Unity, Happiness, Reconciliation

“Unity, happiness, reconciliation, may they return to us.” The longing for unity is part of the Slovenian national genome. At least in poetry and in theory. In practice, it often seems we can’t manage to read Prešeren’s verse to the end. We Slovenians are obsessed with overcoming divisions and differences. We don’t want to be divided into left and right, into Partisans and Home Guards, into ours and yours. We swear by development governments and project governments, non-party politics, transcending “ideological” topics and the like. So that we won’t be divided, so that we will be as united as possible. Because there are so few of us. Only a million of us still live, as the song goes. If someone made a music video about the Slovenian understanding of pluralist democracy, a folk-pop tune would be a better soundtrack than Katie Melua. I think the problem of Slovenians is not so much that we are too divided as that we don’t know how to be divided in a civilized way and still live together, cooperate, respect one another, talk to one another, agree or disagree, and above all have the right for some to think one way and others another. Without differences there is no pluralism. Without pluralism there is no democracy. It is true, though, that the public’s disappointment with politics is understandable. After thirty years, it sometimes seems that instead of a functioning democracy we have a ritualized inter-tribal conflict, in which insults are legitimate political discourse and principles, election programs and commitments merely an unnecessary obstacle to political opportunism. But we won’t get rid of tribalism by merging two tribes into one. A civilized democratic society rests on responsibility, political culture and shared values, within which we can be as different and divided as we like. These shared values do not need to be invented. Thirty years ago, we wrote them into the Constitution.

Part of the standard repertoire of Slovenian political folklore is also the demand to end the division into ours and yours. I agree. Partly. The concept of ours and yours implies one person’s ownership of another. A society in which we have handed over the right to think and decide for ourselves to someone else. To whoever we belong to. But in overcoming the differences between ours and yours, we should be careful, since otherwise we may end up, as once before, all being theirs again, only this time “they” may be someone else. What if, for a change, we tried something different: a society in which everyone can first of all be their own?

We are trying very hard to stop dividing ourselves into Partisans and Home Guards. Here too I could agree, on condition that we clarify what we are actually talking about. About ending the quarrel over the outcome of the war and paying respect to all the victims, or about claims that it was only the first half and demands for a rematch? In the second case, it is by no means only a historical question but a question of our attitude to the present. Relativizing historical facts calls into question the European civilizational model that arose as a response to the bloody experience of Nazism, and with it the principles on which this model rests: pluralist democracy, the separation of powers, judicial independence, human rights, political freedoms, media freedom, freedom of association. But a critical understanding of history cannot be a one-way process. These days, as at the end of every May, pictures of Tito are circulating again on social networks. I understand those who are bothered by this. Yugoslavia was no liberal paradise. The post-war extrajudicial killings deserve unconditional condemnation, not denial or justification, since that only makes the job easier for those who, for current political aims, try to legitimize collaboration with Nazism by putting everything on the same level. Nor can we, or should we, forget the violence and injustice that followed. “Using methods in which ancient slavery and modern Nazism, seasoned with Balkan primitivism, were fatally intertwined, they systematically killed the body and soul of Nace and thousands of others from the same quota of indispensable enemies of the state ordered from the top, so that before the unraveling, only a tearless statistic remained,” my father wrote in the afterword to my uncle’s memoir of his horrifying experience of the prisons of Povšetova, Bileća and Grgur. Through their heroism and patriotism, the Partisans made an important contribution to the victory over Nazism and to creating the conditions for a different, freer, more humane and more just Europe, but Tito’s post-war regime was simply not part of that Europe. Among other things, because it did not allow debate on ideological topics.

Slovenians evidently still don’t want to be divided into “left and right.” I would be more cautious about such wishes. We have already had an authoritarianism in which we could only be “left”; there is a risk of steering into a second half in which there will be room only for the “right.” Democracy by definition cannot be uniformity of thought, still less thoughtlessness, but a plurality of minds: a contest, but also a dialogue between different ideas, worldviews, proposals and programs. Although the division into left, right and center parties may seem somewhat outdated, it is still important because it requires, at least in mature democracies, that the content, program and activity of political options rest on a predetermined, transparent and binding system of values. This makes post-election opportunism in their own interest harder for politicians and gives voters a democratic choice and somewhat more guarantee that they will not be cheated. Democracy needs politics that does not build its authority on an arbitrary interpretation of national interests but on a mandate it receives from voters and for which it is accountable to them. The obsession with overcoming differences, the pursuit of a unity without values in which there is no division into left, right and those in between, the fiction of a technocratic, non-political and non-ideological politics that claims to act in everyone’s interest and therefore needs no democratic oversight, is a mimicry of democracy that leads to uniformity of thought. A state in which there are no ideological divisions and differences, and in which everyone is united and of the same opinion on how to manage social processes and solve social problems, can be achieved and maintained only through repression.

None of this, of course, means that I advocate a society in which we cannot talk and work together. On the contrary. Unity, too, is a key value if it means consensus on basic civilizational democratic principles; the problem arises when the argument of unity and balance is abused as an excuse for ignoring, or even legitimizing, the undermining of these principles and values. There are ideological topics that cannot be avoided; one has to take a position on them. What pluralist democracy needs is not parrot-like repetition of platitudes about overcoming differences, but overcoming sectarianism, inconsistency, clientelism, cynical opportunism, threats, pressure and crudeness. We need more political culture, more integrity, more responsibility and, above all, more unity and determination in respecting and defending the democratic values in whose name we Slovenian citizens—left, right and center—won our state thirty years ago. More unity, in which, as then, power and with it honor will once again be ours.