Slovenia: Post-Socialist and Neoliberal Landscapes in Response to the European Refugee Crisis

Abstract

As a nation-state, Slovenia represents an increasingly rare case wherein 80 percent of the country identifies as ethnically homogeneous. Even in the face of this fact, Slovenia's ethno-national identity has been called into question since its independence. The European refugee crisis has brought this questioning into sharp focus as the admittance, care and transfer of refugees has caused burdens not only economically and logistically, but also in terms of what it means to be Slovenian and European at the same time. In a place with little history of provision of care for large-scale refugee populations, the cultural and political frameworks of Slovene society do not possess the crisis response capacity that its Northern European neighbors might. In fact, Slovenia's record on human rights is not as stellar as is often presented to the world at large. This paper argues that Slovenia's place in Mitteleuropa serves as a hindrance to it as a place of social care and reaffirms certain historical conditions that render it a transitory space between The Other and the ‘real’ Europe. It relies upon field observations of how Slovenia organized its response to the crisis in the autumn of 2015 and criticizes those responses as reaffirming both the post-socialist transition and the neoliberal intent of its national infrastructure and political economy.