Forward to the Past

The space-time continuum is a concept developed by Dr Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity at Princeton University—and in its more practical applications, by Dr Emmett Brown in the film Back to the Future. It’s a four-dimensional space made up of three spatial and one temporal dimension, through which you can travel in a modified, nuclear-powered sports car. But time travel isn’t without danger: meddling in the past can lead the present down an undesirable path. Technically, this is known as a disruption of the space-time continuum, or the causality problem. The classic example is the grandfather paradox: what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he fathers your father?

In Back to the Future, the space-time continuum is disrupted the moment the protagonist’s own mother falls in love with him, thereby threatening the likelihood that she’ll later conceive him with his father.

Physics and the past are both complicated matters—and we Slovenes have trouble with the latter. The more we try to leave it behind, the more it comes back to kick us in the ass. Perhaps it would be wiser to stop turning our backs on it and instead look it straight in the eye. This is especially true of the period that causes us the most difficulty—what we usually call our “recent history.” As if that weren’t enough, we’ve lately been having increasing trouble even with some later events, which by logic could be called our “semi-recent history.”

Until recently, it was generally accepted that Slovenia became independent so that we could build a free, open, solidaristic, democratic society based on respect for human rights, political liberties, and the democratic rule of law. So firmly were we committed to liberal democracy that we wrote all of this into the constitution—along with a host of other important things, from declaring Slovenia a social state, to the right to freely decide on childbirth, and the validity of ratified international treaties—not to mention the separation of church and state. We spoke more about citizens than we did about the nation.

Until recently.

Today, many are acting as if in June 1991, the space-time continuum was broken and history twisted in an unwanted direction. Of course, I’m not saying anyone regrets independence itself. I believe we all support an independent state—many out of sincere patriotism, others perhaps because they believe that a smaller political format makes it easier for mediocre politicians to gain power. We Slovenes have no issue with independence—we do, however, have trouble with the reasons we so passionately repeated, to ourselves and others, as justification for independence 27 years ago.

And in dismantling those reasons, we are becoming increasingly effective. We’re reconfiguring the past quite successfully—even without a nuclear-powered sports car. In Back to the Future, the main character nervously checks a family photo after every failed attempt to deflect his infatuated mother, watching whether his image fades or strengthens. Here, we have no need for anxiety: we are efficiently erasing all traces of our semi-recent liberal democratic aspirations from the photograph of our political present. In their place, a society is emerging that very much resembles the one we supposedly wanted to leave behind.

Let me illustrate. Let’s recall the kind of society we once lived in:

The state from which we became independent was based on very strong leaders—or rather, one leader. In politics, there were no relative winners. All victories were absolute and irreversible.

We had tightly secured borders. Guards, German shepherds, outposts, and no-man’s-land patrols protected us from the dangers of crossings in both directions.

There were no immigration pressures. Foreigners only came here on vacation; it never occurred to them to move here and threaten our culture with their customs, languages, and habits. If anything, it was our gastarbeiters (migrant workers) who threatened theirs.

The political process ran smoothly and efficiently. There were no problems with fragmented parties or coalition building. All governments were, by definition, focused on development and reform-oriented. All reforms were, by definition, successful.

We were completely safe from the threat of ideological polarization. We turned unity into a state religion. We even named a highway after it.

We called journalists “socio-political workers.” They were expected to have no opinions of their own.

Human rights and political freedoms were seen as a conspiracy by Western liberal elites—at the expense of the ordinary, honest folk, or as we liked to say back then, the working people and citizens.

Yet despite all the similarities, there is one key difference between the society of that time and our society today. In the final years before independence, we lived in a liberal non-democracy; today, we are striding ever more boldly into an illiberal democracy.

The difference isn’t so much in substance as in direction. In the previous system, liberalism was undermining non-democracy. Today, anti-liberalism is undermining freedom.

In the name of the people, we march forward—into the past.