Discourses on 'the Balkans' and the post-socialist identification politics of Slovenia

Vezovnik, Andreja (author)

Understanding discourses as sedimented forms of objectivity allows us to frame and analyse different discourses that emerged in the Slovenian printed media since its secession from Yugoslavia. In approaching this topic, the paper focuses on the ontic level of discourse analysis in order to complement the ontological level of Laclau's discourse theory. The analysis deploys concepts from discourse theory in a textual analysis in order to show how post-socialist identification politics are constructed through language. After the dislocation in the Yugoslav social and political structure that occur at the end of the 1980s, socialist values such as brotherhood, unity, collectivism, solidarity, labour, progress etc., that had been articulated to provide unity to a culturally heterogeneous region in the state of Yugoslavia, were replaced by discourses that split apart the territory and made sure that the socio-cultural boundaries were clearly set. The Slovenian politics of identification began the process of differentiation from everything that symbolized socialism or 'the Balkans' - i.e. from the other. The disintegration and reintegration of the chain of equivalence and the fantasmatic ongoing pursuit of a fully constituted identity resulted in the nationalist, traditionalist and pro-European discourses that emerged in the Slovenian press from the beginning of the 1990s. These have basically remained unchanged until the present time. These articulations of self and other also prepared the terrain for concrete political actions, such as the still unsolved illegal deletion of the 18.305 non-Slovene inhabitants of Slovenia from the Register of permanent residence in 1992, and the expulsion of a Roma family from their local community.

• Language: English
• Work type: Not categorized
• Typology: 1.08 - Published Scientific Conference Contribution
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Year: 2008
• Number of pages: 12 str.
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-44910
• UDC: 81'42:32(497.4)
• COBISS.SI-ID: 27577949
• Publication date in RUL: 10.07.2015