Slovenia's history: a map drawn by other people's treaties

How Carantania became a Habsburg land

Occupation of the eastern Alps goes back around 250,000 years. At Divje Babe, a cave near Šebrelje, a perforated bone was found in 1995 and dated to about 41000 BC, argued over ever since as either a flute or the leavings of a carnivore. Pile dwellings more than 4,500 years old were found in the Ljubljana Marsh in 2002, together with a wooden wheel whose date indicates that wheels appeared in Europe and in Mesopotamia at close to the same time.

Illyrian and Celtic tribes held the region through the Iron Age until Rome took it in the first century BC. Rome divided it between Venetia et Histria, Pannonia and Noricum, and built Emona at Ljubljana, Poetovio at Ptuj and Celeia at Celje along the road linking Italy to the Pannonian Plain. That road is why the region kept being fought over. Theodosius I defeated the usurper Eugenius at the Battle of the Frigidus in the Vipava Valley in 394, and the empire abandoned the region at the end of the fourth century after walling the passes with the Claustra Alpium Iuliarum.

Slavs moved into the Alpine area after the Lombards left in 568, arriving from the north through what is now eastern Austria and from the south through Slavonia. Samo united Alpine and Western Slavs against both Avars and Germanic neighbours from 623 or 626, and after his death around 658 the region formed the duchies of Carantania and Carniola. Carantania submitted to Bavarian overrule in 745 and entered the Carolingian Empire alongside Bavaria. The Carantanians were the first Slavic people to accept Christianity, converted largely by Irish missionaries, among them Modestus. After the rebellion of Liudewit in 818 the Franks removed the Carantanian princes and installed their own border dukes.

Carinthia was made the sixth duchy of the Holy Roman Empire in 976. From the eleventh century the Germanisation of what became Lower Austria cut the Slavs of Carantania and Carniola off from the other western Slavs, and the historic provinces of Carniola, Styria, Carinthia, Gorizia, Trieste and Istria took shape between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries under the Spanheims, the counts of Gorizia, the counts of Celje and eventually the Habsburgs. In 1335 Henry of Gorizia died without a male heir, Carinthia and the Carniolan march passed to Albert II of Austria, and Ljubljana became the capital of the Habsburg province of Carniola. The counts of Celje took the title of state princes in 1436 and died out in 1456; their estates went to the Habsburgs, who held the territory until the twentieth century.

Ottoman raids then inflicted economic and demographic damage, a peasant revolt spread across nearly the whole Slovene territory in 1515, the Croatian-Slovenian revolt did the same in 1572 and 1573, and further risings continued through the seventeenth century. A Carniolan noblemen's army beat the Ottomans at Sisak in 1593, which ended the immediate threat without ending the raids.

Why the Reformation gave Slovene its first books

The Protestant Reformation reached the Slovene lands in the sixteenth century and left the written language behind it. Primož Trubar, a preacher in the Lutheran tradition, wrote the first two books printed in Slovene, an Abecednik and a Katekizem, and built the standard out of the dialects of Upper, Inner and Lower Carniola. Jurij Dalmatin translated the whole Bible into Slovene in the second half of the same century. The Counter-Reformation then arrived, directed by the Ljubljana bishop Thomas Chrön and by Martin Brenner of Seckau, and expelled almost every Protestant from the territory.

The books outlived the movement that made them. Bohorič's alphabet, the orthography the Protestants devised, stayed in use until the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation absorbed part of what the reformers had written. Protestantism itself survived only in the east, in Prekmurje, where Hungarian nobles who were often Calvinist themselves protected it. Protestants were under 1% of the population at the 2002 census; in Prekmurje the Lutheran share is around a fifth, headed by a bishop at Murska Sobota. A written Slovene existed three and a half centuries before any of the borders in this article were drawn, which is why the argument that followed was always about where the line should go and never about who the people inside it were.

What United Slovenia asked for

Between 1805 and 1813 the Slovene lands sat inside the Illyrian Provinces of the French Empire, administered from Ljubljana. French rule introduced equality before the law, compulsory military service, a uniform tax system and a judiciary taken out of church hands, and Austria took the territory back after declaring war in August 1813. Standardisation of the written language had resumed before that under clergymen such as Marko Pohlin and Jurij Japelj, and the peasant-writers known as bukovniki had begun among the Carinthian Slovenes. German remained the language of administration, culture and education well into the nineteenth century.

The argument of the 1830s and 1840s was whether Slovenes were a nation or a province of a larger Slavic one. Activists from Styria and Carinthia took up the Illyrian movement out of Croatia. The circle around the philologist Matija Čop and the poet France Prešeren made the opposite case, that Slovene was a language of its own and its speakers a nation of their own. In 1848 the demand acquired a name. United Slovenia, Zedinjena Slovenija, asked for the Slovene-speaking territories to be joined into one autonomous kingdom inside the Austrian Empire. The project failed and the platform stayed, and Slovene parties were still asking for it seventy years later.

What the movement won in the meantime was institutional. After the Austrian constitution of 1860 granted civil and political liberties it built theatres, publishing houses and financial and cultural organisations, and in the late 1860s and early 1870s it held the mass rallies called tabori, modelled on the Irish monster meetings. Literacy reached 80 to 90%. Between 1880 and 1910 around 300,000 Slovenes, one in six, emigrated, most of them to the United States, where the largest group settled around Cleveland. Trieste held more Slovene inhabitants than Ljubljana did, and around a third of the city's population was Slovene by 1910. Ljubljana itself was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1895 under the mayors Ivan Hribar and Ivan Tavčar, and in 1905 the mining town of Idrija elected the first socialist mayor in Austria-Hungary.

How the first partition was drawn

Hundreds of thousands of Slovene conscripts served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and over 30,000 of them died, many in the twelve battles of the Isonzo. Hundreds of thousands of civilians from the Princely County of Gorizia and Gradisca were moved into refugee camps in Italy and Austria, and several thousand died of malnutrition and disease in the Italian camps between 1915 and 1918. In the spring of 1917 Slovene, Croat and Serb deputies put the May Declaration to the Vienna parliament, asking for a South Slav state under Habsburg rule; the campaign behind it had collected more than 200,000 signatures by early 1918.

The empire dissolved before the question was answered. A National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs took power in Zagreb on 6 October 1918, a national gathering in Ljubljana declared independence on 29 October, and on 1 December the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs merged with Serbia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The borders of the Slovene lands were then decided at a series of separate tables, and the process ran for most of a century.

Rudolf Maister seized Maribor and the surrounding parts of Lower Styria for the Yugoslav state in November 1918, and Saint-Germain confirmed it. Volunteers under Franjo Malgaj tried the same in southern Carinthia, where fighting ran from December 1918 to June 1919 and Slovene volunteers with the regular Serbian army reached Klagenfurt before withdrawing under the treaty. The Carinthian question then went to a vote, and in October 1920 the majority there chose Austria. Only the area around Dravograd and Guštanj went to the kingdom.

Inside the kingdom, the centralist constitution of 1921 passed against the votes of 70% of Slovene deputies, and in 1929 the territory was renamed the Drava Banovina. It carried a large share of the state's industry: Slovene industrial output was four times Serbia's and twenty-two times that of the Vardar Banovina.

Inside Italy the pressure ran the other way. The Narodni dom in Trieste, the Slovene national hall, was burned by Black Shirts; Slovene organisations were suppressed; Italianisation was enforced in municipalities from Idrija and Ajdovščina to Postojna and Ilirska Bistrica; and the Slovene minority in Italy held no minority protection in domestic or international law between 1920 and 1947. The militant anti-fascist organisation TIGR formed in 1927 in response, and by the mid-1930s several thousand Slovenes, mostly middle class, had left the Littoral and Trieste for Yugoslavia and South America.

How the occupation split the country

Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and finished the campaign in weeks. The territory was cut four ways: Germany took the north and east, Italy the south including Ljubljana, Hungary took Prekmurje, and villages in the Lower Sava valley went to the Independent State of Croatia. German policy in its zone was removal. Ten thousand Slovenes were sent to the Croatian puppet state and 7,500 to Nedić's Serbia, some 46,000 were deported to Germany including children taken from their parents and placed with German families, over 10,000 Jews were sent to German concentration camps, and between 30,000 and 40,000 Slovene men were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Slovene was banned in schools, and the German-speaking population of the Gottschee enclave was resettled onto land cleared of its Slovene inhabitants.

Resistance began in the Italian zone. The Slovenian National Liberation Front was organised in the Province of Ljubljana in April 1941 under the Communist Party and formed the Slovene Partisan units inside Tito's Yugoslav Partisans. Italian reprisals followed. Some 25,000 people were deported to camps, among them Rab and Gonars, a figure equal to 7.5% of the population of the Italian occupation zone. To counter the insurgency the Italians sponsored local anti-guerrilla units drawn mostly from conservative Catholic Slovenes who objected to partisan revolutionary violence. After the Italian armistice of September 1943 the Germans took over both the Province of Ljubljana and the Littoral, combined the anti-communist units into the Slovene Home Guard and installed a puppet regime at Ljubljana. The resistance expanded at the same time and built the administrative structures that became the basis of Slovene statehood inside a federal and socialist Yugoslavia.

Around 8% of the Slovene population died in the war, which ran from 1941 to 1945. The Jewish community, concentrated in Prekmurje, was destroyed in 1944 during the deportation of Hungarian Jews. The German-speaking minority, 2.5% of the pre-war population, was expelled or killed afterwards. In the foibe killings, members of fascist and collaborationist forces along with civilians presumed to oppose communism were killed, and more than 25,000 people fled or were expelled from Slovenian Istria. Around 130,000 people, mostly political and military opponents, were executed in May and June 1945.

Those years are read two ways in Slovenia and the two readings have never been reconciled. In one, the Liberation Front is the founding institution of the republic and the Home Guard is collaboration raised under Italian and then German command. In the other, the Home Guard answered revolutionary violence against civilians, and the executions of May and June 1945 were a crime the state that followed left uninvestigated. Both accounts are argued from the same four years.

How Slovenia lived inside socialist Yugoslavia

The federation was declared on 29 November 1943, and the Socialist Republic of Slovenia was one of its republics. Two pieces of the border came back inside a decade. Italy ceded most of the Julian March in 1947, returning the Slovene Littoral and the western half of Inner Carniola, and the Italian-populated towns of Koper, Izola and Piran emptied as part of the Istrian exodus. The Free Territory of Trieste was divided between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1954, which gave the republic its coast, and the Treaty of Osimo gave the western border legal sanction in 1975.

Repression eased slowly. Thousands were imprisoned for their politics between 1945 and 1948 and tens of thousands of Slovenes emigrated at once, many to Argentina, with more than 50,000 following over the next decade. After the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 the persecution extended to Communists accused of Stalinism, and hundreds of Slovenes were held in the camp at Goli otok. Show trials ran from 1945 to 1950, among them the Nagode trial of democratic intellectuals in 1946 and the Dachau trials of former camp inmates from 1947 to 1949. The bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Vovk, was doused with petrol and set alight by Communist activists at Novo Mesto in January 1952.

Forced collectivisation was attempted from 1949 to 1953 and abandoned. What replaced it was workers' self-management, designed under Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene and the main theorist of the Yugoslav road to socialism. Borders opened in the late 1950s, the republic industrialised, and independent journals appeared: Revija 57 between 1957 and 1958, then Perspektive between 1960 and 1964. The conservative faction of the Slovenian party stopped that in 1973, and the decade that followed is called the Years of Lead, svinčena leta, for its censorship and its jailings. By the 1980s the republic held under 10% of Yugoslavia's population and produced around a fifth of its GDP and a fourth of its exports, and the arithmetic of who paid for the federal administration had become the central political argument.

What the plebiscite decided

In 1987 the journal Nova revija published Contributions for a Slovenian National Programme, which called for democratisation and greater independence, and some of its articles argued for leaving Yugoslavia outright. The authors kept their liberty and the journal kept publishing, though the editorial board was forced to resign. A strike at the Litostroj plant in Ljubljana produced Yugoslavia's first independent trade union, and an independent Peasant Union followed in May 1988. Later that month the army arrested four journalists from the magazine Mladina for revealing state secrets, and the Ljubljana trial that followed brought mass protests. On 27 September 1989 the Slovenian Assembly amended the constitution to end the League of Communists' monopoly on power and to restate the republic's right to leave the federation. In December police stopped several hundred supporters of the Serbian leadership from holding a rally in Ljubljana. On 23 January 1990 the Slovenian communists walked out of the federal party congress, which then ceased to function.

The assembly renamed the republic on 7 March 1990, dropping the word socialist. Free elections on 8 April 1990 gave the DEMOS opposition coalition 54% of the vote. The assembly passed the Plebiscite Law on 6 December 1990 and the vote was held on 23 December. The results announced on 26 December recorded a turnout of 93.2%, with 88.5% voting yes. That share is calculated against everyone eligible to vote, a stricter measure than the share of ballots cast.

Six months of law-making followed. On 25 June 1991 parliament adopted the constitutional law implementing the Basic Charter of the Independence and Sovereignty of the Republic of Slovenia together with the Declaration of Independence, and independence was proclaimed the next evening at Trg Revolucije in Ljubljana. The Yugoslav People's Army moved on 27 June. The fighting lasted ten days across 72 separate armed conflicts and cost 19 dead on the Slovenian side and 44 on the army's, along with 12 foreign citizens; 4,693 servicemen and 252 federal police officers were captured. A three-month moratorium was agreed on the Brioni islands on 7 July, the federal presidency decided on 18 July to withdraw the army, and the last soldiers left through Koper on the night of 25 October 1991. A new constitution passed on 23 December 1991. Croatia recognised Slovenia on 26 June 1991, the European Community on 15 January 1992, and the United Nations admitted it on 22 May 1992.

Where the last border was settled

The rest of the map arrived by accession. Referendums in March 2003 approved both applications, and Slovenia joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the European Union on 1 May 2004. It adopted the euro on 1 January 2007 and joined the OECD on 21 July 2010.

One line remained undrawn. Slovenia and Croatia carried a territorial and maritime dispute out of the federation, and on 4 November 2009 the two prime ministers signed an arbitration agreement, which both states ratified under their own constitutional procedures and which Slovenian voters approved in a referendum. The tribunal was asked to determine the course of the land and maritime boundary, Slovenia's junction to the high sea, and the regime for the use of the relevant maritime areas, applying the rules and principles of international law to the first and, to the other two, international law together with equity and the principle of good neighbourly relations. Three rounds of written submissions followed, with over two thousand documentary exhibits and maps, and a hearing at the Peace Palace in The Hague from 2 to 13 June 2014. The register records Croatia's agent and counsel as acting until 31 July 2015. The tribunal handed down its final award at a public sitting on 29 June 2017.

Each of those settlements left Slovene speakers outside the line and other communities inside it, and the parliament is arranged around the second half of that. Of the ninety seats in the National Assembly, 88 are filled by proportional election and two are elected by the registered members of the Hungarian and Italian minorities, one seat each. The constitution protects both communities by name, and the Roma community holds a separate recognised position.