Changes and Contemplations : Economic and Historical Reflections

The interpretation involving the slow processes of economic and social modernisation of the Slovenian space in comparison with the immediate and more distant surrounding areas is one of the generally accepted and often supported suppositions of Slovenian historiography. We should underline that this was a long-term characteristic, not a temporally restricted phenomenon. Slovenian territory was permanently at the brink of the European processes of economic and social transformation. External demand was the driving force of structural economic changes, as domestic demand could not carry out its role as the agent of the economic restructuring due to the low level of income. The dependence on domestic demand lengthened the process of economic changes considerably and preserved or expanded the dimensions of the lag. Slovenian economy and society joined these processes with a lag of several decades and with significant discontinuities manifesting themselves as re agrarisation or de industrialisation in the proto industrial interpretative concept.