SLOVENIA FACING ITS EUROPEAN FUTURE
Will Slovenia be a part of the Europe of peace, tolerance and cooperation?
Lecture by the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Milan Kucan, at the University of Uppsala - Sweden

Uppsala (Sweden), 6 October 1999



The future is a challenge. A challenge for Slovenia, just as it is for the whole of Europe. It is an opportunity. It is also a responsibility.

In facing its future, Europe is facing its past. This past is well known. Tragic, full of intolerance, violence, dispute, division, war and conflict over which ones would rule over others. Yet Europe has also known times of peace. At those times we have seen a blossoming of culture and technological development, and a flowering of science and economic advancement. For many centuries Europe set its mark on world civilisation.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall a wave of hope swept across Europe. Suddenly a different kind of Europe seemed possible. It would be pervaded by peace, cooperation, solidarity, economic development and prosperity. It would enshrine the values of Europe’s Christian civilisation, founded on the dignity of individual people and their human rights.

There is now an alternative to the past. And it is enticing, especially for the people from the former political East of Europe, who lived the longest time in the past. The future has a recognisable and realistically solid substance. It is contained in the EU and in the European idea of association. The enlargement of the European Union is a confirmation of this future, and membership in the Union is the goal for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet such a future is now more a possibility and opportunity than a reality. The reality is problems and wavering, over enlargement of the EU and NATO, as well as within these two groupings. The reality is the Balkans and the problems over consensus among European countries regarding the future of the Balkans. Even over halting the violence there, and over the exercising of vested interests in the area of Southeast Europe. The reality is the objective existence of several Europes, which are the consequence of old, entrenched divisions and also the result of new divisions. The reality is countries already living in the European future, and countries that are still living in the European past. Today the future and the past are living side by side.

The long-awaited and desired world of the future will not appear by itself. For this we will need great effort and a persuasive concept of European association. At this point the future is possible, but so is the past. This is a test of the maturity of European countries and nations, of their will and strength to take a decisive step from the past and into the future. We have never before had a better chance than this one, offered by post-Berlin Europe.

Nor have we had a greater challenge. This has been brought by globalisation. An awareness that in this world of ours, more than ever before, we are dependent on one another, and we are linked one to another. For this reason we are also responsible one to another, for ourselves and for others. No country can be certain today that its own mistakes and the mistakes of others will be without consequences, simply because that country is far enough removed, economically more successful, politically more influential and militarily stronger than others. What others do has an influence on us. Less than ever before can we be indifferent to what is going on in the world. The Balkans and East Timor are the most recent and convincing proof of this. No one is far enough or safe enough from what is happening there. More than ever before we must now think about the consequences of today’s political decisions for the life of coming generations. The egoism of the present at the expense of the future is a rejection of responsibility for the future.

Eurocentrism is now over. That was an era when for better or worse Europe put its mark on world civilisation. New developmental centres of human civilisation are emerging. Europe has a future, if with its own identity it can find a path of cooperation with those centres. European association is not simply a technical process of bringing countries together. Indeed it is a process of making Europe ready to influence the world order, so that diversity of cultures and civilisations will not mark out the battle lines of new disputes and conflicts, but rather a need for dialogue. So that Europe will take equal responsibility for such a world.

In itself, Europe must become a society of tolerance, fostering internal cooperation, respect and coexistence of European nations. Diversity generates a strength which will benefit all countries. Europe’s responsibility for entering into its own future is at the same time Europe’s responsibility for the future of the world. Within the common European past, individual nations have had their own different past. And now within a different kind of European future, we all desire our own different kind of future.

There have never been so many groups or bodies that would wish to take advantage of such a possibility. Alongside states and national political interests, there are growing numbers of civil movements and civil society institutions. People make history. It is not governed by historical laws that are independent of the will of the people. Human individuals have free will. They may exercise this wherever there is the rule of human rights, and where political democracy is founded on these rights. In principle this is the case almost throughout Europe. With their experience and hopes, and with their free will, people are putting persuasive pressure on the leaders of democratic countries to finally take that step into a common European future.

If we observe and consider the past, we may learn what kind of future it is that we must step into. Taking our leave of the past is a confirmation of maturity for the future.


I. The Europe of today and the future
Ten years ago, as the Brandenburg Gate was opened, Europe was swept by a great hope that the past could not be repeated. The project of a United Europe seemed realistic.

The fundamental expectations and hopes of European nations, especially those that were for more than half a century politically and culturally removed to the political east of Europe, are today to a large extent still unfulfilled. The decades lived by the nations and countries of pre-Berlin Europe have left deep traces in the spiritual and political structures of the nations on both sides of the physically collapsed wall. In real life, as well as in our minds, the old European economic and political divisions remain. And even new ones are emerging. Life in Europe seems to be becoming increasingly adjusted to these divisions.

The plans for a European homeland as a homeland of all homelands, and especially for enlarging the European Union, are being put back from year to year, and may be postponed to some indefinite time in the new century. This is the undesired but all too real possibility for the Baltic states and the countries of Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe, which are in the “waiting room” for the European Union or even waiting outside it, with or without association agreements and negotiating positions. Holding back enlargement even after the candidate countries have fulfilled the conditions can be understood as an attempt to persist in the earlier ideal of a house with a solid fence. Yet the new wall should to be protecting the other side of this fenced house. An indefinite postponement of enlargement, however, would have negative effects.

Just this year a grotesque and provocative boundary has been drawn – partly to protect the Schengen security border – between the politically stable and unstable parts of the European continent in the east and southeast. In these areas the horrors of war have barely ended, yet terrorism, organised crime and corruption are already rampant. Slovenia is situated on the stable, south-eastern edge of this boundary, and feels directly all the damaging security, spiritual, civilisational, economic and social consequences of this gulf. We also feel the consequences of the facile reasoning that would divide Europe into western and eastern Christian spheres, and declares the Christian countries defenders against Islamic fundamentalism. Slovenia has also seen the insecurity that is a living reality for a part of the people of Europe because of the phenomena of nationalist and religious fundamentalism, antisemitism and ideological exclusivism.

The stable and democratic part of Europe has still not been able to establish productive communication and relations with Russia, which is facing the political, economic, social, spiritual and even emotional consequences of the collapse of the Soviet state. It has not been able to define its relations towards this one-time superpower, with which it shared responsibility for peace in the former ideologically polarised world.

The situation in Europe tells us that a wide variety of future pictures of Europe are possible. Including pictures that would bring back the past. Here the fate of small countries, including Slovenia, is less certain than the fate of large countries.


II. Slovenia between stable and unstable areas
Slovenia is a small country. Beyond it, the unstable part of Europe begins. History has not been especially favourable towards the Slovenes. We managed to protect our national identity in extremely inclement historical circumstances, and before 1991 witthout the support in the form of our own state.

At the end of the eighties Slovenia was faced with a choice: increasingly intolerable totalitarianism, Serbian hegemony and a distancing from the market economy, or a Slovene identity, human rights, democracy, a market economy and welfare state, and the path to integration of European nations and states. The choice in this fundamental conflict, which consumed the then Yugoslavia, was not hard. In December 1990 the Slovenes opted in a plebiscite for independence and a European orientation.

The transition from socialist self-management to a market economy and a democratic, rationally ordered welfare state, which in the earlier system provided excessive care for individuals, so to speak watching over them night and day, was less painful for Slovenia than for the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Yet it was no less complicated than elsewhere. As an independent country Slovenia made a fairly rapid transition to a market economy with stable macroeconomic conditions for companies to operate in. It crossed over from state social protection of the individual to a welfare state of comparable European standing.

Slovenia enjoys a GDP per capita of 14,000 dollars in purchasing power parity. It attains 71 per cent of the European Union average, and has a GDP per capita that is more than 70 per cent higher than the average of the ten candidates for accession to the European Union. Slovenia’s economy is growing at a rate of 4 per cent each year. The proportion of public spending on education stands at almost 6 per cent, and spending on research and development represents 1.6 per cent of GDP. Slovenia has a considerable number of international – and now even its first global – companies. It is seeking new strategic partnerships, including with Swedish companies.

Today Slovenia is endeavouring to implement European standards in their entirety and in all areas of public life. A decade ago it looked on the institutions of united Europe with euphoria, and today with a proper degree of criticism. Yet the majority of Slovenes are becoming convinced that we may guarantee both our national identity and a secure life, democracy and prosperity if we are members of the European Union and NATO. A united Europe is the safest common home for the Slovenes.

We know that Slovenia cannot be an industrial power by world standards. It cannot be important in the world of quantitative measures. We seek our future in knowledge, which is confirmed in the quality of products and services. For this reason it has and is developing good, modern schools. Computer literacy is very high, and general education is also above average by European standards. This is a solid basis for the development of high technology companies, including those in the fields of information science and process technology.


III. The Balkan Syndrome
Slovenia is living in conditions in which the nearby Balkan instability is ‘breathing down its neck’. That region is governed by a special climate with special political relations, states of mind, inter-ethnic and human relations, indicating a ‘sick’ spiritual and political pathological condition in the heart of Southeast Europe. But this Balkan ‘powder keg’ just beyond the democratic part of Europe, is not a result of the genetic features of the people in that region.

The countries in this region are the result of European history. Their elites maintain the old patterns of thinking, founded on aggressive nationalism and opposed to the rule of universal human rights above national and state sovereignty.The reasons for this extreme supremacy of the nation, and the nation state, can also be found in the political maps drawn time and again in the Balkans by the Great Powers of Europe, through the dictates of the victors, following countless conflicts, and particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. These maps seriously distorted the boundaries between ethnic and state territory. This is the origin of the myths, including the Serbian myth of Kosovo, which aggressive nationalist political elites summoned to life in order to fire up the hordes of soldiers, believers and rebels in the bloody rampage on other nations.

At the foundation of all the Balkan conflicts lies the historically unresolved national question of certain Balkan nations. Yet the reasons for the conflict lie in the methods used to resolve this question. For it is resolved through the historically outmoded concept of the nation state, built on the principle of Blut und Boden, and through the mission of protecting and expanding the national living space (Lebensraum). These concepts serve as an ideological justification for ethnic cleansing, genocide and forcible expulsion of members of other nations in the ethnically mixed areas that can be found everywhere in the Balkans. Such concepts have also been used by political leaders elsewhere in Europe. Talk of the naturally genocidal propensity of the Balkan peoples is therefore absurd, and serves merely as a handy excuse for the international community not to follow up on intervention and commitment.

For more than ten years Europe’s political leadership stared at its own, malignant Balkan tumor and thought that it could be cured by a political aspirin. But it grew too big and only direct surgery could remove the tumor. The possible consequences of a metastatic condition remain a potent question. For this reason, too, it is vitally important that the members of the European Union and NATO maintain their unity over the use of force to prevent mass aggression against people. Those responsible for this aggression are unscrupulous players of political poker, yet they have names and surnames. They are also known to the international war crimes tribunal.

NATO intervention has shown that the conflict in the Balkans has finally been recognised as a European and world problem. The intervention has been justified by the position that human dignity, basic human rights and their protection against systematic state aggression through international intervention represent a value which the modern world places above the sovereignty of a state. This could signify a completely new chapter in international relations, and a new chapter in international law. It will be put to the test if fundamental human rights are violated through mass aggression by big and powerful countries. If at that time, and in the future, the United Nations is capable of intervening, then perhaps the price of the trial that humankind had to pay for this in the Balkans may be acceptable.

Until recently Slovenia pointed in vain to the true nature of the Balkan conflicts, and to the real causes of Europe’s Balkan syndrome. Let us hope that now it will be different, and that the implementation of the Stability Pact for Southeast Europe will take this into account. Yet mere hope is not enough. Europe is making the choice for very difficult changes. No one will remain unaffected by them. No one can expect that they will be made only by others, and that it is possible just to gain from them.

Perseverance and patience will be needed for everyone to gain. But it is worth persevering. We know this from our memory of the tragic picture of Europe’s past. It would be irresponsible to ourselves and to the future generations of Europeans, if the opportunity so favourably offered now by history were not to be used, out of some selfishness or fear of difficulties. This would be a common defeat for us all. Slovenia wishes to collaborate in using this opportunity. It wishes to share the European future with all other peoples, nations and countries of good will. It is ready to do whatever it can for this encounter with the future, since within this it sees the guarantee of its own future.

I am most grateful for the opportunity you have given me to speak here at your distinguished university.
Thank you for being prepared to hear my views and for listening to me.