Slovenians and the Slavic World: The Political Landscapes of Yesterday and Today

Slovenians kept encountering the Slavic ideological, political, and social issues, which comprise one of the key European historical topics. In the second half of the 19th century, the outlooks on the ethnographic, linguistic, cultural, historical, political, geographical, and economic circumstances in the Slavic environment started to consolidate. Among other things, political issues and the related developments started attracting notable attention, and their intensity continued in the new century as well.

The diversity of events that took place in the Slavic world and among Slavs in the 20th century points to the intensification of modernity, which eventually led to the first as well as the second global conflict. With regard to the first half of the previous century, which concluded with the onset of World War II, comprehensive imagery of the development of Slavism at the time can be discerned from the individual ideological, social, and political-military dynamics. Focusing on this period allows for the familiarisation with the outlooks of the Slovenian politics on the Slavic issues in the time that represents a considerable research challenge. With regard to this period, the following had to be considered: the important contemporaneous ideological and political principles; violent intrastate changes; the evaluation of Slavism and Slavic countries in the critical international circumstances and during wartime; Slavic historical personalities; and the October revolutionary shift of global historical importance, carried out in the Slavic world. From the viewpoint of the Slovenian and specifically Slavic, i.e. Yugoslav, development, the historical dimensions of the Yugoslav ideological-political and state phenomenon represent a distinctive historiographical challenge, as does the self-evaluation of Slovenians – in the Republic of Slovenia, formed after it had separated itself from the Yugoslav world in 1991.