ABSTRACT
A few years ago, central Europe was rediscovering itself: the collapsing communist states were taking the Mitteleuropa concept as a kind of short cut out of autocracy into the realm of democratic states, while central European sentiment was resurging in the consolidated democracies of the region. Then the provocative Austrian writer Peter Handke, whom the Slovenes count as one of “their own” because of his Slovene mother, baldly and cynically joked that, for him, central Europe was merely a meteorological term. This provoked a wave of ire, particularly among intellectuals in the new democracies of the region, Slovenia included. Is central Europe really only connected by geography and meteorology? Or is it also bound together by culture and values? And what is Slovenia’s place in it?
