This paper offers a tentative analysis of some problematic "post-totalitarian" elements that can be found in the processes of establishment of the post-Yugoslav nation-states and have their origin in the time before, during, and after the period of wars and collective crimes. "With a little help" from Arendt, it asks questions about some features of the new post-war communities and their nation-states, such as the following: Why are they based on ideologies of non-responsibility for the past and on some very (...) unpleasant features of the newly established "citizenship" and national identity - producing new exclusions and inventing new techniques of tribal nationalist and racist dehumanization within the framework of a new nation-state's "demographic policies? The analysis is paying special attention to the phenomenon described as an "organized innocence syndrome " - while alluding to Arendt's portrayal of German "organized guilt" under the Nazi-regime and elaborating on her notion of responsibility - a problematic "identity" basis for a nascent state, its citizenship and political institutions in general. To illustrate the phenomenon of organized innocence as a conditioning commonality of all the newly established states, special attention is paid to the post-war case of those called the "erased people" in Slovenia.". (shrink)

In this article, I try to explore some of the elements of the potential for active citizenship, as conceptualized by Hannah Arendt. Inspired by, but not limited to her work, I attempt to find some important common points of the Arendtian reconceptualization of politics and the prospects for a feminist analysis of the conditions for active citizenship and gender equality within a post-socialist context. On the other hand, I would like to show how, within an East European context, the feminist (...) approach that wants to be useful for a concrete analysis and inspire substantial actions cannot avoid the questions of the relationship between the social and political as argued by Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

Reinhard Koselleck has long been regarded as a particularly eminent theorist of socio-political concepts, while Hannah Arendt had not been in focus as a conceptual author until recent times. This article explores the common thinking space between Arendt and Koselleck through their thesis about the gap, rupture, crisis, or break in the tradition of political thinking and historical periods and how this is linked to their notion of conceptuality, i.e. Begreifen. Despite the impression that each of them focused on the (...) one main break between the past and the future, Arendt and Koselleck both studied multiple breaks and crises in the Western political tradition. The article attempts to show how their distinctive thinking and rethinking of political concepts are related to these breaks through several direct and indirect encounters and how these are both close and apart at the same time. While they have different concepts of politics and the political, their understanding of the breaks in time and crises can be read as complementary, especially considering their concern with returning the responsibility for actions and concepts to the human sphere. (shrink)

The case of the erased residents of Slovenia – when approximately 18,000 people who were mostly of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ethnicity, were erased from the permanent residence registry of the Republic of Slovenia – represents one of the most severe cases of administrative ethnic/racial discrimination and human rights violations in the post-communist East and Central Europe outside the conflict area. The erasure caused “civil death” of the people who were affected by the measure, depriving them of civil, political, social, (...) and economic rights. In 2007, 4 years after the 2003 Constitutional Court decision, declaring the 1992 erasure an unconstitutional act of the state and requiring the legislator to adopt measures to reinstate the statuses of the erased people, the problem remains unsolved and unaddressed both systemically and individually, and the situation of erasure persists. This article presents the case and analyses of the framework that made the erasure possible in terms of the preparation of the majority of Slovenes to accept and even support the violations and politicians to renounce their political responsibility to those who have lost the right to have rights. (shrink)