The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 208208 THE SCARS OF THE ERASURE4.1 The significance of national identityTo be able to understand the erasure and the long absence of noteworthypublic indignation at what happened to the erased people, it is important to knowthat national identities are invariably deftly interwoven with daily routines, and althoughwe are continuously reminded of our nationality, this process is mainly invisible.Reminders of “our” national identity are such a familiar part of our socialenvironment and so normalized that they affect us subconsciously. Michael Billig(1995) picturesquely described this subliminal process by giving examples ofeveryday habits of language, where the use of pronouns such as “here,” “we,”“us” and the like connote a specific national community, providing daily remindersof nationhood (e.g. in weather forecasts or daily news, where weather or eventsare discussed in terms of “here” and “elsewhere”). Billig’s analysis indeed pertainsto “established nations” (the emphasis is on Great Britain and the US), cha -racterized not only by a long tradition of statehood but also by a multicultural ormulti-ethnic notion of national identity (“American” and “British”). However, theseprocesses are in essence the same as those that are at work in Slovenia. In bothcases, the national community is constructed by politically delimiting it from neighboringstates based on territorial borders, by emphasizing its separate historythrough public collective memory that is reproduced by the media, the educationsystem, literature and so on, and by defining specific symbols, myths and valuesas national, “ours” and therefore exclusive and different. A national identity existsnot simply because a group of people has been defined as a nation from the outside.People first need to go through the psychological process of identifying witha nation and must internalize the symbols of that nation. For this to be possible,the experience of contact with the nation must be congenial and must producea feeling of security. The emphasis on security is important because it enablesus to contextualize the erasure within the framework of the uncertain period ofpolitical and economic transition and the consolidation of the Slovenian nationstate,plagued by growing unemployment and facing a precarious future (for moreon the influence of transition, see Zorn in this volume). Thus, during the early1990s, public discourse followed the rapid shift in displacing the collective identityfrom the context of the class solidarity and brotherhood and unity of Yugoslaviatowards conspicuously exclusionary practices that promotedSlovenianness (see Mihelj et al. 2009 and Bajt 2009).A national identity is not solely a means of categorizing and determiningother people’s place in the world, but invariably, and above all, part of every individual’sself-categorization as well. One important determinant of national identityis differentiation along with the complementary sense of belonging, which involvesboth conscious cognitive schemata as well as, and even more importantly,the early acquired and therefore unconscious ones which in “a person’s selfimage(his ‘self’) connects him with the principal traits of a national group” (Musek1994, 22). Highly relevant in this connection are certain theories of social psy-