Slovenian Press Research Articles

СЛОВЕНСКАЯ «ДОРОЖНАЯ АФЕРА» 1969 Г. (ИЗ ИСТОРИИ БОРЬБЫ ЮГОСЛАВСКИХ РЕСПУБЛИК ЗА ИНВЕСТИЦИИ)

The Slovenian «road scam» is an acute conflict between the leadership of Slovenia and the Yugoslav federation over the distribution of foreign loans. It was provoked by the pressure of world financial capital on the Yugoslav government. Favorable internal conditions have developed for the crisis. In Slovenia, the team of S. Kavchich was in power, it advocated the creation of a national republican economy. For many years, the Slovenian press criticized the union center and supported the public opinion that all other republics lived at the expense of Slovenia. In 1969, these factors caused a campaign of pressure on the federal government, which was openly led by the leaders of the republic. Such a massive and public uprising against Belgrade had no precedent in the history of the Yugoslav federation. The crisis was overcome thanks to pressure from the country’s top party leadership, but did not lead to any systemic changes. The Slovenian leadership formally submitted and admitted that they were wrong. The “road scam” showed that the economic reforms of the 1960s, designed to eliminate the basis for conflicts between the republics and the federation, did not lead to the desired goal.

Anatomy of the “deathly silence”: Slovenian newspapers in Carniola and the pre-March censorship

The media landscape of the Habsburg Monarchy in the pre-March period was relatively meagre. In Carniola and other Austrian crownlands with a Slovenian population, the opportunities for literary development were limited: this is well evidenced by the ban on the publication of Slavinja in mid-1820 as well as by the many conflicts Krajnska čbelica (‘The Carniolan Bee’) had with censorship in the early 1830s. The modesty of literary activity in Slovenia at this time is often related to the low level of education and literacy among the population, discontinuity in the development of literary culture, and the general underdevelopment of the emerging Slovenian literary and media systems. However, imperial censorship also decisively contributed to this state of affairs. This article therefore outlines the functioning of the pre-March censorship apparatus at the state and local levels, showing how the censorship office in Vienna (headed by the count Josef Sedlnitzky) systematically blocked attempts to establish Slovenian-language periodicals (Slavinja, Slovenske novice ‘Slovenian News’ with its supplement Zora ‘The Dawn’, and Ilirske novice ‘Illyrian News’ with its supplement Ilirski Merkur ‘The Illyrian Mercury’) and how local factors were involved in these processes. It is argued that the power to ban a newspaper had a much stronger impact on the Slovenian press than the activities of local or state censorship. In particular, the long struggle to establish Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (‘Agricultural and Handicraft News’) between 1838 and 1843 testifies to the early tendency of the imperial censorship apparatus to block the respective national(ist) agendas.

Ljutomer parish during the Great War

Drawing on archival materials from the Archdiocesan Archives Maribor and especially on an overview of church records and news items from the Slovenian press, the contribution aims to shed new light on the developments that took place in the parish of Ljutomer during the First World War. These entailed not only a wave of refugees from the Littoral and local casualties but also the presence of military graves in Ljutomer cemeteries, which is a lesser-known fact today.

Ljutomer parish during the Great War

Drawing on archival materials from the Archdiocesan Archives Maribor and especially on an overview of church records and news items from the Slovenian press, the contribution aims to shed new light on the developments that took place in the parish of Ljutomer during the First World War. These entailed not only a wave of refugees from the Littoral and local casualties but also the presence of military graves in Ljutomer cemeteries, which is a lesser-known fact today.

Ljutomer parish during the Great War

Drawing on archival materials from the Archdiocesan Archives Maribor and especially on an overview of church records and news items from the Slovenian press, the contribution aims to shed new light on the developments that took place in the parish of Ljutomer during the First World War. These entailed not only a wave of refugees from the Littoral and local casualties but also the presence of military graves in Ljutomer cemeteries, which is a lesser-known fact today.

Bulgaria and Slovenia Protest Event Dataset (2009-2017): Protest cycles and protest patterns in Southeast Europe

This article aims to present findings from an original dataset on collective action in the protest arenas of Bulgaria and Slovenia in the aftermath of the global economic crisis, 2009-2017. Unlike other empirical studies which focus either on particular social movements or individual-level measurements, this dataset consists of all reports of collective action in the form of protests demonstrations, strikes, blockades, occupations, sit-ins, marches, petitions etc., derived from the national Bulgarian and Slovenian press agencies, including information about claims and actors. Along with a description of the data collection, techniques, and coding, the article identifies the phases of protest cycles and explores general protest patterns. The findings depict three distinct periods of activity in Bulgaria and Slovenia: the ascending phase of protest cycle involving immediate protest responses against austerity measures (2009-2011), massive anti-establishment discontent involving the dominant role of new informal protest movements (2012-2013), and the de-mobilization phase of mass protest and the rise of contention about cultural issues (since 2014).

The Slovenes and the government of E. Taaffe (1879–1893)

The article, based on the analysis of materials from the Slovenian press, memoirs of Slovenian politicians and research by Slovenian historians, traces the perception of the policy of E. Taaffe (1879–1893) by the Slovenian public and assesses the impact of his reforms on the socio-economic and national status of Slovenes. The Taaffe government, which replaced the German liberal governments who had conducted centralizing policies, carried out a series of reforms aimed at smoothing out social and national contradictions in Cisleithania. Most Slovenian politicians supported him and abandoned the most radical national demands. Thanks to Taaffe’s reforms, the national position of Slovenes improved: the Slovene language strengthened its position in schools, gymnasiums, courts and provincial authorities. Most bonuses received Carniola that in the early 1880s was recognized as a Slovenian province. It began a rapid process of Slovenianization. Liberals and conservatives during this period of “consent” mainly pursued a common policy, putting forward Slovenian demands in the Reichsrat and provincial assemblies. Some of them have been implemented. At the same time, the reforms caused a certain aggravation of national and political differences in the Slovenian lands. Their half-heartedness caused discontent among the Slovenian liberals (primarily among the group of radicals). In the second half of the 1880s, criticism of the government in the Slovenian liberal press increased. It should be noted that, in general, the policy of supporting Taaffe’s government, pursued by the majority of Slovenian national figures, was real and balanced, and as a result, Slovenes received quite a lot of national concessions during his reign.

The nation as an imagined commodity: Branding ‘Melania’

The article uses the case of Melania Trump, the former First Lady of the United States, to analyse the discursive strategies through which the print media in Slovenia represented ‘Melania’ as an ethnically born Slovenian on a national scale. The article also demonstrates how patriotism, based on the love and feelings of belonging to the Slovenian nation-state, was nationalized in the case of ‘Melania’. The main argument is that numerous and repetitive media representations of ‘Melania’ aggressively put nationalism in the commercial context, and consequently transformed the nation into a commodity and an object of trade which can be sold and of which the Slovenians can make a profit. Consequently, the Slovenian press coverage of Melania Trump created her as a national brand meant to perform on the local, national market when merging emotional attitudes with commercial allure. The article concludes with the discursive strategies such as representing ‘Melania’ as ‘ours’, as a tool to accelerate the country’s economic growth and as a branding strategy to sell the Slovenian landscape and culture and produce the Slovenian nation as an imagined commodity. Furthermore, such branding of the nation is directed towards domestic rather than international audiences.

Independent, alternative, cultural, specialised, niche: How the press can survive without the market and state (or with them)

The financing of media has become a prime political and public topic in Slovenia. In light of the government’s financial draining of the Slovenian Press Agency, a politically motivated distribution of funds for public interest media, and advertising commissioned by state institutions and companies, attention has primarily focused on the media aimed at the general public. Specialised magazines have more limited access to both the market and public funds. Despite public support, demonstrated by the campaign #zaobSTAnek (#forsurvival), crowdsourcing is not a viable solution for public media and even less so for media aimed at more narrow audiences.

Confucius, a Yugoslav Nationalist

The aim of the present paper is to analyse the representations of Confucianism in early 20th century Slovenia and reflect on the role of external factors – historical and political events of the time, Yugoslav internal and external political developments, social and economic changes, etc. – in these interpretations of Confucian tradition. In the virtual absence of books on the topic, the main source for assessing what the representations of Confucianism were like in the period will be journal and newspaper articles (more than 500 texts in a vast array of genres). The material analysed is limited by the time of publication to encompass the last two decades of the 19th and the first four decades of the 20th century, and only publications published in Slovenian and on the territory of today’s Slovenia are used. The topic of the paper, early 20th century representations of Chinese thought, has not been explored extensively in scholarly works. By an analysis of the 1884–1941 representations of Confucianism and Confucius in Slovenian press, the present paper aims to partly fill this gap, while also exploring the outside factors which had an impact on the type of discourse produced about Confucius and Confucianism in the period.

Slovenian Press and Russia in the late XIX — early XX centuries: attitude to K.P. Pobedonostsev

Life and work of K.P. Pobedonostsev were known to the Slovenian public, primarily thanks to the German press. The liberal public looked sympathetically at the understanding of the Orthodox Church as a people`s Church and on Pobedonostsev’s faith in the “strong” Russian people. Also, the Catholic Slovenian public emphasized that Russia needed to be understood, and also sympathized to Pobedonostsev’s ideas about the place of faith in society. But on the other hand, especially the Catholic press condemned him for caesaropapism and for persecutions against Catholics. For both liberal and Catholic critics, it was problematic to assess his attitude towards democracy and parliamentarism, although both of them agreed that Pobedonostsev’s criticism was fair.

Engineering Technologies for Journalism In the Digital Age

Although technological innovations in journalism have recently received growing scholarly attention, studies have hardly questioned or explored the naturalised dominance of technology over newswork. By drawing on critical scholarship, the study aims to explore how articulations between technology and journalism are negotiated by actors engineering technological innovations for and implementing them as part of newswork. Adopting the qualitative methods of interviews and document analysis, the study explores the XLike project (Seventh Framework Programme) co-ordinated by the Jožef Stefan Institute, a Slovenian public research institution for natural sciences and, among others, partnered with the New York Times, Bloomberg Media and the Slovenian Press Agency. One of its main results is a technology that is able to extract formal knowledge from texts in different languages scattered online in a structured way. While the study indicates journalists and editors are seen as conservative and hesitant to adopt what is understood as progressive technology, the project chiefly focuses on journalism as a business by pursuing a better understanding of audience behaviour, tracking online traffic and customised advertising. Additionally, newsrooms played at best a marginal role in defining the project’s goals and implementing the technology, and that these were driven foremost by business concerns.

Russian Refugee Crisis and Its Possible Solutions

The first co-ordinated international efforts for refugee protection were a direct response to the Russian exodus that had followed the 1917 revolution and the subsequent Civil War. The Russians who had left their homeland lived in exile with no legal rights, in great misery and deprivation, as the Russian ‘problem’ clearly exceeded the capacities of the existing humanitarian organisations. Difficult circumstances and poverty similarly afflicted the majority of those Russians who found refuge in Slovenia. The situation of the Russian refugees and the humanitarian role played by the Roman Catholic Church in that period came under the spotlight of Slovenian press. The latter gave detailed reports of Bishop Jeglič’s visit to the barracks at Ljubljana’s central train station, where many Russian refugees had been housed.

The Growth of Covert Advertising in the Context of Local Self-Government

Advertising has become an indispensable component of the modern information society. The advertisers try to attract attention, often with aggressive and unethical advertising; one aspect being covert advertising. Covert advertising means all the texts are paid for in the forms of journalistic texts but they want just the commercial benefit. Our goal was to investigate covert advertising within the Slovenian press, with a mutually comparative analysis of three daily newspapers comparing the years 2008 and 2012, and to study the existing theoretical contributions on covert advertising in the context of local self-government as a key element of democracy, its causes, and the legal order. We determined that the number of such articles is growing each year, and the laws and regulations are absolutely disrespected.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined as Balkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

Balkan Immigrant Workers as Slovenian Victimized Heroes

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure's characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined asBalkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.

Interpretations of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in the Slovenian Press at the Beginning of the 20th Century

This essay deals with the Slovene reaction to the military intervention of eight coalition forces in China during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. To Slovenes, China was then seen as a faraway land that had been visited by some Slovene missionaries, noblemen and travellers throughout the past centuries. Nevertheless, much interest was expressed by the Slovene public and press in the events surrounding the Boxer Rebellion. Despite the fact that the Austro-Hungarian military was part of the international coalition that intervened in Chinese internal affairs, the leading Slovene newspapers of the period supported the right of the Chinese people to defend their country against the big powers of the time, who tried to dismember China and enforce the regime of capitulation.

Interpretations of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion in the Slovenian Press at the Beginning of the 20th Century

This essay deals with the Slovene reaction to the military intervention of eight coalition forces in China during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. To Slovenes, China was then seen as a faraway land that had been visited by some Slovene missionaries, noblemen and travellers throughout the past centuries. Nevertheless, much interest was expressed by the Slovene public and press in the events surrounding the Boxer Rebellion. Despite the fact that the Austro-Hungarian military was part of the international coalition that intervened in Chinese internal affairs, the leading Slovene newspapers of the period supported the right of the Chinese people to defend their country against the big powers of the time, who tried to dismember China and enforce the regime of capitulation.

Unlabelled advertorials in Slovenian life-style press: A study of the promotion of health products

The paper analyses unlabelled advertorials about health products in four life-style magazines and three daily newspapers' life-style supplements in Slovenia. Based on 250 hours of observing the production practice, 20 in-depth interviews with the main participants and a textual analysis of 247 advertorials, supported by three detailed case studies, the process of unlabelled advertorial production was unveiled, reasons for their production explained and their discursive elements of promotion uncovered. Despite their typical news-like appearance, advertorials focus on a product's positive characteristics only and represent an oversimplified viewpoint on health, primarily oriented towards the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. In advertorials, readers are instructed in healthy living and caring about their health through buying the promoted product. No particular differences were found between the magazines and quality dailies' supplements, indicating that the advertorial practice has become a common part of the Slovenian press media scene. The outburst of advertorials in Slovenia is outstanding due to the lack of historical democracy, problems with the supervision of legal transgressions, the small media and advertising market, economic downturns and the financial weakness of the media.

Generation X in Slovenia(n)

Addressing themes of family, interpersonal relationships, historicity, jobs, religion, and apocalypse Generation X narrative includes works by young American writers in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century. The search for oneʹs identity in urban landscape is heavily influenced by mass media, pop culture and consumerism. Slovenian press and professional literature provided only scarce response to Generation X fiction which is also influenced by the ambiguity of the term Generation X and the essence of its culture and literature, which is also true for American literary criticism. The paper aims to explore the reception of novels by Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney and their analyses with emphasis on narrative, themes of consumerism and mass media, characters, and style of writing.