes themselves remained mostly serfs, completing the political and cultural pattern that would long prevail. The main changes up to the period of the Enlightenment, with the exception of a brief flowering of Reformation culture discussed below, were provided by the consolidation of Habsburg power (by about 1400) and the incursions of the Ottomans, who had become a major force in the Balkans and then pushed on into Central Europe by about 1500.

There also exist some later Slovene political traditions, which indicate some degree of unity and local autonomy. Into the early 1400s, there was a principality (later, duchy) known as Karantanija; it was named for Carinthia, one of the northern Slovene regions. The local prince took his oath of office in Slovene, wore peasant clothes for the day, and was invested in a traditional ceremony on an outdoor stone throne just north of Klagenfurt. This throne, the knježni kamen, or, in German, Kaiserstuhl, was a remnant of an old Roman column; the accession was followed by a mass in the nearby church of Gospa Sveta/Maria Saal. From its origins in the 600s to the Frankish take-over in 820, Karantanija had its unique phase: the leader was elected by a limited franchise of freemen and had to agree to a “contractual” relationship with the people. It should be remembered, though, that the leader generally owed higher loyalties to foreign powers and that most Slovenes did not live in Karantanija. Nonetheless, this is as close as Slovenes got to a state tradition prior to 1991.

The famous Christian missionaries Cyril and Methodius, who brought both Christianity and literacy to several Central European and Balkan peoples during their ninth-century travels from their base in Thessaloniki, stressed the right of newly converted groups to worship, at least in part, in their native tongues. When European Christianity experienced its first great division in the eleventh century, this use of the vernacular, of course, would remain a part of the Orthodox tradition, but it would gradually fade in the Catholic world, to be replaced by the universal use of Latin. Evidence that the Slovenes originally worshipped in their own language is provided by the Freising Memorials (also known as the Freising Fragments, Texts, or Monuments; in Slovene Brižinski spomeniki). These manuscripts, discovered in Bavaria in 1807, are the oldest artifacts written in Slovene or, for that matter, in any Slavic language using the Latin script.

Like much of Europe, the Slovene lands were racked by peasant uprisings ( jacqueries) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The biggest of the revolts, encompassing 80,000 peasant rebels at its peak, lasted for five months in mid-1515. Faced with ever-greater taxes being used to fight off the Turks, and with restricted use of common fields and forests, peasants demanded a return to their stara pravda, or traditional rights. They also demanded a role in determining future dues and duties. The situation in the countryside had recently worsened, since feudal lords were trying to increase production for export and there was a switch to a monetary instead of natural economy. A war with Venice and higher tolls imposed by cities shut down much of the peasants’ economic activity. Thus, the peasantry organized into leagues and attacked and plundered castles. The nobility sought refuge in cities but finally called in some imperial troops and raised a mercenary army. Dozens of rebel leaders were executed, while taxes and the corvée (labor dues) were increased even more to pay for the damage that had occurred. The famous Croatian uprising (1572–1573) led by the ill-fated Matija Gubec also spilled over into parts of Slovenia, while the year 1635 saw another major uprising in the central Slovene lands. Although only involving about 15,000 rebels at its peak, this revolt also resulted from domestic and external causes. Erosion of traditional rights and increases in feudal dues and duties combined with higher imperial taxes and obligations to quarter ill-behaved imperial troops during the Thirty Years’ War.¹ After the suppression of the second revolt, fewer leaders were executed but many more were sent to the galleys or into other types of forced labor.

From 1000 AD up to the time of the Reformation, however, an enormous gulf swallows up Slovene high or official culture. We know, of course, that there was no independent Slovene state or even administrative unity in these five-plus centuries; the Habsburg feudal system had sunk deep roots into the Slovene provinces and the area’s cities became increasingly Germanized, in terms of both new population and diluted local loyalties of the resident Slovenes. It has been correctly asserted that in this long period “no writing, let alone literary creativity, took place in any of the numerous dialects of Slovene before the middle of the sixteenth century.”² What then happened, during the Reformation, was remarkable, but, like a spark quickly extinguished, Slovene was destined to go underground again during the exigencies of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. Despite the occasional work of non-fiction in Slovene or in German about Slovenia, it was only in the nineteenth century that the Slovene language would begin, again, to take firm shape and to gain in self-confidence and acceptance. The long history of the language, then, is burdened with a remarkably slow beginning. Slovene survived through these centuries as a peasant language, in family and village use among one of Europe’s smaller ethnic groups.

The Reformation was truly a seminal time for Slovene culture. Primož Trubar (1508–1586) is a figure of such importance in Slovene history that he has been called both the “father” of Slovene literature and the founder of the Slovene literary language. A Catholic priest who adopted Protestantism, he holds the first designation because his primer of 1550, entitled Abecedarium, was the first printed book in the Slovene language and because he is the first named poet in Slovene. He bears the second appellation because of his success in beginning the standardization of the Slovene language; his works follow, at least partially, a pattern common to English and German in this same era: the impact of Protestantism was registered as a spur to popular national culture, and great religious undertakings such as Martin Luther’s Bible (1534) and the King James version (1611). (Dante’s works had had a similar, if earlier, effect on standardizing the Italian language.) Although Protestantism all but disappeared from the Slovene lands during the ensuing Counter-Reformation, the works of Trubar and the men such as Jurij Dalmatin and Adam Bohorič who continued his work through about 1600 gave the Slovene language a much-needed injection of energy and status. Nothing approaching significant political change occurred in this time, as the Slovene lands remained firmly under the Habsburg scepter, even despite Turkish incursions; and even economic change had not yet permeated the region, since Slovene feudalism was able to suppress a series of violent peasant uprisings in this period. But one can speak of a revival, or an incipient modernization, of Slovene national consciousness through the rudiments of standardization and the beginnings of a wider literacy occasioned by Trubar’s work, which flourished with help both from urban humanist circles (pressing for educational reform and the use of various vernaculars) and from German Protestant patrons, thinkers, and printers in Tübingen and Urach.

The supradialectal version of Slovene created by Trubar contained many Germanisms, which began to be purged (along with Protestant theology) by the authors of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Trubar, of course, although writing for all Slovenes, had mostly an urban following and the Germanization of the language was most advanced in cities. Although Trubar sometimes used the words “Slovene” and “Slav” interchangeably (foreshadowing a major set of issues in nineteenth-century Illyrianism and Yugoslavism), he evolved a clear sense of who the Slovenes were and he eschewed pan-Slavic borrowings that would have made his writings intelligible to other Slavic peoples.

In total, Trubar published thirty-one books. They were all of a religious nature. Among them were translations of Gospels and the Psalms from the Bible, many pedagogical materials, music, and liturgies. Among the achievements of his immediate successors, Dalmatin’s 1584 complete Bible translation (not surprisingly, from Luther’s German version) and Bohorič’s grammar (also of 1584), dictionary, and alphabet provided the greatest anchoring of the peasant-based Slovene national culture. Trubar’s reputation remains so great that even modern Slovene writers such as Aškerc, Cankar, and Kosovel paid homage to him. His reverent but imposing likeness appeared on Slovenia’s ten-tolar banknote after independence, a position of everyday prominence that can be likened to the image of George Washington on one-dollar bills in the US. Trubar, himself, seems to have known full well the momentous nature of his cultural undertakings: “In the history of the planet this has never happened before, since the Slovene language was not written till now, much less printed.”³

In the long centuries of high-cultural silence following the Reformation, written works from the Slovene perspective or on Slovene affairs were extremely rare. One exception to this tendency is the encyclopedic four-volume Die Ehre des Herzogthums Krain (The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola) by a nobleman and scholar named Janez Vajkard Valvasor (1641–1693). This work was published in 1689; the fact that it was written in German foreshadows the overlapping cultural identity of Slovene intellectuals that will continue into the decades of the great linguistic works of Kopitar and Miklošič. Such was the cultural power of the Habsburg metropole, Vienna, or, in this case, such was the degree of Germanization in the Slovene cities that produced Valvasor. Valvasor’s name, fittingly, is found today in many variants, involving various combinations of Ivan, Johann, Weikhard, and Valvazor.

Valvasor was born into a Germanized aristocratic family in Ljubljana and received a Jesuit education there. Interested in the natural world and science, he traveled widely across Europe and North Africa and fought as a volunteer against the Turks. Upon settling down he began an energetic and comprehensive investigation of the life and countryside of his home country. He collected a library of thousands of volumes and drawings and he wrote and printed a total of nine volumes about Carniola and the surrounding areas. They were lavishly illustrated and most had Latin titles. His collection Die Ehre was the peak of his investigations into topography, history, technology, and ethnography. His enthusiasm for study was so great that, in addition to his three castles, Valvasor even bought a house in the city of Ljubljana so that he could be close to the archives.

Valvasor, in the fashion of the Baroque culture of the day, sponsored a group of artists who left renderings of some notable Slovene buildings of the time. The general intellectual setting of the time was rather thinly populated, with Jesuit high schools throughout plus a scientific association called the Academia Operosurum Labacensium and public library in Ljubljana. He is an individualistic phenomenon, although in some ways a breathtaking one, since he was also an inventor and architect and even a member of the Royal Society in England.Valvasor’s work is of tremendous value to historians of many types. He provides detailed information on economic life, everyday customs and popular culture, heraldry, language, folklore, and military affairs. Valvasor depicts a great economic bustle and exploitation of natural resources – coal, timber and charcoal, ironmaking, agricultural products, wool, mercury – in the Slovene lands. Trade with German and Italian lands brought imported goods and a higher standard of living than in more remote, more predominantly agricultural regions of the inner Balkans. The assertion that the production and trade created a Slovene middle class which then, open to European ideas and eager to share political power, acted to introduce the ideas of nationalism into the society is disputed by many historians, however. This model certainly seems to hold for many Western European and some Central European peoples, but it has been argued that the bigger spurs to Slovene nationalism were provided by intellectuals (including churchmen) and the Habsburg government itself, which promoted education and the vernacular to mobilize the population and better centralize the government. At any rate, two things are certain: the intense economic activity of the early modern era provided for the emergence of a Slovene bourgeoisie that would, eventually, challenge the German supremacy in urban areas, and the highways (and eventually railroads) connecting Vienna to Trieste pulled the Slovene lands together and helped build an awareness of common identity across the regions.

Valvasor was one of the few Slovenes (the musician Jacobus Gallus and the scientist Jurij Vega being others) who was known outside his home region. He thus helped bring some knowledge or awareness of Slovenia to the outside world, and he confirmed the necessity (and possibility) of Slovenes maintaining intellectual contact with the rest of Europe and producing work up to international scholar standards. It has even been remarked that “he advocated the peaceful coexistence of peoples and was aware of the interdependence of humans and nature,” which would make him an even more admirable figure by the standards of today.⁴ Ultimately, in terms of nationalism, Valvasor was a chronicler of Slovene life, and not a deliberate promoter of national consciousness, but his work constitutes a vital catalog of, or voice for, Slovene culture and history.

The lands inhabited by Slovenes had been incorporated into the Erblande in the fourteenth century; under the organizational pattern of the Habsburg Empire, these particular Slavs lived in six different territorial units: they predominated in the historic province of Carniola and also were present in Styria, Carinthia, Istria, and Gorizia; in Slovene these regions are known, respectively, as Kranjsko, Štajersko, Koroško, Istra, and Gorica. In the Hungarian part of the Empire lived a smaller number of Slovenes – about 45,000 – in the nineteenth century, and even more Serbs and Croats. (Much later, in 1866, Italy would remove some of these Slovenes from Austrian rule by annexing territory north of Trieste that contained some 27,000 Slovenes.) The Slovene position between the German hinterland and the Adriatic made their territory of crucial importance to the Habsburg Empire; thus German superiority in the region, or at least an absence of Slavic particularism, was very important to Vienna.

For a number of reasons, the Slovene lands did, in fact, remain largely loyal to the Habsburgs – or quiescent, one might say, in the face of overwhelming pressure. One reason was that the German commercial class was dominant in the cities well into the nineteenth century. Another reason was the fear of Italian irredentism in Istria, the Trieste region, and Gorizia. The Slovenes in Carinthia and Styria also looked to Vienna for protection against German nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth century.⁵ The first postwar generation of Slovene and Yugoslav leaders, who matured in the interwar period, when Italy had annexed a large portion of Slovenia, Istria, and Croatia, would be faced with a recurrence of this problem after World War II.

The bond of Catholicism was another source of Slovene loyalty. A nascent Slovene Protestant movement in the sixteenth century, which brought advancement in local literacy and the publication of the first studies of the Slovene language by men such as Primož Trubar, Jurij Dalmatin, and Adam Bohorič, disappeared during the Counter-Reformation, to which the Catholic Habsburgs lent strong support. Thus the basis for Slovene particularism had to be, in effect, largely reconstructed during the nineteenth century. In the words of the English historian A.J.P. Taylor, the Slovene national movement was “respectably clerical and conservative, a last echo of the alliance between dynasty and peasants.”⁶

The Habsburg nineteenth century

For Slovenes the modern era dawned during the Enlightenment. This era also brought Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon, sometimes called “the Enlightenment on horseback,” to France. The political philosophy and military campaigns of that country would in turn have great significance for Slovenia. But first, there was an indigenous Enlightenment. Its catalyst was a wealthy Baron named Žiga Zois (1747–1819). He was a major patron of the arts and learning, cultivating both European trends and the Slovene language itself. The Augustinian monk Marko Pohlin wrote an important grammar at this time, and the philologist Blaž Kumerdej (1738–1805) helped design and run an elementary school system initiated by Empress Maria Theresa. Since modern nationalism requires widespread literacy, the standardization and spread of Slovene is of great importance. The other artists and scholars whom Zois supported ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1. The Slovene Lands and People to 1918
• 2. Slovenia In the Two Yugoslav States
• 3. Slovenia and the Breakup of Yugoslavia
• 4. Independent Slovenia: Politics, Culture, and Society
• 5. Independent Slovenia: Economics and Foreign Policy
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography