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What appears as revolutionary and liberatory in this notion of national, popular sovereignty, however, is really nothing more than another turn of the screw, a further extension of the subjugation and domination that the modern concept of sovereignty has carried with it from the beginning.
—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 102)
Introduction
The dissolution of the Yugoslav multi-ethnic state in the 1990s did not spark as much aggression and conflict on Slovenian ground as it did in other republics of the former Yugoslavia. Slovenia’s path to independence, therefore, is often portrayed as a success story, built upon the country’s image as a democratic state based on the rule of law. But after Slovenia’s emancipation from the decaying Yugoslav regime, its government took hostile measures against the citizens of other republics of Yugoslavia with permanent residency in Slovenia. In 1992, the government erased 25,671 individuals—mainly ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Roma—from the Register of Permanent Residents of Slovenia. Hence, they became irregular foreigners and lost the political, social, and economic rights they had enjoyed as permanent residents of the Republic of Slovenia. This has left a huge black mark on Slovenian nationalism and the country’s supposed democratic governance, a fact that is often absent from the history of the Slovenian secessionist movement and the creation of the new nation-state.
This gap in the narrative of Slovene national history has been filled by many academics, who have extensively criticized and elucidated the erasure. For instance, the erasure has been discussed in the context of law and legal studies (Kogovšek Šalamon 2007, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012; Vrbek 2015), Slovene nationalism (Zorn 2007, 2009; Bajt 2010), media discourse (Vezovnik 2010), political discourse (Vezjak 2007), the politics of exclusion and totalitarianism (Gregorčič 2007; Jalušič 2007; Dedić, Jalušič, and Zorn 2003), citizenship and statelessness (Blitz 2006), and everyday life (Lipovec Čebron and Zorn 2011). In recognition of this year’s 25th anniversary of the erasure, this article examines the event in the light of modern nation-state rationalities.1 It complements existing works by offering an explanation of the erasure stemming from Michel Foucault’s theoretical, which allows us to give special focus to the logic within contemporary ways of governing populations manifesting in various forms, including nationalism.
To develop this...