Political History

BASIC RESEARCH QUESTIONS: WHAT, WHO and WHERE is the state?

In the 20th century, the processes of the deconstruction and reconstruction of statehood transformed and upgraded the Habsburg statehood heritage, but they did not altogether abolish it or replace it with something new. In the 20th century, the concept of state was closely associated with the issue of people’s prosperity and national homogeneity. Socialist Yugoslavia experimented with the political practices that were supposed to accelerate the withering away of the state, though at the same time, its state concept was closely related to the idea of the national through the federal system. In public, the attainment of Slovenian independence was perceived as an equalisation between a nation and state (“Slovenians got their own state”), while with the European integrations, Slovenia achieved a dimension that transcended the national state: EU regulations and legislation. As A. Landwehr emphasised (2003), the concept of state had not “always existed”, and it had also not fallen out of the sky. Our approach transcends the general conviction that the state is merely a neutral framework that constitutes the nation as a political entity. It is a complex, historically conditioned phenomenon that cannot be understood in a one-sided manner, especially not in the narrow national narrative framework.