Civil society in Slovenia

from opposition to power

Tomaž Mastnak

pp. 134-151

in: Paul G. Lewis (ed), Democracy and civil society in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

"Civil society" is the concept that summarises the democratisation — or the transformation from totalitarianism to democracy — in Slovenia, as elsewhere in the socialist half of Europe.¹ As elsewhere, the concept implies a normative political philosophy, as well as describing and helping us to analyse and understand a wide range of empirical democratic struggles. The distinctive feature of the transformation to democracy in Slovenia, however, is that it was initiated by the new social movements (NSM) and that they — and not dissident intellectuals, or reform communists, or the aging New Left elite — played the crucial role in the formative period of civil society. The network they formed was called "the alternative scene", or simply "the alternative".