Slovenia since 1918

Interwar Yugoslavia

At the Paris Peace Conference after the war, the Allies awarded Italy all the coastal areas that had given Slovenes access to the sea—including Gorizia (Gorica), Trieste, and Istria. The Yugoslav kingdom was given the Prekmurje region and southern Styria but only a small part of southern Carinthia. Yugoslav troops occupied much of the Klagenfurt basin, but the Allies insisted that a plebiscite be held in two zones to decide the fate of the rest of southern Carinthia. In October 1920 the more southerly zone chose Austria, so that no plebiscite was held in the northern zone around Klagenfurt; both zones were left to Austria. Almost one-third of Europe’s Slovene speakers were thus left outside the boundaries of Slovenia. Slovene speakers in Italy and Austria continued to be subject to discrimination and political pressure by the dominant majorities—as were Slovenia’s Germans between 1918 and 1941.

Incorporation into the Yugoslav kingdom also proved disappointing. Anton Korošec reached high positions in the government, but Slovene politicians overall had minimal influence in Belgrade. Strong central control—in effect, Serbian hegemony—was imposed over the kingdom in an effort to discipline its hybrid citizenry. As a “province” of Yugoslavia, Slovenia found its autonomy restricted mainly to cultural affairs. Its economy, which had already industrialized more than the rest of the kingdom, benefited somewhat from greater commercial contact with Belgrade, but progress was limited by the detachment of Slovene producers from the economically vital Habsburg centres of Klagenfurt and Trieste. Also, as one of the kingdom’s wealthiest areas, Slovenia was taxed more heavily than other regions. By the late 1930s Slovene politics was riven by political factions, including ardently Catholic conservatives, anticlerical liberals, and ever-more-militant leftists.

World War II

After the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Slovenia was partitioned. Italy took the southwest, including Ljubljana; Germany annexed the north directly into the Reich; and Hungary recovered Prekmurje. Although the Slovenes had been deemed racially salvageable by the Nazis, the mainly Austrian rulers of the Carinthian and Styrian regions commenced a brutal campaign to destroy them as a nation. Resistance groups sprang up; after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they came under the domination of the communist-led Slovene National Liberation Front. From its principal base in the forests near Kočevje, in the mountainous region of Kočevski Rog, the Front combined operations against the occupiers and their Slovene collaborators in the White Guard with a ruthless struggle against potential rivals, such as members of the Slovene People’s Party. In November 1943 the Front joined Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans in proclaiming a new Yugoslavia, and in May 1945 Ljubljana was liberated. After the armistice the British repatriated more than 10,000 Slovene collaborators who had attempted to retreat with the Germans, and Partisan forces massacred most of them at the infamous “Pits of Kočevje.”

The communist era

Having occupied Trieste in May 1945, the Partisans hoped that its possession was assured, but the Allies forced the establishment of a Free Territory of Trieste, consisting of an Italian-administered zone in and around the city and a Yugoslav zone on the Istrian Peninsula. In 1954 Tito agreed to allow the return of Trieste to Italy. The Yugoslav zone was incorporated into Slovenia; this gave the Slovenes access to the sea and left fewer Slovene speakers outside Yugoslavia, but it also brought a small Italian minority into the republic.

As a constituent of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia underwent a complete restructuring of its economy, politics, and society along Stalinist lines. Following the rupture between Tito and Stalin in 1948, however, conditions improved. Over the next two decades, Slovenia managed to achieve greater prosperity than the southern Yugoslav republics under the unique economic system known as “socialist self-management”—designed largely by Tito’s chief ideologue, the Slovene Edvard Kardelj. By the 1970s, liberalization had spurred the development of a number of local autonomy movements, especially in Croatia and Slovenia, obliging the League of Communists of Yugoslavia to reassert party control throughout the federation. Through the 1980s, as the Yugoslav economy succumbed to inflation and debt, even Slovene communists steadily lost patience with what they perceived to be profound cultural differences between them and the southern Yugoslav peoples. In May 1990 Slovenia held free, multiparty elections in which Milan Kučan, a former communist official, was elected president, and in December a referendum calling for a sovereign, independent Slovenia was endorsed by more than 90 percent of the voters. The Belgrade government—by then dominated by Serbia’s nationalist strongman, Slobodan Milošević, and by the Serb-led Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA)—began an economic blockade of Slovenia and expropriated Ljubljana’s bank assets. Slovene and Croatian proposals for a looser Yugoslav confederation were rejected by Serbia, and on June 25, 1991, Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia.

Two days later the YPA attacked border posts that had been taken over by Slovenia. In what became known to the Slovenes as the Ten-Day War, Slovene militiamen, adopting tactics originally intended to defend Yugoslavia against invading Soviet tanks, defeated the ineptly commanded, disintegrating YPA units with minimal loss of life. The last Yugoslav soldier left Slovenia on October 25, 1991.