Crisis in Slovenia and the Dispositions of the Uprisings

Slovenia as a peripheral European economy witnessed the first impacts of the global financial crisis by the end of the year 2009, mostly in the lateral labor markets of migrant and precarious work. By the second half of the year 2011, the economic crisis could be felt in all social segments, mostly through the collapse of the construction sector and the consequent collapse of the financial sector. With the coming of the new government in 2012, plans of severe austerity measures were announced, involving cuts in public spending, mostly in the sectors of education, culture and welfare. Trends of growing public debt, increased unemployment, decreased welfare spending, combined with elements of systemic corruption, led to a deeper, social and political crisis in the following months. First major organized struggles against austerity measures in Slovenia resulted in the movement around the global initiative 15th of October in 2011 (so-called #15o movement) and in a subsequent major public discontent, which erupted in the so-called uprisings. The uprisings started in November 2012 in Maribor, triggered by the installment of a new speed radar system, which enabled huge financial gains for private partners. Protests started on 2nd of November and were directed against the ongoing corruption of the Mayor, but they gained in weight on the 21^st and especially on the 26^th of November, turning into riots after police used all means to suppress the unrest. Protests were organized all over Slovenia as a result of brutal police intervention in Maribor, but also against the corrupt elite and lowering standard of life. Three weeks of protests across Slovenia were later channeled into the first centralized all-Slovene uprising that happened on the 21^st of December. Until 27^th of April 2013 four more all-Slovene uprisings were organized.

Between “National” Uprisings and Global Movements

Looking at the two manifestations of mass discontent in Slovenia, we are faced with two questions: First, what are the similarities and discontinuities between the #15o movement and other local expressions of global Occupy initiatives? Second, what impact, if any, did #15o have on the expressions and organizations of the later uprisings, which erupted in the city of Maribor?

As active participants in both struggles, our partial conclusion is that there were bigger organizational and ideological similarities between the different local expressions of the Occupy movements around the world then between the two local struggles, the occupation and the uprisings. First was embedded in the global context, following the trajectory of Arab Spring, #15M movement in Spain as well as the Occupy movements in the USA and elsewhere. On the other hand uprisings started on the local level, addressing issues such as political and economic corruption on the municipal level, demanding early elections and the “restoration” of the state of law as well as other economic and political measures that would mitigate the deepening of the social crisis on the national level. The uprisings eventually adopted some slogans and demands of the 15o movement, but they would remain embedded in the “national” framework.

Criminalization

How did the uprisings transform from a networked model of social revolt into a series of normalized protests, encoded as rehabilitation of representative democracy? One of the two processes, which was crucial in narrowing the social question that the uprisings opened up, was criminalization, repression and normalization of protests. In the beginning, police repression during the second Maribor uprising was definitely the privileged topic of the media reports. It seemed that the response to the police repression was largely critical of the state of emergency, established by the police against the thousands of protesters in Maribor. In fact, there was not even much moralization around the issue of „violent protesters“, who were clashing with the police that was indiscriminately attacking protesters. The predominant discourse of the third Maribor uprising, however, was already that of violent thugs vs. peaceful protesters. The following events in Ljubljana, where a group of neo-Nazis clashed with the police during an early demonstration sealed the fate of heterogeneity of practices, largely because the discourse of forms of resisting was diluted. It is worth noting that what happened in Ljubljana was in fact a false generalization as it is simply not true that neo-Nazis were the only ones who clashed with the police. Still, the media instrumentalized precisely this story and surrounded it with a conspiratorial talk of paid provocateurs, secret services, etc. All in all, everything was done in order to de-politicize what occurred that evening. It seems that what state/police/media were attempting to cut out of the uprisings what precisely that which proved to work in favor of the multitude in Maribor: solidarity and openness to a multiplicity of forms of resistance. Re-establishing a top-down governance of the uprisings by giving the police the upper-hand meant that the protesters had to be violently split into two: those, who sided were praising the legitimacy of protests (while dictating what is allowed and what not) and those who were radically open to the spirit of revolt that we saw in Maribor. The later were largely marginalized and demonized. The result was that the police had a tremendous advantage and turned to repression whenever a situation of active confrontation was appearing. At a general level, we could argue that criminalization of the uprisings, which in that time took the form of nothing less than widespread social control, was a way at demobilizing autonomous practices and re-establishing a form of protesting that would correspond to a more institutional manner, proper to the so-called “social dialogue”.

Representation

First protests, especially in Maribor, but also in Ljubljana and elsewhere were by and large direct expressions of social discontent. Heterogeneous in their composition, they were marked by a variety of demands and the absence of any organized political reality, which would provide a meta-narrative. Complementary to the process of criminalization and normalization of protests, another crucial process took place: the uprisings were channeled into a framework of representative politics and the discourse of civil society. These attempts were not directed merely by the state, but formed one of the main lines that some groups of protestors advocated. They were the ones who got the space in the media and the ones that helped the media to build the narrative of the need for representing the uprisings. On the other side, there were groups of protestors who entered the uprisings in a non-organized manner or came from the militant traditions that rejected representative politics, for example the #15o militants.  The mass media were encouraging people to come out as leaders, so their voices were the ones that were overridden in the mainstream discourses.

One of the results was that the heterogeneous composition of the uprisings was overridden by the re-imposition of the dogma of representative politics and this gave boost to the division that was already becoming apparent: protesters started to be divided by their “usefulness” and the sense of a representative politics (be it party or otherwise organized). An intriguing aspect of the local uprisings is that to a large extent the protests developed outside of – and parallel to – packages of austerity measures accepted and applied by the government. It seems that this framework increasingly pushed out themes more closely connected with social and class issues as well as the European context of austerity measures. So the question is whether the local expression of public discontent addressed the level of everyday needs and desires? Did it enable organization of and around social needs?

Victories and the Memory of the Uprisings

How can we approach the productivity of the uprisings? In order to evade a predominantly negative tone, it is necessary to point out forms that became present after the uprisings and which did not exist before those took place (i. e. district assemblies, urban gardens). We understand all the events happening after 2009 as deeds of a common multitude and we are not individualizing them. In this sense we can see that in the case of Maribor some new forms of militancy emerged already prior to the uprisings, for example the local farmer cooperatives, urban gardens in the city and its neighborhoods. Similar could also be claimed in the case of Ljubljana, where the militants of 15o movement and some older collectives developed a tradition of opened assemblies and manifestations of discontent. The question arises, whether and how the “new” forms can be seen as similar to the ones from the time of Yugoslavia – maybe the new (social, political, economic) circumstances are a basis for building new syncretic forms that include the “old”? Could the function of the old be putting in practice the notion of solidarity, on which the new structures among people who did not cooperate before (e.g. rival football fans; victims of unjustified police violence and social movements, etc.) arose?

How can we approach the productivity of the uprisings? In order to evade an predominantly negative tone, it is necessary to point out forms that became present after the uprisings and which did not exist before the uprisings (i.e. district assemblies, urban gardens). Still, in the case of Maribor, some new things already appeared before the uprisings, like the local farmer cooperatives, urban gardens in Maribor and its neighborhoods. But still we have to take all the events happening after 2009 as a common plural multitude so we should not individualize them. Are the “new” forms similar to the ones from the time of Yugoslavia and on the basis of the new (social, political, economic) circumstances are becoming new syncretic forms? Do they still function? The paradox is that the uprisings also produced solidarity structures between people, who before did not cooperate (e.g. rival football fans; victims of unjustified police violence and social movements, etc.).