Homelands

Homeland is not a legal term but a political and emotional reference. And because it is politics mixed with emotion, it is also one of the most inspiring, but also most abused, of concepts.

Za domovino (For the Homeland) was the name of the newspaper of the Fifth Army District in the late SFRY, which covered more or less the entire territory of today’s Croatia. I did my military service in that district in the distant 1980s, the last six months in the editorial office of the publication mentioned above, which demanded loyalty to the (then) homeland in its very name. I got this privileged position in the editorial office, which had its premises in the military prison in the center of Zagreb, through connections. I am not in the least ashamed to admit that I did everything I could to make the grueling military service, which drove me to despair, easier. In exchange for a pass allowing unlimited free movement around Zagreb, I wrote some of my most lyrical texts during that period. My comrades at the typewriters and I competed to see who could take the mockery of the pathos glorifying the army and the ruling ideology furthest without the editors, or anyone else, noticing. For the homeland, middle finger first. Incidentally, when I met Josip, one of the two officer-editors, in Belgrade years later, he told me that it had been perfectly clear to him all along what we were up to. When war broke out in Croatia, Captain Josip, a Croat by nationality married to a Serb, remained loyal to the JNA and ended up in Belgrade, while his co-editor Captain Bojan, a Serb by nationality married to a Croat, joined the Croatian National Guard. It is one thing to love your homeland, and another when life forces you to choose between love and homeland.

The British historian Timothy Garton Ash writes about a different concept of homeland in his book Homelands, subtitled A Personal History of Europe. For the author, homeland is not a unitary and exclusive concept based on blood and soil, but a community that also allows for multiple identities or homelands—hence the plural in the title—and is based on belonging to a common system of values.

The American singer Marvin Gaye thought about it differently again in his song “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).”

These are just three random associations that first came to mind as I followed the “scandal” that followed the Slovenian President’s words to Slovenian minority high school students in Trieste. “Your homeland is Italy,” said Nataša Pirc Musar, setting off a wave of indignation and condemnation, above all in Slovenia.

I myself spent the first years of my life among the Slovenians across the border, and later too I regularly visited those parts, where my father’s family comes from. I went to kindergarten in the Trieste district of Roiano, to the nursery-school nuns, who didn’t talk much about the homeland. The nuns told us more about how children whose parents didn’t take them to Mass on Sundays would end up in hell. That worried me particularly, since on Sundays we really didn’t often go to church, but rather to my father’s friend Drago in Dolina near Trieste. Drago was a Partisan, wounded in the battle for Mrkonjić Grad. In Drago’s house only Nona prayed: in the postwar elections for the Italian Communist Party to win, and later often for the two unruly rascals, my brother and me, to get out of the house as soon as possible. “Off you go, off you go, with God and Mary,” she would wave to us with pursed lips as we left. Drago was attached to Yugoslavia, and he was not the only one among the Slovenians across the border who followed independence with considerable unease. It was not only about ideological positions; many in the minority worried about what would happen when there was no longer a strong neighboring state supporting them politically and financially, although it of course had its own calculations in doing so.

A prominent representative of the Slovenian minority once explained to me some of the collateral consequences of this close connection of (part of) the Slovenian minority with the mother country. If you are always turned only toward Ljubljana, you turn your back on the state whose citizen you are. That is not good. We are Slovenians, part of the Slovenian nation and cultural space, and the bond with Slovenia and its support are extremely important, but if we want to be a successful and dynamic community, we must build our success and our development in the state in which we live, in it and with it. In essence, he said something very similar to what the President said the other day. It is true, however, that these words carry more weight coming from a member of the minority than when someone from this side of the border explains them to a member of the minority.

Many reproached the President for speaking about the homeland when she should have spoken about the state. That is probably true, and perhaps it was just a slip of the tongue. Homeland is not a legal term but a political and emotional reference. And because it is politics mixed with emotion, it is one of the most inspiring, but also most abused, of concepts. Heroes sacrifice themselves for the homeland, receive monuments for it, and deserve our respect, gratitude and remembrance. On the other hand, patriotism is often—if I may use the hackneyed but nonetheless evergreen line of the British writer Samuel Johnson—abused as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Because homeland is an emotional category that everyone, from Josip to Bojan and Marvin Gaye, interprets and feels in their own way, invoking it, especially in a political context and when we link homeland to ethnic belonging, can quickly get us into trouble. Regardless, I believe the President can hardly be reproached, apart perhaps from imprecision. As for her critics in Slovenia, I am not entirely convinced whether they were really guided by sincere concern for the minority or simply could not resist the temptation to give the President a flick on the ear. Heh, heh, heh.

The thesis that the Slovenians in Italy are Italian citizens whose homeland is Slovenia logically means that we have two categories of Italian citizens in Italy. Those whose homeland is Italy, and the others. Can we imagine how we would react if the Italian President came to Trieste and snapped at the minority that Italy is not their homeland? Especially since in the past it often behaved toward them in just that way. And what happens if we apply the doctrine of linking homeland to ethnic belonging to ourselves? Do we in Slovenia also have several categories of citizens? Staunch and not-so-staunch? Those who are Slovenian by blood and whose homeland is Slovenia, and those who have always lived here or who came to us, many of them generations ago, but whose homeland is, jus sanguinis ad perpetuam, exclusively and for ever and ever, elsewhere?

It seems to me that in Slovenia we have not yet fully internalized the fact that we have our own state. In a democratic state, the fundamental status from which all rights and freedoms derive is citizenship, not ethnic belonging. This does not conflict with arrangements that grant minorities additional rights and protection, but it does not allow a system in which the majority nation has a privileged position over minorities by default. As is the case in Israel.

Of course, this does not mean I do not respect love of one’s homeland. It is a powerful and, as a rule, noble, though often manipulated, feeling. But I suggest we allow people to have not just one, but, if that is how they feel, two or even more homelands. Like Timothy Garton Ash. The very expression “mother homeland,” which we use so often in connection with the Slovenian minorities and Slovenian emigrants, shows that the homeland is not necessarily just one; there can be at least two, the mother one and the non-mother one. The Slovenians across the border are indisputably part of the Slovenian nation and cultural space and need and deserve our attention and support. Ties with them are extremely important, for them and for us, but if we absolutely must talk about homeland, this is in no way in contradiction with the fact that, as the President said, their homeland is Italy—or, if the President will allow me, also Italy.

How to put this into practice in today’s world and Europe was the task of the Group of Eminent Persons that, in 2011, under the leadership of Joschka Fischer, prepared the report “Living Together: Combining Diversity and Freedom in 21st-century Europe.” One of the “eminent persons” was the aforementioned Timothy Garton Ash. One of the group’s recommendations proposed a “hyphenated identity” as an answer to the traditional insistence on only one, exclusive and excluding identity, in which a growing number of Europeans do not find themselves and which causes many frictions and conflicts. A great deal has happened in the world in the last twelve years, above all many worrying things. The report has lost none of its relevance in that time. Rather the opposite. It can show us the way to a coexistence in which the Slovenians across the border are not merely Slovenians or merely Italian citizens, but part of both and a bridge between the two communities, cultures, nations and identities. To no one’s detriment and to everyone’s enrichment. It is true, though, that in light of a history in which the Italian state was often unkind to the Slovenian minority, it would have been more appropriate if the message to the minority that their homeland is also Italy had come in Trieste from the mouth of the Italian President, Mattarella. He and our President could have held hands while doing so, and then gone together to our side of the border, where our President could have addressed the members of the Italian national community in Slovenia with a similar message.