Slovenes, the Balkans, and the Yugoslav Idea, or A Short Story about a Lengthy Cow

In one of her articles, Dunja Rihtman-Augustin (2000: 211–36) discusses the choice of words in contemporary Croatian political parlance by which politicians at the end of the twentieth century mobilised their constituency by expressing their attitudes towards what was good and acceptable for Us, and what was bad and thus unacceptable for Our ways. In her enlightening article, full of witty insights, she argues that the notion “Balkan” belongs equally to history and to imagination. Although the Balkans are always east of Us, she suggests, the Balkan mentality is here, with Us, not somewhere else. Rihtman-Augustin’s article inspired me to analyse the history and image of the term Balkan in Slovene in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is to say, in the period when Slovene national consciousness developed

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · National consciousness · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Romanian · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy