caught within contemporary global processes.311 However, what is specific to the Balkans is
‘the particular ideological form in which these processes are lived, and which predominantly determines the way how the region responds to them: this form is best condensed in the term of “transition”’.312
The consequences of the neoliberal takeover become particularly opaque in post-communist and transitioning countries through the various manifestation of the discourse of the post-communist transition. The basic effect of this transition is the normalization of the process of the transition itself where the transition is viewed as an ‘ascension towards civilization’, to join Europe and the West.313 This discourse of transition ‘implies an imposition of a peculiar temporality to politics itself: the temporality of finitude and accomplishedness’.314 As we have seen, according to this narrative Eastern societies
undertake a transition to the condition of capitalism and Western democracy, ‘which poses as normality, that is as the universal norm of historical development in general’.315 At the same time, the impact of this narrative includes the internalisation of political inferiority, which is exploited by political elites, and results in a ‘destructive social system with the absolute victory of the rule of the market and the dissolution of all other alternatives’, where ‘the rule of market is actually more ruthlessly actualised than in some other Western European states’.316
311 Rastko Močnik, “Social Change in the Balkans,” Eurozine, 2003, https://www.eurozine.com/social-change-in-the-balkans/.
312 Ibid.
313 Ibid.
314 Ozren Pupovac, “Present Perfect, or the Time of Post-Socialism,” Eurozine, May 12, 2010, 5, https://www.eurozine.com/present-perfect-or-the-time-of-post-socialism/.
315 Buden, “The Post-Yugoslavian Condition of Institutional Critique: An Introduction On Critique as Countercultural Translation.”
316 Kunst, “Performance, Institutions and Gatherings: Between Democratic and Technocratic European Cultural Space,” 59.
In light of this, I would argue that the position of Slovenia offers a particular
perspective from which to observe the nature and impact of these global shifts and processes.
I agree with Kunst’s remark that there is something to learn from the failed narrative of transition, which can be helpful also ‘for environments that don’t share the same political and cultural circumstances but are nevertheless confronted with the same populist turn in
politics’.317 In this way, I suggest that Slovenia's transition can offer an interesting
perspective on the outcomes of neoliberalism, particularly on the question of how neoliberal rationality enabled the contemporary rise of populist and anti-democratic forces.318
This question of the damaging effect of neoliberalism on democracy has been a central focus of many of the leading theorists of neoliberalism, and is, for example at the core of Wendy Brown's work In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019).319 Brown argues that the aim of neoliberalism was the ‘permanent inoculation of market liberal orders against the regrowth of fascistic sentiments and totalitarian powers’, and that in this way, contemporary manifestations and outcomes of neoliberalism are not ‘neoliberalism’s intended spawn, but its Frankensteinian creation’.320 Brown argues that in order to understand the cause of the current situation, an understanding of not only neoliberalism's economic conditions, but also of its political culture and subject production is necessary.321 Brown thus focuses ‘on how neoliberal formulations of freedom animate and legitimate the hard Right and how the Right mobilizes a discourse of freedom
317 Ibid., 63.
318 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, The Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 7.
319 Casper Verstegen, “Neoliberalism as Frankenstein and an Unfinished Monster,” Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 41, no. 1 (June 15, 2021): 210, https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.41.1.37309.
320 Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 9–10.
321 Ibid., 8.
for its sometimes violent exclusions and assaults, for resecuring white, male, and Christian hegemony, and not only for building the power of capital’.322 Brown writes that the rise of antidemocratic and authoritarian political formations should be understood in light of ‘more than three decades of neoliberal assaults on democracy, equality, and society’.323
I argue that the case of the echo of the Alternative in the anti-government movement can contribute a valuable perspective on these issues because it points to the decidedly political nature of the narrative of the transition and thus challenges the ideological message that we live in a post-political world.324 This upholds Brown's focus on the study of the political culture of contemporary neoliberalism, and emphasises the importance of
‘recognising these politicised sites as politicised sites’.325 In short, the case of Slovenia is an example of how the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism and its repression of
antagonism and agonistic dispute result not in the end of history, but in the expression of antagonism in the forms of nationalism, populism, and violence.326 I posit that an
examination of Slovenia's transition and the transition of the wider region could illuminate distinct aspects of contemporary neoliberalism and offer a unique perspective on how it enabled the rise of nationalist and anti-democratic politics. At the same time, such an inquiry could provide Slovenia with a better understanding of our particular position within this hegemony, which is crucial if we are to develop the political tools and strategies that could overthrow it.
322 Ibid., 10.
323 Ibid., 8.
324 Dean, “After Post-Politics: Occupation and the Return of Communism,” 261.
325 Ibid., 264.
326 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, “Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political,” in The Post-Political and Its Discontents, ed. Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 12, https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748682973.003.0001.
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