The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 213MORE THAN ADMINISTRATIVELY CREATED “FOREIGNERS”213others, had already been firmly in place when Slovenia became independent.For the majority of the latter, “becoming convinced” that they were in fact Slovenians– rather than Croats, Serbs, etc. – was out of the question, but more importantly,the Slovenians also no longer saw them as “compatriots.” 35Because of the implicit ties between the state of Slovenia and “its” constitutivenation – the Slovenians – no other civic or supranational identity (i.e.national identity in the strictly political sense of the word) could counterbalancethe exclusivist, ethno-cultural monoframe of Slovenianness. People who werenot re cognized as “true Slovenians” therefore had to be excluded from nationalbelonging and from the state, since in accordance with the nationalist doctrineof subordinating all belongings and identities to the Slovenian nation, they weredefined as Others, as foreign bodies in the national organism, which had to beremoved. They literally had to be erased, and it was what the state did in February1992.6. ConclusionIn the opinion of many theorists, post-modern society has surpassed nationallimitations and has weakened the feeling of national belonging (as wellas other “particular” identities). In line with this, nationalism and national identityare presumably part of the rapidly vanishing world; the old politics of nationalityand national consciousness with their emphasis on territorial state borders havepresumably been surpassed. However, reality shows that national identity continuesto be the basis for self-categorization of individuals and the typifying theyuse to explain the social environment, while the alleged homogeneity of nationalcommunities is used as a withdrawal in the face of uncertainty brought aboutby globalization processes. The differentiation between “us” and “foreigners”therefore continues to be important, since our notion of who we are is inextricablyconnected with the construction of the Other, with respect to whom we defineourselves as a community.This chapter has considered the erasure through the prism of nationalismstudies which allow us to contextualize the exclusionary practices of nation-states.In order to assess the sociological aspect of the erasure and its consequences, Iwas primarily interested in the question of why the erasure occurred at all andwhy the erased people continue to be the stigmatized Other even today, 18 yearsafter this administrative measure was implemented. By interpreting the erasure35 At least from 1974 on, when the new Yugoslav Constitution was adopted, the republics were treated as ethnoculturalentities, which is confirmed by the use of Slovenian in the public life and institutions of the former socialistRepublic of Slovenia. In simple terms, individual republics, with the exception of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were regardedas national units (despite multi-culturality and a multitude of various minorities, i.e. the actual heterogeneity of thepopulation of the Yugoslav republics). In this constellation, Yugoslavia was a supra-national entity, so both identities,political and ethno-national, could coexist more or less peacefully (for more on this, see Bajt 2009). When Yugoslaviadissolved (or rather, a few years before this happened), the chasm came to light in Slovenia between the supra-national,civic principle of belonging to a Yugoslav state, and the ethno-national principle of belonging to a specific republic thatbecame an independent state in 1991 – yet preserved its ethno-cultural understanding of Slovenian national identity.