• No results found

Culture and Politics

In document A Failed Transition? (pagina 38-42)

Alternative artistic practices that developed in Slovenia in the eighties utilised

methods and tactics that included establishing alternative spaces and practices, appropriating the state’s methods, undermining the authorities and exposing their duplicity. Culture, the press, and newly emerging civil society were at the core of the movement, with each pillar introducing new practices, new structures and configurations. These alternative practices, new modes and spaces of sociality, and the strong alliance between culture, civil society, and press, contributed to the emergence of the Alternative, a movement and an alternative public.

The movement gathered many individuals and gained significant social, cultural, and political power, as it was able to reflect and articulate the experience of youth within the wider context of the end of the two bloc division of the world, the political tensions and economic crisis

142 Badovinac, Čufer, and Gardner, NSK from Kapital to Capital : Neue Slowenische Kunst, an Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, 7.

within Yugoslavia, growing political cynicism, and an increase in dogmatisation. Reflecting on the impact of the Alternative, Gržinić writes that in just one decade, ‘the alternative scene brought a completely new perception of the concept and strategy of art - as an inherently political paradigm, connected to daily life, mass media and technology’.144 In terms of Slovenia’s position within the spectrums of West and East, modernity and backwardness, capitalism and socialism, democracy and authoritarianism, it can be said that the Alternative movement, cautious of both actually existing socialism as well as capitalism, gazed towards a democratic future, a third way. Therefore, for the Alternative, the issue was not socialism or capitalism.145 The ethos of the movement was not based on a realisation of a vision of an independent liberal democracy, but on ‘the possibility of developing a cultural production – and above all, a society – that would transcend both formations’.146

The political power and effect of the Alternative movement can perhaps best be demonstrated by describing the events that took place in the spring of 1988. During that year, civil society was mobilised by the JBTZ affair, also known as the trial against the Four, which led to massive protests and significantly contributed to the democratisation and

independence of Slovenia. At the time, tensions between Slovenia and the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) were rising, as Slovenian thinkers and writers were vocal critics of the YPA and its projects, while the critiques and demands of Slovene politicians also increased.147

Tensions further escalated due to Mladina’s attacks on the Armed Forces of the SFRY and the minister of defence Branko Mamula.148 This was followed by numerous discussions

144 Marina Gržinić, “Metelkova: Actions in a Zone of Indifference,” Subsol, n.d., http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/grzinictext2.html.

145 Praznik, “Alternative Culture, Civil Society and Class Struggle,” 69.

146 Ibid.

147 Božo Repe, “Background of the Yugoslav ‘Night of the Long Knives,’” n.d.

148 Ibid.

between the Slovene government and the Yugoslav leadership, the formation of a working group that was to collect information on the attacks on the YPA, as well as several sessions and proceedings on the topic held by the Federal Council for Protection of the Constitutional Order, and the Military Council.149 Repe describes that the accounts of these sessions give the general idea of the measures that the army leadership had in mind, such as the arrest and sentencing of the authors of negative articles, and measures ‘to restrict or prevent the democratization processes in progress’.150 Then, a note of a debate from a session of the Presidium of Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was leaked.151

On 31 May 1988, Janez Janša, a columnist for Mladina and candidate for the presidency of the Union of Socialist Youth of Slovenia was arrested, followed by Ivan Borštner, a sergeant in the YPA), and Mladina’s journalist David Tasič, while Mladina’s editor Franci Zavrl avoided arrest by hiding in a hospital.152 The four were arrested and tried before a military court in Ljubljana for betraying military secrets, and for possessing a confidential document that evidenced the Commander of the 9th Army tightened the measures for combat readiness of his troops due to the situation in Slovenia.153

The JBTZ affair, named after the initials of the Four, was the main focus of all Slovenian media for half a year. At the trial, Borštner was sentenced to 4 years’

imprisonment, Zavrl and Janša to 18 months, and Tasič to 5 months, after which their sentences were suspended by the Slovene authorities who also applied to the SFRY for pardon, albeit unsuccessfully.154 Instead, more favourable sentences were secured, as were

149 Ibid.

150 Ibid.

151 Ibid.

152 Repe, Slovenci v Osemdesetih Letih, 38.

153 Ibid.

early releases.155 Meanwhile, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights was formed for the protection of the rights of the Four, which consisted of more than a thousand different organizations, and over a hundred thousand individual members, becoming the strongest civil society organisation of the so-called “Slovenian Spring”.156 The Committee organised a series of protests, including one in front of the military court on Roška street.157 These famously culminated in a mass protest on 21 June 1988 in the centre of Ljubljana.158

Močnik describes the Alternative movement as ‘a conglomerate of counter-system movements with ideological sources in pluralistic traditions of global leftist and revolutionary movements’, which sought to establish “different spaces of sociality”.159 Reflecting on the role of artistic and cultural practice within the wider Alternative movement, it can be said that culture was a site for the formation of alternative and parallel ways of existing and coexisting and for the formation of an alternative or parallel public. Culture, together with the newly forming civil society, and independent and youth press, formed a web that contributed to massive political shifts that took place in Slovenia in the eighties and nineties, and eventually led to the country’s transition to capitalism, democracy, and independence.

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid., 46.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid.

159 Močnik, “The Vagaries of the Expression ‘Civil Society’: The Yugoslav Alternative.”

In document A Failed Transition? (pagina 38-42)