A Nation of Joiners. Volunteer Firefighters and Slovenian Nation- and State-Building from Below

Südosteuropa 68 (2020), no. 2, pp. 148–175 VOLUNTEERING AND VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS ANA KLADNIK A Nation of Joiners. Volunteer Firefighters and Slovenian Nation‑ and State‑Building from Below Abstract. Challenging the received view that the Western world is the authentic cradle of associations, with the United States often epitomised as the ‘nation of joiners’, this article interprets voluntary associations in East Central Europe (ECE) as variations from the West‑ ern model. New studies on associational life in ECE suggest that well-established theoretical dichotomies like state-non-state or governmental-civil need to be overcome and argue that voluntary associations always actively interacted with the political context and contributed to shaping it. The article revisits these theses by focusing on the role of volunteer fire de‑ partments, which in ECE have existed almost uninterruptedly since the mid-19th century. It focuses on the period of double transition in Slovenia around 1990—to a democratic system and to an independent Slovenian state—and argues that the volunteer firefighters were able to negotiate the inevitable changes also because they were recognised as associations of Slo‑ vene national substance. Ana Kladnik is a Research Associate at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. Introduction In 2018, during a research stay in Slovenia, I met with a volunteer firefighter from a small municipality in the eastern part of the country. In the mid-1970s, as a young boy, he had joined the volunteer firefighting department (VFD) in his village. This VFD was founded in 1951, based on the idea and experience of a man from a neighbouring village which already had a four-decade-old VFD, and with the help of a group of men, among them my interlocutor’s father and uncle. His VFD remains very active to this day: my interlocutor’s wife has been a member since her childhood, and they were joined in recent years by their two sons. During our meeting, I asked him about the development of volunteer firefighting during the political transition: ‘“Transition?”, he asked, “This is the period around ’91, right? Hard years, yes. In any case, this was progress for the firefighting department in my opinion. The transition in Slovenia was, thank God, in the right direction. So, to keep volunteering […] we solved the firefighting story, precisely because of that.” Volunteer Firefighters and Slovenian Nation- and State-Building from Below 149 “I wonder, if there are not too many [volunteer firefighting] departments?”, I re‑ plied. “Well”, he said, “if I looked at the rules, both commercially and economically, I would agree that there are municipalities where there are too many of them. I speak for my own municipality […] of 3,600 people, and five departments. It’s too many, yes. But there is no one with the courage to say ‘we are going to close one’. Who would say such a thing? The mayor? No. This is his electorate, right? What can you do—just leave it. You buy another fire truck, and have no worries for the next hun‑ dred years.”’1 This is a glimpse into my conversation with a member of one of the oldest and most popular organisations in Slovenia, the Firefighting Association of Slovenia (Gasilska Zveza Slovenije, GZS), which in 2018 had 120 regional asso‑ ciations, 1,299 VFDs, and more than 162,500 members. Today, membership in Slovenia’s volunteer fire departments amounts to around 7.7 % of the pop‑ ulation, compared to around 4 % in Austria and the Czech Republic, around 3 % in Croatia, and 1.7 % in Germany. These numbers represent operative fire‑ fighters between 18 years of age and around 63 for men and 50 for women, children and youth aged 7 to 18, as well as firefighting veterans, i. e. long-time members of a VFD older than 63 years (men) or 50 (women). The figures also include supporting members, who for example help to raise funds, to organise firefighting events, or to maintain museum collections. The percentage is cal‑ culated on the basis of the number of volunteer firefighters registered by the national firefighting associations and in national statistics, and the population of the country according to the country’s Bureau of Statistics.2 According to information published on its website, the GZS defines itself as ‘independent, nonprofit, humanitarian, non-political and connecting voluntary fire departments and their [regional, A. K.] associations at the highest level. It operates on the basis of the Associations Act and the Firefighting Act. […] It was founded in 1949 in Ljubljana as the successor to all previous firefighting organisations.’3 I am extremely grateful to both anonymous reviewers and Sabine Rutar for their criticism and suggestions that considerably improved my arguments in this paper. My sincere thanks go to Karin Taylor for language editing. 1 Interview with G. Z., 27 July 2018. 2 Poročilo Upravnega odbora XVII. kongresa GZS, Ptuj, 18-19 May 2018, http://www. gasilec.net/uploads/datoteke/Priloga%20porocilo%20Janko%20Cerkvenik.pdf, 4. The mem‑ bership data also includes the volunteer firefighters in the so-called volunteer industrial fire departments (VIFD), a total of forty-two. Although the VIFDs deserve detailed research, in this study I concentrate on territorial, local VFDs. All internet references were accessed on 26 June 2020. 3 Gasilska zveza Slovenije, Portal slovenskih prostovoljnih gasilcev, http://www.gasilec. net/organizacija/kongresi‑plenumi. On the local level, the VFDs operate as a local public firefighting service, whose functioning is ensured by the municipality and the state. The exact rights and duties of the members are defined in the statute of each VFD separately. 150 Ana Kladnik My conversation with the volunteer firefighter, firstly, points to the ever-pres‑ ent intention of volunteer firefighters to expand their association and, secondly, illustrates the relationship between the volunteer firefighters and (local) au‑ thorities. It thereby alludes to the focus of this article: in the following, I demon‑ strate to what extent firefighters and their association took part in pro-demo‑ cratic and national mobilisation at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s in Slovenia, and how they managed to preserve, or even extend, their autonomy vis à vis the state. Firstly, the article contributes to scholarship which views the relationship be‑ tween civil society and the state not as separate from one another, but as more flexible and multifaceted.4 Thus, it challenges the historiography of civil society in Eastern Europe and specifically of its role in the transition to a democratic system—in the case of Slovenia, also the transition to an independent nation state—which usually focuses on the anticommunist, oppositional movements or the ‘new alternative’ movements of the 1980s.5 This article, instead, investi‑ gates associations with a century-old tradition and which in the local environ- ment by and large remained spaces of typically conventional values, while cultivating local autonomy and devotion to unpaid public service. The study is structured in five parts. First, I give a short overview of the first century of volunteer firefighting in Slovenia, underlining especially its importance for Slovene national aspirations. In the second part, I introduce the changes that affected firefighters after 1968, as for example in 1974 the new Yu‑ goslav constitution included policies based on the idea of the withering away of the state. Thirdly, I concentrate on transition to a democratic system, includ‑ ing the position of firefighters in the first democratic elections and their rapid integration into the new national structures. Fourthly, I discuss the transition 4 Fabio Giomi / Stefano Petrungaro, eds, Voluntary Associations in Yugosla‑ via (1918–1941), special issue, European Review of History 26, no. 1 (2019), 1–18, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2018.1474178; Nicole Kramer / Christine G. Krüger, eds, Freiwilligenar‑ beit und gemeinnützige Organisationen im Wandel. Neue Perspektiven auf das 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin, Boston 2019; Čarna Brković, Ambiguous Nations of ‘National Self’ in Montenegro, in: Ulf Brunnbauer / Hannes Grandits, eds, The Ambiguous Nation. Case Studies from Southeastern Europe in the 20th Century, Munich 2013, 113–149. Cf. also Oli‑ ver Zunz, Philanthropy in America. A History, Princeton 2011; Pat Thane, The Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2011: The ‘Big Society’ and the ‘Big State’. Creative Tension or Crowding Out?, Twentieth Century British History 23, no. 3 (2012), 408–429, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/ hws009; Bernard Harris / Paul Bridgen, Introduction. The ‘Mixed Economy of Welfare’ and the Historiography of Welfare Provision, in: Bernard Harris / Paul Bridgen, eds, Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800, New York, London 2007, 1–18. 5 For Slovenia, cf. Žiga Vodovnik, Demokratizacija in nova družbena gibanja, Teorija in praksa 51, no. 2–3 (2014), 415–433; and Marko Zajc, When the Slovenian Spring Turned into a Hot Summer, in: Joachim von Puttkamer / Włodzimierz Borodziej / Stanislav Holubec, eds, From Revolution to Uncertainty. The Year 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe, New York 2020, 142–163. Volunteer Firefighters and Slovenian Nation- and State-Building from Below 151 to a nation state and recognition of the firefighters’ association as a patriotic organisation in the process of achieving Slovenian independence. I conclude by discussing more generally the heterogeneity of civil society during late socialist Slovenia and the subsequent postsocialist transitions. Voluntary Firefighting in Slovenia. A Brief Overview of Its First Century The Importance of the Slovenian Language. The Late Habsburg and Interwar Periods In the Slovene-speaking lands of the Habsburg Empire, volunteer fire depart‑ ments (VFDs) started to proliferate from the late 1860s onwards. They grew, for example, out of the enthusiasm of those town residents who had seen such associations elsewhere, or were established on the mayor’s initiative.

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