Sabina Mihelj

Continuities and discontinuities in contemporary mass-media discourses in Slovenia:

back to the nineteenth century?

Abstract: The article presents Slovenian contemporary mass-media discourse on the geographical position of the country.

Keywords: Symbolic geographies, Eastern Europe, Slovenia, mass-media

On 21 February 2001, the breaking news of the evening news bulletin broadcast on the first channel of the Slovenian public broadcasting service TV Slovenija referred to a couple of events taking place in the capital of Ljubljana: the election of a new ombudsman and the public manifestation of solidarity with refugees and against intolerance. Both events were a reaction against xenophobic discourses that had arisen around the issue of ‘illegal migration’ in Slovenia since the early autumn of 2000.[1] After a general introduction to the manifestation and its aims, the camera entered the crowd gathering in one of the central squares in Ljubljana and turned to Jani Kovačič, a popular Slovenian musician, to ask for his comment on the happenings. In his answer, Kovačič used a reference that could hardly be understood by a viewer who was not raised in the Slovenian education system: “Sometimes, Martin Krpan was trafficking salt, while today his contemporaries are trafficking humans.”

Martin Krpan is a Slovenian folk hero familiar to virtually every Slovenian citizen from the short story written by Fran Levstik (1831-87) and published in 1858. Krpan is a positive character, usually depicted as a mighty, smart and witty village man, known for his disregard for authorities. He made his living by smuggling salt from the Venetian coast near the Venetian-Austrian border to his home village situated halfway between the coast and Ljubljana. Although he had been ridiculed for his uncivilised manners (drinking and eating a lot, dressing inappropriately, etc.) by the urban population of Vienna, it was he who finally managed to protect Vienna from a man called Brdavs who had previously decapitated many strong men of the empire, including the emperor’s own son. Confronting him in a duel, armed with nothing but a double-bladed axe and a club made out of lime wood, Krpan defeated Brdavs without any problem. As a sign of gratitude, the emperor first offered him a fortune and even his daughter. Yet, since this provoked an angry reaction from the empress, Krpan declined the offer, threatening that given the ungratefulness of the court, he would never come to defend Vienna again. All he finally asked for was a permanent license to transport salt, and depite everything he left Vienna with the promise of staying its loyal defender.

Almost without exception, Slovenian literary history, especially as translated into the curricula, inculcated the story of Krpan into the collective memory as a glorification of common Slovenian people — simple but strong and ingenious peasants. As such, the story is also a prime example of the affirmation of the rural Slovenian native against the urban Viennese population. The emperor was obviously much too weak to be able to defend its state efficiently; the healthy, simple, peasant’s world of Krpan triumphed over the world of Vienna, the spoilt urban and civilised life. As such, the story of Martin Krpan embodies the characteristic discourse of ‘discovering the people’ that proliferated in the Balkans (as well as Europe as a whole) in the nineteenth century as both a consequence of, and a reaction to, uneven processes of modernisation in the region. At a more specific level, the story also fits into Austrian dynastic ideology,  which praised several national groups or individuals for their loyalty to the Empire. This perception usually referred to particular historical fights in which subjected groups or individuals played a crucial role in securing the survival of the Empire by providing military help or abstaining from nationalist agitation. Yet it should also be noted that this story displays a specific accommodation to the subjected position of Martin Krpan —and, by virtue of representation, the Slovenian nation. Playing such a vital role in the survival of the Empire is a way of overcoming the stigma connected with the fact of being a subjected and sometimes despised population in the Monarchy.

The appearance of Martin Krpan in the media coverage of ‘illegal migration’ is far from being an isolated case of mass-media appropriations of this folk hero; according to Miran Hladnik, in the central Slovenian daily Delo (Work or Labour) alone, in the period from 1998-2001, Krpan’s name appeared more than 400 times. Moreover, Krpan’s character permeates the everyday life of Slovenians in a variety of other ways: a school, a gallery, a popular pop-rock group, a fitness club and a number of restaurants, shops and streets bear his name, as do consumption goods and even machines (M. Hladnik, 2002, 104). His character appears in the coat of arms and flag of one of the municipalities of Pivka, while the municipality of the coastal town of Koper has for years now been discussing the proper location for a statue of Krpan. Indisputably, this folk hero has an important role in the construction of meaning in public discourse in Slovenia. The analysis presented in the paper focuses on just one example of the contemporary use of the story, namely the appearance of Martin Krpan in media coverage of ‘illegal migration’ at the turn of the millennia. Starting from this example, the analysis sets off to explore various discursive layers that intersect in media representations of ‘illegal migration’ and can be interpreted either as a reinvocation of discourses formed among the Slovenian population of the Habsburg empire during the second half of the nineteenth century or a reinvocation of a specific memory of that same period that was formed only after the disintegration of the Empire.  

The overarching assumption of the analysis is that mass-media representations of ‘illegal migration’ were not simply describing the immediate reference, namely migration, but were also, implicitly, (re)constituting the imagined collective of Slovenians, its past and present, its internal structure, as well as its relationships towards other (especially neighbouring) national communities as well as wider regions such as ‘Europe’, ‘the Balkans’, ‘the East’ and ‘the West’. In these media representations, the migrants themselves were only a marginal element, an object over which Slovenians were to redefine their relationship towards ‘the state’ — both the Slovenian state, as well as the European Union as the potential future host. For example, by referring to a canonical literary character, Slovenian mass media clearly outlined their addressee (or model-reader, lettore modello, according to Umberto Eco’s conceptual network); the ones who were expected to watch the news, read the newspapers, etc. are those who were raised in the national education system and are acquainted with canonical accounts of national history and culture. They are thus addressed as members of a collective linked by common experiences, knowledge, values and norms, i.e., as culturally homogeneous.[2] Furthermore, since Martin Krpan was used as a representation of a common Slovenian from the past, the reference to him also served as a link between the present and the past. With such an interpretative procedure, the national collective is placed into time, and a continuity is established between different events and individuals from past and present as if they all belonged to the identical body, i.e., an identical national collective evolving through time. Or, in Benedict Anderson’s formulation, the addressed national collective is constituted as “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time … a solid community moving steadily down (or up) the history” (1991, 26).

In rough accordance with E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (1983), I take this continuity or tradition as invented. Given the variety of plans for national unification existing among South Slavs in the nineteenth century, it may well have happened that Slovenes would not exist as a separate nation. Instead, a larger and differently defined national collective would perhaps appropriate Martin Krpan and use it as a reference point to legitimate its present by constructing its past.[3] What is more, even in what is nowadays (due to the repeatedly constituted historical continuity) conceived of as the same national community, i.e., Slovenians, the interpretation of Martin Krpan is twisted in different ways in order to accommodate it to the changing positioning of Slovenia inside geo-political space. Furthermore, it is important to note that in media representations, Martin Krpan was perceived as a real and not fictional character,[4] which indicates that the memory of the past that was used to make sense of the present might easily be mythological. One of the main aims of the paper is precisely to disentangle the various discourses interlocking in media representations of ‘illegal migration’ and analyse them from the point of view of their relationship with the  nineteenth-century history of southern Habsburg provinces: could they be seen in direct continuity with discourses formed at that period, or are they rather a product of the collective memory of that period that was established only after the disintegration of the Empire?   

This question will be addressed through examining two interrelated groups of discourses. The first section of the paper will consist of an overview of the prevailing symbolic geography[5] as discernible in mass-media representations of ‘illegal migrations’ appearing in the main Slovenian television news bulletins and daily press in the period from September 2000 to May 2001.[6] This symbolic geography will be compared to the one implicit in the story of Martin Krpan and prevalent among the Slavic population inhabiting the Habsburg provinces of Carniola, Carinthia, Styria and Istria in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the story of Martin Krpan was first published. Although the story of Martin Krpan evidently represents Slovenians as loyal subjects of the Empire, and could as such resonate very well with the symbolic positioning of Slovenia vis-à-vis the EU as adopted by some state institutions (most notably police), this connection is never spelled out. Rather, journalists using the character of Martin Krpan in their narratives of ‘illegal migration’ were establishing a link between the story and contemporary traffickers of ‘illegal migrants’, using as tertium comparationis the engagement in illegal activities, i.e., disregard for the authorities’ ban on trafficking. Such an application of the story of Martin Krpan is consistent with the prevailing ambiguous and at some point rebellious attitude of Slovenia towards the EU as established in these media representations, yet it can also be conceived as an imprint of a discourse of long duration that achieved a dominant position more than half a century after the actual publication of Martin Krpan, with the formation of the first Yugoslavia in 1918.

The second section of the paper will explore another set of aspects of imagining the Slovenian national community[7] (the ‘people’) discernible in mainstream media representations of ‘illegal migrations’ in 2000/2001, namely the specific modes of addressing ‘the people’ and positioning them with regard to ‘the state’, as well as with regard to more broadly conceived ‘elites’. Some of these aspects can be linked to discourses first established in the second half of the nineteenth century among Slovenian intellectual circles (those that felt compelled to speak for the ‘Slovenian people’). These discourses intersect in the work of the author who wrote the story of Martin Krpan, i.e., Fran Levstik. His literary works, including his literary theory, are an example of the ‘nativist turn’ in literature, comparable to the one carried out in Serbia earlier in the nineteenth century by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Furthermore, Levstik’s work — which extended well beyond the realm of literature into politics, linguistics and journalism — can be interpreted as a part of the larger project of ‘discovering the people’ that was spreading in the Balkans (as well as in Europe as a whole) in the nineteenth century. By examining his literary program and other activities, it becomes evident that media representations of ‘illegal migration’ were also reiterating some of the dilemmas typical for the region in the nineteenth century, especially the question of the appropriate direction of social transformation (either by following ‘foreign’ examples or finding ‘native’ solutions). With the cold-war arrangement of the world gone to history, and the belief in an alternative grand plan for the arrangement of modern societies disappearing, some of the old issues of modernisation and unequal development, and the reactions and resentments provoked by them, are back on stage. Yet again, only a part of discourses discernible in the ways contemporary journalists use to address and represent ‘the people’ can be seen in a direct continuity with the Habsburg period, while an important part of them is an intervention of discourses formed only in the twentieth century. While both discursive levels may be subsumed under the heading of ethnonationalism, only the latter is likely to have a strong bearing on the field of politics, and may result in hindering any political action that does not contribute to the perpetuation of Slovenian ethnocultural distinctiveness or tends to support the transfer of a part of sovereignty onto another political agency, most notably the EU.

The symbolic mapping of mass-media representations of ‘illegal migrations’

In the past decade, the phenomenon of non-registered migration is regularly among the most disputed issues on political agendas of European countries. Yet Slovenian political elites became aware of it only in the late 1990s, when, Yugoslavian wars finished, the so-called ‘Balkan route’ of migration leading through the territory of former Yugoslavia became lively again. The issue of ‘illegal border crossings’ began appearing as a regular feature of daily newspapers and news bulletins in early autumn of 2000. As if out of the blue, Slovenia was represented as being endangered by an ever-increasing flood of people coming ‘from the East’. As it seemed from most media reports, they were fleeing their home countries for no specific reason, most of them simply in search for a better life ‘in the West’.

As such, the prevailing mass-media representations of ‘illegal migrations’ were reproducing the symbolic mapping of Europe that saw the continent divided into two opposing halves, the East and the West, and has, according to Larry Wolff, a history that reaches back to 18^th-century Enlightenment thinkers (L. Wolff, 1994). However, as opposed to the mapping invoked by Winston Churchill in his famous speech held at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, that sent Slovenia into the shadows lurking behind the iron curtain, mass-media representations of ‘illegal migration’ suggested a more ambiguous positioning of Slovenia. Rather than clearly Eastern or Western, Slovenia was represented as a transitory land, a space in-between, a neither-here-nor-there land, caught between the current Schengen border that leaves Slovenia outside EU, and the future one that will include it in the ‘European family of nations’. Such a mapping of Slovenia employs some elements of the discourse usually activated in descriptions of the Balkans. According to Maria Todorova, practically all descriptions of the Balkans offer as a central characteristic their transitory status. While the West and the Orient are usually presented as incompatible entities, completed anti-worlds, the Balkans have always been characterised by transition and ambiguity (1997, 15-17).

However, contrary to the discourse of Balkanism as identified by Todorova, the images connoting connection — such as images of bridges and crossroads — were virtually absent from mass-media accounts of ‘illegal migration’ in Slovenian mass media. Rather than being described as a crossroad or bridge between East and West, Slovenia was referred to as “the rampart of the West”, “the waiting-room of European Union”, the “sanitary cordon of Europe” or the wall that is bound to protect Europe from the tide of migrants coming from the East. Slovenia, then, was still represented as somehow connected to Europe, yet not as an equal part, but rather (from the point of view of the centre) as a backward and denigrated periphery —however also as a periphery that has a specific task and is, despite being despised by ‘Europe’, crucial for its well-being. Such a symbolic positioning of Slovenia is not a novum. It closely resembles the discourse formed in the nineteenth century in the territory formerly constituting southern Habsburg provinces and forming the myth of loyal (yet not always rewarded) imperial subjects. In this respect, the concept of frontier orientalism coined by Andre Gingrich may prove very useful. This “complement to or a variant of orientalism in general” is, in his view, a distinctive feature of folk cultures in (roughly) the southern parts of central Europe, which made up the central domains of the Habsburg empire, including what is nowadays eastern Austria, Hungary, the north-eastern part of Italy and Slovenia. It is a “folkloristic glorification of decisive local military victories in past times, either against Muslims or together with Muslims, but serving present nationalist purposes, and it places the home country and its population along an adjacent territorial and military borderline which is imbued with a timeless mission,” (1998, 119). The story of Martin Krpan, itself formed in nineteenth century, clearly fits such a discourse: it glorifies Krpan’s victory against Brdavs, yet it serves the era’s nationalist purposes, especially the self-glorification of Slovenians.

The frontier orientalism as formed inside the Habsburg empire can be seen also as a variation of the more general ante murale myth, which stresses that the group concerned (Slovenes) is an integral part of the true civilisation (Europe) and even more, presents it as its very outpost, as a group chosen to be its martyr. The wall may run along different dividing lines, usually along divides perceived as cultural, thus creating a series of walls coinciding with what Milica Bakić Hayden and Robert M. Hayden (1992) called a system of nesting orientalisms.[8] However, the ultimate wall — sanctified lately by academic discourse (S. Huntington, 1993) — is running between Islam and Christianity. Contrary to the symbolic map prevalent in the Cold War period, the symbolic mapping typical for the nineteenth  century and (re)arising at the turn of millennia is thus no longer structured along an ideological opposition, but along a predominantly cultural or civilisational one. Europe (or more broadly ‘the West’) is no longer represented only as a realm of democracy and/or capitalism, opposed to a communist East, but as a culturally/civilisationally defined unit confronted with another one. It may well be that what is arising here is a reworking of a definition of Europe to which Islam, rather than communism, is now seen to supply the Eastern boundary (cf. P. Schlesinger, 1991, 189-190; D. Morley and K. Robins, 1995, 80).

However, it needs to be pointed out that although invoking the mapping sketched above, most media representations did not thoroughly comply with it, i.e., they were not eager to embrace the timeless mission of protecting ‘Europe’ from ‘the East’ without reservation. In the first phase of the ‘crisis’ (September – November 2000), police especially would enthusiastically accept the double task of protecting Slovenia as well as protecting ‘Europe’, arranging special border controls and regularly informing media about their daily ‘catch’. At their regular press conferences, covered by media in meticulous detail, the representatives of the police were presenting their ever more technologically sophisticated techniques for tracing illegal migrants, providing newest statistics and plans for joint actions with border police from neighbouring countries — all with the aim of “protecting Europe from the increasing pressures of migration” and “demonstrating Slovenia’s credibility” as a candidate for EU membership. Thereby, Slovenian police, along with most media at that time, were reproducing a discourse closely resembling the myth of Slovenians as loyal imperial subjects dating from the nineteenth century and exemplified in Martin Krpan. Yet towards the end of 2000, the enthusiastic displays of loyalty were gradually replaced by protests (joined also by the police itself) against the — putatively imposed — role of the safety belt for ‘Europe’, as well as against the state, which was supposedly succumbing to EU pressures.

Interestingly, protests framed in terms of a critique of EU (and Slovenian government as far as it was following EU policies) came both from political actors that sought to close Slovenia for ‘illegal migration’ and were amply supported by public opinion, as well as from political actors condemning xenophobia. In this regard it is important to notice that even those non-governmental organisations that were criticising government’s policies towards illegal migration and condemning xenophobic reactions, and those rare media and journalists that represented their voice, did not substantially change the symbolic mapping as sketched above. Only rare commentators would point to the fact that the EU (or at least some of its member-states), which was increasingly named as the main cause of the ‘illegal migration crisis’ in Slovenia, was still far more hospitable to ‘illegal migrants’ than Slovenia. Rather than pointing to positive cases of immigration and successful integration into host societies, Slovenian media would regularly provide examples of outbursts of xenophobia and violence against immigrants inside the EU, thereby trying to show that Slovenia was no more xenophobic than Europe (cf. V. Jalušič, 2001, 32). Furthermore, journalists would only exceptionally point to the fact that upon entering the EU, Slovenia will have to grant at least 500-600 asylums annually, while in 2000 less than 10 applications for asylum were answered positively.

In one of the first public denunciations of rising xenophobia in Slovenia (published in various dailies on 19 December 2000), members of the so-called Office for Interventions[9] argued that while the EU was turning itself into an impenetrable fortress, Slovenia was uncritically accepting EU-imposed instructions on how to deal with migrants. Moreover, they suggested that the strategy of dealing with illegal migration by provoking fear in the population and thus homogenising “us” against “them” might have itself originated in seminars organised by the EU for aspiring member states. Even at the public manifestation against xenophobia, a representative of the Office for Interventions argued: “We are against Slovenia closing its borders under the pressure of Schengen dictates,” (the statement was reproduced in the main news bulletin broadcast by TV Slovenia 1). Finally, the shift of responsibility to the EU (and the Slovenian government only insofar as it succumbs to EU pressure) is exemplified also in a book published in the aftermath of the crises by the Peace Institute,[10] which included essays comparing migration policies in different countries positioned at the outskirts of Europe. The title of the book is symptomatic: The Door-Guards of Europe (Evropski vratarji) (Milohnić, 2001). In this way, also, an important part of public opinion that was otherwise critical of mainstream discourses regarding ‘illegal migration’ left the basic symbolic mapping appearing in mainstream representation almost intact, including the attribution of (at least partial) responsibility to ‘Europe’ and a rather negative and even rebellious attitude towards ‘the West’.

And it is only at this point that the story of Martin Krpan comes into play — despite its apparent consistency with the Habsburg myth of imperial loyal subjects, which makes it, at least at first sight, a ready-made narrative to interpret Slovenia’s initial attitude towards EU in dealing with ‘illegal migration’ as an example of loyalty. But instead of that, journalists referred to the story of Martin Krpan by pointing to Krpan’s rebellious posture against the imperial authorities, i.e., by way of using the illegal activity of smuggling as tertium comparationis in establishing a metaphorical link between contemporary traffickers of migrants and Krpan. Just as Martin Krpan would disregard authorities’ ban on trafficking salt, so contemporary Slovenians would disregard authorities’ ban on trafficking ‘illegal migrants’.[11]

Surely, the stress on the rebellious posture against authorities is consistent with the above-mentioned ambiguous relationship towards the EU and the Slovenian state (as far as it was allegedly acting only as an instrument of the EU). Yet, could there be — besides the internal consistency of the prevailing media representations of ‘illegal migration’ — other structural reasons supporting such an application of the folk hero, namely reasons pertaining to a structure existing on a diachronical rather than synchronical level? Indeed, such an interpretation of Martin Krpan — stressing his rebellious posture — is consistent with the way of imagining the Slovenian nation and the concomitant interpretation of the story as established during the course of the twentieth century, after the formation of the first Yugoslavia. This structure, which is amply perpetuated in Slovenian historiography in both its scholarly and especially its textbook version, represents Slovenians as a long-oppressed nationality fighting for its independence from political domination. Inside this structure, the previous loyalty and conservatism of Slovenians had to be erased from collective memory and the story of Martin Krpan was appropriated accordingly. As Bojan Baskar argues, in post-1918 literary science, Martin Krpan “was primarily seen as a national rebel or allegory of the Slovenian nation, struggling to emancipate itself from the Viennese rule”. The consequence of this vision of Slovenians as rebels against, rather than loyal subjects to, the Habsburg empire was the incapability of Slovenian literary historians to notice that the Krpan story offers a variant of the Habsburg myth, with the motive of Slovenians as the saviours of the Empire, and Brdavs as a symbol of the Turks (B. Baskar, 2002).

One could thus conclude that the symbolic geography as discernible in mass-media-disseminated imagery of ‘illegal migration’ is not a straightforward reinvocation of the symbolic positioning of Slovenia as existing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather, what we are dealing with is a reinvocation of the memory of that positioning — a memory that is heavily conditioned by the geopolitical positioning of Slovenia at the time when it became dominant (around 1918), and in fact serves to legitimise the latter. This also means that if inside contemporary representations (such as the ones of ‘illegal migration’) the European Union plays a role structurally similar to the role played — inside memory — by the Habsburg empire, this means that both the past and the present, as well as the vision of the future (the membership in EU) are structured by a very similar narrative and implying a very similar symbolic geography. Since this narrative served the function of legitimising past secession, one may expect it to function, at present, as an element hindering integration into the EU or, in any case, fuelling an ambiguous relationship towards it. The rather negative representation of the EU present in media representations of ‘illegal migration’ provides one example, and one could find many more in a range of discourses surrounding the specific issues related to the EU, especially those dealing with ‘Slovenian culture’ and its possible disappearance upon entering the EU. 

However, while the link between the present positioning of Slovenia vis-à-vis the EU and the positioning of Slovenia vis-à-vis the Habsburg empire in the second half of the nineteenth century is largely invented, there is another element of symbolic geography displayed in contemporary media representations that can indeed be seen as a reinvocation of collective imagery as established in the nineteenth century: Slovenia’s relationship to the Turks. In the historiography and popular literature of nineteenth century the Ottoman raids were regularly appearing as the major evil that affected Slovenians in their history, accompanied by the motive of the abduction of young boys. Until recently Slovenian historians did not question highly inflated numbers of people killed and abducted into slavery during the akinci raids, quoted by local authorities in their letters to Habsburg princes calling for help (cf. B. Baskar, 2002). Although only seldom explicitly, the oft-used way of representing the Other — by using the image of the Turk — appeared also in media representations of ‘illegal migrants’. Most often, journalists would establish a parallel between the Turkish raids and contemporary ‘waves of illegal migration’. For example, after a chain of local protests against the establishment of new (temporary) centres for asylum seekers,[12] a journalist stated: “If the intolerance against foreigners will raise further, people will soon be setting fires on hills (look how history keeps repeating itself) as a warning that unwanted guests are coming — which this time are not Turks,” (Delo, February 12).

Furthermore, it can be argued that the discursive register including the image of the Turk as the negative Other also intervened in media discourses in implicit ways. An indication of this can be seen in the distortions in representations with regard to the source countries and nationalities of migrants involved.[13] Although (in the period in focus) Iranians were by far the most represented nationality in actual statistics provided by border police, the proportion of mentioning Turkey and Turks reached almost the same level as the proportion of mentioning Iran and Iranians. What is encountered here can adequately be conceptualised using the distinction of elaborated and limited codes (Eco, 1996: 155-157). In the absence of an elaborated code, journalists based their representations on limited codes that were melting very different people together to make them suit those few images of the Other that were long segmented in collective memory in Slovenia. Among those, the image of the Turk was obviously one of the most appealing.[14]

Finally, it should be pointed out that the memory of the Habsburg empire was not the only one to display a narrative structure as described above, i.e., a narrative of an oppressive supranational state structure endangering the Slovenian nation or being used as an instrument by a specific nation to oppress all the others. In late 1980 and especially in the 1990s, a similar narrative was applied to Yugoslavia.[15] The element of rebellion against a state which is not properly ‘ours’ thus seems to be a recurrent element of Slovenian national imagery from 1918 onwards and is getting reproduced at the turn of millennia.[16] The premise of this recurring element is a specific theory of political legitimisation and representation, one that requires two distinct units — peoples and states — to coincide. It is this premise, the way it is translated into the modes of address employed by contemporary media, but also the extent to which its foundations were laid down in nineteenth-century Slovenian literature, that will be explored in the following section. 

Giving voice to ‘the people’

Besides selected elements of symbolic geography as sketched above, namely the image of the Turk, there is another set of elements in the media representations of ‘illegal migration’ in Slovenia at the turn of the millennia that can be seen as an intervention of discourse that was formed in the nineteenth century. This set includes the modes of addressing the ideal recipient (a generalised version of Umberto Eco’s concept of lettore modello) and the related ways of constituting the ideal sender (the implicit author or, together with Eco, autore modello), as well as the logic of constituting various actors of the narrative and the structure of relations established among them (and thus also subject positions into which recipients may be interpolated).

A useful entry point for the exploration of these aspects is the selection of interviewees and authorities media turn to for information and/or interpretation; this selection is a crucial part of the constitution of actors (and also subject positions) in media representations. In the first phase of the ‘illegal migration crisis’ (autumn 2000), journalists would mostly turn for information and interpretation to ‘the state’ (more specifically its various institutions, police in the first place). However, towards the end of 2000, and especially in the first months of 2001, journalists were increasingly often turning to ‘common people’, who were mainly against any measures that would lead to integration of  ‘illegal migrants’ into Slovenian society and were expressing evidently xenophobic views. This was also the point when journalists became evidently critical and aware of the opportunity to take sides, to select some representations while refusing others. In the first phase of the ‘crisis’, they strictly followed professional standards that were deemed to secure their objectivity, producing reports with frequent citations or chunks of interviews with various actors, where their voice functioned as a supposedly neutral glue linking different points of view together, with no explicit commentary. Contrary to that, when it came to representing ‘common people’, they were often explicitly taking sides and adding their comments.[17] Most of them, however, decided to side with ‘common people’ and against ‘the state’;[18] it became common to blame the state for intensifying xenophobic sentiments among ‘common people’ (by not reacting early enough to increasing numbers of illegal migrants). While the state, “which should rely above all on its rationality, planning and systematicity, is turning into a sentimental Samaritan”, the citizens are — out of distrust towards such a state — taking on the role of “evil, alienated repressive agents” (Delo – Sobotna priloga, 3 February 2001).

 Sometimes, blaming the state went so far that the state was seen as “more intolerant than the people” (Nedelo, 4 February 2001). Such an opposition between ‘the state’ and ‘the people’ thus resulted in a culpabilisation of the state and victimisation of ‘common people’ (cf. V. Jalušič, 2001). In the end, people’s xenophobia was seen merely as — to use the words of one of the spokesmen of the ‘common people’ regularly appearing as an interviewee in mass media — “a normal reaction to an abnormal situation”. As Vlasta Jalušič argues in her analysis of ‘illegal migration crisis’ through the optic of the citizen identity in Slovenia, ‘it is possible to say that the media functioned as mechanisms of propaganda. They did not force opinions on people, just the opposite, they resounded their opinion,’ (V. Jalušič, 2001, 14).

However, one needs to take in account that ‘common people’ as represented in media do not correspond to the actual variety of views shared by the population; although views expressed by their alleged representatives in media were widely spread, giving voice already implied a selection. By this, only certain views became representative of ‘common sense’. Mostly, these views were based on ethnonationalist arguments, representing the state as primarily a union of members of a nation, and not its citizens, putting the rights of ‘our people’ — linked by common culture understood in ethnic terms — above the rights of other human beings.[19] In other words: although ‘the people’ were taken as something given, something always-already-there to be counted, addressed, interviewed, journalists were actually crucially involved in creating them.[20] Since the selection of people appearing as representatives of ‘common people’ in mass media did not correspond to the variety of positions taken among the population, individuals self-conceived as ‘common people’, yet not sharing the represented position, could find no appropriate subject position to relate to in prevailing media representations. Moreover, when alternative, i.e., not ethnonational positions were represented in the media, they would be almost exclusively taken as representative of ‘intellectualist’ or ‘elitist’ positions. When, for example, people would argue that for them, living close to centres for asylum seekers would not represent any problems, the journalists would label their views as elitist, and confront such interviewees with questions such as whether they had ever really lived in such an environment or were they only commenting “from safe distance”.

Thus, through the selection and labelling of interviewees, mass media were also engaged in constituting the division between ‘the elite’ and ‘common people’. Most importantly, they were also crucially contributing to the constitution of the range of possible subject positions and with those, venues for action in the political field. After the xenophobic ‘common people’ voice was legitimised as an important actor through media discourses — an actor that presumably had to be taken seriously by the state if it was to be taken as democratic, i.e., receiving its legitimacy from ‘the people’ — various state institutions felt compelled to answer their calls for a better protection of ‘our (Slovenian) people’. This resulted in a crucial limitation of possible political solutions to the ‘crisis’: the only acceptable solutions appeared to be those that followed the logic of ‘our people first’, where ‘our people’ were defined by ethnic bonds. To summarise: by giving voice, defending, representing ‘the people’ (in specific ways described above), journalists were engaged in constituting an important force in the political discussion on ‘illegal migration’, a force that — together with Bourdieu again[21] — crucially contributed to the limitation of the range of possible political decisions and with that to the loss of autonomy of the field of politics.

However, all these aspects of journalists’ interventions in representations of ‘the people’ could hardly be exposed to critiques; just as with any sayings containing the magic epithet ‘popular’, they were shielded from scrutiny. Or, as Pierre Bourdieu argues: “Any critical analysis of a notion which bears closely or remotely on ‘the people’ is apt to be identified immediately as a symbolic aggression against the reality designated — and thus immediately castigated by all who feel duty bound to defend ‘the people’, thereby enjoying the profits that the defence of ‘good causes’ can bring,” (P. Bourdieu, 1991, 90). Indeed, when various groups of intellectuals began voicing their concerns about raising xenophobia among common Slovenians, journalists, especially those working for media with a yellow-press character, reacted by ‘protecting the people’. Answering accusations coming from the Peace Institute, the journalist of Slovenske novice (Slovenian News), a yellow-press daily, commented: “The sin of Slovenian News is, therefore, the fact that they are listening to the people … At Slovenian News, we are making a newspaper for the people. Not for Peace Institute. Only due to that we are the most read Slovenian daily,” (11 January 2001).

Back to the initial question: which of these elements of media representations of ‘illegal migration’ can be seen as continuous with discourses formed in the southern Habsburg provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century? First of all, the premise of the logic of ‘our people first’, as well as of the idea that ‘the state’ can be opposed to ‘the people’ rests on a set of premises concerning the appropriate social organisation, including, first and foremost, the belief that ‘people’ have a bearing on politics. No matter how obvious various appeals to the ‘people’s will’ seem today, ‘the people’ only recently became a legitimising force in the political field; such a theory and practice of political legitimisation was established only with the Enlightenment and gained ground across Europe in the nineteenth century with the rise of nationalism. In the case of the Slovenian nation, the first uses of ‘people’ in political discourses appeared in the nineteenth century, along with the idea of Slovenians as a separate nation which appeared at the same time and gradually prevailed over competing ideas of grouping South Slavs in the region. Thus, one could expect that at least some conventions employed in addressing and constituting ‘the people’ in media reports on ‘illegal migration’ — such as establishing the opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the state’ and ‘the common people’ and ‘the elites’, as well as various rules aimed at securing an ‘objective’ representation of Slovenian reality — were actually formed as early as the nineteenth century, when ‘Slovenian people’ first became a force in various fields.

Although the ‘spring of nations’ in the year 1848 occupies an important place in the Slovenian myth of national awakening, the actual numbers of intellectuals who felt authorised to speak in the name of ‘Slovenians’ were very low, and among those, only a small part advocated the idea of a ‘Unified Slovenia’ (cf. A. Melik, 1981), i.e., the idea of a unification of Slovenians inside the Empire. It was only in the 1860s, and especially in the period of 18681871, with the activities of the so-called Young Slovenes, that the idea of a ‘Unified Slovenia’, comprising demands for greater (using contemporary discourse) cultural autonomy, especially the introduction of Slovenian language into schools, gained a wider support. It should not come as a surprise that one of the most prominent members of Young Slovenes was precisely the man who wrote the story of Martin Krpan, i.e. Fran Levstik. Indisputably, authors before and after Levstik were engaged in forming similar discourses, yet none of them achieved such a prominent place in canonical accounts of Slovenian literary, and more broadly cultural, but also political history. Therefore, it can be expected that his work — filtered through subsequent interpretations provided by authorised institutions — played a crucial role in the formation of collective memory and as such also in forming contemporary debates. Therefore, his work, and its subsequent reception, can be read as a paradigmatic example of an interlocking of discourses that were perhaps marginal at his time, yet acquired a dominant position in a later period, and partly persist also in contemporary Slovenian society.

Besides writing fiction, Levstik engaged in a variety of activities he deemed appropriate for the ‘awakening’ of the Slovenian nation, including linguistics, literary history, political activities and journalism (cf. M. Kmecl, 1981a: 270). Thereby, he became the central ideologue of the most militant variation of Slovenian nationalism at the time, fiercely attacking the representatives of Slovenes (most of them later referred to as ‘Old Slovenes’) in Vienna for their pragmatic behaviour and inclination to compromises when it came to defending Slovenian cultural autonomy. It was his advocating of an upright, rebellious posture that earned him the later-established prominent position in Slovenian national history. Yet, as his biographies indirectly show (cf. M. Kmecl 1981b; A. Slodnjak, 1976), the rigid version of nationalism he was advocating was at the time a rather marginal, and in any case not well accepted, phenomenon in the Slovenian political field. Moreover, authors of fiction writing in the Slovenian language, although declaratively adhering to Levstik’s views, found it hard to realise them in literary work (cf. J. Kos, 1996, 102).

In all of his activities, Levstik argued for an upright, distinctively Slovenian posture; in the field of cultural production, he argued against following ‘foreign’ (mostly German) literary trends and instead insisted on turning for inspiration to ‘native’ (autochthonous) Slovenian culture. As such, his work formed an integral part of the larger project of the ‘discovery of the people’ that became popular across Europe in the nineteenth century: traditional songs, traditional stories, popular religion, vernacular languages became a favourite subject of European intellectuals (P. Burke, 1978). Johan Gottfried Herder’s equation between language and the people (Volk=Sprache), his glorification of folk poetry and, above all, his suggestion to think of cultures in the plural, inspired poets, writers, linguists and other members of the educated elites who turned to ‘the people’ in search of the pure culture, unspoilt by processes of modernisation, urbanisation, civilisation. Inspired by the same ideas, Fran Levstik also believed that “the poetry of our people [narod] is dying” and that “nowadays, the era of composing and singing songs is over” (2002b: 4), and it is high time to turn to the people to recover what is left. He believed the proper basis for (Slovene) literature should be the everyday life as well as language of the rural population. He explained these views on language in various texts, the most influential among them being Mistakes of Slovenian Writing (Napake slovenskega pisanja) (1858), where he listed all those elements appearing in Slovenian public writing that presumably went “against the proper spirit of Slovenian language”. The chief mistake he kept criticising in a variety of texts was the wrong syntax — wrong because of being to close to German syntax and therefore introducing a non-authentic, i.e. non-Slovenian, spirit into texts (quoted in M. Kmecl, 1981b: 78).

Yet, the ones to tell the ‘authentic’ from the ‘non-authentic’ elements of language were not ‘the people’, but Levstik himself; he warned against ‘the mob’ that could be found among the peasants, and insisted that one should be after rescuing what is left of “proper and clean language” (quoted in B. Paternu, 247). It is at points such as this that a recurrent feature of all uses of the ‘people’ and the ‘popular’ becomes clearly evident. The ‘discoverers’ (or, more broadly, representatives) of people, despite claiming to be in proximity with ‘the people’, are actually concealing — first and foremost to themselves — the break with the ‘people’ that is implied by gaining access to the role of spokesperson (cf. P. Bourdieu, 1994, 152). The same ambiguous relationship to ‘people’ can be found in contemporary mass-media discourses, especially tabloids.

By far the most popularised (through the national education system) of Levstik’s texts is Journey from Litija to Čatež  (Popotovanje iz Litije do Čateža) (1858), a description of a journey he made from Litija to Čatez, full of essayist passages sparked by events and people encountered on the way. Paragraphs from this text where he discusses the proper role (and, in connection to that, the proper form and content) of literature are usually quoted as the first literary program in the history of Slovene literature (cf. J. Kos, 1992; J. Kos, 1996; I. Cesar, J. Pogačnik, 1991). According to Levstik, Slovenian literature should primarily serve the people, it should be written in their language, it should borrow motives and characters from their everyday life and folk tales. The result of such an approach to writing should allow “a Slovenian to see another Slovenian in the book as he sees his own face in a mirror” (F. Levstik, 2002b: 19). To be able to produce such literature, the writer should master people’s language as well as know them very well, with all their grievances, joys, strong as well as weak points.

Levstik opposed those literary currents that supported the development of literature that would be sharply distinct from folk traditions, would find its audience among educated elite, use literary rather than peasant language and follow developments in Western literature. He was not openly opposed to changes and modernisation, but rather argued against the type of modernisation which follows exclusively foreign examples and produces, according to him, an alienated elite which loses all contacts with common people, which is the main cause of an even greater lagging behind of the rural population. Moreover, Levstik also suggested who should be the Other in such literature: in order to develop patriotic feelings, novels, short stories and theatre plays should employ heroic motifs from Slovene history such as fighting the Turk. The short story about Martin Krpan was written explicitly as an example of literature that follows all these ideas.

Turning back to contemporary media representations of ‘illegal migration’, one cannot help but notice striking similarities between principles advocated by Levstik and those shared by many contemporary journalists, especially those working for media with a yellow-press character. Just like Levstik’s ideal Slovenian writer, journalists felt compelled to get closer to the ‘common Slovenian people’ and voice ‘their’ concerns, amusing them with stories that resemble their everyday life and square with their common sense. And finally, what medium could better serve the principle of a representation that would allow “a Slovenian to see another Slovenian as he sees his own face in a mirror” then those contemporary media that employ audio and visual codes? Since visual (but also audio) recordings incorporated into press articles and radio and TV news items are — due to a specific set of communication conventions or literacy[22] — believed to be “unstructured replicas of reality” (G. Kress, T. van Leeuwen, 1996, 172) or “messages without a code” (R. Barthes, 136), they are an even more powerful means of creating the verisimilis than the means available to Levstik, i.e., language.

It could thus be argued that, to an extent, contemporary journalists observe similar communicative conventions and follow similar principles of representation as authors of literary prose in the second half of the nineteenth century that followed Levstik’s program. Furthermore, both social groups play a similar role in the field they are entering (predominantly cultural and scientific in one case, political in the other): in both cases, the self-appointed representatives of the ‘voice of the people’ are creating an important force in the field, narrowing down the range of possible actions to those bounded by, and serving the interests of, ‘our people’. Moreover, in both cases, the notion of ‘people’ embedded in this structure is closer to the ideal type of an ethnic rather than civic nation. Accordingly, the ideal of the state that could be related to this notion is the idea of an ethnonational state, a state based on a theory of political legitimacy which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones — a theory which is, according to Ernest Gellner, at the core of nationalism (E. Gellner, 1983, 1).

Yet it would be a mistake to ascribe to Levstik and his followers the aspiration to secede from the Habsburg empire and form a separate Slovenian state. In other words, while Levstik was certainly fighting for the creation of a cultural unity of Slovenians (based on peasant’s culture), he did not expect this cultural/ethnic unit to coincide with the political one; leaving a substantial part of sovereignty to the Empire did not present him with any problems, as long as cultural distinctiveness was allowed. It was only later, when national history had the task to legitimise secession from the Empire, that his views were read as a confirmation of the existence of the ‘millennial dream of the Slovenian nation’, a dream that included the aspiration to have a state inside which ethnos and state would coincide. And it was only inside this narrative that giving up a part of sovereignty became perceived as a loss. As Bojan Baskar argues, the assumption that nation-building and empire-building are incompatible is related to an erroneous conception of the nature of national movements in multinational empires: “An impetus, intrinsic to these movements, is assumed, which drives them, from the very beginning, to demand full political independence and their own national state. Nationalist historiography, exalting the ‘millennial yearning of the nation for its own state’, is plainly interested in maintaining such a conception’,” (B. Baskar, 2002).[23]

Taking these considerations into account, one could conclude that the similarities between discourses at work in Fran Levstik’s work and those invoked by contemporary journalists exist primarily at the level of imagining and representing the Slovenian nation as a culturally distinct unit, while the idea that this culturally distinct unit of people could have the right to exercise full self-determination and form ‘the people’ of a separate state, or at least decide which state it wants to join, is an element that appeared only at the period when the formation of Yugoslavia had to be legitimised.

However, Levstik’s ideas about what should be the appropriate form of Slovenian national culture were not the only ones to be found among Slovenian writers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even less so in that century as a whole. It is important to note that in the Slovene literary canon, which is still taught in all schools today, Fran Levstik is praised for being the ‘founding father’ of Slovenian literature in proper terms (meaning prose). Yet, parallel to and even earlier than Levstik, there were other authors producing literary prose in Slovene language.

The other author that could easily be praised for being the ‘founding father’ of Slovene literary prose was Simon Jenko, who published a short story Jeprški učitelj (The Teacher from Jeprca) in the same year as Levstik’s Martin Krpan was published, i.e. 1858. The principal reason for the long-lasting marginalization of Jenko (and other authors following the same literary principles and literary critics favouring their literature over the one produced by Levstik and his followers) was that his literature was following European literary trends rather than folk traditions. Although his stories featured a rural milieu, his focus was on the inner world of the central characters, usually individuals not fitting into their social surroundings, alienated, sometimes on brink of nihilistic feelings, experiencing the disintegration of the metaphysical understanding of the world (cf. J. Kos, 1992). Consequently, his literary characters could not play the role of a national symbol, and this made them less fit to be praised by a national narrative that primarily had to celebrate and thus perpetuate the cultural distinctiveness of the Slovenian nation. In opposition to them, Levstik was firmly insisting on the nation-forming and nation-affirming function of literature, on literature being a mirror of the national soul (cf. A. Zorn, 1999), and his literary characters, especially Krpan, were ready-made symbols to be adopted by national narratives produced by historiographers of national literature.[24]

Furthermore, Levstik was also not the first Slovenian intellectual professing a literature that found inspiration among Slovenian peasants. In his attempts to build Slovene language and literature on the basis of folk culture, Levstik actually followed ideas advocated in the first half of the nineteenth century by the linguist Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844), who worked in Vienna as the imperial librarian and censor for South Slav books. Just as Levstik would, Kopitar followed late 18^th-century ideas on language, inspired by Rousseau but also Herder, and believed that the purest language is to be found among peasants. His main aim was to purify the language of German words and bring it closer to the language spoken by the peasants.[25] Finally, Kopitar — as later Levstik — mainly rejected the idea of developing a separate literature for educated elites, and this was the point at which he got into a conflict with literary and intellectual figures closer to ideas of romanticism, including France Prešeren (1800-1848), who is considered to be the central Slovenian national poet.[26]

In 1830-1831, the issue of appropriate language, literature and alphabet became the major issue among Slovene intellectuals, amounting to a so-called “ABC war” waged primarily through letters published in major newspapers and partly even through satiric poetry.[27] Besides Prešeren, the most vocal opponent of Kopitar in the ABC war was Matija Čop (1797-1835), a literary critic and Prešeren’s close friend. He argued that linguistic purity, which Kopitar was trying to achieve, was not enough and that a language limited to the vocabulary of peasants would not be able to express abstract ideas and thus could not become a “cultivated language”. Therefore, he argued that the language should be adapted to the needs of intellectuals and bourgeoisie, even at the cost of allowing it to be less pure and allow the use of some foreign words from various sources (these words were, according to Čop, an expression of the level of civilisation achieved by a nation).[28] In the end, it was Prešeren’s and Čop’s idea that won the ABC war, and one could generalise that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Slovenian literary production could be seen as more inclined towards pro-western than nativist and populist ideas.[29]

It was only in the second half of the century, with Fran Levstik, that the turn to folk culture and language as defended by Kopitar gained a wider echo. Yet, as opposed to Kopitar as well as some of his followers, such as the linguist Fran Miklošič,[30] who would favour the gradual approaching of different South Slav cultures living inside the Habsburg empire and possibly even the melting of them into one,[31] Levstik strongly believed that Slovenians should be a separate nation. One could argue that the main reason for Levstik’s subsequent canonisation was precisely his belief in Slovenian particularity — which was also an idea shared by France Prešeren, although on importantly different grounds. While Prešeren defended Slovenian particularity against what he perceived as less-parochial, more pro-European and transnational trends, Levstik defended Slovenian particularity as based on pro-peasant and also pro-South Slav trends. Despite their differences, both Prešeren and Levstik would enter the Slovenian literary canon and national history as defenders of Slovene particularity.[32]

By incorporating both authors, the Slovenian literary canon of the nineteenth century — strongly inculcated into everyday life through the education system, media-perpetuated collective memory, various public rituals etc. — embodies also the central dilemma of the period (not restricted to artistic production alone), namely the split between cosmopolitan and populist trends. Again and again, this split gets reproduced also in the twentieth century, up to very recent history; the phenomenon of non-registered migration seems to have activated the same dilemma, but with the result in favour of the populist option.   

To summarise: whatever ideas about the appropriate nature of Slovenian culture they advocated, authors occupying the most prominent positions in the Slovenian literary canon of the nineteenth century, and with that also in collective memory, all agreed on the need for retaining Slovenian cultural distinctiveness. Furthermore — and most importantly from the point of view of the main aims of the paper — the idea of the nation they adhered to was close to the ideal type of an ethnic nation, and thus squares with the idea of nation underpinning contemporary media representations of ‘illegal migration’. Yet, in media representations, this idea interlocks with the one that developed only in the twentieth century, which sees the ultimate goal of a nation as having its own state. The combination of these ideas, culminating in the idea of an ethnonational state, inside which the political and the cultural nation are expected to coincide, is the premise of the specific journalistic ways of constituting ‘the people’ as unveiled above.

It is important to note that the same combination of ideas about ‘the people’ and ‘the state’ is present also the Slovenian constitution as enacted in 1991. According to Robert M. Hayden, the document is characterised by constitutional nationalism, i.e., “a constitutional and legal structure which privileges the members of one (ethnic) nation over those of any other resident in a particular state” (R. M. Hayden, 2000, 68). As such, constitutional nationalism is a departure from generally accepted democratic constitutional norms, which view the individual citizen as the basic subject of the constitutions, into a vision of a state in which basic sovereignty resides with a particular nation. In a state defined by such a constitution, individuals are not incorporated into the state as individuals, but first and foremost as members of a particular (ethnically defined) nation.[33] By way of such a constitution, the ethnonationalist discourse permeates the whole institutional structure of the state, which makes any discourses fostering alternative ways of constituting ‘the people’ and relating them to ‘the state’ very difficult to sustain. Moreover, as the case of the ‘illegal migration crisis’ shows, even when some of the state institutions become susceptible to alternative notions of ‘the people’ and ‘the state’, their efforts might be countered by the media, who get interpellated into the position of the representatives and defenders of ‘the people’ against ‘the state’. When some representatives of the state, most notably the minister of internal affairs, became (after months of pressure exercised by a range of non-governmental organizations) willing to employ measures that were not founded on the logic of an ethnonational state, it was the media who kept forcing the ethnonationalist discourse.

Conclusion

Both on the level of symbolic geography and on the level of addressing and representing ‘the people’, the analysis uncovered various discourses that could be subsumed under the heading of ethnonationalism. Although the nineteenth century is presumably the birth of ethnonationalism in Europe, only one layer of discourses discernible in contemporary media representations can be seen in a direct continuity with the Habsburg period, while an important part of them is an intervention of discourses formed only in the twentieth century, with the reorganisation of the map of Europe after World War I. Despite the fact that both discursive levels clearly conceive the Slovenian nation in ethnic terms, only the latter (historically more recent) level is likely to have a strong and direct bearing on the field of politics. It is thus that the presence of the discourse fully formed only in the twentieth century may result in hindering any political action that does not contribute to the perpetuation of Slovenian ethnocultural distinctiveness or tends to support the transfer of a part of sovereignty onto another political agency, most notably EU. After the disassociation from Yugoslavia was persistently represented as the realisation of the Slovenian nation’s millennial yearning for its own state, the idea of giving up a part of that sovereignty can hardly be justified by anything other than extremely pragmatic arguments, while always keeping the sense of a big loss. However, the most disturbing result of the analysis of media coverage of ‘illegal migration’ is perhaps the fact that not even the actors who organised the anti-xenophobic campaign challenged the growing negative attitude towards the EU and the ideal of full national sovereignty. Quite the contrary: the manifestation against intolerance and in support of refugees turned out to be also a clearly anti-EU, and even more strongly, anti-globalist, manifestation.

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