By: Gašper Blažič
Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to what is happening in Ukraine. For two months now, the media has been raising expectations of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Which should have happened yesterday – but it did not. Quite the opposite: the pressure of the Russian army on the border with Ukraine has even decreased, and with this the announcement of an imminent global war has apparently fell flat.
This, of course, does not mean that Russian threats should not be taken seriously, and that the supreme Russian oligarch Vladimir Putin has no aspirations for imperialism. He has been in power for more than twenty years and there seems to be no force in Russia that can break him. Therefore, at least now, there is no great need to consolidate power through external conflicts. However, he is understandably quite loud, as he has to compete with the growing Chinese in the face of a relatively weakened European Union.
But there is also a superpower that needs a conflict with Putin’s Russia more than anyone. This is the United States, specifically the Biden administration. It turned out that the current US president is a rather weak figure on the world political scene and that he is tolerated on home soil only because he managed to dethrone his otherwise eccentric predecessor Donald Trump, who was even described as a war instigator. But he was anything but that, as e.g., he alleviated the conflict with North Korea rather than exacerbated it. And he also did not allow major conflicts with Russia, so it is no wonder that conspiracies are still circulating today about Trump, that he is in fact a Russian agent who managed to break through to the highest position in the White House. But Biden’s administration is now struggling with desperately low public support, so opening to the conflict with Moscow is a good idea. At the same time, they forgot that Putin is an imperialist, but he is not so stupid as to embark on a military adventure that would do him more harm than good. Ergo: The presumption of imminent war was actually grist to Biden’s mill – due to domestic political needs.
To better understand what is happening now, let us look back to a good thirty years ago, to 1989, when Gorbachev, on behalf of the Soviet Union, and Bush, on behalf of the United States, ended the Cold War by meeting in Malta. It was clear that the Soviet empire was collapsing, communist regimes were falling in the countries of the Eastern bloc, and the communist system in the former Yugoslavia was shaking. In Slovenia, then still a formal socialist republic, we got the first independent political organisations: the Slovene Peasants’ Union was formed in May 1988, the Slovene Democratic Union in early 1989 and the Social Democratic Union of Slovenia in February of the same year. It became clear that the ruling monopoly ZKS was losing legitimacy and that sooner or later the first multi-party elections would take place. That is why the events in Kosovo and the rise of Slobodan Milošević came in very handy at the time. The head of the ZKS Central Committee Milan Kučan, the president of the republican presidency Janez Stanovnik, the president of the SZDL republican conference Jože Smole and others began to raise their heads in the spirit of “coming down from power” and defending human rights in Kosovo, especially in relation to party-conservative Serbia, which was, of course, a well-calculated manoeuvre. Serbs, burdened with theses from the memorandum of Serbian academics on the unresolved Serbian national question, were expected to feel threatened and affected by being stabbed in the back by the northernmost Yugoslav republic, which was in fact the only one not bordering Serbia nor did it have any open national issues (unlike Croatia, which had a few Serb-majority municipalities). In a way, they understood that perhaps the Slovene nation does not think like the republican leadership, and they wanted to emphasise this through rallies. But in this well-calculated game, it was clear that the Slovenian nation would unite with the leadership in the defence of Slovenia, even at the cost of destroying “brotherhood and unity”. It had nothing else left, as several swords of Damocles hung over Slovenia and its future. On the one hand, the change of the last version of the Yugoslav constitution from 1974 in the direction of centralism, and on the other hand, the overthrow of disobedient provincial and republican leaders with the help of the street. If the Slovene party establishment had dealt with the newly formed class enemies a year earlier through the process against the JBTZ quartet and already before with the opinion war against Nova revija and the creators of the so-called writer’s constitution, while kneeling before the Belgrade centralists, the situation was different now: the ZKS had to risk a conflict with Belgrade to stay on home soil. And if a conflict is inevitable, it must be directed in such a way as to bring the maximum benefit to the republican power structures.
Thus, in 1989, Kučan was able to get rid of the “hard line” of the ZKS with France Popit at the helm and play the card of unification of the nation, as he knew that the views of the emerging opposition on Kosovo and the Serbian rally would not be significantly different from those, he launched to the public himself. It was essential for him that the Party kept behind a large enough critical mass of people who did not perceive its moral bankruptcy. The latter proved especially in response to the announcement of a truth rally in Ljubljana – Serbian strategists had to know in advance that dismantling the territory that did not directly fall into their sphere of interest would not achieve anything but would only deepen the rift between Ljubljana and Belgrade. The dream of a centralised Yugoslavia thus ended even before the announcement of the truth rally took place. And with the announcement itself, there were in fact a lot of negotiations within Slovenian party structures about how Slovenia should act – either to allow the rally or to ban it. Finally, the organisers (Božur) decided to cancel it themselves, and it is still not entirely clear what influenced this decision the most. The fact is that shortly before that the ZKS was still cheering for socialism and Yugoslavia, but three weeks after the failed rally, just at the time of the overthrow of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania, the ZKS adopted a new, “European” direction. And was intensively preparing for the ZKJ congress, which followed three weeks later. The departure of the Slovenian delegation from this infamous congress actually paid off for the party, although it may still be too little to form a government even after the spring elections of 1990. But enough to retain all control over social subsystems.
If we observe the Yugoslav events from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we can say that Kučan succeeded incredibly well in keeping the Party – today led by his successors Tanja Fajon – alive. He took advantage of the favourable political terrain, where the Party was able to turn its attention from the domestic situation to Serbia and thus take the initiative to the emerging opposition. The question is whether, if the ZKS-SDP, as the strongest individual party in the socio-political assembly of the then assembly, formed a government with Prime Minister Janez Kocijančič, Slovenia would embark on an independent path, as we experienced under Demos. It was during the Demos government that Kučan, then president of the republic’s presidency, was able to play with two cards: on the one hand, his option was still cheering for a united Yugoslavia (even despite the plebiscite – as evidenced by the Declaration on peace, the destructive actions of demo liberals, and SDP meetings with colleagues from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina), and on the other hand he was able to publicly criticise the government for being ill-prepared on D-Day, giving the impression that Demos was the one that ruined the project of independence after the Slovenes unanimously confirmed the decision for independence in a plebiscite. With this, Kučan, as the last party leader, continued to maintain the status of his political superiority in Slovene politics and took over the position of “uncrowned king of Slovenia” from Ivan Maček-Matija (according to Dr Stane Grandi).
Anyway, this very example explains to us why Joe Biden (and not Vladimir Putin) is the one who needs the Russo-Ukrainian war now.
Gašper Blažič is a journalist for Demokracija, editor of its daily board and editor of the Blagovest.si portal.
