One of the tough things about studying abroad in the former Yugoslavia is that every successor state uses its own currency. Every time I travel across borders, I need to get my money exchanged. Slovenia, the self-described "heart of Europe," switched over to the Euro on Jan. 1. For the Slovenian media, it seemed to symbolize even more than the 2004 ascension to the European Union. Membership in the EU was great, but the Euro was a physical manifestation. It was a little piece of Europe that Slovenes could hold in their hands, stuff in their pockets and pay for their groceries with. It was a message to the rest of the former Yugoslavia: We are Europe, and you are the Balkans. This "Balkanization" of the five other successor states has been standard operating procedure for Slovenia since independence in 1991.
Last Monday marked the 15th anniversary of the Erasure. For Slovenia, it was the equivalent of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina that war criminals are still being tried for today. 18,305 people, amounting to almost 1 percent of the newly minted Republic of Slovenia's population, were removed from the Registry of Permanent Residents on Feb. 26, 1992. These "erased" people, most of whom had migrated to Slovenia from the Yugoslav republics of their birth in the '50s or '60s, had the same status as any illegal alien, despite living in the country legally for decades while Slovenia was still a part of the SFR Yugoslavia.
When I was in Ljubljana, Slovenia's excessively European capital city, I met Alexander, an erased individual. An older guy with a degree in archaeology, Alexander has lived in Slovenia for 25 years, after immigrating to the country from Serbia. He didn't find out that he had been erased until his son was born in 1993. When he and his wife, a Slovene, registered the birth, all of Alexander's documents were seized - his passport, driver's license and working papers. For three years, the line on the child's birth certificate where Alexander's name should have been remained blank. Despite permanent residence in Slovenia and marriage to a Slovenian citizen, Alexander legally did not exist. He lost all the rights of a citizen: to pension, health care, education, legal working status, even paternity.
Alexander's experience is fairly uniform for erased individuals in Slovenia. There was no notification when noncitizens were erased from the Registry of Permanent Residence. Most people did not find out they were erased for years, until they needed to go and renew state-issued documents. It took Alexander two more years to learn that there were six other erased people living on his street.
There was a period of six months between independence and the Erasure where Yugoslav nationals could acquire citizenship, which 8.5 percent of Slovenia's population did, totaling 171,000 people. The Erased make up the number who either did not apply for citizenship or whose application was rejected. They represent what nationalism, the same nationalism that caused mass rape in Bosnia and political oppression in Kosovo, means in practice in the former Yugoslavia. Far from a theoretical imagined community, nationalism justifies the systematic exclusion of the other. Following the Erasure, Slovenia became a refugee-producing country.
The Slovenian fascination with the Euro represents the economic focus of EU membership. Despite touting the newfound communion with West Europe, Slovenia is far from shaking off the postcommunist tendency toward ethnonationalism. Ascension to the EU doesn't mean human rights, democracy, or even the existence of aspirations toward either. Systematic discrimination against the Roma population in Romania and against the LGBTIQ community in Poland stresses the point. In Slovenia at least, EU membership doesn't mean much beyond the Euro. And quite possibly, the EU itself doesn't mean much beyond the Euro. Until the standards set for ascension have some validity, my traveling from "the Balkans" to "Europe" is only going to mean changing my Croatian Kuna into Euros.
Despite using every opportunity to differentiate themselves from the other countries of the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia faces most of the same problems in building a functioning democracy. Until the situation regarding the Erased is resolved, the Euro is going to be as European as Slovenia will get.
