10.1177/0888325403252249 ARTICLEEuropean Forms of BelongingEast European Politics and Societies
European Forms of Belonging
Ale¹ Debeljak
The article questions collective identities of "imagined communities"
involved in the process of European Union (EU) enlargement. Focusing on
issues of citizenship, unity and diversity, nationalism, and patriotism, the
author explores the process of EU enlargement from the viewpoint of the
"other Europe" in general and Slovenia in particular. It presents the dilem-
mas of "new democracies" of Central and Eastern Europe and their reluc-
tance to hand over their only recently won national sovereignty to a trans-
national entity of the EU. The author approaches the question of
exclusivism and inclusivism through the scope of modern citizenship and
the need of multiple identities that provide not only tolerance but also
understanding and possible respect for the Other. On the other hand, it
presents the strategies of both sides, the nationalism of candidate states,
and the gethoisation (Schengen) of member states as they outline the possi-
bility of a dim scenario of enlarged but internally divided Europe.
Keywords: citizenship; national identity; multiple identities; nationalism;
EU enlargement
Slovenia celebrated the tenth anniversary of its independence
and the establishment of a nation-state in June 2001. This was a
unique event in the history of the Slovene people, who, after a
long tradition of limited autonomy, acquired full national sover-
eignty only in 1991, following a ten-day war with the Yugoslav
army. To mark the occasion, the country's leading statesmen and
politicians assembled for an official ceremony on Republic
Square in Ljubljana, the capital. We ordinary people commemo-
rated our independence each in his or her own way. I watched
the fireworks display over Ljubljana Castle from a distance. You
could say I was gazing into the public sphere from across the
threshold of privacy: I was leaning against the garden fence in
front of my house. But I was not alone; many of my neighbors,
too, gazed out over the tops of the old acacia trees in the school-
yard across the street. We had all trickled out of our suburban
houses that evening to watch the colorful traceries of light,
151
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 17, No. 2, pages 151­165. ISSN 0888-3254
 2003 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1177/0888325403252249
which, besides providing visual delight, were supposed to
remind us that a great and important event was taking place.
The name of my street always makes me think about one of
the most crucial determinants of the human condition: Zvezna
ulica--"Union Street." It reminds me of something more than the
now disintegrated Yugoslav federation, although that is my
street's primary symbolic connotation. Of this there can be no
doubt, considering the history of the territory on which my
neighborhood stands. As the summer days grow warmer, the
truth of this history seems all the more apparent to me as I listen
to the "ethnic mix" of Croatian, Bosnian, and Roma dialects--
already reaching far beyond standard Slovene--which the gang
of kids who gather under the corner street lamp use for commu-
nication as they go about their boisterous affairs, no matter how
often they appear problematic for our traditional working-class
neighborhood. Rare are the nights I do not watch these kids,
when I go out to the front yard to smoke one last cigarette before
going to bed; under the murky circle of light from the street lamp,
they try out various strategies of power, authority, and adapta-
tion, vying for leadership.
But I prefer to imagine that the name of my street hints at
another, much broader unity and community, playing with con-
notations from a different stock of meaning and opening spaces
for the continuity of life we share. The hidden metaphor advises
me to reflect on something that is existentially fundamental for an
individual identity and, indeed, for a collective one, too: not only
tolerance but also understanding and possible respect for the
Other. The writer Marjan Roz*anc has movingly depicted such
regard for the Other in his popular novel Ljubezen (Love), which
is set in my very neighbourhood.
1
The characters in the novel,
later made into an acclaimed film, are politically divided, belong-
ing to either "Red" communist or "Black" collaborationist groups.
The Second World War has sharpened the conflict between the
two factions to bloody extremes. What redeems the things in the
novel is, in the end, love--fragile, innocent, and resting on the
authority of a direct and immediate acceptance. Love, for Roz*anc,
152 European Forms of Belonging
1. Marjan Roz*anc, Ljubezen (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1979).
is an ecumenical force. The primary characteristic of love as the
basic glue of solidarity is surely that it functions trans-politically.
The young narrator loves the communist activists with the same
disarming passion he bestows on the youths that collaborated
with the Fascist and Nazi occupiers since what excites, inspires,
and delights him most is the whole of the neighbourhood com-
munity, in all its fecundity, complete with all its internal quarrels,
conflicts, and disputes. If the novel teaches me anything, it is that
we need to look for the glue that binds a community together,
whether that community is something immediate and concrete,
like my neighborhood, or something rather distant and abstract,
like the Slovene nation-state or, even more so, the joint European
federation as it desires to emerge from the current struggles
within European Union (EU). The microcosms of a neighbour-
hood may be admittedly easier to imagine since love and solidar-
ity among its inhabitants have been given emotionally charged
and tangible forms in Roz*anc's literary masterpiece, forms that in
more than one way continue to shape life of this local community
today. But what interests me here is something more abstract: a
larger political community, where solidarity depends not only on
living experience and spontaneity of love but on strenuous
reflection and critical consideration.
Especially now, when the story of Yugoslavia has ended in
catastrophe and when, through the pain of loss, an opportunity
presents itself for a new beginning, new ties, and new forms of
connective tissue, it seems clear, at least to me, that it is impossi-
ble to live sensibly without some sort of anchorage in the collec-
tive, although it is clearly possible to die senselessly in the name
of that very same collective. Ten years after independence and
removal from a federal framework, and at the same time from
under a yoke of communist regime, the Slovene nation-state is
now confronted with what our political, economic, and media
elites constantly tell us is the central question of our collective
existence: entry into a new connection, a new federation, a new
unity--entry, that is, into the EU and NATO.
It is, however, critically necessary that I proceed with certain
reservations. First of all, there is the matter of the subordinate sta-
tus that candidate nations are compelled to accept during the EU
East European Politics and Societies 153
expansion process wherein one is faced with an almost "take it or
leave it" ultimatum. I am suspicious, too, about the EU's often-
criticized "democratic deficit." I have in mind the fact that the
European Commission, the EU's main decision-making body, is
led by politicians who are appointed, not elected. Then, there is
the weak European public sphere, which is hindered by a lack of
media and forums for genuine transnational debate, not only
among politicians but also among the various nongovernmental
organizations and, especially, among the citizens themselves.
Also, stronger ethical and political solidarity across nation-state
lines would be an important integrating factor for developing our
sensitivity to and forms of belonging together. In this regard, the
EU's shameful passivity in the wars of Yugoslav secession can
hardly be considered accidental. Rather, it was an unmistakable
sign of the EU member nations' distrust of the terra incognita of
Europe, the Balkans, the dark continent within a continent. In a
trivial prose of everyday perceptions in Western Europe, this
meant that Bosnians, Croats, and other victims of Serb national
socialism were not viewed as true, genuine, full-blooded Euro-
peans and were therefore not worth the investment in any orga-
nized effort to stop the attempted genocide until late.
Considering all this, it is not easy for "new democracies" in
Central and Eastern Europe to accept the cancellation of an
essential part of the national sovereignty or to ponder the conse-
quences of handing it over to a transnational entity such as the
EU, especially since, for post-communist states, national sover-
eignty has only recently been won. This is particularly true for
Slovenia, which unlike Hungary or Poland, for example, has
never in all its history been a separate and independent nation.
While there has long been a discussion in Western Europe about
the decline of the national state within the context of globaliza-
tion, Slovenes actually hopped on the last car of the last train of
nationalism as a legitimate movement toward a nation-state. It is
thus no accident that Slovenes still see themselves predominantly
as members of an ethnically based state, while most West Euro-
pean countries have already begun to see themselves largely as
multicultural and multireligious communities in which the essen-
tial principle of public life is respect for the law and the constitu-
154 European Forms of Belonging
tion, no longer ethnic membership. The practice of a common
way of life is, then, no longer entirely dependent on ethnic iden-
tity but rather on the ideal of "constitutional patriotism" of the citi-
zens, as Jürgen Habermas would have it, following Dolf
Sternberger's studied rejection of the nationalism that appeared
in early 1980s.
Ethnic identity, however, is far from obsolete and is certainly
more accessible than the tangled political deliberation that
informs "constitutional patriotism": unlike other foundations for
human unity, it has a dubious advantage in that it naturalizes his-
tory. That is to say, it regards culture as a natural phenomenon
and freedom as a necessary given. The nation-state, which pro-
motes the principle of ethnic unity in such a way that it dominates
and transcends all other loyalties, is the only story of successful
community in the modern age, as Zygmunt Bauman convinc-
ingly argues in his recent book, Liquid Modernity.
2
Nationalism is
the only ideology that has carried out its often violent ambitions
to acquire general community status with a considerable mea-
sure of conviction and effectiveness. The romantic ideal of a sin-
gle people and a single language, which contains the nation's
unique untranslatable and inalienable spirit, has been particu-
larly successful in Eastern Europe. Here, the philosophy that
nationhood should be understood as something organic, as
Johann Gottfried Herder interpreted it, has found a much more
fertile ground than the emphasis on universal civic identity that
was introduced by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
The idea that the unity and self-respect of a particular people
could be legitimately based on ethnic homogeneity has, indeed,
received important impetus from German Romanticism. But we
need to remember, too, that the success of the nation-state was
due to the fact that it managed to suppress or crush all other
groups trying to assert themselves. It fought stubbornly against
provincial authorities and local heritage, imposing a single stan-
dard language and a single historical memory. It pushed all other
traditions to the side, from regional to linguistic, such as, for
East European Politics and Societies 155
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (New York: Blackwell, 1999).
example, the Provençal and Breton languages in France, Sycilian
and Friulan in Italy, or the Styrian and Istrian dialects in Slovenia.
If we agree, then, that even today it is relatively difficult to
think outside the frame of the nation-state, or more precisely,
outside of ethnic tradition--which we may reject but which we
nevertheless cannot get beyond in the modern world--it would
be wise, I think, to consider the difference between patriotism
and nationalism. Without splitting academic hair, it is possible to
argue that patriotism is nationalism that has been tamed and civi-
lized; it can even be something noble. Patriotism has been
described--in especially elegant fashion by George Orwell in his
essay Politics and the English Language
3
--as the repudiation of
the most undesirable, shameful, and brutal aspects of national-
ism understood as chauvinism. A nationalist who believes in his
nation as the embodiment of the highest Idea, the nation as a
metaphysical truth, wants to ensure the collective existence of
those like himself, ensuring it by means of violence and hatred
toward others so that he can easily succumb to the illusion that
the blunders and failings of his own nation are nothing more than
the result of foreign conspiracy. The patriot is, instead, a citizen
whose behaviour in a democratic political order is characterized
by his tolerance for cultural diversity and especially for ethnic
and religious minorities. The patriot thinks it self-evident that
these minorities should celebrate their own tradition just as he is
not ashamed of his own membership in an ethnic collective or
squeamish about the emotional charge that comes with such
membership. Karl Shurtz, an important nineteenth-century Ger-
man revolutionary who later immigrated to the United States
where he fought in the Civil War and later became an American
statesman, made a name for himself by famously proclaiming his
allegiance: "My country, right or wrong." On the face of it, this
sentence represents a quintessentially nationalistic sentiment.
Yet, Shurtz's next sentence, often conveniently overlooked in
public discourse, sets the record straight: "When right to be kept
right, when wrong, to be put right." These two sentiments taken
156 European Forms of Belonging
3. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in George Orwell, ed., Collected Essays
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1946).
together, the allegiance to one's nation and the critical attitude
toward such membership form the backbone of intelligent patri-
otism. The latter is never arrogant, while crude nationalism
always is, as Robert McClure argued in his eponymous article in
Maxwell Perspective.
4
Despite these considerations, which are not anti-European but
rather Euro-skeptical--an important difference--it nevertheless
seems to me that it would be better for Slovenes to participate in
European integration. It would be better, I think, for Slovenia to
take an active role--even if it must be only a small one--in deci-
sions concerning the critical institutional processes involved in
forming a European "unity in diversity" rather than watch from
the outside. The Slovenian state is, after all, often powerless
before the political and economic, if not also covertly territorial,
appetites of neighbors, especially Austria and Italy, EU members
with increasingly more populist and conservative governments
that are quite prone to anti-European rhetoric.
At the same time, we must not forget certain basic contradic-
tions of phantasmatic Slovene self-sufficiency, which in the cur-
rent public debates of my country translates into an irrational, yet
deeply held desire to sleep with a girl without any consequences.
After Slovenia successfully escaped the Yugoslav disintegration
and concomitant bloodbath, both the political elite and the gen-
eral public quickly asserted that the country did not want to have
any further dealings whatsoever with the Balkans. After Septem-
ber 11, 2001, and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washing-
ton--although Slovene public opinion reacted with horror, to be
sure--there were also cautious and, at least to me, irritatingly
smug admonitions that the Americans had, after all, reaped what
they had sown with their global expansionism. That is to say,
Euro-Atlantic solidarity was not the defining factor here. Simi-
larly, entry into the EU seems to be understood, by a substantial
segment of the Slovene public, not as a way of developing neces-
sary broader ties--not only economic (Slovenes would have to
have these even if we remained "outside") but also political, cul-
tural, and social--but rather as something to fear, a way for for-
East European Politics and Societies 157
4. Robert McClure, "Intelligent Patriotism," Maxwell Perspective 12:2(2002).
eign "carpetbaggers" to make money off of our labor. It is, more-
over, ironic that this unhappy coalition of EU naysayers includes
both the radical left (for whom the EU and NATO are hardly any-
thing else but agents of political and military hegemony) and the
radical right (which claims that unique Slovene identity, what-
ever that might be, would surely disappear in a broader integra-
tion, the condition Slovenes barely escaped in former Yugosla-
via). In other words, the Slovene people do not want to return to
the Balkans, are at best indifferent toward America if it does not
actually get on their nerves, and view the EU as a self-interested
exploiter of our natural and human resources. It would appear,
then, that Slovenes do not want to belong anywhere!
In my opinion, such isolationism is unacceptable. I need only
to consider the historically momentous aspirations of the EU to
create similar living conditions throughout its territory as well as
to ultimately dictate the terms of a common destiny for all its citi-
zens. Citizen is the operative word here. Instead of a citizenship
that derives from a belonging to a state where shared traits with
people who possess the same language, mythology, and history
are ethnically based, European "dual citizenship" implies, in an
ideal scenario, a form of belonging not only to one's own nation
but also, more and more, to the supranational framework estab-
lished by the agreements made at Rome, Maastricht, Amsterdam,
Schengen, and Nice. Make no mistake here: I have no illusions. I
am perfectly aware of the fact that the oscillating dilemma
between the "domestic" and "foreign" will not evaporate once
Slovenia enters the EU but will be internalized instead. The bor-
der, then, will remain in place, but its meaning will have been
shifted to "first rate" and "second rate" members. Nevertheless,
the interests of Slovenian citizens might be more comprehen-
sively safeguarded if they are protected not only by the Slovenian
constitution alone but also by European regulations and laws.
Consider, for example, a new word for foreigners that has
become widespread in contemporary Italy: excommunitari, that
is, those who come from countries outside the EU. In accordance
with the laws regulating the right to work, citizens of EU member
states have long been accustomed to enjoying the status of
nationals anywhere within the EU (this is most obvious in the
158 European Forms of Belonging
world of sports, especially soccer). At the same time, however,
this situation has led to an ever-stricter policy concerning the
EU's external borders. This newly fortified Europe, which seems
so peace loving within, looks quite different on the outside. Citi-
zens of countries that are not members of the Schengen Treaty,
implemented in July 1995, receive second-class treatment by the
EU: they have difficulty getting entry visas and residency or work
permits, they are kept in assembly camps on Europe's new bor-
ders, or they are quickly expelled. If West European politicians
want to convince their constituencies that EU's eastward expan-
sion is in the interest of public good, they have to maintain the
notion of firm borders on the outside, which is precisely what the
Schengen Treaty does. If internal borders are to be done away
with successfully, the "civilised part" of Europe must reinforce its
external borders. But in contrast to this policy, for the constituen-
cies of the East European countries preparing for EU expansion,
it seems wise to advocate softer, more open borders between
those who are inside and those who are not. Dirk Schumer is thus
entirely correct, for example, when he states, in his article Mod-
ern Slavery, that for long-standing historical as well as more
recent economic and political reasons, Poland may find it diffi-
cult to accept new and more rigid borders with Lithuania and
Ukraine.
5
The same claim is true in regard to the Czechs and the
Slovaks. Hungary, moreover, has since the Treaty of Trianon in
1920, this "peace without honor," based its foreign policy on sup-
port for the whole of the Magyar people, which, of course,
includes the numerically substantial Magyar minorities in neigh-
boring Romania and Slovakia, as well as in what is left of Yugo-
slavia; meanwhile, Hungary is increasingly vocal about its hopes
for better protection of its minorities within an internally inte-
grated Europe, albeit advancing a newly asserted and reinvigo-
rated politics of an ethnic body. The latter is designed to encom-
pass segments of ethnic Hungarian population that live outside
of the borders of nation-state. This concept appears traditional.
At least it appears so in comparison with a modern political citi-
zenship that is "ethnically blind" and thus potentially better
East European Politics and Societies 159
5. Dirk Schumer, Modern Slavery (FAZ-English edition, March 28, 2001).
equipped to deal with realities of Europe of nation-states. How-
ever, I cannot help but wonder whether the exclusive reliance on
political citizenship inside the borders of a nation-state might not
make it difficult for any Slovenian government to continue
extending support for the Slovene minorities in neighboring
countries. This consideration gains currency particularly in light
of rapidly shrinking rights these minorities have in Italy and Aus-
tria. Nor has Slovenia yet worked out its border problems with
Croatia, which may be due, in part, to the fact that Croatia harbors
a collective envy toward the Slovenes because, unlike Croatia,
Slovenia went through only a short war and so entered into inde-
pendence with its industrial and social infrastructures more or
less intact.
In general terms, it is possible to argue that whereas the
enforcement of European standards should be viewed as a posi-
tive step toward modernization, the EU's adoption of the strict
Schengen Treaty line of external borders at the time when candi-
date countries are still waiting to join has negative implications.
These implications should be seen in the way the EU attempts to
transfer its own insecurity onto the shoulders of much weaker
countries, the East European candidates. There is no doubt, then,
that the expansion process raises questions about the borders of
Europe, although it would, by all means, be nicer and nobler to
daydream about "Europe without borders." Such utopian imagi-
nation is necessary, but that does not mean one should lose sight
of the fact that, while Europe's borders are clearly defined on the
west, north, and south, they are not at all clearly defined on the
east, that is to say, on Europe's soft underbelly. In this regard, I do
not think the Slovenian political elites have sufficiently consid-
ered the strategy of Slovenia possibly playing its "Balkan card,"
not only economically but also in the realm of culture, scientific
research, and education. For example, by establishing a "Univer-
sity of Southeastern Europe," Slovenia could define itself as a
European bridge for transferring knowledge, critical observation,
information, and skills to the less fortunate parts of the former
Yugoslavia and the Balkans, rather than shunning the region as if
Slovenia is a kind of cordon sanitaire between the stable and
unstable regions, a fate that might befall the country anyway.
160 European Forms of Belonging
Right-wing political parties are visibly making hay out of
Europe's shifting borders, while left-wing and centrist parties
mostly watch in crippled bewilderment. All across Europe, par-
ties with programs directed against immigrants from outside the
EU won significant public support in the third millennium. These
include Pia Kjaersgaard's Danske Folkeparti in Denmark; Jorg
Haider's Freedom Party in Austria; Casa delle Libert, the rightist
alliance in Italy led by Silvio Berlusconi; the Spanish right-of-
center Parti de Popular; Jean-Marie Le Penn's Front National in
France, and the Flemish Bloc in Belgium. Although these aggres-
sive right-wing parties have but a few policies in common, they
all share, at the very least, the goal to make life extremely difficult
for immigrants. Ideally, they would like to send immigrants back
to their countries of origin and sharply limit the mixing of ethnic
identities in individual countries. We should not forget that, while
inflaming xenophobia, these right-wing parties are not function-
ing in any provincial manner that might automatically provoke
public disgust over their ethnic hate mongering. In many cases,
these parties even use instruments supplied by the EU itself. In
my opinion, Slovenes can make a stand against such appetites far
more effectively if we are inside the EU rather than meekly
appealing, from outside, to the international public's tolerance
and reasonable understanding, which are by and large in short
supply. Let us recall, for example, Jörg Haider in the fall of
2001--then head of a regional Carinthian government--and his
refusal to abide by the decision of Austria's constitutional court
concerning the requirement for bilingual, Slovene and German,
public signs in the Austrian southern region of Carinthia, where a
large ethnic Slovene minority has lived for centuries. Or consider
his militant assertion that a large section of Carinthia's Slovenes
do not really speak Slovene but "Wendish"--so that, with a seem-
ing decrease in the size of the Slovene community, it would be
easier for him to undermine its constitutionally guaranteed status
as an ethnic minority and the legal protections that derive from
such status, although in practice, to be sure, they have rarely
been enforced in their entirety.
But one should not overlook the following paradox: despite its
declared anti-European stance, Haider's Freedom Party would
East European Politics and Societies 161
never reject any opportunity to fatten its wallet--an opportunity
that Austria secures for itself through Europe's structural funds
for agriculture and historical preservation, which is to say, from
funds expressly designed to foster solidarity, as Klaus Ottomeyer
has demonstrated in his study Die Haider-Show: zur
Psychopolitik der FPO.
6
Nor is there anything accidental about
Haider's delight over new possibilities for cross-border partner-
ships with like-minded neighbors in the Southern Tirol, the
Veneto, and Friuli-Venecia-Giulia--northern Italian regions
where cooperation along the borders would strengthen the
economy and especially tourism.
Instead of investing its joint efforts in creating a federal Europe
with a high quality of life, the EU is becoming more and more like
the "gated communities" of America, where the inhabitants of
wealthy neighborhoods keep their territory ethnically and socio-
economically homogeneous by means of armed security guards,
high real-estate prices, and limited access. But watch out! This is
no cheap imitation of American politico-economic urbanism or
the result of American cultural pressure but rather an entirely
"domestic," entirely European response to a real challenge. We
should remember, too, that those regions of Europe that display
the greatest degree of resistance to foreigners are at the same
time among the economically most successful regions, having
achieved this status only recently. Neither Austria nor Italy's
Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region have anywhere near the number of
illegal immigrants as do, for example, former colonial powers
such as Great Britain and France.
Such hatred of foreigners is, above all, morally repugnant. In
the long run, however, it is also economically hazardous.
Because of Europe's low birth rate (Slovenes with a birth rate of
1.2 children per family can congratulate themselves, for in this
regard we are quite European!), an unceasing influx of immi-
grants and constant migration are necessary to maintain condi-
tions for a high standard of living. According to many predic-
tions, the deficit in the workforce over the next ten years will
162 European Forms of Belonging
6. Klaus Ottomeyer, Die Haider-Show: zur Psychopolitik der FPO (Klagenfurt/Celovec: Drava
Verlag, 2000).
require that immigration to the EU continue and not be inhibited.
The politically broad-minded program, recently launched in Ger-
many, of providing "green cards"--work and residency per-
mits--for foreign experts presents a good example of the con-
flicted situation in modern European countries. The essential
feature of such conflicts is an opposition between, on one hand,
a feeling of ethnic endangerment (these dark-skinned, different
people threaten "our" values and social harmony) and, on the
other, economic demands (the German economy will languish
without these "imported" experts). Ethnic fundamentalism--not
only the idea of "Germanness" but also "the Magyar essence,"
"Slovenianess," "the Czech soul," and so forth--must face the
fundamentalism of the free market. Meanwhile, EU candidate
countries, the post-communist states of East Central Europe,
have themselves become destinations of choice for many for-
eigners. A large segment of immigration, both legal and illegal,
now flows into these countries, especially from the territory of
the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, although
many immigrants enter as temporary workers. These countries
were not prepared for this wave of immigration, which has made
the shock of encountering people who are different and "other"
all the more severe, unexpected, and badly managed.
This situation raises new questions about the purpose and
meaning of collective identity, particularly for countries whose
capitals and urban centers today reveal a substantially higher
degree of ethnic homogeneity than they did at the beginning of
the last century. Throughout the twentieth century, the cities of
Krakow, Prague, Budapest, and Ljubljana--both as urban spaces
and as focal points of respective national aspirations--experi-
enced not only modernization and industrialization but also a
defining and decisive transformation in their collective identities:
they turned national culture, that is, the one based on a chosen
ethnic tradition, into their dominant culture. As a rule, this meant
a more or less violent de-Germanization, which at the very least
indicates how extensive, influential, and powerful the Prussian
and Austrian empires had been. After World War I, for instance,
fully half of all the secondary schools on Slovene territory had to
be Slovenized since classes had been conducted entirely in Ger-
East European Politics and Societies 163
man; education in the other schools had been bilingual, con-
ducted in both German and Slovene, before the fall of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. After the Second World War, an even greater
ethnic homogeneity was established: the indigenous German
populations in Czech Sudetenland, and over a vast section of Pol-
ish lands, in Yugoslav northeastern provinces and elsewhere in
Eastern Europe, all disappeared in an immense whirlwind of vio-
lent retribution, while the Holocaust had dramatically reduced
Eastern Europe's Jewish population to tiny handfuls, mainly in
the larger cities.
But collective identity is flexible. As an "imaginary commu-
nity" (Benedict Anderson
7
), its mechanism of exclusion finds
expression precisely in an appeal to the most puristic forms of
the ethnic principle, such as is practiced by contemporary parties
on the extreme right in their hatred of foreigners and anyone
who is different, especially East Europeans. What is most per-
verse about this mechanism is the way it wants to suppress the
cultural, linguistic, and religious features of immigrants and
migrant workers even as it wants to make room for their eco-
nomic potential and specialised skills. The north Italian business-
men, Carinthian hoteliers, and Flemish merchants who despise
foreigners without full wallets then get rich by exploiting these
same illegal immigrants and migrant workers, without whom
their businesses would no longer be profitable.
The condemnation of foreign workers by privileged xeno-
phobes, whose lives these despised foreigners ultimately make
more comfortable--this is a new form of European hypocrisy. It
is a kind of hypocrisy, however, that clearly wins victories at the
polls both today and, it is to be afraid, in the future. This is some-
thing we need to keep in mind, especially since leftist and centrist
parties are responding to the changed circumstances either hesi-
tantly or neurotically. As a rule, they either do not give a fig for
national identity or dismiss it as a sheer romantic whim. Mean-
while, the loose set of social-democratic principles underscoring
the "politics of third way" of British prime minister Tony Blair,
164 European Forms of Belonging
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-
alism (London: Verso, 1983).
and his vague rhetoric of the social market still have relatively
few committed voters on their side. Thus, the rightist parties have
been able to acquire new voters in the space vacated by others.
For their part, the moderates and liberals have managed to con-
struct a mutual opponent out of the right-wing extremists while
concealing the fact that they themselves lack any inclusive pro-
grams of solidarity other than mere lip-service support for the
new democracies of Eastern Europe--this Other incarnate, as
Slavoj Z*iz*ek brilliantly demonstrated in his book More Hatred,
Less Love.
8
Instead of a Europe built on gradual and enduring solidarity--
as was begun with the successful integration of Ireland, Portugal,
and Greece into the EU--nothing really rules out the possibility
that the EU's eastward expansion might lead to an internally
divided Europe, where citizens, burdened with the legacy of the
new borders, are categorized according to their country of origin
and their purchasing power. The only question is whether
Slovenes will experience this divided Europe from the inside. We
already do so now, one way or another, from the outside.
East European Politics and Societies 165
8. Slavoj Z*iz*ek, More Hatred, Less Love (Belgrade: Belgrade Circle Press, 2001).
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