NATIONALISM TODAY: CARINTHIA's SLOVENES Part I: the Legacy Ofhistory by Dennison I
SOUTHEAST EUROPE SERIES Vol. XXII No. 4 (Austria) NATIONALISM TODAY: CARINTHIA'S SLOVENES Part I: The Legacy ofHistory by Dennison I. Rusinow October 1977 The bombsmostly destroying Osvobodilna other world is Slovene, and in the valleys of Carin- Fronta or AbwehrMimpfer monumentshave been thia, the two peoples and cultures have been mixed too small and too few and have done too little for more than eleven hundred years. Until the damage to earn much international attention in this "national awakening" of the nineteenth century, age of ubiquitous terrorism in the name of some nobody seems to have minded. Then came the Slo- ideological principle or violated rights. Moreover, vene renaissance and claims to cultural and social the size of the national minority in question, the equality for Slovenes qua Slovenes, backed by the quality of their plight, and the potentially wider shadows of Austro-Slavism, South-(Yugo-)Slavism, Austrian and international repercussions ofthe con- and pan-Slavism. The German Carinthians, feeling flict all pale into insignificance alongside the prob- threatened in their thousand-year cultural, political, lems of the Cypriots, of the Northern Irish, of the and economic dominance on the borderland, Basques, of the Palestinian and Overseas Chinese reacted with a passion that became obsessive and diasporas, of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet that was to culminate in Nazi attempts during Union, or of many others. Despite these disclaimers, World War II to eradicate the Slovene Carinthians however, the problem of the Carinthian Slovenes is through a combination of forcible assimilation and worth examining for more than its local and population transfers.
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