Zed Books Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. AftershockA Journey into Eastern Europe's Broken DreamsBy John FefferZed Books LtdCopyright © 2017 John FefferAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-949-9ContentsAcknowledgements, vii, Introduction: Exile Off Main Street, 1, PART I: STEPPING BACKWARD, 1. Pyramids of Sacrifice, 47, 2. The Journey to Utopia, 89, 3. The Revenge of the Provinces, 147, 4. The Faces of Illiberalism, 179, 5. Unexploded Ordnance, 242, Interlude: Stepping Backward, Leaping Forward, 303, PART II: LEAPING FORWARD, 6. Reinvention of Self, 309, 7. The Talented Tenth, 341, 8. The New Dissidents, 384, 9. The Next Generation, 435, 10. Creating New Worlds, 462, Conclusion: The Future of Illiberalism, 493, Notes, 527, Index, 575, CHAPTER 1Pyramids of SacrificeJelka Zorn, a petite blonde Slovenian, was conducting ethnographic research on asylum issues for her social work degree. It was 2000. The last war of the Yugoslav succession, over the breakaway region of Kosovo, had recently ended. Yet Slovenia, in the northwest corner of the former multiethnic federation, was still dealing with people who'd fled the conflicts that accompanied the breakdown of Yugoslavia. The detention centers were crowded.Jelka's interest in immigration was piqued by the experience of a friend from Croatia who wanted to relocate to Slovenia. It had been relatively easy to move between republics in the communist era, but this changed when the country broke apart in the 1990s. 'She had a terrible problem getting papers,' Jelka told me in 2012 over tea in a cafe in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. 'She was not a refugee. She just wanted to move here for personal reasons. I helped her with the papers. This took five or six years!' Jelka made no effort to conceal her frustration. 'Through her, I got to know how it is to come here from ex-Yugoslavia, how people were treated administratively, and what consequences this had for their life.'Slovenia cultivates an image of itself as the Switzerland of the Balkans. It's small, with an alpine landscape and a relatively prosperous population of 2 million people. Slovenians also tend to think of themselves as tolerant. That tolerance was tested by the waves of ex-Yugoslav refugees that flowed into the country in the 1990s. 'At first, people's reactions were very welcoming toward the refugees,' Jelka explained. 'But after a while this really changed. Politicians gave hostile speeches. Refugees were restricted in their movement around the town. They were kept in those centers, and only their basic needs were met. It's terrible to treat people like this.'Provoked by her friend's travails and the increasingly intolerant rhetoric of politicians, Jelka decided to visit a Slovenian detention center to learn more about asylum issues. It was not an easy task. For one thing, the head of the institution was not happy to have a graduate student poking around in the center's affairs. It only became more complicated when Jelka spoke with the resident social worker.'Do you want to talk with our foreigners,' the social worker asked, 'or foreigner foreigners?'Our foreigners? Foreigner foreigners? What could those phrases possibly mean?With that one visit, Jelka Zorn's life changed completely. She'd stumbled onto a nightmare of a situation that had been going on for nearly ten years. 'Our foreigners' turned out to be a group of 25,000 people who had lost their citizenship from one day to the next. They had been born in many different places, but they had lived in Slovenia for most of their lives. In some cases, they had lived nowhere else. Until 1991, they considered themselves Yugoslav citizens, and that's what it said on their passports.When Slovenia established its own citizenship law on gaining independence in 1991, the new state promised to grant citizenship to the approximately 200,000 people from other Yugoslav republics living in the country. These prospective citizens just had to demonstrate that t