Only Real Slovenians

The weekend before last I spent in Istanbul. My friend Hakan had gathered just under a dozen people from different corners of the world to discuss trust and polarization. There are days in which decades of conversation happen, to paraphrase Lenin—and that Saturday was one of them. Political scientists, sociologists, artists and one bureaucrat, namely me. Among us were a former Secretary General of Amnesty International, the South African Kumi; Harsh, a veteran of bridging divides in Modi’s India, cruelly intolerant of his tolerance; and Emma, a former adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq, now a lecturer at Yale University.

The fun began right at the start, when the political scientists fell out over the definition of polarization. We agreed on only one thing: polarization should not be confused with disagreement. Disagreement is proof that different opinions exist, which in an open democracy is not only possible but essential. Polarization, however, is not a consequence of different opinions; it is a tool and a goal. And often also the end of an open, democratic society.

Hakan doesn’t deal with this only in theory. He is one of the greatest humanists I know. You don’t get far with humanism these days. Hakan’s landed him in prison—for allegedly violently inciting against the constitutional order during the Gezi Park protests. From prison he published an open letter in which he wrote that he would withdraw his appeal if anyone could show the slightest evidence for any point of the indictment for which he had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison. After a year he was released. When I first visited him after he came out of prison, I caught him moderating a conversation between LGBTI activists and members of Erdoğan’s ruling party about the pros and cons of gender quotas in politics.

Hakan not only knows how to talk about polarization; he also knows how to overcome it, as we would say in Slovenia. With a great deal of listening, by seeking paths to empathy and by encouraging critical thinking.

On the plane home, I was reminded of the Slovenian way of overcoming polarization by the news that, after a quarter of a century, the band Agropop is releasing a new song, “Zapojmo, pravi Slovenci” (Let’s Sing, Real Slovenians), whose chorus celebrates proud Slovenians who have lived here for centuries as one nation with one heart.

This is of course not Agropop’s first contribution to the search for patriotic monolithic unity. Their legendary “Samo milijon nas je” (There Are Only a Million of Us) set the gold standard of Slovenian turbo-patriotic pop in 1987. The song is bouncy, perfect for village fêtes, and its lyrics are packed with subtle messages. Starting with the title. If there are only a million of us, where did that other million come from that has wandered into the statistics?

According to the Statistical Office, on April 1 this year there were 2,130,850 of us. So either:

1. Klinar sacrificed a million for the rhyme;

2. the Statistical Office published an April Fool’s joke;

3. since 1987 we have gained more than a million Slovenians; or

4. Agropop is telling us that there are only a million real Slovenians, and the rest are not real.

We don’t sing about the unity of real Slovenians only at village fêtes. Every few years, state celebrations resound with words about a healthy nation and healthy Slovenians, visually supported by photos pinched from Shutterstock of families who, with a precisely measured amount of permitted pigment, reflect the desired standards of national health.

Now we have also got a political party that will address normal Slovenians.

As Dežulović remarked on Marcel: “Instead of the Balkans becoming Slovenianized, we Slovenians are becoming Balkanized.”

Cue the chorus.

Hakan on the one hand, and Agropop with the advocates of healthy, normal Slovenians on the other, are addressing the same problem, but they understand and solve it entirely differently. Hakan turns polarization into dialogue, in order to establish a civilized organization of different opinions. Which is not only the foundation but the definition of democracy. In today’s Turkey he succeeds at this only in small circles, but it proves that it is possible even in the hardest of circumstances. You change the world by starting to change it around you.

Perhaps we will never be the biggest or the strongest, but we can be the most empathetic and critically thinking.

Here, however, some go about overcoming polarization differently—with a frantic drive for national unity in which there will no longer be different opinions and we will all really love one another.

In the new song, the brothers and sisters are called to forget all grudges and let love unite them again into one nation.

But because such unity is always a fiction, since people simply have different opinions, we overcome divisions with new divisions: into real and unreal, healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal. We build an apparent monolithic unity on stigmatizing those who don’t fit our exclusionary mold, which is not only the foundation but the definition of authoritarian populism.

And then we wonder why only a million of us are sure that we are good people.