ABSTRACT
Approximately 1,400 years ago, the ethnic ancestors of the Slovenians rst arrived on the territory; and yet, given the country’s recent fteenth anniversary in June 2006, it is still a comparatively young state. The entire period between the rst Slovenian state of the seventeenth century, called Karantanija (Prunk 1994, 25), and present-day Slovenia was characterized by ‘subordination … to larger state formations in the region’ (Prunk 1994, 12), e.g. during the Habsburg Empire, later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, as part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians or the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, during the Italian, German and Hungarian occupation of the Second World War or as part of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (hereinafter Former Yugoslavia). In the eyes of Fink Hafner and Lajh (2003, 28), Slovenia’s declaration of independence on 25 June 1991 ‘was the last step in a long process of nation-building’.
