The sovereign, democratic, social state of Slovenia, governed by the rule oflaw, will be based »on people’s freedoms, work and enterprise, social justiceand security for all, ecological responsibility and the fi nest Slovenian and Europeandemocratic traditions.«(From the Statement of the Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia on GoodIntentions, adopted on 21 November 1990)The topic of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and attainment of Slovenian independenceis always multilayered and contradictory (historical processes arenever absolutely positive or absolutely negative, and evaluations are most oftenmade from the viewpoint of current circumstances). Furthermore, history is nota laboratory, so we cannot check what the process of the historical developmentwould have been if the dissolution of Yugoslavia and attainment of the Slovenianindependence had not taken place. Or if it had happened in a different way.According to the principle of the so-called »if history« we can only presume.InSlovenia these questions also have unavoidable ideological connotations. Let uslook at the problem from two viewpoints:1. Evaluations and self-evaluations of the Slovenian role in the dissolutionof Yugoslavia2. Contemporary predictions, presumptions and promises from the currentpoint of view.3. Temporally the evaluations and self-evaluations of the Slovenian rolein the dissolution of Yugoslavia can be divided into contemporary (topical,political) and subsequent (partly political, partly pertaining to social sciences,humanities, history, etc.). The evaluations of the major part of the Yugoslavpublic, politicians, journalists and other writers (with the partial exception ofCroatia), made at the time, were that Slovenia wanted to secede and that thiswould result in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The estimates about when thisprocess supposedly started varied. Most often the approximately concurrentrise of the national (nationalistic) opposition in Slovenia and the onset of thereformist processes in the League of Communists of Slovenia with the rise ofMilan Kučan were identified as the beginning. Some estimates build on theviewpoint that secession was the goal of all post-war Slovenian political circles.The opinion about the Slovenian guilt was (with nuances in interpretation)also adopted by the majority of the European politics and diplomacy, and evento a greater degree by the United States. This interpretation fails to take accountof the internal processes in Yugoslavia, which Slovenia could only influencepartially, as well as foreign-political processes (the end of the Cold War, declineof socialism, dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, integrationprocesses in Europe). Later this viewpoint – due to the continuation ofthe war in Yugoslavia and especially because of the intervention of the NATOforces against Milošević (1999) – started to change. Milošević (also due to thedeath of Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović, before they could be summonedby the International Court of Justice in Hague) became the main culprit responsiblefor the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia. However, the conviction ofthe Slovenian guilt or at least responsibility is still frequently encountered, notonly in diplomacy, but also in social sciences and humanities. After all, theSlovenian political elite made the following pledge in their Statement of GoodIntentions, adopted immediately before the referendum and quickly forgottenafter that: »Thus the Republic of Slovenia accepts its share of responsibility forthe democratisation in the whole territory of what is now Yugoslavia, also infront of the international community.«In Slovenia the theory of it being the »disintegrator of Yugoslavia« has beendenied by the politics as well as experts in humanities and social sciences eversince the beginning. Not completely, though: some people tried to keep a criticalor more problematised distance, but under the influence of the media andpolitics the mythicised outlook on the Slovenian attainment of independenceprevails, picturing Slovenia exclusively as the victim of the circumstances atthe time. Paradoxically the theory of secession (and thus the beginning of thedisintegration of Yugoslavia) is implicitly or sometimes explicitly confirmedby the circle of people who take most of the credit for Slovenian emancipation.This is most evidently illustrated by the statement of Dr. Jože Pučnik, thepresident of Demos (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia), made after the referendum:»Yugoslavia is gone, Yugoslavia is gone!«, which was the first directnegation of the Statement of Good Intentions. (Even before the referendum, on17 December 1990 in the town of Ljutomer, Pučnik had spoken in breach ofthe Statement of Good Intentions and the defence of nationally pure Slovenia –the reasons for that were supposedly economical). According to this mythicisedversion of events the secession supposedly began with the 57th issue of the Novarevija magazine. According to the most radical interpretations, the attainment ofSlovenian independence was also carried out in a struggle against pro-Yugoslav»Slovenian traitors«, headed by Milan Kučan.As the concept of nationally and ethnically clean countries, stemming fromthe former Yugoslavia, rose doubts in the international politics, in the Sloveniancase nationalism was supposedly »passive« – a reaction against Serbiannationalism and simultaneously a reaction against the non-democratic situationin Yugoslavia as well as Slovenia. But in fact the national issue was more importantthan the issue of democracy, which was clearly shown by the subsequentdevelopments in the independent country. To what degree this nationalism was»passive« was later shown by the case of the so-called The Erased, by the factthat the immigrants from the former Yugoslav republics living in Slovenia donot have any minority rights even today, by the long-term obstruction of thebuilding of a mosque in Ljubljana, as well as by a long list of examples basedon prejudice and xenophobia.In the legal sense the inconvenient implication of the word »secession« wasreplaced by the word »dissolution«, which was a diplomatic definition of thecontemporary presidency. Fortunately (for Slovenia and Croatia), this was includedin the Badinter Commission’s interpretation of the disintegration of Yugoslavia.Furthermore we should note that Slovenia as an independent countryhas a very hypocritical attitude to the similar rights of other nations as it demandedfor itself during its emancipation process.2. The contemporary discussions, predictions, presuppositions, promises aswell as programmes of political parties built on the conviction that Slovenia didnot belong to the civilisation of the Balkans. Instead it was supposedly (Central)European. Slovenians would do much better in their own country, because moneywould not flow to Belgrade. It would allegedly have an efficient capitalisteconomy without the interference of politics, it would allocate far less resourcesfor its armed forces as it had had to do in case of the Yugoslav People’s Army,it would even be neutral or without an army, far less indebted, and the livingstandard would be higher. After the independent state was established, Sloveniawould supposedly get rid of the hysterics involved in the political space andthe permanent state of emergency. The multi-party system would allegedly automaticallyresult in democracy. In short: in all the fields – education, culture,media, and all other social segments – Slovenia would be better off by far, andit would become a kind of »Switzerland in the Balkans«. But in truth the exitfrom the »civilisation of the Balkans« (which has been gradually restoring inthe recent years through culture and art, and for most Slovenians the formerSerbo-Croatian language is still the second language) resulted in intellectual andcultural impoverishment, as it was not automatically replaced by the Europeanspace, the standard only improved for certain narrow elites, not for the majorityof the population, and simultaneously the social cohesion has dissolved. TodaySlovenian debt is higher than the total Yugoslav debt had ever been. It allocatesmore money for the army. It is burdened by weapons sales and corruption affairs.Militarization has not diminished, more likely it is the other way around.Furthermore, in certain hot spots Slovenia is in the service of the United States,acting as an actual occupation army. The level of democracy is only formallyhigher, and hysterisation of society is only greater than in Yugoslavia, or at leastit has not significantly receded. (After Slovenia had attained independence, ittimes.) And what is worst: Slovenia is immobilised by its emancipation relationsand it is losing the generation which grew up after its emancipation: eitherpeople are running from the country or they stagnate without any future. Ironically,the actual or supposed emancipators and most fervent supporters of thenational state as the »end« of history mostly agree with the criticism of the twenty-year-long development, at least as far as the state of economy and democracyis concerned. The only difference is that they do not see the reasons in their owngreed, privatisation of the emancipation process, corruption and clientelism,which they have created. Instead they feel threatened by the nostalgia for theYugoslav state, dominion of old forces and conspiracies aimed at the preventionof the so-called Spring Option’s efforts to complete the processes it had started.