|
Yugoslavia Slovenes
The Slovenes were among the most westernized but least
numerous of the Slavs. About two million strong, they lived
almost exclusively in the mountainous Republic of Slovenia and in
enclaves in Austria and Italy bordering Slovenia. The Slovenes
never possessed an independent state, but lived within
German-dominated empires from Charlemagne's day to the end of
World War I. From the thirteenth to the twentieth century, they
were ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs. Centuries of exposure to a
strong Germanic, Roman Catholic culture fostered qualities that
distinguish the Slovenes from the Croats, who lived under the
Hungarians, and the Serbs, who lived under the Turks, during the
same period. The tenacity of the Slovenian drive for ethnic and
cultural survival was evident under German cultural hegemony and
surfaced again when the Slovenes spearheaded the drive for
democratic reforms in communist Yugoslavia in the late 1980s.
Slovenian cultural self-awareness dates from the Protestant
Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation. Propagandists
for both sides made use of the Slovenian language, which at the
time was exclusively a peasant idiom. This bolstering of the
Slovenes' linguistic identity laid the foundation for the later
growth of a Slovenian sense of national identity, which began in
earnest after Napoleon's armies occupied Slovene-populated
regions in the early nineteenth century and promoted the idea of
a Slovene nation. One of the few monuments to Napoleon outside
France remains in Ljubljana, as evidence of Napeloneonic
influence on the Slovenes. Intellectuals trained by the Catholic
clergy led the Slovenian national movement through the nineteenth
century. Led by the Romantic poet France Preseren, they
established Slovenian as a literary language and produced a rich
national literature. Slovenian leaders sought political and
cultural autonomy under the Habsburgs rather than territorial
independence. Although they sympathized with their coreligionist
Croats, the Slovenes had no interest in uniting with the Orthodox
Serbs until World War I.
The Slovenes were by far the most economically advanced of
the South Slavs at the close of the nineteenth century, and
Slovenia maintained that position in the interwar years.
Widespread primogeniture (land inheritance by the oldest son) in
Slovenia limited the land fragmentation that plagued the Balkans.
Credit and marketing cooperatives saved rural Slovene families
from the chronic indebtedness that afflicted other regions in the
1920s and 1930s. The Slovenes' readiness to negotiate and
compromise also served them well in the interwar era. Their most
important contribution to interwar Yugoslavia's parade of
coalition governments was Monsignor Antun Korosec, leader of the
conservative Populist Party. Korosec, an effective spokesman for
Slovene interests, headed several Yugoslav ministries in the late
1920s and early 1930s. The Slovenes' linguistic distinctiveness
and distance from Belgrade kept their republic free of the
Serbian bureaucrats who gained strong influence over other
republics during the interwar years.
Slovenia's level of prosperity remained higher than that of
the other Yugoslav republics throughout the socialist era.
Because its per capita income was highest, the republic
contributed a higher per capita share to Yugoslavia's federal
funds than any other republic. The Slovenes complained that the
less-developed republics exploited them and that as a result
their standard of living slipped precipitously relative to that
in the neighboring regions of Austria and Italy. Nevertheless,
among the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia had the highest proportion
of its population employed in industry, the lowest rate of
unemployment, and the highest value of exports per capita.
Slovenia also boasted Europe's second-highest literacy rate in
the 1980s. Throughout the turbulent late 1980s, the Slovenes
maintained a strong sense of cultural continuity and a devout
belief in Roman Catholicism.
Data as of December 1990
|
