NATIONALISM TODAY: CARINTHIA's SLOVENES Part I: the Legacy Ofhistory by Dennison I
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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. Meanwhile, the logic of the bilateral Austro-Yugoslav importance. It is, above nation-state ideology and the inclusion after 1918 of all, a particularly tidy and suggestive case study of neighboring and totally Slovenian Carniola in a new two intimately related questions that are now and kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugo- again of worldwide concern and that historically slavia) also brought Slovenian irredentist claims to first became acute precisely in this and similarly Carinthia's ethnically mixed districts. Here, too, the multinational provinces of the Hapsburg Empire. culmination was violent, bringing two short-lived The first of these is what Central Europeans call Yugoslav military occupations of the southern half "the national question," involving the nature and of the province, in 1919-20 and 1945. significance of nationality and nationalism and the inherent contradiction between the ideology of the Today the dispute focuses on Austrian nonimple- nation-state and the existence of multinational ones. mentation of specific and international obligations, The second combines an empirical and a value ques- designed to protect the existence and guarantee the tion: under what circumstances will a national (-- equality of the Carinthian Slovenes, that are part of ethnic? linguistic? cultural?) minority tend (a) to the State Treaty which ended Four Power occupa- survive while integrating in other ways and pros- tion and restored Austrian sovereignty in 1955. For pering, (b) to survive at the price of social immobility two decades the implementation of these provisions in a ghetto or on a reservation, or (c) to disappear has been blocked by an unresolvable disagreement through some form of assimilation? And does it over the superficially curious issue of the relevance (always? sometimes?) matter if it disappears? and need for some kind of head count (Minder- heitenfestellung) to determine how many Slovenes Austria's Carinthia is one of those provinces there are and where they live. First proposed by the like Alsace and prewar Posnania, Bohemia, or West principal Carinthian German nationalist organiza- Hungarywhere the German world comes gradu- tion in 1957, such a head count was eventually ally to an end and becomes something else. Here the endorsed by all three of Austria's parliamentary Copyright (C) 1977, American Universities Field Staff, Inc. [DIR-4-'77] DIR-4-'77 -2- partiesboth government and oppositionas a its source just inside South Tyrol), and in the south- precondition for the introduction of bilingual topo- east where the Drau crosses into present-day Yugo- graphic signs, Slovenian as a second language in slavia, the mountains surrender to the great courts and local administration, the definitive regu- Pannonian Plain. Only here and to the northeast lation of bilingual schools, and other measures and east, where the passes into Styria and toward stipulated by the State Treaty. On the other side the Vienna are lower and more numerous, is Carinthia two officially recognized Slovenian political and easily accessible. cultural organizations in the province, backed by the Yugoslav government, have vehemently and This geographic configuration, open to the east continually refused to accept its need or legitimacy, over yielding mountains and to the southeast along opposed its execution when it finally came in the Drau, but barely accessible in all other November 1976, and are now refusing to recognize directions, has been important in the history of the results as a basis for settlement. Carinthia and of the national question. The Slovenes came from the east in the second half of the Each item in the history summarized above plays sixth century, driven before the conquering Avars to a role in explaining and giving significance to this an apparently bloodless occupation of valleys either dispute and to the positions assumed by all these uninhabited or sparsely populated by a mixture of actors. Relevant items include such apparently Romanized (Celtic?) peoples and dropouts esoteric questions as the language spoken by the (Langobards? Goths?) from earlier barbarian man who sat on the ancient stone throne on the migrations. The High Tauern and the Carnic Alps Carinthian Zollfeld in the early eighth century and imposed western limits on their penetration, while the ethnographic and linguistic validity of the con- the eastward thrusting Karawanken split their cept of a Windisch or Wend people. migration into two streams and thereafter impeded communication between those who settled in the Ljubljana Basin to the south and those who followed Slavs and Germans in the Valley ofthe Drau the Drau into the Klagenfurt Basin to the north of this mountain barrier. By the time of Charlemagne Carinthia itself is worth fighting over. For my the German Bajuvarii had come, too---both as taste it is Austria's loveliest province. Its many lakes settlers filtering across the high passes into northern are the warmest in all the Alps, and there is some- Carinthia and as a Bavarian king's vassals who were thing about the ratio between the shape of its wide, summoned by Slovene appeals for help against the glacially U-formed valleys and the height and mass Avars and who stayed to rule. Carinthia became a of its mou.ntains that is particularly pleasing to this Bavarian tributary state and with Bavaria passed observer's soul. It is also, significantly, one of the into the Frankish Empire. As an autonomous most completely enclosed of the AustrianLinder. In German duchy, for a brief time including Styria, the northwest corner rises the Grossglockner, at Carniola, Istria, Friuli, and the March of Verona, it 3,798 meters Austria's highest mountain and pride was part of the Ottonian Empire and then of of the High Tauern, a west-to-east prolongation of Ottokar's short-lived realm. Finally in 1335, both the main backbone of the Alps that cuts these Carinthia and Carniola passed to the Hapsburgs, to southern valleys off from Tyrol, Salzburg, Upper be joined with Styria after the fifteenth century as Austria, and north winds. In the south the the "Inner Austrian" lands of the Styrian branch of Karawanken Alps, another west-to-east range, the House of Hapsburg. raises a massive, steep-sided barricade between Carinthia and Yugoslav Carniola (gradients on the Whoever may be right about the nationality of the Loibl Pass road, now avoidable through a tunnel, first man to sit on that stone throne on the Zollfeld exceed 22 percent). The Karawanken's westward by the Karnburg north of Klagenfurt, by the end of extension in the Carnic Alps, beyond the narrow the eighth century he was a German. But even Tarvis Gap that is eastern Austria's only all-weather centuries later, in a curious tradition apparently route to Italy, similarly bars the passage to Friuli. unique in feudal Europe, each new duke was wel- Through the middle of this land, giving it hydro- comed there by a Slovene peasantan honor graphic and geographic unity, flows the river Drau hereditary in one familywho heard his oath to be a (Drava to the Slavs and to the Italians who command just ruler spoken in the Slovene language before -3- DIR-4-'77 yielding the throne to him. a In this fashion, and for (written) language for the first time. This is not more than a millennium, German lords and strictly true, since there had been a Slovene trans- German monasteries ruled a Slav peasantry who lation of the Bible and a modest flowering of Slo- were almost alone among the peoples of Central venian books during a "first Slovene renaissance" Europe in never having had an independent and at that coincided with the Reformation's brief triumph least momentarily powerful state to remember. in Inner Austria in the sixteenth century. But the In Carniola, lower Styria, and southern Carinthia Hapsburg Counterreformation put an end to all an ethnic pattern familiar throughout the eastern this, and for over 200 years no books were published in Slovenian. The Hapsburg domains emerged: a countryside of Slav linguistic revival after 1800 therefore a peasants speckled with German market and admin- included significant amount of istrative towns to which a few ambitious Slavs in updating, new vocabulary, and purging of non- Slavic loan German or each generation came.., and were Germanized.