ABSTRACT
Since 1991, Slovenia has been in the process of what scholars and politicians call “transition.” This term originated with studies of the changes in authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Africa in the 1980s; it has also been applied to “southern European” countries, such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece, that left the realm of dictatorship even earlier. With the fall of communist governments starting in Eastern Europe in 1989 – with Yugoslavia and Albania officially breaking with that model a few years later – and in the Soviet Union in 1991, the set of possible subjects for “transition studies” grew tremendously. The transition has been described and analyzed from all sorts of academic perspectives, from history to economics, political science to sociology, with a healthy admixture of other perspectives thrown in by scholars specializing in nationalism, feminism, and environmental studies. Considerations of the pace and mandate of reform are important, as are international influences such as access to economic assistance from the IMF and World Bank and the lure of admission to the EU and NATO; of course, the historical legacy of the previous system is also of great significance because it determines the starting point of change and helps set the intellectual and emotional framework of transition. Many policy-makers have sought predictions about the future of countries in transition, creating a demand for comparative studies between countries and, most intriguingly, across regions.
